Desert heat blasted the glass sands. The empty plain shone like a mirror, glistening with dust that made a mockery of morning dew. It was dry, scorched, and the memory of the dead slug was now long behind them. Bee and Em were bundled up, hidden from the stinging wind beneath a blanket and shawl. Ay merely kept his beak shut fast when the dust picked up, cracking it open from moment to moment to peer out to the horizon.

“You’re burning,” he growled.

Bee whined, pulling her sore, pink feet and hands back under the sheets.

“Suppose the Vat-Mother can make anything,” he said, then grunted. “Why do you burn?”

Bee made a pitiful sound again, twisting to stop her little sister from escaping her lap.

“Could she really make anything?” Ay asked, beak turning towards the girl.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. Then, a heartbeat later, she realised Ay was actually looking at her. She shrank under his fleshy gaze. “I don’t.”

Ay’s beak closed with a clack. He focused on the way ahead, an ululating path winding through blasted dunes and stumps of fractured rock. The servants groaned and struggled, but together they made a good pace. Their mismatched limbs kept an irregular back and forth, faster and slower as they dragged the cart. The occasional stone under the steel wheels bounced them in their seats.

“She’s hungry again,” Bee said, then sighed. Rocking Em on her lap and muttering to the little one’s maggoty head wasn’t keeping her still anymore.

“Give them more,” Ay said through a crack in his beak. “Get some water yourself. We’ll cross the Oasis this way. Resupply.”

That was all she was waiting to hear. Then, dragging the fur rags with her, she jumped out of her seat and into the back. Putting Em down with her other sisters, they chirped together when their swaddling was removed, and their eyes found the light.

“You need to be careful.” Ay rasped back to her. “Children eat those who feed them... When they get big enough.”

Bee peered back at him. She was tearing up a strip of meat, taken from Heych’s pack, to feed the girls but stopped. His words shouldn’t have made her stop - they were just words; they didn’t matter. Yet she had stopped.

“Shut up,” was her dumb response, and she felt a shiver of regret creep up her spines after the words left her lips. Ay only croaked a laugh and continued driving the carriage. Then, above, Bee saw the black spectres swoop out. They began to circle, sharp figures drifting high in the sky, sweeping, innumerable.

“What are they?” Bee asked, scattering scraps to her sisters.

Ay made a show of leaning his body to one side, beak opening far enough to look up into the bright sky. He shielded his eyes from the sun with a muscular arm.

“Scavengers. Follow freaks in the desert, wait for them to die.”

“That can’t be a good way to get water.”

“Not just water, their biomass, their augs.” He looked back. “Like hounds. You know what a hound is?”

“Yes.”

“Right.” Ay refocused on the road ahead, such as it was. With every gust of wind, it seemed to twist and turn. This time he didn’t stay quiet for long. “Your mother was a Goddess, you know?”

“Was she?”

“People worshipped her.” Ay fidgeted with the reigns in his hands, where the child wouldn’t be able to see. “Or they did. Every city has her temples, palaces, and halls filled with her wombs. She’s created... Many of us.”

“Did she make you?”

“No. No, I was shed.”

“Heych said he was shed….” Bee stopped feeding her sisters and sat there as her anguish rose back up, gathering the strength to continue. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Ay began but paused. He needed a moment to find the right words to explain to the child. “Means we fell off of someone who got too big, got too much biomass. Cities do it a lot. First thing I remember, belched out of a malfunctioning chute into Jaabas Street.”

Bee’s nose wrinkled. Ay looked back, caught the look and explained, “It’s a marketplace.”

That wasn’t what disturbed her.

“Why does it matter?” She asked.

“It doesn’t.” Then, vaguely offended, Ay straightened up, bouncing his shoulders. “Just didn’t think a noble could die.”

Bee stared at the back of his head as Ay returned to his silent vigil. She decided not to tell him, feeding her sisters instead. He didn’t need to know.

That bright spark overhead, that foul daystar, slowly arced above. Finally, it escaped over the horizon. Night swallowed them, and Bee’s furs became insulation from the biting cold. She slept. She awoke. The sun made its way across the heavens until it disappeared once more. When night came again, and Bee dared peek above, she saw the darkness break with flashes of light, streaks of fire spitting across the heavens, as if the stars themselves were trying to rake the earth and burn the sky.

Together, they did not slow. Ay did not break and the thralls mewed at his lash. Even in what seemed to Bee unconquerable darkness, he pressed on, those at his call guided down the faintest traces of a path.