We left the village quickly, not daring to look back. My head throbbed intensely but not to the point where I needed to say anything. It faded the moment we were about a mile from the village, a similar distance to when it had begun as we arrived. Something about DNA’s village triggered my headache. DNA stopped walking. The steer and I stopped, too. He looked back the way we came, slightly out of breath, and then at me.
“I hope your sister is okay,” I said.
“My sister thrives on trouble.” He laughed. “She’s my sister.” He shrugged. “She’s not you.”
I nodded, “That’s a good thing.” We both chuckled nervously.
“I think we’re safe,” he said.
“The clans don’t have drones?”
“Oh they have drones, yes. But we can rest for a few minutes.” He went to GPS and pulled a small square from one of the pack. He unfolded and unfolded it and shook it out. We sat down on it.
“Why is everything from your family red?”
“That’s our color,” he said. “People identify us by it. Other families have patterns, but my father, he just loves the color red.”
“It makes me think of . . .”
“I know. Just look at the sky. It’ll distract you.”
I looked up. There were a few clouds, but more importantly, there was a slight haze of dust now. I shuddered at the thought of where that dust was blowing in from. Jesus, are we that close to the Red Eye, I wondered?
“We were lucky, but the fact that the clans didn’t set up a perimeter of lookouts and even drones around the village tells me that they didn’t really believe I was there,” he said. “Which means we might still run into some of their scouts.”
“Can your family update us on what happens?”
“No,” he said. “The networks and groups are full of clan spies, people’s accounts can be hacked. They’ll be watching the accounts of all my relatives.”
After a few minutes, I asked what had been nagging at me since we’d left, “Did they really believe you?”
“My sister, yeah. Maybe my mother,” he said. “My brother? No. The Elders, mostly, yes. Everyone else? Definitely not. My reputation in the village, well, people think I’m strange, that I’m too much of a traditionalist. Like my embracing the solitary herdsman life was an excuse to get many young wives, avoid so-called real work . . . or be a terrorist. They’ve been waiting for something like this.”
My shoulder flared hot with pain, and I stopped walking.
“What’s wrong?”
“My arm. It hasn’t been right since yesterday. Someone smashed at it with a brick.”
“Can I see?” he asked.
I shook out my arm as I moved a step away from him. “It’s fine,” I said. “Nothing we can do about it out here, anyway.” We looked at each other for a moment. “I’m just a really private person,” I added.
“Hmmm, okay.” He stepped back, raising both of his hands. “I understand.”
I nodded, still rubbing my shoulder and bending and straightening my arm as much as I could. We continued on, and for several minutes he kept looking at me. He didn’t think I noticed, but I did. An hour later, we reached a Noor. They looked nothing like how I’d imagined them. I thought they’d be like the windmills back home with the long sleek white base and the three-blade horizontal rotor. But Noors were monstrously huge, about the size and width of two football fields. Made of sand-colored most likely carbon-fiber plastic or glass fiber, these turbines were helical, and lay horizontally on the desert floor.
“They look sort of like strands of DNA,” I said as we made a wide berth around it. DNA gave me a loathsome look, and I chuckled. He’d clearly heard this before. The wind had begun to howl around us and, surprisingly, it was only the wind that I heard, not the turbine. “They’re so quiet,” I said.
“What does it matter?” he asked. “The wind makes noise for everyone.” He pointed to the northern end of the turbine. “You stand there, even a half mile in front of it, and the wind funneling through for energy will tear you apart because the helix accelerates it on its way out.”
I squinted. The land in front of the turbine was flat and looked made of smooth stone.
“Do they all face the same direction?”
“The Noor south of the Red Eye, in this part of the desert, all face North South,” DNA said. “That changes when you get farther in and when you travel east or west. They’re drawing the wind from the storm and the storm moves in a circle, like a hurricane. Ya’allah, I hate imagining how much power Ultimate Corp harnesses from each and every Noor. They send all that energy wirelessly to wherever they want. And no one knows exactly where. Some place has lights because of these. There’s a reason they are called “noor,” which means “light” in Arabic.”