The first faint kindling of dawn found Monroe trembling at the foot of the southern wall, the closest to it she’d ever stood. The corrugated steel loomed barely a breath away, but she didn’t dare to reach out and touch it. She swayed on the tips of her toes—forwards, backwards, endlessly, pointlessly trapped in place. Just over the wall, the fall to the churning sands below was stomach-dropping high, higher than the towering spires of the anchorage that sliced like shards of bone into the bleeding sky.

This morning, the world held its breath. Even the buzzards and hawks always circling the city’s edge, reminding the inhabitants of their uneasy truce with the wild world beyond their walls, had yet to stir.

She should move now. Ascend the stairs. Claw her way to the very top. Climb onto the ledge. It had taken weeks of failed attempts, but she’d fought her way this close, step by painstaking step, across the parched and broken ground. And at last, here she stood.

Here where the wicked met their end.

Monroe swallowed hard and ascended the narrow steps.

The metal was dull in the absence of the sun’s fury. It would not burn her skin if she touched it. The anchorage would not hinder her, either—the hulking mass of sun-darkened and wind-eaten stone watched over her in silent benediction. Just over the wall the desert waited, and it was too hungry to reject her. Her breath quickened as it slowly came into view.

The world grew still, waiting. Everything was waiting in this final moment before the nothingness. Nothing behind her, nothing before her, nothing stopping her.

But the fear that refused to leave her struck, locking every joint and leaving her helpless. So frozen that not even the sun, which soon would rise red and swollen above the unforgiving desert, could free her. Monroe hated that paralyzed feeling. Her body betraying her. Her screams failing her, dead before they could draw breath. Blackness crept into the edges of her vision, and she clutched the wall, the metal mercifully cool.

Today was the day she was supposed to stop the fear, the nightmares, and the memories, but somehow fear won again, catching her like a beetle in a tar trap. Laughing at her struggle while it swallowed her whole. It would never let her break its hold.

Monroe scanned the horizon, trying to focus on the stars slowly losing their light, the faint vein of crimson that would soon burst across the landscape, the curved and constantly changing crests of the dunes. Slowly the iron band around her chest loosened. The steps once more felt solid under her feet. She pried her fingers free of the wall.

The sand stretched further than her eyes could see, still pale in the lingering darkness. Everyone spoke of it as a thing of terror, merciless and ravenous. Swallowing everything in its path. Relentlessly rolling in to bury them alive. But gazing across its vast emptiness, Monroe sensed no anger, only a deep swelling sorrow. She could still make out vague suggestions of the world that once was. Haphazard dunes in the outlines of buildings. A patch of roof bleached by the sun. A cracked strip of tarmac. All that remained of a world shattered, now abandoned to silence and dust.

Her life stretched as empty as the desert before her, with nightmares like sandstorms hurtling through the vastness to shake her to her core and drive her to her knees.

She was so tired of living on her knees.

The wind was a soft whisper from the farthest dunes. It beckoned to her, soothing her skin in waves of dusty coolness, tugging at her heavy dark cloak and dress. The gentleness was deceptive. Before the morning ended, it would be howling across the landscape, beating at the wall in fury. But it didn’t matter whether it whispered or screamed. It only ever spoke one word to Monroe.

Forgiveness.

That was what her walks of penance had promised. When the sun climbed high into the heavens and rained fire onto her cloaked head and shoulders, striking her skull and parching her throat, the pain was supposed to wipe away all her stains. But she never felt any cleaner. Not the sweat streaming from her brow or the water of all the oceans left in the world could do that. Her mind still ran wild with nightmares, and none of the other balance keepers would come near her.

Forgiveness refused to be found on the edge of sands and storms. All that dwelt here was punishment. The sun glared down on every sin from its throne on high, and the heat of the day did not cleanse.

It broke.

The desert held a revelation, one she finally understood. Forgiveness was not to be found for someone like her.

When the anchorage had selected her from the children of her ward, the matrons had drilled into her skull how lucky she was to be taken away from the city—filled with lawless, wicked people who blasphemed the gods and their laws—and she had drunk in every word like water itself. So many weighty responsibilities had rested on her frail little shoulders. It should have made her afraid. It should have made her humble. But Monroe had had all of a child’s confidence that she could carry the load. She had only to remain faithful and pure, after all, and the gods would have mercy, forgive mankind’s sins, and heal the world.

But she hadn’t been able to keep herself pure.

Now instead of redeeming humanity, she watched helplessly as the sun swelled above them and the desert grew around them, until the anchorage stood alone, a tiny speck against the endless waves of sand. Stopping it was an impossible task.

But that was blasphemy. Monroe didn’t need any more sins added to her account.

Not if this was the end.

She forced herself to look down once more, ignoring the desperate dizziness in the back of her skull. Surely the fall would be quick? Even if the fear clung to her all the way down, strangling her and crushing her, at the end she would be free.

The coming dawn painted the sand with a blush of red. The wind had raked it smooth and clean, as though with morning would come a new beginning. She would have to sully that too. Just as she had sullied everything else.

Blackness seeped into her vision again. Monroe shook her head, clearing it, then froze.

A shape shifted in the shadows below, something living arising from the sea of sand. But nothing should be moving at the foot of the wall, in the dry and dead world where the city cast its most wicked offenders.

Where he had been cast.

Monroe flinched back, blood pounding in her skull. No one could survive that fall. They’d torn his priest’s robes and thrown him to the rocks below, shouting his disgrace—and hers—to the sky, and never once looked back. He couldn’t have survived. He couldn’t.

But if he’d lived—

“He couldn’t.”

Her words were thin and small, barely a whimper against the wind. The voice in her head was always louder. And it was screaming—

If he’d lived, he could find her again.

Fear tightened its noose around her neck, cutting the air from her lungs.

Run.

She needed to run. Flee.

She needed to find someone to help her. Protect her.

Save her.

But no one ever had.

A kestrel shot upwards, its spotted underbelly racing past not an arm’s length away. Its shrill killy-killy-killy shredded the silence.

Monroe reeled backwards, tumbling down the broken steps. She could do no more than gasp as the ground broke her fall, pain like a thousand knives twisting deep into her bones. Tears burned her eyes, blurring the world around her. She pulled her knees to her chest with a sob.

It was only a bird. It was only a bird.

She took a few trembling breaths and blinked hard. She wouldn’t cry. If she didn’t cry, then she wasn’t hurt.

Dawn raced across the sky in a burst of color and heat as she told herself that lie yet again.