Dawn in the Dead Zone didn't arrive. It seeped in.
There was no sunrise, only a slow, grudging shift from black to charcoal to the flat gray that passed for daylight in a land stripped of everything worth looking at.
Revan hadn't slept at all. His eyes burned. After what he had seen, sleeping would have been impossible. For the last two hours he had sat in his corner and watched the glow in the southeast fade as the sky lightened. By the time the gray was bright enough to see faces, it was gone, either swallowed by the daylight or hidden by whatever was making it.
Dain was the first to move. Slowly, he rose. Overnight his wounded shoulder had stiffened. Now his arm hung at his side like dead weight that he didn't even try to lift.
"Everyone up. We're moving."
The camp stirred. Without a word, the guards rose. One of the stretcher cases, the man with the abdominal wound, hadn't made it through the night. The other was awake but couldn't walk.
