Ora felt good. She weighed about twice what she had when she’d met Tengu, was about six centimetres taller, and her dress covered her arms and her ankles, and she had a wide straw hat on her head. The bunkhouse was finished. Tengu had finally brought Ora on one of her adventures.

‘So if you hadn’t been looking after me, you’d have been out here killing slavers and rescuing people?’ Ora asked.

‘It’s important to feel guilty, I suppose,’ Tengu said, in her quiet, gentle voice. ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps I would have been hunting animals and killing raiders. Or drying meat and selling it in Journey.’

‘Why is it important to feel guilty?’ Ora asked, sensibly.

‘You tell me,’ Tengu smiled behind her mask. ‘You’re the one doing it.’

Ora frowned at her and trudged along in silence.

Despite Tengu’s distinctly longer legs and propensity for wandering in the wastes, they went at a pace that was comfortable for Ora. They took regular breaks to sit in the shade and eat and drink, they went the long way around cliffs and inclines that they perhaps could have climbed instead.

Ora was enjoying herself. And she was missing her friends back in Haven. She was quite sure she wasn’t feeling guilty about it, though. This was different. It was inevitable that it would feel different.

After months of sitting around in Haven, enjoying herself and making friends, but feeling vaguely useless, Ora was finally out on an adventure. It was good. But she had still spent months making friends in Haven, and she was quite sure it was completely fine for her to miss them.

‘We’re supposed to feel guilty just for being alive,’ Ora said, eventually. ‘It’s a hard habit to break.’

‘Who is supposed to feel guilty?’ Tengu asked.

‘All us women and girls,’ Ora said. ‘We’re all evil, don’t you know? Spawn of the Mistress of Night, here to lead men astray and destroy civilisation.’

‘Men are enslaved by the Lord’s House, are they not?’

‘They’re enslaved for things they’ve done,’ Ora said. ‘Penance. Or at least that was the idea. All us heathens from outside the Lord’s House were born evil, I suppose. The men were less likely to get out of there than we were.’

‘If you’re all evil, inherently, why keep you alive?’ Tengu asked. ‘I see the practical reason, of course. But is that part of the belief system, too?’

‘It is.’ Ora nodded a few times. ‘Best to keep evil subjugated, after all. Make it work for the cause of good. And, of course, there’s some chance we’ll all be purified if we work hard enough and pray hard enough.’

‘Is that what you seek when you pray, still?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ora huffed. ‘It’s just what I’m supposed to do. If I don’t do it the Lord of Light will climb in the window and smother me with my pillow or something.’

‘I would let him do no such thing,’ Tengu smiled.

‘And you may have noticed that I don’t pray as much anymore, if you weren’t too busy filling bags full of sand to make me carry up the hill into Haven.’

‘Those bags were half-full at most.’ Tengu chuckled.

It seemed odd to Ora that Tengu didn’t carry a bow, or even a crossbow. She was quite sure that Tengu was capable of making herself either, and she was certainly capable of buying either. If she went out hunting in the wastes, wouldn’t it be easier to hunt with a bow?

Instead, Tengu skuttled on the ground like a massive, bird-faced spider. She slipped and slid and jumped and, inexplicably, rapidly approached a pair of apparently unaware lions. In their defence, the lions were quite busy shouting at each other, no doubt over some sort of territorial dispute.

Almost the same moment they noticed Tengu, both lions were quite dead.

Ora was slightly surprised when Tengu didn’t just pick up both, fully grown, male lions. She did pick up one, and carried it back up the rise to Ora without any apparent difficulty.

Ora watched with vague interest and increasing bafflement as Tengu tied a rope around the lion’s hind legs and started pulling it up into a tree. Once it was swinging freely, Tengu slashed its throat. Ora winced.

Tengu went back down the rise and did the same thing over again.

The two of them sat in the shade and chewed on dried meat and vegetables while the blood drained out of the two lions.

Eventually, Ora thought to ask. ‘So is this just a hunting trip?’

‘It doesn’t have to be,’ Tengu said.

Ora chewed thoughtfully. ‘I’d like to do something more interesting than watch you kill animals.’

‘How long do you want to stay out of Haven?’

Ora was still missing her friends, but despite the feeling like Tengu could just be doing all this by herself, Ora was enjoying herself. ‘I don’t know.’

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‘We could roam aimlessly around the wastes for however long it takes to find something more interesting than animals,’ Tengu said. ‘Or I suppose we could go three days west and see if there’s anything interesting passing by some friends.’

‘You have friends?’

Tengu smiled. Her mask was raised to eat, so it was certain that she smiled. ‘I do have friends.’

‘I would prefer to have an aim.’

‘And you wouldn’t mind spending a week out here?’

Ora thought chewfully. ‘Only one way to find out.’

Tengu kept on smiling. ‘In that case, let us go west and see if there’s some slave traders to raid.’

Ora pointed the stub of her dried meat. ‘See? That sounds interesting.’

As they waited for the lions to drain, Tengu and Ora made a sled from sticks and branches. Or Tengu made a sled and explained the process thoroughly enough that Ora was able to help a little. Rather than butcher the lions right there, Tengu loaded them onto the sled and they struck off west northwest across the sand.

When Tengu dragged the sled, they could go at a totally normal pace. When Ora dragged the sled, they had to slow down a little. But she didn’t mind, and Tengu didn’t complain or judge.

They stopped for the night under some more trees, ate more dried meat and some lightly-cooked cactus, and Ora unrolled her bedding to sleep. Tengu set about butchering the lions.

Ora had noticed, had been unable to ignore, just how little Tengu seemed to sleep. From time to time, she would sleep through the night. But much more often she would be off on some work by the time Ora woke, or came in after Ora was asleep. Or both.

By the time Ora woke, before dawn, Tengu was already up and about.

‘In the Lord’s House, they say that idle hands are the Mistress’s plaything,’ Ora said. ‘That’s why we had to work all day.’

Tengu didn’t talk about herself very much, and when she did, she always talked in vagaries. ‘Somewhere I stayed, they said wasted time was wasted opportunity.’

‘They always let us sleep from dusk, even in winter when the days were short,’ Ora said.

‘Well, if you were awake at night, the Mistress would whisper in your ears, wouldn’t she?’ Tengu grinned under her mask. ‘Did you escape during the day?’

Ora smiled back. It was one of those little teases that she didn’t mind. If it was some influence of the Mistress of Night that had convinced her to leave Outer Light, she couldn’t think of that as a bad thing.

She had even considered adding the Mistress to her pre-dawn prayers, but it had felt too entirely wrong. Maybe she could reconsider in future. But for now the Lord of Light could have credit for those things improved during the day.

When they stopped to rest, Ora and Tengu rearranged the sliced meat on the sled, but there was far too much of it to effectively dry without a sled the size of the bunkhouse.

Andros, the shopkeep in Haven, was a very good cook. He was very good at preserving vegetables, since there had long been quite an excess in Haven. Ora had eaten fermented vegetables in Outer Light, it was the only way to transport them so far out into the desert. It had been a surprise, eating at the shop near the western gate, to discover that they could taste good.

Tengu, for her part, was extremely good at preserving meat.

The second day of wandering through the wastes was uneventful but by no means boring. Ora wasn’t sure if this was a nicer part of the wastes, or if she had been too distracted by her quest to reach Haven to notice how pretty this place was. She thought it might have been both.

Cacti were flowering in all sorts of pretty colours. Birds flitted about, chirping merrily. The twisting, rustling shadows of the scrub and grass out in the sand was mesmerising. And they travelled slow enough to take it all in.

Ora made a note to pray the next morning in thanks for how beautiful the world seemed to be.

She was just on the lookout for someone to stop as dusk rolled over the savannah when Tengu sighed and stopped out in the open. She was looking around at the rolling hills, protruding stones and stands of trees with what seemed to Ora to be a distinct sense of disappointment. It was hard to tell under the mask.

‘If we press on, we’ll reach the hideout in a couple of hours,’ Tengu said. ‘I know you prefer to stop at dusk.’

‘I can endure a little whispering,’ Ora smiled.

Dusk had thoroughly settled by the time Ora spotted lights between the hills and dunes. It was faint, well obscured, and flickered like fire. It wasn’t so much longer before they were cresting a rise over a small collection of large buildings, set around a wide hollow in the sand.

It reminded Ora of the ruins of the watchtower, though these buildings were in much better condition, and there was no watchtower to protrude above the hills. Three wide, long, concrete buildings surrounded a large patch of some sort of root vegetables.

As they climbed down the rise, it was increasingly obvious that at some point, these buildings must have looked very much like the ruins Ora had found. New walls, windows, doors, and roofs had been added from concrete, brick and wood. They blended well with the old construction, but up close it was fairly obvious.

The sounds of people talking and enjoying themselves could be heard from one of the large buildings. It was to that building that Tengu led Ora. Then she knocked, and waited politely.

There was something like a hiccup in the noise, a tiny pause that might have seemed quite natural if it hadn’t immediately followed Tengu’s knocking. A moment later a woman’s voice resonated through the concrete and brick and wood of the building.

‘Bird-face, is that you?’

Rather than shouting back, which would have been very odd for Tengu, she just knocked again. Ora was pretty sure this knock was more rhythmic than the last. Some sort of code, no doubt.

Ora was distracted from trying to remember the code by a giant woman flinging open the door. There were many distracting things about this giant woman. The immediately thought-halting distraction was that she was topless.

During the months spent in Haven, Ora had largely gotten over the scandal of women wearing pants, or skirts and dresses that showed their ankles, or sleeveless tops or otherwise improper clothes.

This was a bit more extreme.

What seemed important about this giant woman being topless, aside from the impropriety of it, was that being topless showed off an absolute mass of interesting and ugly scars. It looked to Ora that this woman ought to have died several times, judging from the size, depth, and discolouration of some of the scars around her chest and stomach.

The woman wore only short pants, long, clay-red hair tied in a messy tail on top of her head. And, she was giant. What was most distracting about this woman being giant was when she stepped down from the doorway of this building and Ora discovered that Tengu was taller.

Tengu was tall, this was known about Tengu. But she didn’t seem so tall most of the time. Ora would be reminded occasionally, when Tengu reached down something Ora would have needed a ladder to get, or if Tengu stretched and touched the ceiling.

This scarred, topless woman felt like a giant, and Tengu was taller than her.

‘Who’s this, why’s she so blushy?’ demanded the giant woman.

‘Jules, this is Ora. Ora, this is Jules.’