Mira pulls the reins hard. The camel skids to a stop, sending a spray of sand toward the figure's base. For a moment neither of them moves — woman and shape, ten paces apart, the hot air perfectly still between them. She steadies her breath. The name she has not spoken aloud in three years rises from somewhere below her sternum. "Senna." Her mother's name. Just that. The wind carries it. The sand figure does not move — not exactly. Something shifts inside the column of loose grain, a slow interior rotation, the way a face might turn toward a sound. The spiral groove where a mouth would be deepens. The air smells suddenly of old smoke, of cooled ash, of the particular way her mother's kitchen smelled after the hearth burned down to embers. Against her ribs, the vessel's pulse quickens. Then the sand figure opens what is not a mouth, and speaks.