His mouth was dry before he left the Fingers.

  That was the first thing Dorn noticed—the way his tongue already felt too thick for his mouth, his throat already tight, as if his body knew what was coming and had started preparing for death early. He'd drunk his fill at dawn, before the water skin died. Three hours ago now. Three hours, and already the desert was working on him, leaching moisture from his skin with every step.

  He moved at a steady lope through the bajada, not fast enough to sweat, not slow enough to waste daylight. The sun climbed behind him, painting the rocks in shades of orange and red, and Dorn kept his eyes on the ground ahead. Reading the terrain. Hardpan where the walking was easy. Loose scree where he'd have to pick his way. The shadows of boulders where he could rest when the heat became too much.

  He didn't think about the water skin. Didn't think about Silus's smile, the rifle crack, the wet patch soaking into the dirt. Didn't think about the silver eyes watching from the rocks.

  Thinking was for later. Later, when he had water. Later, when his throat wasn't dry and his paws didn't ache and the sun wasn't trying to cook him inside his own fur.

  For now, he just moved.

  By noon, the world had become a furnace.

  Dorn found shade in a crack between two boulders, just wide enough to curl into. His back pressed against one wall, his nose to the other. The rock held the night's coolness still, barely, and he pressed himself into it like a kit seeking its mother's warmth. Except this was coolness, not warmth, and his mother was decades dead, and he was alone in a crack between boulders with the sun trying to find him.

  His vision blurred.

  He blinked. Cleared it. Watched a lizard scuttle across the rock face opposite, its sides pulsing with the heat. Small. Fast. Too fast to catch, even if he'd had the energy to try. Even if hunting now wouldn't cost more moisture than the meat would give back.

  The lizard disappeared into a crevice. Dorn watched it go and tried not to think about water.

  His mother's voice came to him then, unbidden.

  Find the shade first. Then find the path. The water will wait if you're alive to reach it.

  She'd taught him in country like this, in the bad years after the old world finally stopped twitching and the Frontier became what it was. Taught him to read the sky for rain that never came, to dig for moisture in dry washes, to watch the birds because they always knew where water was even when everything else had forgotten.

  The birds, he thought. What birds?

  He craned his neck, looking past the boulder's edge at the sky. Empty. No ravens, no hawks, no vultures even. Just the blue, bleached almost white, stretching from horizon to horizon without a break.

  No birds meant no water. No water meant—

  He stopped that thought before it finished.

  He moved again in the late afternoon, when the sun lost its sharpest teeth and the shadows began to lengthen. His legs were stiff from lying still, his mouth past dry into something else. His tongue felt like leather. His thoughts came slow and sticky.

  The country had changed while he waited. The rocky slopes of the Fingers had given way to open bajada, mile after mile of gravel and scrub leading down toward the salt flats. He could see them in the distance, white and shimmering, a lake that wasn't there. Mirage country. Death country.

  He skirted the edge, keeping to the higher ground where the creosote grew and the occasional mesquite offered thin shade. His nose worked constantly, searching for the smell of water, of mud, of anything damp. Finding nothing but dust and baking stone and the faint chemical tang of minerals baking in the sun.

  His vision blurred again. He stopped, waited for it to clear. It didn't, not completely—just shifted, the edges going soft while the center stayed sharp. He knew what that meant. Dehydration. Early stage, still manageable, but moving toward the next stage with every step.

  He'd made this crossing before. Always with water. Always with a full skin and a planned route and the knowledge that if something went wrong, he could turn back.

  No turning back now. The Fingers were behind him, and Broken Rock was ahead, and between them was only distance and heat and the slow failure of his own body.

  He moved on.

  The hallucinations started sometime after dark.

  He'd been moving through the night, taking advantage of the cool, when a shape materialized out of the darkness ahead. His mother. Standing on a rock, her grey-and-tan fur silver in the starlight, her bobbed tail twitching the way it always had when she was about to teach him something.

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  "You're pushing too hard," she said.

  Dorn blinked. The shape didn't disappear.

  "You always pushed too hard. Even as a kit. Thought you could outrun anything if you ran fast enough." She tilted her head, and for a moment she looked exactly as she had the last time he'd seen her—tired, worn, but still standing. Still teaching. "You can't outrun this one, son."

  "I know," Dorn said. His voice came out cracked, barely a whisper.

  "Then why are you trying?"

  He didn't have an answer. Or maybe he did, but it was tangled up with the dryness in his throat and the weight in his limbs and the memory of silver eyes watching from the rocks. He'd stayed. He'd stayed in his den like a fool, thinking they'd move on, thinking they'd forget about him. And now his water was gone and he was three days from safety and his mother was standing on a rock telling him things he already knew.

  "You're not real," he said.

  The shape smiled. "I'm as real as you need me to be."

  Then it was gone, and Dorn was alone on the bajada with the stars wheeling overhead and the salt flats shimmering in the distance.

  He kept moving.

  By dawn of the second day, he'd stopped hallucinating and started dying.

  That was what it felt like, anyway—a slow shutdown, system by system, his body conserving resources for the parts that mattered most. His legs still worked. His eyes still worked. His nose, though, had gone quiet, the scents of the desert fading into a single overwhelming smell: dust, dry and ancient, the smell of things that had been dead for a long time.

  He found shade in a wash, under the overhang of a cut bank where the roots of a dead mesquite dangled like old bones. Curled into it. Closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, the sun had moved and a dead pronghorn lay twenty feet away.

  He hadn't smelled it. That was how he knew he was in trouble. A pronghorn that size, dead maybe three days in the heat, should have hit his nose from a mile away. But his nose was quiet, and the pronghorn was just there, bloated and stinking, its sightless eyes staring at the sky.

  Too rotten to eat. Even if he'd had the strength to cut through the hide, even if he'd had the stomach for spoiled meat, the moisture would kill him faster than thirst. Rot carried death in ways that water didn't.

  He looked away. Tried not to think about the water in the pronghorn's flesh, the blood in its veins, the moisture it had carried when it was alive.

  Tried not to think about how soon he'd be the same way—eyes open, staring at nothing, too rotten for even the vultures to touch.

  He moved again at dusk. The sun set in a smear of orange and purple, and Dorn watched it go with the knowledge that he might not see another one. Two days without water. His body was eating its own fat now, its own muscle, anything it could find to keep going. His vision came and went in waves. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else.

  The salt flats stretched ahead, white and endless, and somewhere on the other side was Broken Rock. Somewhere on the other side was water. Somewhere on the other side was life, if he could reach it.

  He couldn't. He knew that now. Three days to Broken Rock, Silus had said, and Dorn had thought he could make it in two. But that was before the hallucinations, before his nose died, before his legs started forgetting how to work. He'd made half the distance, maybe. A day and a half of hard travel, leaving another day and a half ahead.

  A day and a half he didn't have.

  He kept moving anyway. What else was there?

  His mother came back somewhere around midnight.

  This time she didn't speak. She just walked beside him, matching his pace, her fur silver in the starlight. Dorn knew she wasn't real. Knew his brain was making patterns out of darkness because that was what brains did when they were dying. But he didn't tell her to go away.

  They walked together through the night, mother and son, across a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. The salt flats glowed white on one side, the bajada stretched grey on the other, and above them the stars burned cold and indifferent.

  Cactus, his mother said. Not aloud—in his head, the way she used to teach him when words would carry. You remember cactus?

  Dorn remembered. The pulp inside. The moisture. He'd passed a dozen stands of prickly pear since leaving the Fingers, ignored them because he'd had water, because he'd been stupid, because he'd thought he could make it to Broken Rock without stopping.

  He looked around now. Saw nothing but creosote and mesquite. No cactus. Not for miles.

  Too late, he thought.

  His mother didn't answer.

  By midday of the third day, he was crawling.

  His legs had given out first, then his back, then his pride. He moved on hands and knees, then on his belly, pulling himself across the gravel with claws that found purchase and pulled and found purchase again. The sun was a weight on his spine. The rocks cut into his fur, his skin, the soft places between.

  He didn't feel them anymore.

  His vision had narrowed to a tunnel—just the ground ahead, just the next pull, just the next inch. Everything else was white and buzzing, the way the air looked above the salt flats in high summer.

  Something moved in the distance. He didn't look up. Didn't have the strength.

  The something kept moving. Came closer. Resolved into a shape—four legs, long ears, fur the color of dust.

  Jackrabbit.

  It staggered toward him, running but not running, its movements jerky and wrong. As it passed, Dorn saw the bullet graze along its flank, the fur matted and dark. Saw the terror in its eyes, the kind that came from being hunted too long and too hard.

  It didn't see him. Didn't look at him. Just kept running, or trying to run, its long legs pumping in a rhythm that made no progress.

  Then it was gone, and Dorn was alone again, and he wasn't sure anymore whether it had been real.

  He tasted the water before he saw it.

  Not salt now. Water. Clean and cold and so close he could almost feel it on his tongue. He pulled himself faster, ignoring the rocks, ignoring the sun, ignoring everything but that taste.

  The ground changed. Gravel gave way to packed earth, then to stone, then to—something else. Shade. He was in shade. He looked up and saw walls, buildings, the edge of a settlement rising around him like a dream.

  Broken Rock. He'd made it.

  A shape appeared in front of him. Badger, old, grey as the stone around her. Covered in pouches, in satchels, in the smell of herbs and medicines and things that healed. She looked down at him with eyes that had seen a thousand dying things and hadn't flinched from any of them.

  "Well," she said. "You look like something the flats spat out."

  Dorn tried to speak. Nothing came out but a rasp, a whisper, a sound like wind through dead towers.

  The old badger knelt. Pressed something to his lips. Water. Cool and wet and so impossibly real that Dorn thought he might die from it, might choke, might finally let go now that he'd reached the one thing he'd been crawling toward for three days.

  He didn't die. He drank. And drank. And drank.

  And then the world went dark.