"You're doing the thing again," Pearl said, squinting at me over her saddle.
"What thing?"
"The thinking-so-hard-your-face-looks-constipated thing."
"I don't have a thing."
"You have several things, actually, but that's the one currently happening."
I let it go, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and because Chief Mira was still standing at the edge of the village with her staff planted in the dirt, watching us load the last of our supplies onto the horses like she was memorizing our faces for later.
"You'll send word," she said, "if you find anything worth telling an old woman."
"We will," I promised, though I had no idea how, exactly, one sent word to a village that didn't officially exist on any map I'd ever seen.
