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soon.”
    But that was before she got sick. Before the fever sank its teeth into her flesh and shook the life from her body.
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    Musa slept in the cover of whatever brush or rock pile he could find, pressing his arms over his ears to shut out the sounds of the prowling night animals.
    On the third day, Musa crossed a dry lakebed littered with stumps and the skeletons of sunken boats. The clay left behind had broken into a thousand pieces, turning up at the edges like fallen leaves.
    His mind wandered in and out of focus, in and out of memory, till it seemed that his mother walked with him.
    Listen, my little Musa. Listen.

16
Sarel
    Three limp spears of aloe poked out of the soil.
    The garden should have been spilling over with life—the horned cucumbers yellowing, the crossberry flowering, the sour figs stretching to fill every corner. Sarel raked her fingers through the lifeless dirt. Shot through with the memory of her mother’s hands at work, of her mother’s laughter as she plucked a horned cucumber from the vine, bit into the fruit, and wiped a dribble of green juice from her chin, Sarel lay down and pressed her cheek into the charred soil.
    She knew the horned cucumbers grew wild in a sandy hollow a half-day’s walk to the north and east. Toward the city. Her eyes flicked from the barren rows of soil to the low angle of the morning sun. Slinging her newly woven satchel over her shoulder, she set off toward the hazy skyline.
    Sarel followed a dusty game track, the dogs a steady current eddying around her. They moved through the cool morning until the sun swung overhead and pulled the sweat from her pores. Long, thirsty tongues lolled out of the dogs’ mouths.
    When the day was at its hottest, the hard line of a highway wavered into view. Sarel paused and Nandi fell into step beside her, grazing against her hip and ducking her head under the girl’s hand. Sarel let out a gust of breath. No one traveled the highways anymore. She was still far from the city. Who else would come out here, into the middle of the desert, in the heat of the day?
    No one, she told herself. No one.
    Sarel crossed the hot asphalt quickly, the mottled surface scalding and foreign under her feet. But she stopped again when they reached the other side. A sheet of colored metal attached to a long pole lay half buried in a crust of grit. Its reflective edges caught the sun’s light and threw it into her eyes. Shading the glare with the palm of her hand, Sarel knelt and scraped the words clear.
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KARST FLATS
20 KM
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    Below the lettering, an arrow pointed back the way they’d come. Scrubbing her foot in the dirt, Sarel kicked a layer of dust over the sign. She didn’t want anyone going looking for anything in that direction.
    The horned cucumber grew just past the highway, in a dip in the ground where the earth had settled lower than everything around it. The woody vine sprawled across the dirt, the fruit tucked away from the harsh sun under limp green leaves. Sarel reached in and yanked out a studded yellow gourd. She opened her knife and sliced the fruit lengthwise. Glistening green seeds spilled out onto her palm and she slurped a gooey mouthful. Her lips puckered at the bitter taste.
    Sarel hacked off a few knobby husks that rattled with dried seeds, then picked the rest of the ripening fruit. Chakide and Bheka nosed the dirt beneath her fingers, rooting under her hands to sniff out whatever she was hiding.
    Before, Sarel would have laughed. The pups would have licked her face and wiggled their way onto her lap. But that was before.
    Instead, she exhaled in a patter of breaths, the lines that creased her brow smoothing for a moment. Nudging their snouts away, Sarel tucked the gourds inside her satchel and turned toward home.
    She jogged easily, glad to have the city at her back. Sarel cradled the contents of her satchel, her mind working as her feet shushed across the dirt. The cucumber wasn’t