Three days later the Mojave swallowed him.
The old highways were ribs of asphalt picked clean by sand and sun. Billboards leaned like drunks, their smiling faces long since flayed to bone. Farren traveled by night; Sable's eyes turned the dark into green fire.
He followed the Salt Road, a trade artery kept open by bonded caravans. Each wagon was pulled by oxen fused with desert tortoises—armored juggernauts that could walk a week without water. Their drovers wore veils of rattlesnake skin; the serpents' spirits coiled in their veins, tasting the air for ambush.
Farren bartered a single condor feather—his father's last—for a place on a wagon. The drover, a woman named Marisol whose left arm ended in a viper's head, studied him.
"Vale's whelp," she hissed. The viper's tongue flicked. "There's a price on your pelt. Dead or fused."
Farren rested a hand on Moonfang. "Try collecting."
Marisol laughed, a sound like dry leaves. "Not my contract, kitten. But east of the Cathedral, the Choir pays in soul-iron. Your sister's pretty magic would fetch a cathedral bell."
The wagon lurched onward. At dusk they reached the Bone Station, a wayfort built from the skeletons of pre-Rift airliners. Lanterns of ghost-light floated above the gates, fed by the trapped souls of moths.
Inside, Farren found the bounty board: his own face sketched in charcoal, eyes scratched out. Reward: one hundred soul-shards or "intact lynx fusion."
He tore the poster down. Sable growled low; every bonded beast in the courtyard turned to stare.
A boy no older than twelve approached, leading a jackal fused at the hips—two torsos, one mind. The jackal's half carried a message tube sealed with black wax.
"For the Vale heir," the boy said, and vanished into the crowd.
Farren cracked the tube. Inside: a lock of Cherina's sun-gold hair and a strip of parchment.
She sings for the Choir now. Come to the Cathedral before the next blood moon or her voice becomes the bell that calls the Devouring.
The parchment crumbled to ash in his fist. Sable's fury rolled through him like thunder.
Marisol found him at the stables, cinching a stolen mustang whose bond-spirit was a roadrunner—legs blurred into streaks of dust.
"You'll never reach the Cathedral alone," she said. "The Choir seeds the desert with glass storms. Only the Salt Road caravans know the safe veins."
Farren swung into the saddle. "Then I'll ride the storm."
Marisol tossed him a rattlesnake fang on a thong. "Wear it. My venom will mask your scent from their hunters."
He tied it beside the broken signet. The mustang whinnied; roadrunner spirits flickered around its hooves.
Farren kicked it into a run that left sparks on the sand. Behind him, the Bone Station's ghost-lanterns dimmed, as if the dead moths themselves feared what came next.