Stolen by Lucy Christopher Page A

the winter anyway.
    “It was stupid to put it here, really,” you said. You picked halfheartedly at the crispy brown stems. A leaf fell off in your hands. You glanced up at the rocks behind the house. “The garden in the Separates is better.”
    I looked up at those rocks, too. The sun was making shadows around them.
    “What else is in there?” I asked.
    “Vegetable patch, more herbs, lots of food … turtujarti trees, minyirli, yupuna, bush tomato … anything you could want. A few stubble quails come and go, lizard … there’s chickens, too.”
    “Chickens?”
    “Someone’d left a cage of them on the side of the road, on the way here, so I took ‘em. Don’t you remember them being in the back of the car when we drove here?” Your eyes glinted a little. “S’pose not, huh? They were half-dead, and you weren’t much better.” You reached into your pocket, took out a small hip flask, and sloshed some liquid onto the dried-out herbs. “Water,” you explained. I wanted to grab the flask and give them more.
    “They haven’t had enough,” I said.
    You looked at me sharply, but you kept sprinkling until the plants got a few more drops. You stood. “The herbs in the Separates are healthier,” you said again. “There’s shade, you know? Some water.”
    I remembered the path I’d seen leading through those rocks. I thought about what might be on the other side.
    “Can we go there?” I asked.
    Your eyes flicked over me, assessing my intent. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
    You stepped away from the herbs and took a couple of steps into the sand. You looked out, away from the Separates, at that endlessness of rusty-colored land. It stretched before us in waves: a surging sea of dirt, with small green shrubs bobbing on its surface.
    “There are no other people for hundreds of miles,” you said. “Not really. Doesn’t that just make everything better?”
    I stared at you. You could have been joking, or saying something to scare me. But I don’t think you were. You had that faraway look in your eye, the look when your eyes went a bit misty and it seemed as if you were looking out even farther than the horizon. Just at that moment I wasn’t scared of you. Right then you looked like a kind of explorer, looking out over the land, planning where to go.
    “What’s it called?” I asked. “This desert? Does it have a name?”
    You blinked. The corners of your mouth twitched. “Sandy.”
    “What?”
    You pressed your lips together, trying not to laugh. But you couldn’t help it. Your shoulders started shaking, and then you bent your head to the ground. Your laugh was so loud and deep, it made me jump. Your body moved with the sound, until you kind of collapsed on the sand. You picked up some of the grains and gripped them in the palm of your hand.
    “Good name for it, right?” you said, once you’d composed yourself. “It’s the Sandy Desert, and it’s sandy.” You opened your fingers and let the grains go in an orange waterfall. “All just a load of sand hills. Come and see.”
    I took a step toward you, just one. You picked up another handful and held it out to me, pushing your fingers through the grains.
    “This sand is the oldest in the world,” you said. “Even the land I sit on now has taken billions of years to form, worn down from the mountains.”
    “Mountains?”
    “Once there was a range near here higher than the Andes. This is ancient land, sacred, it’s seen everything there is to see.” You pushed the sand toward me. “Feel the heat,” you said. “This sand’s alive.”
    I took the sand. The grains burned into my skin and I dropped them all in a rush. It was the second time you’d made my skin burn that morning. You ran your fingers over the place where they’d fallen, then buried your whole hand underneath. You shut your eyes against the sun.
    “The sand’s like a womb,” you said. “Warm and soft, safe.”
    You buried your other hand, too. Your shoulders relaxed, and your