The Sunken Oasis didn't offer the cool relief its name promised. As the wagons rolled down the sloping, sand-choked boulevards, the air grew stagnant and thick with the scent of hot copper. The leaning towers of glass acted like mirrors, focusing the dying sunlight into blinding corridors of heat.
"Someone's already in the kitchen," Aden muttered, his sapphire eyes darting toward the upper balconies of a half-buried rotunda.
Eren followed his gaze, but saw only shadows. Then, a low, metallic click echoed through the street—the sound of a high-tension crossbow being cocked.
"Halt."
The voice didn't come from the towers. It came from the ground.
A patch of sand ten feet in front of the lead horse shifted, sloughing off to reveal a trapdoor made of rusted plate. A man emerged, clad in tattered desert wrappings, holding a heavy-bore harpoon gun. But he wasn't the threat.
