The wind across the Singing Basin didn’t blow. It screamed in a three-part harmony of shattered glass.
Inside the bed of the handcart, Mira lay convulsing, her back arched against the canvas sacking. The many-sided smoky quartz wrapping her right shoulder, collar bone, and ribs was shaking with such violent intensity that the air above her skin shivered with visible, violet-tinted heat waves. Every breath she drew was with the horrific, high-pitched screech of crystal grinding against living bone. It sent tiny showers of violet sparks cascading into her coarse linen tunic.
“Ren...” she gasped, her left fingers digging into his lambskin apron with terrifying, spasmodic strength. Her nails pierced the stiff leather, drawing four tiny beads of blood from his thigh. “It’s tearing... It’s tearing inward... The sand is pulling at my marrow...”
“I have you, Mira,” Ren said. His voice dropped into a desperate, razor-sharp focus that shut out the howling gale. “I have you. Look at my eyes. Keep your eyes on me. Don’t look at the horizon. Don’t listen to the dunes.”
Nomad Ren vaulted over the cart rail, his rawhide sandals thudding heavily against the floorboards. In his scarred hands he carried a heavy, dull sheet of rolled lead—salvaged from the lining of Julian Voss’s stolen medicine crates—and his three-stringed desert gourd resonator. His quartz goggles were spattered with white chalk-stone dust, his sun-baked face set into grim lines of ancient desert pragmatism.
