The Ghost Caravan burned behind them like a dying star.
Kai walked in front, dragging the masked woman by a leash of living shadow.
Her porcelain smile was shattered. Half of it had crumbled when Calamity kissed her cheek.
What remained was a cracked child-face, weeping red dust.
The survivors—four drivers, two guards, and one cage wagon—followed at a distance.
They had been given a choice: drive, or join the thirty corpses fertilizing the sand.
They chose to drive.
In the last wagon, iron-barred and draped in silence runes, sat the cargo.
Twenty-three children this time.
All eclipse-touched.
All destined for the Red Sand auction.
Kai had not opened the cage yet.
He wasn't sure he could look at them without breaking something he still needed.
Night in the deep Wastes was colder than any grave.
Stars above looked freshly sharpened.
They made camp in the lee of a toppled stone titan—an ancient war-god, face eaten away by ten thousand years of wind.
The drivers built no fire.
They knew better now.
The masked woman—Bai Yu, he had learned her name—knelt where the shadow leash pinned her to the ground.
She had stopped begging an hour ago.
Now she only stared at him with the one eye not swollen shut.
"You're going to kill me at the oasis," she said. Flat. "Why keep me alive this long?"
"Because you're going to introduce me," Kai replied. "As your new partner. The one who wiped out an entire garrison patrol before breakfast."
Bai Yu laughed, sharp, like tearing paper.
"They'll skin you alive the moment you step through the ward gates."
"No," Kai said. "They'll try."
He turned.
That's when he noticed the girl.
She sat on the tongue of the cage wagon, legs dangling. Blindfold of dirty cloth wrapped tight over her eyes.
Silver hair, short and uneven, hacked like someone had tried to erase it.
Hands folded neatly in her lap.
She hummed—a tuneless little thing, the kind orphans make up when the dark gets too loud.
Kai's stomach turned cold.
She was one of the cargo.
Yet no chains on her wrists. No collar.
The other children gave her a wide, terrified berth.
Kai walked over.
The humming stopped.
"You're late," the girl said, voice calm, unafraid. "I thought you'd come on the third night, not the fourth."
Kai stopped, arm's length away.
Calamity stirred against his mind. Agitated.
Something is wrong with this one. Kill her. Now.
Kai ignored it.
"How do you know when I'd come?" he asked.
The girl tilted her head. Blindfold soaked through with old blood in handprint patterns, as if someone had tried to claw her eyes out long ago.
"I see shadows better than light," she said. "And yours is the biggest I've ever tasted."
She smiled. Small. Sad. Knowing.
"My name is Sen. I've been waiting for the boy who carries Calamity to set me free."
Kai's hand found Calamity's hilt without thought.
The drivers froze. The guards reached for weapons they knew were useless.
Sen raised both palms, empty.
"I'm not your enemy," she said. "I'm the reason the caravan took the long route through the Boneyard. I asked them to. So you would find us."
Bai Yu made a strangled sound. "You little— You planned this?"
Sen laughed, soft as moth wings.
"I only bent probability a little. The eclipse does the rest."
She slid off the wagon tongue, landing cat-light on the sand.
Then walked straight toward Kai.
Every step she took, shadows at her feet recoiled as if burned.
Calamity screamed inside his skull.
KILL HER NOW. SHE SEES TOO MUCH.
Kai drew an inch of the blade.
Sen stopped just outside striking range.
"I can't see your face," she said. "But I can see the hole where your name used to be. It's getting bigger."
She reached up, touching the blindfold.
"If you let me, I can slow the eating. Not stop it—nothing stops Calamity once it chooses a sheath—but slow. Long enough for you to finish what you started."
"And the price?" Kai asked. His voice distant even to himself.
Sen's smile turned sharp.
"When the time comes, you'll ask for one thing. You'll hate it. You'll want to refuse. But you'll say yes."
She extended her small, scarred, steady hand.
"Do we have a deal, Shadow Blade?"
Behind her, the caged children began to cry quietly.
They knew something the adults didn't.
Kai looked at the outstretched hand. Then at the wooden sword still tucked in his belt.
He remembered the weight of a little boy's trust.
He sheathed Calamity.
The scream in his head cut off mid-note.
"Deal," he said, taking her hand.
Her skin was furnace-hot.
For one impossible second, he saw himself through her blindness:
A silhouette of black fire, a white streak in his hair like a crack in reality, a hollow chest where a heart should be.
Then the vision snapped shut.
Sen squeezed once and let go.
"Good," she whispered. "Now open the cage. Some of them still remember how to hope. We should let them keep it a little longer."
Kai turned the key Bai Yu had surrendered hours earlier.
The door creaked open.
Twenty-two children spilled out, blinking, terrified, free for the first time in months.
The twenty-third—Sen—simply walked past him and sat by the dead titan's foot.
She patted the sand beside her.
"Sit. The eclipse is almost over. When the sun rises white tomorrow, the real hunt begins. Tonight, let me teach you how to lie to the thing eating your soul."
Kai sat.
Far away, on the horizon, the last fingernail of red sun vanished.
True night swallowed the world.
And in that darkness, a blind girl began to teach a monster how to stay human—one memory at a time.