By one o’clock in the afternoon, the Saltglass quarry camp had sunk into the dead, choking stupor of the desert noon. The heat was no longer merely a condition of the weather. It was a physical press of air that sat upon the basin like an iron anvil. It crushed sound, movement, and thought into a flat, blinding silence.
The limestone cliffs bordering the northern edge of the camp radiated a dry, fire-like heat that could be felt through thick wool coats at ten paces. The nine freight wagons, parked wheel-to-hub in their defensive crescent, cast short, sharp-edged black shadows across the white salt crust. The only patches of shelter in a landscape bleached of all color. Beneath the wagons, the wagon drivers and their families lay motionless on canvas tarps, too exhausted by four days of dry heat, short water rations, and the morning’s heavy sledge work to speak or stir. Even the draft mules, tethered along the picket line in the shade of the limestone terrace, stood with their long ears drooping, their heads hanging nearly to the dust, sometimes stamping a rawhide-shod hoof against the bitter salt crust to shake off the biting desert gnats.
Thirty paces across the dusty yard, beneath the open canvas fly of the medical station, Paxa Sel worked with cold and exact, unrushed care. A small spirit lamp sputtered on an upturned nail keg, its blue flame heating a copper cup of soaked salt water to a bubbling simmer. Paxa held her…
