“We could move away from the rivers,” she whispered. “Get away from the Changers.”

“Yeah, the Silver’s struggling to hold things together right now, so they’re sticking to known trade routes,” Ptahmohtep said. “The network isn’t very stable from what I heard in Hope. Armies are running out of food. Everyone’s just trying to survive. You could get lost out there and nobody’d come looking for you, that’s for sure.”

“You know what this means to us?” Skipper breathed, feeling the weapon like a great relic against her thighs.

He gave the gun a momentary glance, then returned his attention to the spitted rodent. He offered it to her. “Hungry?”

“Show me water,” she said.

He shrugged and took a bite of the packrat. Gesturing at the ground, he said around the meat, “Okay, so the automatic setting is elemental, and its default is Fire, as it’s usually the most useful. That’s why it’s showing orange. To activate the water effect, just tap the top of the gun until it turns blue. Then aim it at whatever you want and concentrate like you did before and press the trigger.”

She did, and, after several tries, the sand collapsed in a puddle of water. No more than a cup, but it was enough.

I can create water, Skipper thought, completely flabbergasted. “How much can I make at one time?”

The Changer laughed. “How much can you make at one time, or how much can I make at one time?”

Skipper scowled. “You.”

He shrugged. “How much you want?” Like it didn’t even matter.

Skipper let out the breath she was holding. “You have to teach me,” she whispered.

The Changer gave her a long look over the remnants of his rodent, then finished eating and cast the stick into the fire. “Does that mean I’ve got more than six days?” His yellow eyes were filled with the first direct challenge that he’d shown since she’d found him.

Skipper considered. Then, reluctantly, she said, “As long as you’re useful, you can live.”

He nodded and grabbed a cactus fruit from the meager pile he’d made in her absence and started trying to peel it with his fingers. He winced, sucking one of the spines out of a finger. Grinning at her, he said, “How about entertaining?”

She felt herself return his smile briefly. “Entertaining works,” then, catching herself, she sobered and said, “As long as I don’t feel like you’re bullshitting me. And I’m pretty sure you’re bullshitting me somehow. I just haven’t figured out how yet.” She reached forward and took the fruit from him. “Here. Don’t peel it. Burn the spines off.” She demonstrated, poking a stick through a cactus fruit and held it out over the fire to singe the spines away.

“That’s pretty smart,” he said, watching. “Wish I’d known that yesterday. My hands feel like I had a run-in with a porcupine.”

“Porcupine?” she asked, handing him the stick.

He waved it off. “Just something they have north of the Silver. In the woods nobody goes in because they’re haunted.”

Skipper snorted. “The woods ain’t haunted. Someone’s just hiding something they don’t want no one else to find.”

He stopped poking at the fire and raised one eyebrow at her appreciatively. “You’re kind of cynical, aren’t ya?”

She tensed. “What aren’t you telling me about what really happened between you and Pastet?”

He looked up, those gold eyes focused on her, and Skipper got a good look at just how inhuman he really was. Even his pupils seemed a bit odd in shape, almost like almonds, and where most Changers just had yellow eyes—if they were different at all—his actually had the tinges of silver around the edges of the iris.

For the first time, getting a close-up look at a living, breathing Changer who wasn’t whimpering in terror or begging for his life, Skipper actually got a little unnerved by whatever predator ancestry had gone into the creation of these beasts. She got goosebumps and felt—really felt—that, at one point in the distant past, his ancestors might have eaten hers.

Then it passed, because he had gone back to sucking splinters out of his thumb, muttering and shaking out his fingers like he could will the tiny, hair-thin spines back out. His fingernails, she noticed, were thicker and sharper than they should have been, and, now that she was paying attention, it wasn’t the blood and dirt that had stained them black.

“What’d they use to make Changers?” Skipper blurted.

He hesitated, dropping his hand from his mouth. “What?”

“Like coyotes or eagles or snakes…?” When he clearly didn’t understand, she said, “What did our ancestors breed with to get Changers?” She went out on a limb and offered hesitantly, “…Tigers?”

He seemed amused by that. “I’m surprised you know what a tiger is.”

Skipper didn’t, but she’d heard her parents tell stories about them enough times, how they could eat men whole and level cities before they had to be taken down by air machines. She flushed.

“Tigers have got a bad rap,” he said. “They’re actually only three feet tall, and they avoid people as much as possible.” He said it with the confidence of a man who had seen them personally.

Skipper felt her eyes sharpen. “How do you know that?”

He grimaced and shrugged, then immediately winced and reached up to touch his shoulder. “I got it back in the socket, but it still hurts like hell. I think I ripped something in the fall.”

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“Answer me,” she growled. “How do you know what a tiger looks like? They were killed off in the war.”

“I, um.” He cleared his throat. His forced smile more of a wince, he held up a spine-free cactus fruit. “Hungry?”

“Listen, you piece of shit,” Skipper growled, hand tightening on her knife. “I’ve let you live this long, but you keep jerking me around, you’re gonna end up dead.”

“With my nuts in an ant hole. I know.” He lowered the fruit with a sigh. “I’m tired of running.”

She squinted at him. “What?”

“You’re right.” He sounded defeated. “Those woods up north aren’t haunted. They’re filled with…something. I can feel them up there, calling to me. Like a siren’s song.” He made a bitter sound. “That’s why they don’t let anyone go up there. Afraid we’ll run away. I tried—got a glimpse, through the trees, like white moonlight in motion—but the Ibis thugs found me and dragged me back before I could get close enough to talk to it. Locked me up for a few years before they decided I was reformed enough to let me see the sun again.”

“Talk to what?” Skipper demanded. Then, frowning, “You were in jail for a couple years?” He looked to be in his early twenties. “Why didn’t they just shoot you?”

“Too pretty, I guess,” he said, grinning.

But she wasn’t smiling. “You’re what, twenty? How could you have been in a work camp?” She’d never heard of anyone getting out of a work camp before.

“Never said it was a work camp. It was my own bedroom under the temple, technically, but it was really a prison. I didn’t see the sun again for two hundred years. Kept me sequestered down there, trying to brainwash me into sucking up their lines of crap like the other guys did their lines of coke.”

Skipper’s brain was stumbling, not registering. “Coke?” was all she could manage.

He waved a hand distractedly. “Silverlander stuff.”

Her thoughts were still staggering. “Did you say two hundred years?” Surely she had misheard that.

“You asked what they used to make us,” he said, poking at the fire. He gave her a bitter look. “I think maybe, in some cases, they aren’t made, but stolen.” He gave the fire a dark look. “Like when they spend so much time raping human women that their bloodlines are running thin. They need fresh studs every now and then.”

She squinted at him. She’d known a man with three horses, before he’d been killed by Changers. He’d been so proud of those horses…had found them trapped in a ravine, had grand plans to breed them. Called the male his ‘stud’. She’d taken that to mean some sort of herd sire. Skipper blinked at him. “Huh?”

He shrugged his good shoulder. “I don’t remember much. Just some vague memories of forest and…peace. Warmth. Some eggs or something. And a light—I think it was my mom. Then there was an explosion and someone bundled me into a sack—literally a fucking sack—and carried me out of the forest. I remember screaming for months. The priests chained me to a post and whipped me with a willow switch until I stopped, but eventually I’d start again, because I could feel her. She wanted me back, was calling. I felt her sorrow.” He let out a miserable sound. “I don’t feel her now. I think she died of old age.” He sighed and tossed the stick into the fire. “Or heartbreak. That, too. Pretty sure they killed the ones they didn’t take, and I was the only one that they dumped out of a sack in the basement of a temple.”

“What…” Skipper asked, baffled and struggling, “are you saying?”

Ptahmohtep glanced at her. “You asked what made the soldiers.”

“…yeah…” she said, still not able to comprehend.

“So I was stupid. I tried to run back the moment I figured out where I’d come from—I guessed it was North. That didn’t work, because every Silverling between the capital and the forest called to report me whenever they saw me. Sent those fucking Ibis assholes after me, dropped me in the pit for a few weeks, then just locked me in my room for a couple centuries. So the next time they let me out, I stole a skimmer and flew it as far as I could into the Wastes—I didn’t try to head north again because there was way too much Silver between me and the forest. I landed in Hope, thought maybe I could blend in, act like one of them while I figured out how to get around the Silver, back to the forest. But they sent those immune Ibis thugs after me to catch me and bring me back, this time, too, so I had to get out of there, go even further out, pretend to have gotten stationed out here.” He glanced at her. “You know that tattoo on Pastet’s head?” He gestured an arc over his ear and neck. “The one of the black stork?”

Skipper had assumed it was some sort of raven, but she nodded slowly, her brain still struggling to keep up.

“Marks the Ibis cult enforcers. You know how a mongoose can kill a snake because the snake can’t poison them?”

“What’s a mongoose?” she breathed, confused and struggling.

“Those Ibis guys are usually bigger, stronger, trained super well, and totally immune. The priests have snake heads. They’re the dangerous ones—they’re the closest to purebloods humanity’s got. The temple guards have black dog heads, and they’re actually terrifying…trained in all sorts of ways to kill people. Silently, because the only ones allowed to talk in the temples are us and the priests. Anyway. Pastet was one of the ones they sent to bring me back. I knew him back at the temple. A true zealot. Thought he was doing me a favor.” He gestured at the gun in her lap. “Ibis thugs are really just bigger, stronger priests that washed out of training, just lower on the totem pole. Immune. They use them to catch us if we get out.”

“Immune to…” Skipper fought with the word. “What are you saying?” She suddenly felt like she was floundering, her world turned upside-down.

“I’m saying…” He sighed, meeting her eyes again. “I was mostly telling the truth. I did land in camp just last week thinking I could lay low, pretend to be one of the artillery guys. I could fit in ok—I knew what the bombardiers did and could imitate them well enough. And everything seemed to be going fine until the morning Lieutenant came out of his tent saying he was ‘ready for a new batch’ and everyone started cheering and gathering up their gear and I thought we were off to save some people. And…well…they didn’t. So I tried to stop the dude from shooting the woman, and one of his buddies hit me with his rifle, called me a traitor. They were gonna torture me at the fire, make an example out of me, but they’re not immune and I killed them all.”

“Immune to what?” Skipper asked, every hair on her body prickling with alarm. “You keep saying immune…what’s that mean?”

He gave her a sideways glance, but didn’t answer. “So I really did kill them, grab a Hummer, and drove until I high-centered it on that hump back there because I was sliding in and out of consciousness and the priests never taught me how to drive a truck.” He made a wry snort. “Couldn’t back up, couldn’t go forward, so had to get out and walk. And I was already seeing double, so I didn’t get far.” He let out the breath he’d been holding. “But along the way, just outside their camp, I found the mass grave where they’d been throwing scavvers over the edge and I just kinda stopped and sat down, looking down at the bodies. That’s where Pastet found me. He jumped me, threw a bag over my head, kicked the crap outta me, and I thought he was walking me back to the Hummer. Come find out, the priests had told him to put me out of my misery when he found me. Orders came from the pharaoh herself. I was already on the edge of the cliff when I managed to get the sack off my head and realized what he was about to do.”

He paused, looking her over. “So I did lie, just a little. There really only was one gun. Pastet’s gun.”

“Did you say you came from a forest?” She squinted at him, trying to back the conversation up to something she could understand. “Like some scavvers living in the oases to the north or something?”

He shook his head. “In the north, it’s not desert like this. The trees go as far as the eye can see, a hundred feet tall, their limbs so thick together they blot out the light to the ground.” He said it with longing, and maybe it was her imagination, but she thought his eyes were brighter.

Skipper had heard stories, but she wasn’t the type to believe in things she hadn’t seen. “So…” She squinted at him, trying to piece together what he was implying. “You’re saying…you…are what the ancestors bred to make Changers?”