“That’s why you made me ditch the bullets,” she said softly.

He winced. “I mean, I’m pretty sure a shot to the head could kill me just as quick as a human.” He hesitated. “In fact, I heard someone did kill one of us out here, when the pharaoh took her pets to visit the mines like twenty years ago. Blew his head right off.” He looked her over carefully. “They threw a couple slaves in the pit for the public, but I know they never caught the one who actually did it.”

“He deserved it,” she whispered.

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Ptahmohtep said. “Yakkhal was an asshole. But the pharaoh was pissed. Sent Ibis out here in droves. I’m surprised you weren’t caught.”

“I killed them,” she said, thinking of the winged tattoos she had seen before.

“With bullets.” He seemed bemused by that.

“And pit traps and deadfalls,” she said, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt.

He grinned. “How old were you?”

“Fifteen or sixteen. Hard to remember.”

His grin widened. “I remember the priests going nuts there for a couple years. They kept throwing Ibis into the Waste and they kept disappearing. Finally had to just throw in the towel and pretend it never happened.”

“The desert suits me,” Skipper said. “Always treated me right.” Her eyes had dropped to the collar again, the sign of divinity amongst the Changer zealots. She swallowed, her face burning as she remembered all the times the gun wouldn’t glow or fire, how she had thought it was her fault for not ‘concentrating’ or believing enough. “So you could’ve murdered me when I pointed that gun at you,” she said, “but you let me think I was about to pop your head off, instead.” She remembered the gold glow, the thrill, the feeling of power, the way her finger wanted to twitch on the trigger. Thinking of it, she felt ashamed, and couldn’t meet his eyes.

“I had to know if you were gonna shoot me or not,” he said, almost softly.

“And if I’d tried to shoot you?” she demanded.

“You didn’t.”

“But if I had?”

“I probably would’ve found another way out of those zip ties,” he admitted. He hefted his shirt. “You done looking? It’s kind of chilly out here, and I’ve only got one arm…”

Skipper shook herself, tearing her eyes from the archaic golden contraption. Obligingly, she stood and helped get the shirt back over his head, careful not to let the collar touch her hand. Then she sat back down, thinking.

“You’re not saying much,” he finally muttered.

“So basically what you’re telling me is you’re the weapon. You could set people on fire or make plants grow.”

“Never tried to make plants grow.”

“With water.”

“Oh, that. Probably.” Like it was nothing.

“And if we got that collar off you, it’d be easier?” Skipper demanded. “You could, like, feed a village?”

He made a face. “I don’t know about feeding a village. People either hate me or try to use me, in case you hadn’t noticed. I kinda just want to disappear. Get the collar off, see if I can fly home.”

The pang of loss was like a knife to her heart. “You could help people. People starve out here.”

He hesitated, glancing across the fire at her, then glanced at the ground and scuffed the sand with his toe. Out beyond the firelight, a coyote yipped in the distance. Finally, he looked up and said, “I’ll help you.” He gestured to the darkness in general. “The rest of the world can get fucked.”

“I don’t need help,” Skipper said quickly. “But there are families a couple gorges over, groups that are struggling. There weren’t many rains, and the Changers killed some of their menfolk…”

The Skymancer looked up, met her eyes directly, and said with extreme finality, “I’ll help you.”

And, she realized, he wasn’t going to budge on that.

Then, his expression softening, he said with reluctance, “But, in exchange for some protection out here, if you wanna take me out to those villages and don’t make a big deal of it, I’m sure I could make it rain or something.”

She gave him a sharp look.

“Yeah, I can do that,” he admitted. “I was going to make it rain if you hadn’t left me canteens. It’s super difficult with the collar, but you certainly gave me enough time.”

“How do you do that?” she asked, gesturing at the pock mark where her ‘weapon’ had made a ‘hole’. “Melt the stone…make it rain?”

“Honestly?” He considered, then shrugged. “I think I’m tapped into something, maybe something genetic. It’s like a frequency I can feel that the rest of you can’t. If I had to guess, it’s like a ship or some old tech buried around the planet or something. Something that links up, does what we want.”

“And the collar blocks the signal,” Skipper said.

“Basically. Or just dampens us enough the signal doesn’t go very far.” He glanced up at the stone around them. “…But we must be close to something big—this is better than I was ever able to do in the Silver, and they have an artifact from the Fall directly under the main temple. I think it’s the living quantum core of a spaceship, but don’t quote me.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Skipper said.

“A big glowing gem.”

“Oh yeah, there’s one of those up the wash.” She pointed. “Half a day, if you don’t have a broken ankle.”

He froze. “You’re kidding me.”

“Well, might take you more like three days, considering how beat up you are.”

“No, I mean the gem. You’re serious?”

“Yeah, in a cave.” She’d found it as a kid, and had kept it hidden ever since. “Want me to take you?”

He glanced down at his broken ankle, then back at her. “Yes, but…”

“We’ll make you a crutch.”

He swallowed, clearly not feeling particularly brave. “Sounds great.”

“Tomorrow,” Skipper said. “Let’s get some sleep first, then we need to get the hell away from this ridge. Sooner or later, someone’s gonna follow those tracks you left with the Hummers, and that’s going to be a problem.”

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“I bow to your superior wisdom,” he said, nodding. Skipper frowned at him, but the Skymancer didn’t seem to be making fun of her.

“So…should I call you Ptah?” Skipper reluctantly asked. “Ptahmohteph is…”

“Long, I know. Ptah is fine,” he said. He shrugged as if he didn’t care. “Probably not my original name, anyway. Just whatever that fucking cult came up with, based on the way the stars aligned the day they dumped me out of the sack.”

“I could call you something else,” Skipper suggested. “Like Nascar or Camero or Derby.”

His lips stretched in a genuine smile. “I think Ptah is fine.”

“Mustang?” she offered.

“Someone in your family like racing?” he asked, grinning wider. The sharp points of his teeth showed again, like a cat trying to pretend it was a rabbit.

She blinked at him, honestly perplexed. “Racing?”

But the bastard only guffawed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “You guys don’t get to read a lot of history books out here, do ya?” he asked, a big smile on his face.

Skipper tensed. “If you’re gonna make fun of me, you can just make a run of the desert on your own…”

He sobered immediately. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just…” He hesitated, looking her over. “Let’s just say I had a lot of time to read in those two hundred years in the basement.”

“So you know how to read,” Skipper said, bristling. “Whoopty-doo. Can it feed you? Stop a bullet? Skin a rabbit?”

“Nope.” He grinned. “That’s where you come in.”

She squinted at him, then at the bones of the dead packrat even then charring away in the fire. “You seemed to be doing pretty well for yourself.”

“I was trying to impress you. The collar makes it really hard to focus. Took me sixteen hours of stalking the little fuckers to finally get a clean shot without blowing him apart.” Ptah winced, looking wistfully at the tiny smoldering corpse. “Let’s just say his fourteen brothers and sisters didn’t fare so well.”

Skipper squinted at the rodent carcass, then at the scorched mass of dead cholla blocking off a section of the wash a few feet away, then back at Ptah. “You killed a whole family of packrats…to impress me?”

“I thought you’d see I’d hunted something on my own and think I was a strong survivor, the useful kind that you totally wouldn’t leave behind because he had a broken ankle and a concussion and is seeing double half the time.” He grinned weakly.

“You can make water,” she said.

“Or that too.” He cocked his head at her. “So you’re not leaving me behind?”

She would be insane to leave him behind, but she wasn’t going to say as much. “I think we can work something out.”

He nodded. “So…uh…not to be weird, but could you take a look at this?” He lifted a lock of his crystalline hair to show her the bruised side of his head, exposing a wound she hadn’t seen before.

Skipper sucked in a breath at the pus-covered gash. “That from the rifle butt or the fall?”

“The rifle,” he said. “But the fall didn’t do it any favors.”

“Gimme a sec,” Skipper said, moving to get her medical kit from her backpack. “I’ve gotta get something to clean that out. You’ve got sand in it.”

“Thanks,” he croaked.

“I should probably stitch it up, too,” she said, wary. What would a Skymancer do if she stabbed him too hard with a needle?

“Oh thank god,” he said in a rush. “I was hoping you’d offer—I could feel it was getting infected, but I was too afraid to ask.” Then, seeing her gaze sharpen, he blurted, “Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m just so terrified you’re gonna leave me behind…”

“I’m not leaving you behind,” Skipper muttered. “That would be about the dumbest thing I can think of.”

“Really?” he asked. “Even after…” He hesitated, glancing down at the collar just visible under his shirt. Then it seemed like a massive weight fell off his shoulders, because he collapsed with a relieved whimper. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about…well…you know. That whole time you were gone, I was in a panic, I thought I was gonna die. And once you told me what happened with your brother, I was sure you would…” He swallowed, eyes quickly catching on her face. “I’m not like Yakkhal.”

“If I thought you were, you wouldn’t be breathing right now,” she assured him.

“Okay.” He hesitated. “So…you’re not… I mean you’re gonna let me…” He glanced at her again, then at the stone ledge above them, and she saw his breath catch, then a softly luminescent tear leaked down his bruised cheek. “It’s been really rough,” he finally whispered, chancing a glance at her. “Really rough.”

She could see the strain in his body, the way his hands were tightened into fists to keep from trembling. “Just wearing that thing must be hard on you,” she said.

He glanced down at his chest. “Oh. Yeah.” He waved it off with a sigh and wiped the luminescent tears on his arm, where they made the black cloth of his sleeve glow slightly. “But it’s been there so long I don’t really think about it.”

“I don’t think I’d ever get used to that,” she admitted.

“Didn’t really have a choice,” he said. Then, belatedly, he added, “But… It was hard in the beginning. I stopped breathing a lot. They had to resuscitate me with the pharaoh’s cattle prod a few times.”

Skipper eyed the collar where she knew it rested under his shirt, then unfolded her kit and, pushing his hair out of the way, got to work. “Hold your hair up,” she said, grabbing the crystalline locks that were hiding the wound from view demonstrating.

The Skymancer obliged, gingerly using his good arm to keep his long locks out of the way as she worked.

She cleaned the grit out of his wound, dosed it with antibiotics, sutured it the best she could without shaving his scalp, then let him drop the hair. “Well,” she said, “If you die, it’s not because I didn’t try to stop you.”

The Skymancer gave her a nervous look, his yellow eyes flashing. “It was that bad?”

“Nah,” she said. “Didn’t punch through the skull. You Changers are…” She hesitated, realizing she wasn’t talking to a hybrid, but one of the originals, and he hadn’t struck her as particularly strong or sturdy, aside from falling off a cliff without dying. “Hardier…”

“Not really,” he said. “Less hardy, if I had to guess. It’s the hybrids that are stronger. The Ibis, the Jackals, the Cobras… Guys like that barrel-chested fuck Pastet could bench-press me. I just had a really lucky fall. I think the collar actually helped keep me from dying.”

Skipper had killed a lot of Changers in her life, and every single one of them had seemed stronger than Ptah, she realized. Too strong. Inhuman strong. And they healed quicker, and their bodies could take a lot more damage before they succumbed. “So Changers really are stronger than regular people.”

“It’s called hybrid vigor,” he said. “Takes the best stuff from both genetic codes and all the recessive crap gets ignored. My best working theory is that some government somewhere got hold of an alien—one of me, I guess—and decided to use the concept to start making supersoldiers.” He hesitated. “Annnnddd, once they figured out they could force them to take the shape of a compatible body, they started a long term breeding program. Then that kind of morphed into…” His face twisted. “A cult.”

“So you’ve seen the Pharaoh?” Skipper asked, still finding that hard to believe. She had heard whispers of a pharaoh in the Silver her whole life, but it had always been like a myth, something so distant it was more of a dream than a fact.

“Yeah, she’s a bitch,” Ptah muttered. “So was her mom and uncle. Dad wasn’t so bad, but he drank a lot and I’m pretty sure she murdered him. Either she did or the capital city nomarch. Maybe the vizier, but he was sick with a venereal disease and off trying to get it treated in Kuberta, if rumors were true. I wouldn’t really know—I spent most of it in my room with my books. Just heard whispers.”

Skipper blinked at how casually he talked about the politics of the Pharaohs, who, until that evening, had been like a distant legend to her, something so ephemeral she never considered whether or not the tales could be true. She thought of how much else she didn’t know, how little of what the Skymancer said had made any sense to her. “I’m…very tired,” she said. “It was a long hike today. I need to sleep.”

He looked chagrined. “Sorry. You could’ve waited on the wound…”

She waved him off. “There’s a second bedroll in your companion’s—your—pack. Feel free to use it.” She noticed, with a pang of guilt, that he hadn’t even unfolded the bedroll while she was gone, probably because he was sure she’d kill him if he went through her stuff.

…which she probably would have.

“I was a little impressed,” she muttered.

He blinked at her with surprise. “Huh?”

She gestured at the fire. “The rat.” She had to force the words out. “…Impressed me.”

A slow, shy smile spread over his face as he looked at her.

“You’re still keeping yourself to the other side of the fire,” she said immediately. “No sharing bedrolls, no inching into my space, no touching, no rifling through my gear…”

He held up both hands, yellow eyes wide. “You just tell me what to carry and I’ll carry it. I’m not looking to get laid. I’ve had enough of that forced on me, thank you.”

In all truth, it was probably him that should have been telling her to stay out of his space. Skipper sniffed and glanced up at the sky, then back at the fire. “I’ll see you in the morning, Skymancer,” she said, and then pushed sand over the coals to put the flames out.

“Ptah,” he said, still looking at the smoking pile of sand with obvious disappointment. “Can’t we keep even a tiny fire going? It’s getting cold again…”

“No. We’re not in a good spot. Nice to meet you, Ptah.”

He sighed and slumped against the pack she’d given him. “And you, Skipper Stax.”

She smiled a little as she settled into a defensible position, her back against the rock wall, facing out from under the overhang. She wrapped herself in a blanket, eyes on the Skymancer, still humbled as she thought about the amazing boon the gods had given her day.

“Can I call you Skip?” he asked.

Her awe faded. “No.”

“Stax?”

“You like your nuts where they are?”

He chuckled and didn’t say anything else.