By the next afternoon, the little girl Mira had mentioned arrived on cue, a small figure cresting the dune like a windblown seed.

The escorts appeared with her slung on a back, their silhouettes wavering in heat-haze like reeds in a mirage, and the onlookers barely blinked. Adelaide had warned the leader ahead of time, so the crowd, stunned that the Vanguard found no villagers, had already agreed to shelter the poor child like a camp drawing in a stray ember.

They were ready, yet a grain of sand still ground the gears during the handoff, a small snag in a smooth rope.

The man carrying her set her down and stepped away, keeping quarantine like a shadow keeping its distance at noon. From the encampment, figures in bird‑beak masks and warded gear advanced, protective array sigils glowing faint as moth wings at dusk. The girl stood through the inspection with her head lowered, as docile as a lamb under a shepherd’s hand, and she didn’t resist at all. Thanks to that quiet, the warded team soon turned and flashed an all‑clear, a clean flag in a dusty wind.

Everything had gone smoothly to this point; then a gasp rose near Adelaide like a startled bird breaking from scrub.

“Hurk—”

Adelaide turned. The woman who’d suffered heatstroke earlier was bent double, hand clamped over her mouth, pain writ plain like cracks in kiln clay. She tried to hold it, but acid and food pulp seeped through her fingers like slurry through a sieve. The vomit hit sand baked by the noon sun, and the sour stink bloomed like rot in a wet cellar, making people clamp noses with sleeves like shutters against a storm.

Adelaide was long used to the rancid tang of organ‑offerings, yet she still shook her head and offered up a pinch of common reagents, dulling her own sense of smell like lowering a curtain.

Her spell had barely settled when fresh groans and retching rolled in, a wave chasing a wave across shingle.

Honestly—what are you all doing, she thought, irritation rising like pricked heat—if you’re sick, go lie down, don’t thrash like fish on hot stone.

She frowned and let out a small note through her nose, a tiny wind through reed pipes.

They were still occupying her and Mira’s carriage, and the fact sat in her chest like grit. She’d offered the swap to get closer to Mira, like smoothing a sail to catch the same wind, but now Mira was miles away in the village, and Adelaide longed to stretch on her own wide bed like a cat in sunshine.

Enough. Don’t dwell on it— She turned back to the girl, expecting the little one to flinch from the commotion like a fawn spooked by drums.

But the girl’s face didn’t ripple at all, a still pond without a stone.

As the distance closed, features sharpened like lines under a knife. Adelaide could now see the face shadowed beneath that messy violet hair, and the eyes that seemed to have no focus, like wells with their buckets missing.

It was as if the retching woman didn’t exist; the girl stared past everything, pupils empty as a night with no stars.

Her condition felt worse than Mira had said, and for some reason, that look tugged at a strange familiarity, like catching a scent on the wind and losing it.

Adelaide’s hand slipped from her chin as she shook her head, letting the odd déjà vu go like a kite cut free, and she stepped forward first.

“Miss, please don’t trouble yourself with this,” someone from the caravan moved to stop her, their hands lifted like fence posts.

“It’s fine,” Adelaide waved them off, her smile as practiced as a hostess pouring tea. “Sheltering her was my companion’s request, so I should be the one to care for her,” she said, warm as coals. “Don’t worry. I’m good with kids.”

Seeing she’d decided, they let her approach the girl like a lone figure walking into lantern light.

Adelaide went down on one knee and lowered herself to the child’s eye level, reducing her height like folding a fan, and spoke.

“Hello there, little one. What’s your name?”

She used the Desert tongue, words rolling like pebbles in dry streambeds. After the last village exposed her weakness, she’d started learning from anyone in the caravan who would teach, picking up vowels like water in cupped hands. People say the first foreign tongue is a hard climb and the second is just a marked trail, and as a noble daughter trained across the Empire’s many languages, two months was tight but enough to plant grammar like seeds. Her accent wouldn’t pass for native, but it flowed clean enough to be understood, like a stream in a rocky bed.

As if to undercut that last thought, the girl’s mouth stayed sealed, lips a stitch‑line, her eyes unblinking like painted lacquer.

…

Stone wall at the start. Adelaide felt her own gentle smile freeze a little, a glaze over soft sugar, but she didn’t give up and tried again, her voice light as shade.

“You met my companion Mira already, didn’t you? The tall girl with black hair. I’m her sister, Adelaide. You can trust me.”

She reached for the only shared thread—Mira—and kept a basket of other options ready if that strand snapped.

To her surprise, the girl spoke after a few heartbeats, a flicker of awareness flashing in her eyes like a struck match.

Only, it wasn’t any of the answers Adelaide had expected. It drifted out like a breath from a cellar.

“…beneath…”

“Uh… beneath?” Adelaide arched a brow, the word hanging like a question mark on a hook.

She waited, but the child said nothing more. Her mouth closed, and that spark in her eyes guttered like a candle pinched.

So, what did “beneath” mean?

Adelaide kept worrying the word as she bathed the grimy girl, the question turning in her mind like a pebble in a pocket.

Was it a homonym? Did she mishear in the wind? And why did Mira care so much about this scrap of a thing? Possibilities lined up like stones, and each time Adelaide tried to circle them and pry, the girl’s mouth stayed shut like seams sewn tight.

After several tries, Adelaide let it go for now and focused on scrubbing the little coal back to skin, her resolve settling like a cloth laid flat.

The girl had arrived wrapped in a coat that didn’t match her rat’s‑nest hair, a borrowed hide over a sparrow’s bones, and it was clear Mira had already cleaned her as much as she could in the field. But for Adelaide’s level of fastidiousness, that was a dusting when a scour was needed, like flicking ash from a pot and calling it clean.

She’d promised Mira she’d take care of her, and Adelaide kept her promises like knots tied tight—and she’d do it her way.

The bathhouse she almost never used steamed like a hot spring after frost and finally earned its keep. She led the girl in, slipped off the coat like peeling bark, and stripped away the ruined rags layer by layer, casting them into the bin like shedding snakeskin. Then she washed the child meticulously, as if she might scrub even the palm‑brown off, working from outside to in and back out again, until every caked line gave way and the drains ran with earth‑colored foam like floodwater. When the girl’s skin had literally shifted a shade, Adelaide swiped her brow and sighed, satisfaction blooming like a flower in warmth.

Now that looked right; girls ought to be clean and bright, not like those gross boys in mandatory middle and high school— The thought rose as she combed the girl’s hair, easy as breathing, then she caught herself, the world she lived in never having that kind of school at all, and the boys she’d known were mostly nobleborn, polished as silver, even the Prince of Neprah at his wildest wouldn’t stride into class sweaty and crumpled.

A sting pricked her wrist, a thorn under silk. She shook her head, banishing memories that weren’t hers like shooing crows from a field. At that same moment, the last knot of dry, split hair slipped clean, and a fine face surfaced for her to see, stopping her a beat like a lantern caught in glass.

Thin, yes. But this kid—she was honestly beautiful, a bud with its petals still tight.

The girl had gone along with everything like a doll, and Adelaide had gotten too lost in the fun of scouring coal to notice the beauty buried under a too‑slender frame. Now, with the grime gone, the arch of her brow and the delicate lines showed a hint of the shape she’d grow into, like a sketch under wash.

If they’d met in a park in Balad instead of here, Adelaide might have paused a step for such a lovely thing, a passerby caught by a blossom. But now—

She lifted the girl, who let her hands and feet hang with gravity, limp as a fine puppet with its strings cut, and there was no spark in her at all.

Adelaide sighed and set her gently into the tub, watching the purple hair unfurl in the hot water like ink blooming on rice paper.

Poor thing. Maybe she’d watched the plague take her kin, and her heart had gone somewhere hollow, like wind through an empty house.

Adelaide stroked the girl’s head, pity loosening in her chest like thaw, and she didn’t expect that thought to be overturned within minutes, as quick as sun behind cloud.

It happened on her way back from the mess with food, after she’d settled the freshly bathed girl to rest. Without Mira’s special cooking, and with Adelaide hopeless in a kitchen, she had to eat at the encampment mess, tasting true travel’s grit like sand between teeth.

What became pastry and salt‑pork fireworks in Mira’s hands turned into dead dough lumps and rubber bands under the cook’s knife, flavors salted for marathoners, not children, like throwing brine on sprouts. Adelaide had no choice. She pleaded the girl’s weakness and need for mild food, and finally wrung a bowl of buttery roux gruel from the man like water from a tight cloth.

That back‑and‑forth chewed up time like a donkey on thistle. She meant to hurry back, but halfway she ran into the vomiting woman and her assigned watcher.

“Ah! Isn’t this our benefactor, miss?” the matron sang out, smile bright as a ladle.

“Hello—” Adelaide began, carrying the bowl steady as a moon.

“—Benefactor, I’m really so sorry. I didn’t keep a close enough eye on Layati, and she embarrassed herself in front of you,” the woman spilled on, words tumbling like beans.

A bad feeling pricked Adelaide like burrs, but before she could speak, the matron surged ahead, relentless as a river after rain. The leader had assigned her as Layati’s caretaker, and she was dutiful; her only flaw was an unending tongue that tied knots around every passerby.

“It wasn’t trouble at all, really, but I do have something—” Adelaide tried to cut in, laying a polite bridge like a plank.

“Oh, how could it be trouble? Watching Layati is my duty, though it’s tiring, like hauling buckets up a dune. She’s frail and still loves to run about, and she throws up everywhere, a mess every time, ai, she keeps us all on edge,” the matron sighed, shaping worry like dough.

Adelaide’s smile started to stiffen again, sugar crusting in cold. “I really need—”

“—You don’t even know, she threw up several times while you and your companion were gone,” the woman barreled on, counting on fingers like abacus beads. “Like when you went out to find water, she threw up once. And when we entered the town before that, I don’t know what came over her. She suddenly started vomiting at the table, and we had to pay the restaurant owner a silver coin…”

Adelaide’s grip on the gruel tightened a fraction, knuckles white as chalk.

“Hey, old lady, stop pestering our benefactor, would you?” a passerby called, shooing words like flies. “She’s got a kid to care for.”

Only then did the matron smack her own forehead with a laugh and step aside, parting like reeds. “Oh my, my silly head. I won’t keep you—”

Adelaide didn’t move.

“No, I’m actually very interested,” she said, turning her face toward Layati, who sat nearby pale as milk, and asked, voice mild as shade under awning, “Exactly when does she vomit? And when does it tend to happen?”

The question caught the matron off guard like a net. She scratched her head and began to recall, words slowing as if she were sorting seeds, and Adelaide listened, nodding, eyes steady as still water.

No one noticed her left hand slip into her sleeve like a snake into grass, and no one noticed the red gleam that breathed from the cuff, a banked coal stoking when the matron said Layati got worse whenever they approached the village.

The next moment, Layati, who’d been sitting fine, went purple at the lips, clapped a hand to her mouth, and heaved, just like at the handoff, a tide turning the same way.

“Eh? You’re throwing up again??” the matron yelped, fluster rising like startled quail.

The caretaker and nearby folk crowded in to help, a circle closing like a ring, and no one saw another face go pale as paper at the edge.

Adelaide let the gruel slip from her hand, the bowl hitting sand with a dull thud and a splash like mud, and after a heartbeat she clenched her fists, turned on her heel in the churn of bodies, and ran for the little girl, sprinting like a shadow racing sundown.