There's a long moment in mid-air -- too long, this is going to hurt -- and I have time to regret my poor decisions. Which is all my decisions, if I'm being honest.

  Then impact and I'm plowing a furrow in the sand with my face. I kind of thought it would be softer.

  Eventually I come to a stop, somewhat abraded but surprisingly not dead. Everything around me is shaking, grains of sand rippling and jumping into the air like a desert full of fleas. The hull of the is only a few feet away, a massive wall of scarred steel, the hiss of its passage competing with the deep rumble of mighty engines to assault my ears. If anyone is shouting "Man overboard!", I can't hear them.

  Which is good! I think?!

  I cringe and put my arms across my face as the rear of the ship goes past, tracks spewing a rooster-tail of sand high into the air. It patters around me like rain, cascading off my rough prisoner's uniform in rivulets. When it finally stops and I dare to raise my head, the throb of the ship's engines has dwindled to a quiet roar, and I watch as the only possible source of food and water within a hundred miles recedes into the distance.

  It is possible, I concede to myself, that I have not thought this escape all the way through.

  ***

  Can you really blame me, though? I was going a little mad. Weeks on that fucking ship, with civilization receding by the day and only a grimy hold full of the worst dregs of the City for company. We got to see the suns twice a day, paraded around the main deck like beetles at a pet show. The guards kept a wary eye out for any prisoner looking to commute their sentence to mere excruciating death.

  And then there'd been an opening. An old man three paces from me had collapsed, coughing so hard he seemed likely to turn inside out. The guard had gone over to get him moving again, and for a sparkling moment there was nothing between me and the rail. It wasn't far to the sand below, right? (Ow ow ow my face.) A quick vault into empty space and then freedom, glorious freedom! Freedom to die of thirst in a trackless desert, admittedly, but that still counts.

  I stand up and brush myself off, wishing I had proper shoes. Or a hat. A bottle of wine, a soft bed, and a nice girl or three wouldn't go amiss either.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Okay, enough feeling sorry for myself. Get on with it. Where am I?

  'Somewhere in the Sinister Waste' is the best I can do. It's getting on toward evening, only four suns in the sky and most of the stars visible. I'm standing on a sand dune among about a million identical sand dunes, stretching off into the blued distance in all directions. Mountains loom in one direction, which makes that south; the Divide is too far east to see from here.

  That hits home. Not only am I on the wrong side of the Divide, I can't even the mountains at the center of the world.

  Fucking Ba'alabeth. If I hadn't given her a key …

  Spilled milk. Water on the sand. No going back. I exhausted my revenge fantasies back on the ship. Now what?

  People live in the waste, right? Admittedly they're Fifth-worshipping lunatic cannibals, by all accounts, but they still

  here. All I need to do is find some and talk them into not eating me. Piece of hopefully-not-people-cake.

  Ha ha I'm definitely going to die, aren't I?

  One thing breaks the monotony of the landscape. There's a spire of carved rock, scoured by sand but still recognizably made by human hands. Around it there are hints of regularity in the dunes, as though they're mounded up over ancient walls. I spotted it from the ship before I jumped. There might be shelter there, or water if I'm a hundred times luckier than I deserve. In any case, it's . I start walking.

  Walking on sand sucks, especially when all you've got are cheap prison-issue moccasins. I'm sweating and out of breath when I reach the base of the spire. It sticks out above the sand to several times my height, an obelisk of black stone rounded by erosion into something melted-looking. Even the oldest of the City's battlements don't look this weathered; this thing has been here for a long, time.

  Doesn't help me particularly, so I look around. A few other walls are exposed, the corners forming nooks I might be able to tuck myself into to hide from a storm. No sign of water, though. But there's a flat, open stretch in the middle, and I spot something shiny in the center of it. It be a pool of standing water, not out here, but that's exactly what it looks like.

  Nobody's that lucky. I should leave it alone and get on with stumbling across the desert to my death, right?

  Fuck it. If it's a cannibal trap, at least I can beg my captors for mercy.

  I scramble down the dune and out into the open. The water looks strange as I approach, shiny, suns reflecting off it with an almost metallic sheen. I slow down, frowning, and notice an odd texture to the sand. It

  slightly when I move, like walking on eggshells. There's something off-white mixed with the yellow-gray, and I bend to look closer --

  It starts to slide. Gently at first, but with unstoppable momentum. The "water" -- now revealed as a solid plate -- tips up and sinks into the gathering vortex as the whole basin drains toward the center and carries me helplessly along with it.

  I realize, belatedly, what

  of trap this is. Typical. Leave it to me, left behind with no water in a trackless cannibal-filled desert, to stumble into an even more exciting way to die.