text: Lilia left Gian's side and ran from the rush of the army after Sina's rise. She fell into a massive tent. It collapsed on her. She wrapped herself in it, willing herself still and silent so she could prepare for what she had to do next.
  
  Heat scorched the air outside. Sweat slathered her body. But she waited. Quiet.
  
  Boots. Blasts of hot air. Yelling armies. She waited for silence outside, counting the beats of her heart. When the waiting got to be too much, she palmed a piece of mahuan root and let her mind wander.
  
  Finally, the din wore down.
  
  She crawled from the stifling tent and peeked out. The plain was churned with mud. A small child watched her from a tent opposite – too big eyes in a starved face. Lilia pressed her finger to her lips.
  
  When she staggered up and took in the measure of the camp, it was mostly empty. The big banquet table was a mess, scorched in places. Gian's body still lay there, smoldering. Her hair, her beautiful hair, had been burned away, the scalp charred. Lilia felt nothing at all, as if her heart had been burned away with Gian's hair.
  
  Lilia walked across the devastated camp. It still smoked in places. Her people had gotten off a few good gouts of flame before being overrun. She glanced back at Kuallina only once. She did not linger to watch it burn. The massive Tai Mora army had already exploded through the gates, and now they were merely cleaning up. Smoke rose from the keep.
  
  She felt a hot, needling pain in her side, and scratched at it. It took her a moment to realize what it was. She tugged at the wards she had on the Seekers and found – nothing. The Seekers had already perished. She was alone.
  
  Lilia stumbled across the camp and made for the trees. There was more burning to come, and she was its catalyst.
  
  On the other side of the camp, Tasia waited for her in the creek bed, still and silent as a cat. There was a dirty, snuffling figure beside her. Lilia recoiled.
  
  "Where did you find that?" Lilia asked.
  
  It was the feral girl who had followed Ghrasia around Liona, now curled up in a ball next to Tasia.
  
  "She saved me," Tasia said. "I got lost trying to find you like you asked me to, but she led me here. She found the bear. I couldn't hold it myself. I was afraid."
  
  Lilia frowned. The feral girl raised her head, cocked it in Lilia's direction. "You're a filthy thing," Lilia said.
  
  The feral girl muttered something, though not in any language Lilia recognized. How had this girl escaped Liona?
  
  "Did you tell anyone when you left?" Lilia asked.
  
  Tasia shook her head. "Good girl," Lilia said, and she took her hand and together they mounted the bear and rode west through the trees, to the woodland, to catch the last of the Dhai before Kirana's great army turned south for the Temple of Oma. Lilia thought they could outrun the feral girl, but she took to her feet and ran after them, faster than any blind creature should have been able to.
  
  Lilia looked back at her once, and resigned herself to the girl's company.
  
  It took two days for Lilia to catch up to the fleeing refugees, in part because she had to stop often to hide from Tai Mora scouts. A cry went up when the refugees saw her, as if she were a hero coming home. She rode to the head of the column, expecting to find Mohrai there, but when she asked, everyone directed her to Yisaoh.
  
  Confused in the rush of bodies, she waited until the group camped before going off to find her. Tasia ran to keep up with her, the feral girl trailing behind. Lilia had been trying to figure out a name for the feral girl, but came up with nothing.
  
  She found Yisaoh standing over a map drawn in the dirt. Mohrai's cousin, Alhina, and the parajista from the wall of the harbor, Hasina, stood with her.
  
  "I thought you were dead," Hasina said.
  
  "Exaggerations," Lilia said. "Where is Mohrai?"
  
  "Bad pregnancy," Yisaoh said. "Barely made it back to the hold after that fiasco." She took a long drag on her cigarette. "So you lived after all."
  
  "Will Mohrai be all right?"
  
  Yisaoh shrugged. "Most likely. She needed some time to sit. Got some blood. Hopefully nothing."
  
  "That doesn't sound like nothing."
  
  "Are you a doctor?"
  
  "I am, actually."
  
  Yisaoh narrowed her eyes. "You're a lot of things."
  
  "Where is the Kai, then?"
  
  Yisaoh shook her head. "We have reports that there are groups ahead of us, fleeing the clans and temples, doing the same as we are. I put out runners so we can meet up with them. He may be with them."
  
  "We shouldn't meet."
  
  "Shouldn't we?"
  
  "As one force, we're easy to kill," Lilia said. "If we stay split up, it makes us difficult to track down."
  
  "Fair," Yisaoh said, and then Lilia liked her, because she knew she was not a fool. Lilia had suspected there was some sense to Yisaoh, when she drugged the Kai and sent Lilia down to the table.
  
  "The map?" Lilia said.
  
  "Options," Yisaoh said.
  
  Lilia looked at the map. She pointed to the finger of the peninsula, the place where her village had been. "I know this place. It once supported a village of five hundred. It will be suitable for us."
  
  "Have to go further south, around Mount Ahya," Hasina said. "I know this topography. If we go north, it looks shorter, but the terrain is rugged. We have too many young and infirm with us."
  
  "South, then," Lilia said. "It will take us past Oma's Temple, though. We may pick up some other refugees."
  
  "If this place only holds five hundred, we can't take any more," Yisaoh said.
  
  "No, but we can start creating networks," Lilia said. "We can be disparate, but we'll need ways to speak to each other. If we can't speak, we can't organize."
  
  "Organize," Alhina said, "for what?"
  
  Lilia cocked her head at her. "To take back Dhai, of course."
  
  None of them said anything.
  
  Yisaoh just stared at her, smoking. The silence stretched.
  
  "Well?" Lilia said. "Anything else? Let's go, then."
  
  Lilia bent and wiped away the map with her hands. She took Tasia's hand and led her back to the bear.
  
  That night, she slept better than she had in a year, though the feral girl whined and farted in her sleep rather terribly.
  
  Lilia stood among the last of the low summer poppies, breathing in the heady scent of them. Above her, the first of the adenoak leaves were just beginning to change. From here she could see the Temple of Oma, and the great Tai Mora army marching across the plateau to take up residence there. They had already begun setting up tends. Her group had indeed had to come south, around Mount Ahya. The journey had taken much longer than it should have – over three weeks through angry, spitting woodlands with the sick and young and injured in tow. Their route, despite their caution, took them perilously close to the temple, which they had learned by now was already fallen. She assumed the Kai and his second Catori and child were dead. Still, after weeks of exhausted trekking in the woodland, Lilia wanted to see it one last time. The army she saw now was the great Dhai army in the valley, the one she remembered hearing about as a child. This was the Dhai she had expected from the very start, and her worlds had collided.
  
  Emlee came up beside her. "The others are asking for you," she said. "You know those Tai Mora will send scouts up here, once they are secure in the temple. We must be swift."
  
  Lilia placed her hand on Emlee's arm, and wished, for a breath, that it was Kalinda Lasa there, Kalinda who told her what to do, where to go, or Gian, who believed in her, who had secrets Lilia would never unravel.
  
  "We'll come back," Lilia said.
  
  "You are the only one of them who says that. No one says that now. You sound a fool."
  
  "Not a fool," Lilia said. "I have faith."
  
  "A fool," Emlee said, patting her arm absently. "Come along, now. Your people are waiting for you."
  
  Lilia turned her back on the temple and the great Dhai army, and plunged deeper into the woodland, just as the sky above her exploded.