Kyrie’s father returned to his children, three daughters and two sons, of whom Kyrie was the oldest. Their mother was not present. She had been laid to rest a year earlier. Kyrie had hoped to raise money to buy the medicine she needed to live, but medicine has little power against the order of life and death. The job that she had gotten at the bakery was a great blessing to her and her family, to be sure, but it could not save everyone.
Aside from Kyrie’s family and Jaysynn, and the red-faced man who sat near the front of the bus, about a dozen others were on board, most of them young men.
They all were silent now. They were like colorless clay sculptures of men—flesh and blood, but without passion or investment or virtue until such a time when their fates would become apparent. Kyrie’s family looked at one another, but the young men on the bus, the men who had no families, stared out the windows, at the rocks and trees. And every once in a while the trees would part, and the view from the mountain trail would open up to miles and miles of open country. A sea of trees. And beyond the treetops, grassy plains. And beyond the grass, far from the Well at the center of Falcon Point, was desert.
Life came from the wells. It always had. And where there were no wells, there was no life, no vegetation. Now the wells were destroyed. Jaysynn and Kyrie and the others took that lonely mountain trail to a farming camp. They had work, which was a blessing, it’s true. But how long the crops would spring up from the ground in a land without magic, no one knew.
People were starving now for lack of work. But perhaps a time was coming soon when all of Lamora would starve. The plants would wither, and soon nothing would be left but the desert dust.
So, without destinies, the passengers on the bus were silent, and they seldom twitched or moved.
At last the bus arrived at the gates of Tarc’s camp. Through the chain link fence were rows of shoddy new buildings, all whitewashed, all identical in shape and size. The ground around them was beaten raw by the footfalls of the workers—so the bunkhouse village already looked like the desert had newly reached it. This was visible to the passengers only through the towering fence, taller than any of the buildings in the whole camp and topped with razor wire.
The gate was a different matter. On either side of it were concrete towers, and two watchmen were posted in each. Whether their job was to keep people in or out was not clear, but it was clear that all four of them were needed in order to open the gate. It was a giant bi-fold door, built of metal scrapped from automobile chassis and then coated in black oxide paint.
The men climbed down from their towers and muscled the gate open, and when the bus was inside, they pulled it shut again and stood with their backs to it, facing the bus. They wore short swords on their hips.
A dozen other men in charcoal black shirts and pants surrounded the bus, mostly unarmed, but a few carried batons. One of the twelve wore a hat. It was short-brimmed and dressy, but three bars were sown onto it like it was some kind of military rank. Around his waist hung a cavalry sword. He and the others formed a semicircle around the bus door and waited for the passengers to come out.
“This is the Tarc Refugee Camp,” said the driver. “Everyone off.”
With a little hesitation, but otherwise without incident, the passengers filled the aisles and made their way out of the bus and onto the yard. Their feet kicked up dry dust when they met the ground.
One of the men pointed his baton toward a building across the yard, opposite the bunkhouse village. “Head in that building across the way and we’ll get everybody sorted out,” he said.
Some of the young men were already shuffling that way when Kyrie and her family and Jaysynn got off the bus. There was a little crab grass growing around the building. Its boards were in good shape—they were all new—but it had been nailed together in a hurry. The lines didn’t seem quite straight. The corners didn’t match up quite right.
“Just across the way,” the man said. “That’s town hall right there.” He smiled at the man with the hat, amused at his little joke. The other man didn’t smile back, but stared at Jaysynn—the stare that solves mysteries: every muscle on the man’s face was tense.
Jaysynn hid his lips behind Kyrie and whispered, “One of these guys knows who I am. He’s trying to remember.”
“Let’s just go with the crowd,” she said.
Jaysynn went on, “If word gets around that I’m here, there could be trouble.”
The young emperor walked in the middle of the crowd, trying to casually hide his face among the others, trying to stoop his shoulders and change his gait and make his expression blank, trying to look not like himself.
“Nobody recognized you,” Kyrie said when they were near the doorway of the main building.
“They will,” said Jaysynn.
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