Author's Preface
The roasted meat had been served and the saffron rice passed twice around the table when Salim came through the tent flap without announcing himself.
Nobody at Seyyid Mansur's table had ever seen him do that. He was the head of Faris's personal squad, an elite warrior who usually waited at doorways until spoken to. Now there was sand to his knees and his chest was heaving. He bowed low.
"Seyyid Mansur. Forgive me. Something fell from the sky." He swallowed. "It's a structure, seyyid. Nothing like what we've seen before."
For a moment the only sound was a flatbread tearing in someone's fingers.
Then every head at the table turned, one after another, toward Halima. She had a hand on her belly and her spoon halfway to her mouth. She lowered it slowly. She didn't need to say anything. They all remembered her capsule, and what had followed.
Faris was already on his feet. His cushion rolled away behind him. He didn't ask a question or wait for his father's nod. He went through the tent flap like something had cut his tether, and the cloth swung in the light behind him.
Salim started after him. Yahya said his name, quietly, and the squad leader stopped.
"Follow him. Stay far back." Yahya set down his tea bowl. He was smiling, the kind of smile he wore when he thought about the lake, and the five hundred years, and the first time he'd seen Halima's face. "Nobody spoils this for my brother. Not you, not me, not a single guard. He gets to meet her alone.”
Faris ran.
He had no plan. His sandals were gone somewhere behind him and the hot ground burned through his socks, and he didn't feel it. His heart was pounding hard enough to hurt. Months of standing at the edge of that black water, looking at a face he could see and never touch. Months of going home with his chest hollowed out. And now the sky had opened and dropped her onto the sand.
He ran across the camp, past the cooking fires and the tethered animals, and the dunes rose ahead of him, and he started up the first one on his hands and feet, laughing like a boy.
"Amir Faris!"
Salim had caught up. He was breathing hard, and he was pointing back toward the pens, where a creature handler was leading out a saddled animal.
"Take the varak. You'll never reach her on foot before dark."
Faris looked at the animal. Then he looked at Salim. He knew perfectly well that he was grinning like an idiot and couldn't stop.
"Yes," he said. "Yes. Good."
Barq came down the path with his head low, clicking softly. He was a big animal, taller than a horse at the shoulder, with six jointed legs folded and unfolded under him like a scribe's rule. Each foot was broad and three-toed, spread wide so he could cross soft dunes without sinking. His hide was the color of sand at noon, gold with dark spots, like a leopard's. The face was another matter. It had the calm, blunt look of a lizard's, but two small mandibles moved constantly at the corners of his mouth, testing the air, and his eyes were huge and dark and far too kind for a beast that size. Faris had raised him from a hatchling. He'd once cried into that neck after a bad night at the lake.
He vaulted into the saddle without touching the stirrup.
"Go," he said, and slapped the thick shoulder. "Go, my Barq. Run. She's waiting for me. Don't let me down."
Barq understood. He always did. The clicking sped up, and then the world lurched forward as six legs bit into the sand together.
Faris had ridden him a thousand times. He had never ridden like this. The dunes came up and went under them in long swells. Wind hammered his chest, and grit peppered his cheeks and got into his mouth and his eyelashes, and he didn't blink it away. He leaned into Barq's neck and talked the whole way, low and fast, half prayer and half nonsense. Nearly there. She's nearly there. I'm coming.
He smelled it before he saw it: hot metal, burned dust, something sharp and chemical he had no name for. Then Barq topped the last ridge, and Faris hauled on the reins so hard the animal skidded on his haunches.
The thing lay in the valley below.
He had seen the pieces of Halima's capsule. He'd stood in that hollow with Yahya and picked through a tangle of scorched plates no bigger than a cart. He had thought he understood what fell from the sky.
This was the length of a village street. A long scar had been plowed through the dune, and at the end of the trench lay a body of gray metal, split along one side, one wing torn off and lying far behind it like a broken oar. Smoke rose from the gap in its hull. The sand around it had been fused into a black glaze in places.
Faris's mouth went dry.
The dune it had struck was deep and soft, a hundred years of drift piled against the wind. That was the only reason the metal had slid instead of burst. A little farther east the ground turned to rock, and the ridge there stood up like a wall. If she had come down on that, nothing would have been left to find.
His hands shook on the reins. He said it out loud, because he couldn't hold it in.
"Alhamdulillah."
Praise be to God. He said it again, quieter, and felt the words settle in his chest the way they always had, since he was small enough to say them after a meal. It meant thank You. It meant You saw her, and You caught her. Nobody had to be told that the sand had been put there on purpose.
He slid down from the saddle. His legs almost went out under him. Barq nudged his shoulder with a warm, slightly clumsy mandible, and Faris put a hand on the animal's face and held it there for a moment.
"Stay," he whispered. "Please."
Then he started down the slope toward the wreck.
The warning tones hadn't stopped in eleven minutes.
Latifa had counted, in the stray corner of her mind that still counted things. Eleven minutes since the pull had grabbed her. Six since the last time she could read the nav display without it tearing itself into stripes.
It had started as nothing. A scout run, the same as forty others. Three small ships had come off the carrier's belly like seeds off a pod, each sent to circle a different rock while the big ship held station and recorded. Her own job was a wide swing around an orange planet nobody had a name for yet. She'd been listening to a song she liked. She'd been drinking cold tea from a pouch.
She had drifted too far. That happened. She'd done it before, twice, and both times she'd flipped her ship around, found the carrier's beacon, and gone home with a small embarrassed report. This time the beacon wasn't there. Not fading, not weak. Gone.
Then the instruments had all started to disagree.
She remembered the reading on the gravity sensor, because it had climbed off the scale. Something invisible was leaning on the ship, hard, and it was getting stronger by the second. Some collapsed remnant, some ghost of a dead star. She wasn't given time to name it. The hull had begun to groan. She fired every thruster she had, and the ship spun and shuddered and kept sliding sideways, and then it let go all at once, like a hand opening, and threw her out the other side.
Straight into the rocks.
The first impact rang through the frame and knocked her head into the seat. The second took the port stabilizer. She heard it go, a shriek of metal, and then the master alarm went from a chirp to a howl. Hydraulic pressure was dropping on two lines. Then three. The attitude control was fighting itself. She screamed at the console to hold, and she hit the manual override with the heel of her hand, and the stick came back dead and light in her fist.
A rock the size of a house went past the canopy so close she saw the pits in it.
When the field finally spat her out, the planet was there. Orange, huge, filling the whole window. She had no steering. Half her thrusters were gone. The heat shield was reading numbers she'd only seen in training manuals, the kind printed in red with a warning beside them.
The cabin began to shake. Her harness dug into her collarbone. Somewhere behind her something tore free and went banging along the bulkhead. The glass in front of her went white, then yellow, then the color of a forge. Smoke curled out of the panel by her knee. She could taste it, bitter and chemical, in the back of her throat.
She had never prayed. Not once. Her parents had believed in schedules and systems, and she'd believed in them too. She had thought that was enough. But there was no procedure now, no checklist that ended in and then you're safe. There was a stick that didn't work, a shield that was going to fail, and a planet she'd never see the ground of.
Her fingers had gone white on the grip. Her lips were moving before she knew what they were doing.
"O Allah," she whispered, in a voice she didn't recognize. "Protect me. Save me.”
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