12

Those old coveralls let you pass as a maintenance worker just about anywhere; they were better protection from prying eyes than any Nosferatu's invisibility arts.

"Carrying water for the Ivory Tower, eh, Menas Blackburn?" Julian said with a little chuckle, hoisting the plastic gallon jugs out of the back of the Tracker. Each read ¡Buena suerte! or something like it in blue Sharpie.

You didn't laugh. This wasn't humanitarian work.

Or maybe it was. The desert Princes still fear the thing that slept under those sands. They told you that if it woke up hungry, it would tear this land apart.

"How long you think we're gonna do this?" Julian asked. Julian talked too much, but sometimes he cut through the bullshit with words that carried a constellation of meanings. How long: decades? Centuries? We: neonates, nothing but larvae in the eyes of their elders. And this: this awful work.