In the dark freezing air of the snowy night, Ishi crouched motionless in the stone nook and waited. She waited for the scouts, the men who were hunting them.

The ones she was with were slow. She hadn’t wanted them as friends, but that seemed to have happened anyway. The stocky woman was injured, and the staff woman helped her, so they moved slowly. And the men were coming for them. But she would not fail in getting the staff to The Beast. Where her sister had gone. Ishi would allow none of these things to stop her.

So Ishi crouched in the shadow on the side of the shale pile and waited for the man just like she had waited for a man once before.

The green tech that Raj had given her allowed her to see the terrain. Ishi had learned the poor way people see things in the dark was how she always saw things. She scanned the landscape through the lens around her, and it showed the landscape in green—so many piles of stone. Solid rock turned into chips by clockworks and piled into identical mounds. Piles of chipped rock and bad water made in the time before marched off into the surrounding darkness.

Between the piles of stone had been frozen lakes of bad water. So much water—and the princess had said that it was all poison. Then she went on to say the maze of stone piles in the setting sun was where the ones from before had cut into the earth. They had made the piles of rock and the poison lakes. Ishi didn’t know why the old ones would cut the earth and make poison water, but the princess had assured her it had been done.

Ishi had trouble seeing these things that didn’t move. She knew they were there, but it was the moving things, the things that pushed against the air, that she was easily aware of. And she knew she could hear far better than anyone. She could hear the cooling rocks cracking at night far out in the desert, the same way Kalla heard pebbles clatter beside her. She could hear the two scouts following them now, coming closer, and she could feel their mounts pushing against the air and falling snow.

There were other things she learned about herself from observing her sister. Her skin was tougher. She was stronger. Her hair didn’t grow but fell off in individual strands like a lizard tail or a beetle wing. Ishi had cut Kalla’s hair many times for her, but Ishi’s hair was part of her. She felt with her hair. Kalla spoke to her of clouds in the sky. Ishi’s sight was not good enough to see clouds. And she hadn’t realized at first Kalla couldn’t sense how the air was moving. If Kalla pointed out a cloud to her, Ishi knew where that part of the air was and where it would go. She knew where that cloud was, and she could point to it for Kalla, just like she knew where all the air would go.

She had realized even Raj didn’t know how the air moved around him.

She had been young when she had been found by the men. They were glad when they found her. They had pulled her from the building that was buried deep in the ground. They had hopes that she would live and grow. They let her drink blood and gave her bones to break so she could eat the insides. The men waited for something as she grew in the wasteland by the dirty camp and the sick water.

Then the clean man arrived, and she could feel his excitement when he saw her.

She remembered everything. He had slung her basket from the side of his clockwork horse and had ridden with his guards back to the large building. She was put into a room that smelled like fresh lime wash. She didn’t leave that room. Only the clean man came to see her. He brought her food. And once he fed her blood, like the dirty ones had, and he never did that again. Ishi remembered never to have blood again, regardless of how much she craved it sometimes.

The man tried to teach her language, and when he realized she couldn’t make the sounds, he showed her how to make language with her hands. Then the woman came. The woman with Kalla inside her. She had felt the woman living with the man in the farthest end of the house. They smelled the same, these two. She could tell they shared in life.

Then they brought Kalla to her. Ishi never slept much, and she liked to watch Kalla. She marvelled at the hair that was as bright as a flame and skin that shone. Kalla grew, and Ishi learned what it was to care for someone. To be imprinted onto them. To become their guard. They played together. Ishi went with Kalla everywhere. She sat in her lessons at the teacher’s hall. They chased each other and hunted each other in the giant stone house. They laughed.

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And then the army came to the Central City.

The army flooded the river and pulled down the tower. The merchant families were destroyed. Ishi helped Kalla escape from the wreck of a home and followed Kalla to the market. It was the only place Kalla knew. The old merchantman wasn’t in his burnt warehouse. They found that the father’s store was gone, and the market was a chaos of soldiers, traders, and the displaced. Kalla said that her father had told her the army would try to get him and his things.

The father was gone. The merchant children stayed together in the market, an unofficial gang waiting for the return of their parents, and then children started to disappear.

Ishi watched and learned. She never slept, and she felt the movement of the others around her and learned the patterns of the marketplace. She could anticipate when a child would be taken, and then she studied the series of events backwards in her mind. It was the old woman who smelled of bad fish and the men who smelled of beetle spoor or had the screaming machine. There were two different ways the children disappeared. When three smelly men came or when one man came by himself with the machine. A piece of technology that screamed like metal against metal.

She woke Kalla one night as they lay swaddled with the other children in the market and told her they must leave, that a man was coming for them. They had agreed that if this was going to happen, they would run away and seek shelter with the Sisters. Kalla was worried because the other children that had tried to get away from the market were always caught. Ishi now knew it was the warm and caring old fish woman that was trading children for coins that clinked in the night. Children hunted for family debts.

Kalla thought it wouldn’t matter if they ran. They would be captured like the others. Ishi signed to her in the darkness that she wouldn’t let them be captured.

They snuck from the market and walked out towards the Sister’s pyramid. Kalla couldn’t make it without resting and wanted to stop and make a fire. Ishi wouldn’t let her make a fire, but she did let her stop. She sensed she couldn’t go any further. It was a long walk for a city child to the pyramid.

Ishi was not tired and not cold, but Kalla was, so she wrapped them in cloaks and lay with her on the desert floor. It wasn’t long till she heard the man coming behind them. It wasn’t hard to hear him. She would have been able to pick out his movement, his footsteps as they “hushed hushed” in the sand, but the tech he was using to track them squealed to her through the night air.

She looked to Kalla in the darkness. She had heard nothing.

She gently rose, wrapped Kalla in the cloak, and went back to get the man. She made sure she was far enough away to not wake Kalla, and then she crouched and waited.

The man came, following their trail, concentrating on his tracking machine. He was a large man. He would have to be a large, strong man to be a bounty hunter that hunted alone. But tonight, he moved without concern for he thought he was only hunting two little girls.

As he drew closer, she could feel his excited pulse. Ishi knew she was different in this way too. She never became excited like people did. She waited for him to step closer in the darkness and then leapt onto his face. She would get him, but it would also be a quiet getting. She could not let Kalla know because Kalla wouldn’t like this.

Before the hunter hit the ground, she had a handful of sand shoved deep into his mouth. He spat and gagged, but it had kept him quiet enough, so she put another handful of sand where his air went in. From his back in the sand, he struck at her and pulled at her small arms, but she clung to his head with a far greater strength. When he tried to get her eyes, she bit his fingers. She pushed more sand into his mouth as he continued to cough and choke. He wrenched at her with all his strength. He broke his fingers when he tried to force the relentless little fists away from his mouth. But the thing held on to him and choked him with more handfuls of sand.

She sensed when he pulled the knife, and before he was able to strike, she kicked at the blade. It branded a hot slash across her foot, and she kicked again to send the blade spinning off into the darkness. The big man punched her side. She clung tighter and forced in more sand. He punched harder and broke his knuckles off ribs that felt like steel.

She clung to him until he became still so he would never again be able to push through the air with the little metal box that screamed and find Kalla.

That night, as she stood over the dead man in the desert, she wanted to go back to the market and stop the old fish woman’s air with sand. Then she wanted to find the men of three that smelled and stop their air with sand. But she knew Kalla would not approve.

So she turned and limped back to where her sister slept and lay peacefully down at her side and never ever told her of the awful thing she had done. She knew the cut on her leg would be healed by the time the sun rose, and Kalla would never know what had happened.

And today, the field marshall had not stopped her, and now the entire People’s Army would not stop her.

She would go to Kalla.