and vanished into the dust about twenty paces from the shelter, so there was no way to tell where they’d come from or gone to. Maybe Petra could have figured it out. But none of the other scouts could.
The sentries swore they’d seen no one. Since my dad hadn’t posted any of them at the emptied shelter, that made sense. Still, he took the whole group into his headquarters with Aleka and the other officers, leaving one officer to stand watch at the front door. I got as close as the guard would let me, but I heard nothing.
Korah stood nearby, her upper lip in her teeth. Somehow, on her, that didn’t look bad at all.
“Why would anyone go back?” I asked her.
She jumped as if she’d just come out of a trance. Then she smiled. “They must have been hoping to filch extra rations.”
I was about to ask her who in camp was stupid enough not to know we’d cleaned the place out, but then I remembered who I was talking to. “He’s checking them, isn’t he?” I said. “To see if they’re infected?”
She shot me a look, and I thought I saw a flash of fear in her eyes. But before I could say anything else, Wali swaggered over. I swear the guy had a homing device on me. He took Korah’s arm, flexed every muscle in his body, and walked away.
An hour later the sentries came out, their shaken expressions making me glad I wasn’t them. A smear of blood crossed one of the men’s cheeks.
My dad appeared at their rear. His face revealed nothing.
“Let’s go, people,” he said. “Show’s over. Time to get to work.”
“Laman,” Aleka said. “Quarantine procedures.”
Everyone froze. My dad had told me about quarantine. It meant subjecting every person in camp to the trials, no exceptions. Risky, because the results weren’t always reliable. False positive, you torch one of your friends. False negative, you relax your guard. Normally, he’d told me, you put quarantine into effect only when you had a very good reason to suspect a breach.
“Laman?” Aleka repeated.
My dad must not have thought this was one of those occasions, because he didn’t even bother to respond.
“Querry,” he called. “Seems like you’ve got time on your hands. How about helping us out over here?”
We left Aleka standing there, a frown on her thin lips.
I spent the rest of the morning shoveling.
The location of our new camp might not have made us more vulnerable to Skaldi. I guess it depended on who you asked. But there was no doubt it made us vulnerable to a different kind of enemy: dust. Perched on the highest spot for miles, with only our flimsy fence as a windbreak, it had gotten pummeled by a dust storm that blew through overnight. I guess my dad should have foreseen that possibility the day we arrived, what with dust choking the empty swimming pools and painting miniature sand dunes up walls and foundations. Maybe he had, but he’d decided that was worth the risk, too. When daybreak revealed the dust piled on everything, coating our trucks, our equipment, our clothes, I’m not sure everyone agreed.
The strange thing for me was that I’d hardly noticed the dust accumulating while I lay half-awake those long hours before dawn. I’d heard the wind blow and felt the tickle on my cheek. But when I joined the work detail and discovered our supplies buried, I couldn’t believe it had all materialized in a single night. I guess it was something like the snowstorms the old woman had told me about, from the time when there still was snow. Overnight squalls that blanketed the world in white. People dreamed about it, she said. Prayed for it. Kids pressed their faces against frosty windowpanes and stared through the steam of their own breath at the sparkling shroud. Why they were so excited about seeing their world erased I don’t know.
But then, this was the woman who wouldn’t tell anyone in camp her own name, so I’m not sure I believed her until I waded through the brown powder that had obliterated everything we