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“Now, where did you come from?” the rider said.
He’d seen me. He’d finally seen me.
Would he help me? Would he get me somewhere safe?
I didn’t know. And I was unlikely to find out.
My eyelids were already drifting shut.
And I was gone.
My dreams were nightmarish and infected with fever.
The cart ride was rough and comfortable. It jostled me awake several times, but I was glad of it. Anything to escape the memories of fireballs being hurled toward my face and boulders of rock cracking beneath my feet.
When I opened my eyes, the sun glared at me, accentuating the headache blossoming at my temples.
Then I would fade unconscious and awaken again sometime later.
I choked.
I gasped and bolted upright—I was only capable of a few inches—and spat out the liquid in my mouth. I rolled over onto one shoulder.
“Easy there,” a man’s voice said.
It was the arlath rider from the riverbank. I guess he must have helped me after all.
He patted me on the back before raising the plastic container in front of my eyes.
“What… What is it?” I said, my voice an ugly rasp.
“Only water,” the rider said. “I would feed you soup but you can’t keep it down.”
The man could easily overpower me if he wanted. I doubted he wanted to poison me.
I let him give me the water. It tasted refreshing as it spilled down my throat. Some leaked out of the hole in my cheek and ran down my neck.
“I’m headed to a town called Urcim,” the man said. “It’s home to the Urcim tribe. I’ll drop you off at their medical center. If they have one.”
“What happened?” I said, struggling to mouth the words. “Changelings.”
The man took a seat on the cart’s edge. His legs dangled over the side.
“They came out of nowhere,” he said, “and attacked every colony at once.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Every Titan colony? There were hundreds of them. Surely, they couldn’t strike them all at the same time? Reports suggested they didn’t have the military for such a big operation.
I thought they’d only attempted to kill me. After all, remove the emperor, and you had an empire without a head.
But the Changelings were far more ambitious than that.
“Do you know… anything else?” I said. “More news?”
“I’ve been on the road since the attack happened,” the rider said. “The last thing I heard was…”
He glanced at me and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You don’t need to hear that yet. It’s better you focus on getting stronger. This news can only weaken you.”
