The next morning, Voss made good on his promise. He did not let Lyra follow in his steps; he forced her to forge her own.
The sun had not yet climbed high when he led them out from beneath the sheltering stone shelf and into a long stretch of broken ground, where the earth split into shallow channels and dry, crumbling rises. From a distance, the land looked simple enough. Up close, it was a relentless test of small, punishing decisions.
Voss stopped, his boots kicking up a small cloud of dust, and turned his blindfolded face toward her. "Which way?"
Lyra shifted Soren's weight against her chest and looked out over the terrain. To their left, a low cut in the ground wound like a dry riverbed between two steep ridges. To the right, the path rose gently, the ground more packed and undeniably easier underfoot.
"The left," she decided.
"Why?"
She frowned at the immediate challenge. "Because it's lower. It keeps us hidden."
"That's not a reason. That's a shape."
Lyra bit back her sharpest response. Soren was warm against her chest, wrapped tight, his own tiny blindfold secure. He had been perfectly quiet all morning, a stillness that should have comforted her by now, but only made her chest ache with a different kind of anxiety.
She forced herself to look at the landscape again, truly looking this time.
The left path was lower, yes — but it was narrow. Sound would echo strangely against those rock walls. If someone entered from the opposite side, they would be funneled into a trap with nowhere to climb. The right path climbed gently. It was more exposed, certainly, but it offered better footing, better sightlines, and room to maneuver.
"The right," she said after a long moment.
Voss said nothing.
Lyra's jaw tightened. "Why ask the question if you're not going to tell me whether I'm wrong?"
"I'm waiting to hear whether you know why you changed your mind."
She let out a slow, controlled breath. "Because the left narrows too much. If someone comes through that cut, there's nowhere to run."
"And the right?"
"More visible."
"Yes." Voss tilted his head slightly, as if listening to the wind passing over the rocks. "And visibility matters far less when you can see farther than the people who might see you."
Lyra looked at him, feeling a small spark of triumph. "So I was right the second time."
"No," Voss said mildly. "You were just less wrong."
Then he started walking.
Lyra followed, wearing an expression of pure, unadulterated annoyance that she didn't bother to hide. Voss, predictably, did not care.
They spent the entire morning like that. At every split in the land, every rise, every wash, and every broken ridge, Voss stopped and asked the same questions: Which way? Why? What do you hear? What holds footprints? What carries sound? What would you choose if you were the one hunting, instead of the one hiding?
At first, Lyra answered badly. Then, slowly, less badly.
By the fourth hour, her legs burning from the uneven terrain, she had stopped choosing the easiest route on pure instinct. By the sixth hour, she had actually begun to notice what Voss wanted her to notice: patches of dust that had been disturbed too recently, bird calls that cut off with unnatural abruptness, tracks that could tell entire stories if you stared at them long enough, and stretches of ground that lied by seeming too safe.
Near midday, Voss crouched beside a patch of pale earth no wider than a table and traced the air above it with two fingers. "What do you see?"
Lyra adjusted her grip on Soren, her back aching from the harness, and bent awkwardly to look.
There was nothing there. Just dust. A faint mark here, perhaps. A subtle scrape there. A long, barely visible line.
"I don't know," she admitted.
"Then start smaller."
She narrowed her eyes, fighting the sun's glare. The faint line in the dirt was too regular, too continuous to be random. It wasn't the scuttle of an animal, nor the sweeping pattern of the wind. It was a drag mark. And right beside it, a shallow crescent was pressed firmly into the dust.
"A wheel," she said slowly.
Voss nodded once.
"One wheel?" Lyra asked.
"One wheel visible," he corrected. "And what else?"
She squinted harder. The dust was disturbed more deeply in one specific spot than another, the dirt compacted where the wheel had sunk further into the earth. "It's heavy."
"Yes."
She glanced up at him. "A wagon?"
"A small one. Passed through two days ago, maybe three." Voss rose smoothly to his feet. "Traveling east."
"How can you possibly tell the direction?"
"Because the drag shifts at the broken stones," he explained, pointing blindly toward a small outcrop. "Weight catches and digs in when it's pulled uphill, but it skims when it rolls down. This wagon was fighting the ground."
Lyra stared at the mark again, suddenly struck by a wave of profound irritation. It bothered her how much the world had been speaking around her all her life, shouting its secrets, without her ever understanding a single word of it.
Voss heard the silence for exactly what it was.
"That feeling in your face," he said, turning to walk again, "is learning."
"I'm not making a face."
"You are."
"You can't even see me."
"I don't need to."
That answer would have been unbearable if it weren't so routinely true.
By late afternoon, the land began to change again. The broken, aggressive ridges flattened out into longer, sweeping slopes of sun-baked stone and hard dirt. Here and there, Lyra began to spot signs of human use — too faint to be called a settlement, but too deliberate to be mere chance. There were old cart ruts, patches of chopped scrub, weathered fence posts standing without any fences, and one upright marker stone half-buried in the dust, its carved runes worn almost entirely smooth by the wind.
Voss stopped before the stone. "We're close."
"To what?"
"A trade point."
Lyra's entire body tightened instinctively, her arms pulling Soren closer to her chest.
Voss heard the shift in her posture. "It's not a town," he assured her, though his tone remained completely flat. "Not even a village. It's just a place where people exchange things and leave before anyone asks too many questions."
"That sounds worse."
"It depends entirely on what you're trying to hide."
Lyra looked down at the sleeping child in her arms. "Everything."
Voss's mouth twitched — the ghost of a smile. "Then today, you hide enough."
They continued over the next rise until the trade point finally came into view. It was exactly as he had described: a cluster of low, makeshift structures built around a crumbling stone well. A leaning awning of patched, sun-bleached cloth threw a wide block of shade over stacked crates and sealed barrels. Two miserable-looking pack animals stood tethered near a dry trough, and lazy smoke drifted from an iron brazier where someone was boiling a stew that smelled strongly of wild onions and old meat.
Lyra counted seven people visible in the camp. Too many.
She slowed her pace, every maternal instinct screaming at her to turn back to the empty desert.
Voss did not falter.
"Listen to me," he said quietly as they closed the distance. "You do not volunteer names. You do not tell long stories. If someone asks about the child, you say he has a fever and light-sick eyes."
Lyra frowned at his back. "Light-sick?"
"People fear what they don't understand far less when it sounds ordinary."
"And if they ask where we're going?"
"You answer with a place far enough away that they won't ever expect to hear whether you arrived."
"That is a terrible rule."
"It's an excellent rule."
They reached the edge of the trade point. No one stopped them. No one greeted them. That, Lyra was beginning to learn, was often the closest thing to mercy that life in the Faded Lands had to offer.
Voss led them directly beneath the patched awning. A broad-shouldered woman with a jagged scar cutting across her chin sat behind a plank table piled high with bolts of rough cloth, rusted tools, blocks of salt, dried legumes, and three knives of obviously varying quality.
The woman looked first at Voss, registering the blindfold, then at Lyra, and finally at the bundled baby. Her eyes lingered on Soren for a fraction of a second too long.
"What do you want?" the merchant asked, her voice like grinding stones.
"Salt. Cloth. Lamp oil, assuming it isn't watered down," Voss replied.
The woman snorted. "Everything out here is watered."
"Then water it less."
She almost smiled at that. Almost. But her gaze drifted right back to Soren. "Quiet child."
Lyra's stomach plummeted.
"Fever," she lied smoothly, the word leaving her mouth before her panic could catch it. "His eyes are bad in the daylight. Light-sick."
The woman grunted, neither convinced nor particularly interested in proving them wrong. "Bad season for that."
Voss tilted his head toward the merchant. "Everything's a bad season if you make a profession of complaining."
That earned him a dry, assessing look, but it successfully shifted the conversation away from Soren, which Lyra understood immediately had been the entire point of the insult.
While Voss bargained over the goods, Lyra stood slightly behind him, keeping her head down while tracking the others at the trade point from the corners of her eyes. There was a boy hauling heavy sacks from one stack to another. An old man drawing a bucket at the well. Two dusty travelers under the far awning, arguing in low voices over a folded map. A girl no older than fourteen, meticulously cleaning the mechanism of a long rifle with careful hands.
And a man in a brown coat, who was pretending very hard not to listen to everything happening around him.
That one bothered her. Not because he looked overtly dangerous, but because he looked forgettable on purpose.
Voss must have sensed the sudden rigidity in her spine. Without turning his head, he murmured, "Don't stare at the listeners. It makes them think they're important."
Lyra snapped her gaze back to the merchant's table.
The scarred woman tossed down a heavy coil of woven cloth. "That's all the good stuff I'm giving you."
"You say that every time," Voss replied seamlessly.
Lyra blinked in surprise.
The woman actually smiled then —a faint, sharp expression. "And every time, you still buy it."
So Voss had been there before. The realization should have comforted Lyra, proof that he knew the territory. Instead, it made the vast, empty world feel suddenly thinner. More connected. More dangerous.
Then, Soren stirred.
It was the smallest movement imaginable, just a shift of his tiny hands beneath the heavy wrappings. But Lyra felt it instantly. Her fingers pressed firmly against his chest. Warm. Small. Terribly present.
Not yet, she thought fiercely, throwing the thought downward like an anchor. It wasn't a prayer; it was a command. Not here. Do not slip here.
Voss's head shifted by a fraction of a degree. He had felt it too.
The air around them didn't thicken at once, but something incredibly subtle went wrong with the fabric of the moment. The light under the awning seemed to stutter. Across the yard, the girl cleaning the rifle frowned, pausing her work as if trying to remember a word she had just forgotten. The old man at the well turned his head toward them, uneasy without having any earthly idea why.
Lyra bent low over Soren, pressing her lips to his covered head, and whispered fiercely into his fine hair. "You are here. Stay here."
For a terrifying second, nothing happened. Then, a tiny hitch caught in his breathing, and the strange, humming pressure in the air snapped, releasing its hold on the camp.
The woman behind the table narrowed her eyes at Lyra's sudden movement. "You all right there?"
Lyra forced herself to straighten, though her hand remained clamped protectively over the child's heart. "He's running warm again."
The woman clicked her tongue in mild sympathy. "Then you should keep him off the open roads."
Lyra very nearly let out a hysterical laugh at the sheer absurdity of the advice. To receive mundane maternal concern while actively fleeing for their lives was almost too much to bear. Instead, she swallowed the madness and offered a tight nod. "That's the plan."
Voss dropped a handful of coins onto the wooden planks. It was too much payment.
The woman noticed the overage immediately, her scarred chin lifting. "You've gone soft."
"No," Voss said, gathering the cloth and salt without bothering to haggle for his change. "You've just gone expensive."
That careless transaction told Lyra everything she needed to know: they needed to leave. Immediately.
They turned away from the stall, walking toward the open scrub. Three steps. Four.
Then, the man in the brown coat spoke from directly behind them.
"You travel with a blind man and a sick child," he observed, his voice casual but loud enough to carry. "That seems inconvenient."
Lyra's blood ran cold.
Voss did not stop walking. "It often is."
The man took a few leisurely steps after them, closing the distance. "Still," he pressed, "you must be truly desperate to travel this far out with so little company to guard your backs."
Voss finally slowed, but only enough to let the ensuing silence stretch until it became heavy and obvious. When he finally spoke over his shoulder, his voice was flatter and colder than Lyra had ever heard it.
"Do you work for someone," Voss asked, "or is nosiness just a private hobby?"
The man smiled — the exact kind of smile worn by men who think they are inches away from discovering something highly profitable. "Depends entirely on what's being bought."
Voss turned his blindfolded face halfway toward the stranger. "Then consider this a gift."
The man's smile faltered.
"Walk away," Voss said.
The trade point seemed to go deathly quiet around them. It wasn't true silence; it was just thinner. It was the specific, cowardly quiet created when seasoned people hear violence coming and suddenly find urgent work looking in the opposite direction.
The man in the brown coat hesitated, his hand twitching near his belt. Then, perhaps because there were too many witnesses, or perhaps because his bruised pride had already begun to speak louder than his survival instinct, he jutted his chin. "I don't take advice from beggars."
Voss let out a small, sharp breath through his nose. It wasn't quite a laugh. "Then you'll pay for it."
The man's expression finally cracked. It wasn't full-blown fear, but deep, sudden uncertainty. He looked from Voss's rigid stance, to Lyra's fierce glare, to the unnaturally quiet bundle in her arms, and back again. Something in the arrangement of them failed to fit whatever easy narrative he had built in his head.
Whatever conclusion the listener reached, it was enough to keep him alive. He clicked his tongue, muttered an obscenity under his breath, and turned sharply away, retreating toward the tents.
Lyra did not look back. She kept her eyes locked dead ahead until they had left the trade point completely behind and the crumbling stone well was swallowed by the rolling hills.
Only then did she allow herself to breathe. "Who was he?"
"Someone who sells things that aren't his," Voss replied evenly.
Lyra shot him a look. "That could describe half the people you've mentioned since we met."
"Yes."
"That is not helpful."
"It wasn't meant to be."
They kept walking until the sun began to bleed orange across the horizon. Once the trade point had vanished entirely behind the curvature of the land, Voss finally slowed his relentless pace.
"You did well today," he said to the open air.
Lyra stared at him, exhausted to her bones. "That's praise?"
"It's not an insult."
She let out one short, breathless sound that might have been a laugh if it had managed to survive being born.
Soren was sleeping deeply again, his tiny chest rising and falling rhythmically against her. Despite the child's calm, Lyra kept one hand firmly anchored over his heart as they walked.
When dusk finally claimed the sky, Voss led them to another hidden shelf of stone, this one overlooking a dry basin littered with old, sun-bleached bones. Animals, mostly. Small desert things that had chosen their paths wrong, or reacted too slowly.
He built the fire with practiced efficiency while Lyra sat against the rock wall, untying her boots and watching the last light surrender to the dark.
After a long, comfortable silence, she spoke. "You knew that woman."
"Yes."
"And she knew you."
"Yes."
"But this morning you said not to linger. Not to become familiar."
Voss adjusted one of the heated stones around the edge of the fire, the orange light flickering across his blindfold. "Familiarity is dangerous when it turns people curious. Predictability, however, is immensely useful when it turns them bored."
Lyra considered that, turning the logic over in her tired mind. "So the trick," she said slowly, "is not to be unknown. It's to be uninteresting."
Voss tilted his head toward her, the firelight catching the sharp line of his jaw. "That," he said, "is the first truly intelligent thing you've said all day."
Lyra stared at him in utter outrage.
Then, to her own profound surprise, she laughed. It was brief. Ragged. Far more tired than amused. But it was entirely real.
Voss did not smile. He did, however, say, "Good."
Coming from him, that single word felt less like approval and much more like permission.
She didn't say anything else, letting the rare moment of levity dissolve into the quiet crackle of the fire. The silence that followed was no longer sharp with tension, but heavy with a bone-deep exhaustion. As the last of the twilight finally bled out of the basin, the stars came out in the freezing dark above them — far away, indifferent, and infinitely patient. Lyra looked down at Soren...
Across the low fire, Voss sat perfectly still, his face turned upward toward the vast, empty night.
"Tomorrow," he said softly, "you learn lies."
Lyra frowned, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders. "I already know how to lie."
"No," Voss corrected, his voice carrying the weight of a stone dropping into a deep well. "You know how to be desperate and hope people mistake it for the truth. That is entirely different."
She opened her mouth to argue.
Then, she closed it.
Because he was probably right. Because he was completely infuriating. Because tomorrow would come for them whether she liked it or not.
And because somewhere between the relentless fear, the bone-deep exhaustion, and the endless, terrifying work of keeping one impossible child anchored to the fabric of reality, Lyra had begun to trust the blind man who listened to the dark. She hadn't agreed to it, and she certainly didn't like it, but the truth was undeniable.
Above them, the sky burned on with cold light. Below it, hidden among ancient stone, gray ash, and the fading warmth of a small fire, Lyra held her son tight against her chest, and prepared to learn how to lie well enough to keep him alive.