Thomas kept the fire small tonight. He fed it twigs, not logs, and watched the smoke thin to nothing before it cleared the ring of stones. Four sleeping bags circled the pit. Emmy sat on the red one, knees pulled up, chewing a strip of jerky like it owed her something. The Vael had found his last camp because he built a fire too big on a cold night. Two people died. One was taken. He would not do it again. But he could not keep Emmy walking forever either, and that was the problem eating him tonight. "We can't run forever," Thomas said. The man across the fire, thin, older, shook his head before Thomas finished. "We run, we live," the man said. "We stop, they find us." The woman beside him agreed. She said every camp that stayed put got hit. Thomas set his hands on his knees. "Emmy's shoes are through. She sleeps two hours a night. You want to tell me she walks another month?" He said they needed walls. A place with one way in. Somewhere they could see the Vael coming and hurt them when they did. The thin man laughed, short and mean. "You said that last time too?" Thomas felt the heat rise in his face. He did not answer. Emmy watched him across the coals. She did not look away. The woman cut in and said they were tired and shouting would carry farther than smoke. That ended it. Nobody agreed. Nobody moved. One by one they crawled into their bags. Thomas kicked sand over the fire until only a red eye remained, then buried that too. He sat by Emmy while she pulled the bag to her chin. "Were you at the other camp," she said. Not a question, the way she said it. He worked at a knot in the drawstring near her throat. "Sleep," he said. She watched him a moment longer. "I'm going to know eventually," she said, and closed her eyes. Thomas stayed sitting. He listened to the others breathe and to the wind moving over the sand. He had decided, sometime between the shouting and the silence, that he was done running. In the morning he would tell them. If they would not come, he would take Emmy and go alone, and find a place with walls.

Thomas woke to the wrong kind of quiet. The fire was cold. The wind had stopped. He sat up on his elbow and looked at Emmy, who slept curled on the red bag with her hand under her cheek. Beyond her, the low stone wall that ringed the camp caught the moonlight in broken teeth. Then a shape moved through the gap in the wall, low and smooth, and the quiet broke. The first Vael came over the stones without a sound. The thin man was standing before Thomas understood what was happening. The Vael took him by the throat and the man dropped without a cry. The woman ran two steps toward the trucks and a second Vael caught her around the waist and lifted her off the ground. She kicked once. Then she was gone into the dark past the wall. Thomas grabbed Emmy by the arm and pulled her up out of the bag. "Run," he said. She did not ask. She ran. He kept his body between her and the gap and drove her toward the line of vehicles parked past the sleeping ring. His boots slid in the sand. A third Vael turned its head toward them, the antenna above its skull twitching, and started their way. The man who owned the blue pickup lay ten feet from the driver's door. His chest was open. His keys were still clipped to his belt loop. Thomas shoved Emmy toward the passenger side and cut left. The Vael lunged. Thomas dropped his shoulder and went under its arm, hit the sand on one knee, and tore the keys free with both hands. The clip snapped. He felt claws graze the back of his shirt. He rolled once, came up running, and threw himself into the cab. Emmy was already inside, pressed flat against the seat. Thomas jammed the key in and turned it. The engine caught on the second try. He put it in gear and drove. The Vael struck the tailgate hard enough to rock the truck on its springs. Thomas kept his foot down. The headlights swept the wall, the sleeping bags, the dark shape of the thin man on the sand. Then the camp was behind them and there was only the road and the dark. They drove a long time before Emmy spoke. "You left them," she said. Her voice was flat. Thomas watched the road. His hands were shaking on the wheel and he could not make them stop. "I got you out," he said. She looked at him and did not answer. He checked the mirror. No lights. No shapes. Only the dust the tires kicked up, settling back down behind them. He did not know where the road went. He drove anyway.

The needle had been on empty for an hour when the pickup coughed and quit. Thomas coasted it off the cracked road into a stand of dry brush and let it roll to a stop. He shut off the key out of habit. In the sudden quiet he heard Emmy breathing next to him, quick and shallow. He looked in the mirror. The road behind them was empty, but empty did not mean safe. The Vael hunted by heat. Sitting in a metal box in the sun was the same as lighting a fire. "We walk," he said. Emmy nodded once. She pulled her shoes tight and climbed out. Thomas grabbed the red bag from the floor, a jug of water, and a folding knife from the glovebox. He left the doors open so the cab would not bake and blink on their scanners any brighter than it had to. He took Emmy's hand. She let him for three steps, then took it back and walked on her own. They moved along the low side of a ridge where the shadow was longest. Thomas kept them off the ridgeline. He watched the ground for tracks and the sky for dust. Emmy did not talk. Her gym shoes hissed against the sand. After a mile the ridge opened into a shallow bowl, and Thomas dropped to a crouch and pulled Emmy down with him. Below them, on the flat, a Vael scout stood beside a wooden cart on iron wheels. Blue light ran along its seams in cold veins. The scout's antenna twitched, sweeping. Thomas put his mouth close to Emmy's ear. "See the rocks," he whispered. He pointed at a line of pale boulders that stepped down toward a ruined building half swallowed by rubble. "One at a time. When I move, you count to ten, then follow. Stay low." Emmy stared at the cart. Thomas saw her understand what it was for. Her jaw set. She nodded. He went first to the nearest boulder and pressed himself against the warm stone. The scout's head turned. Thomas held still until the antenna swept past. He waved Emmy forward. She came in a fast crouch, silent, and slid in behind him. They moved that way from rock to rock, from a leaning slab to the broken face of the ruin, using the rubble as a wall. Once, a small stone rolled from under Emmy's shoe. She caught it against her ankle before it could clack. Thomas felt his heart hit his ribs twice. The scout did not turn. They slipped out the far side of the ruin and kept low until the bowl was behind them. Thomas did not stop until the cart was out of sight. Emmy was pale and her hands shook, but she was walking. He handed her the water. She drank two swallows and gave it back. "Where are we going," she said. Thomas looked at the empty land ahead. "Away from that," he said. They walked.

They walked until the sun climbed high and the shadow under the ridge shrank to nothing. Thomas did not know where they were going. The land ahead was flat scrub and pale rock, one dune folding into the next. He stopped once to check their backtrail. Nothing followed. Nothing waited ahead either. Then Emmy lifted her chin. "Listen," she said. Thomas held still. Far off, thin through the heat, came a sound. Metal on metal, maybe. A engine, maybe. It was too distant to name. He crouched beside her. "That's people," he said. "Or something people made." Emmy watched his face. "We go toward it?" He thought about smoke and heat and every mistake he had made before. Then he looked at her thin shoes and the empty land behind them. "We go toward it," he said. "Slow. We stop if I say stop." They walked an hour before Thomas raised a hand and pulled Emmy down behind a low shelf of rock. Below them, in a dry basin, a small desert deer was cornered against a slab. In front of the deer stood a flower as tall as Emmy. Its petals were pink and orange, bright as a warning sign. Vines thick with thorns crawled from its base, planted in the sand like legs. At its center a wet mouth of teeth opened and closed. A vine whipped out and caught the deer's back leg. The deer screamed once. The mouth came down. Emmy did not look away. Thomas put his hand on her shoulder and held her still. "That's a maw," he whispered. "Men at the last camp talked about them. When the Vael came, some of the plants out here changed. Took on their biology. That's what you get." Emmy's eyes stayed on the mouth. "Does it hunt like they do?" "No. It waits. It grabs what walks close." He watched the vines settle. "Never walk between two big flowers. Never step over a vine you didn't see the end of." She nodded once, the way she nodded when he told her to tie her shoes. He waited until the maw folded its petals halfway and went still over the kill. Then he tapped Emmy's arm and pointed a wide path around the basin, upwind, over open sand. They moved one at a time between the low rocks, the way they had moved past the scout. When the basin was behind them, Thomas stopped and listened again. The far sound was still there. Closer now. He could hear the rhythm of it, steady, mechanical. Something running. Something built. "Still that way," Emmy said. "Still that way," he said. He shifted the red bag on his shoulder and started walking. Emmy fell in beside him. For the first time since the truck, they were moving toward something instead of away.