“There’s a storm.” Sasha tugged on his arm. She turned her face, making sure he was listening. She wasn’t panicked, but her pulse thrummed at the base of her throat, and her eyes grew so wide they frightened him. It was just a smear on the horizon, a writhing in the distance that portended the arrival—or departure—of something that would never reach them. But Sasha saw something else.
“There’s a storm coming,” she repeated, and pointed toward the dark smudge, her finger outlined against a sky so impossibly blue, he should have laughed. He didn’t.
She began looking this way and that, searching for shelter. “There will be sand everywhere. We won’t be able to breathe.” Her chest started to rise and fall, as if oxygen deprivation had already begun. Then she shuddered, shrugging it off and ke
