Jack gulped guiltily.
It was all he could do not to say the words that would prompt Sprinkle to tell him, “I told you so.”
He still did. “I told you so.”
Jack had not even known what sand was outside of seeing it in picture books, and it wasn’t like it had immediately welcomed him to the desert. The floor had turned sandy miles beforehand when there were still trees and patches of grass.
A savannah, Sprinkle called it.
They had faced a couple of predators by themselves, which had been scary enough, but the sight of what he was about to traverse was all the more terrifying.
“Is that heat? Twisting my view of things in the distance?” Jack asked.
“Heatwave,” Sprinkle replied, standing in Jack’s shade. “The one nice thing I’ve heard about the desert is how cold it gets at night.”
“
