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bits of their bodies away. Korah had told me of one guy in the colony, years ago, who’d kept his entire body wrapped like a mummy, only his eyes showing through the bandages. What ever happened to him she didn’t say.
    But it was no secret why some people went to such extremes to keep anything from falling off their bodies. No one knows how the Skaldi track us, but the best we can guess is that they use our smell. Our sweat, our blood. I’ve seen people suck cuts until the bleeding stops, so they don’t have to use a bandage. I’ve even heard people say that anything you touch, anything that falls off you, can lead them to us. Clothes. Crumbs. Hair. Fingernails. Skin. I asked my dad about it, and all he said was, “Some people don’t know when it’s time to move on.” He told me it was pointless to trim your nails and hair, because you shed your skin all the time and there’s not a thing you can do about it. He said if a single hair was all it took to fill the Skaldi’s nostrils, we’d all have been dead long before now.
    Still, he must have half-believed the theories himself, because he always told us not to leave anything behind. He insisted we dig the latrine pits extra deep and cover them extra well. And he went ballistic one time when Wali, who’d just started shaving, had the bright idea to burn the trimmings in a rusty, dented mess tin.
    “Are you out of your mind?” my dad yelled that time, his face so close to Wali’s he could have bit him. His own chin lay buried beneath a dirty, tangled beard, his matted hair trailed to his shoulders. The camp stank, thick and sweet from Wali’s fire.
    “Do you have any idea what this smells like?” my dad demanded, shoving the tin under Wali’s nose.
    Wali’s mouth moved in the word no , but no sound came out.
    “It smells like you,” my dad said. “Like supper. Like another body for them to chew up and spit out.”
    He threw the tin at Wali’s feet, scattering sparks.
    “You want to kill yourself, be my guest,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if you kill anyone in my camp.”
    “I’m sorry, Laman,” Wali managed to say.
    “Clean this mess up,” my dad cut him off. “And get with the program.”
    He left Wali on his knees, putting out the fire with dirt and his own shaky hands.
    Korah stooped to help him. I heard her say, “He’s just trying to protect us” before I turned away and left them to work it out themselves.
    I’ve often wondered what we smell like to the Skaldi. Living in camp, washing as little as we do, and then in muddy water with a film of oil on top, we don’t smell so great to each other. People talk with faces averted to avoid getting a whiff of each other’s breath.
    But to Skaldi, I guess we smell good enough, or maybe bad enough, to eat.
    *    *    *
    By the time the diehards were done grooming, full night had arrived, the moon riding high and casting a net of shadows over camp. In the pale light, the place looked even emptier than before, the homes seeming as threadbare and precarious as the matchstick houses the little kids built. Me and the other teens had set up against a low wall that framed one of the structures. My own bedtime preparations weren’t much, taking off my boots and rinsing my mouth and swallowing the dirty water. All I felt like doing after a day of work was lying there and staring at the sky until sleep came.
    But I knew I had to fulfill one more ritual, just for me, before the day was done.
    I heard the crunch of his boots and turned to see his shadowy shape, outlined in bronze. His belt and holster were strapped on, his uniform jacket buttoned to the top. I don’t know if he ever took them off. He came around the wall and sat on a stone that’d come loose, leaving a gap like a missing tooth. He rested his hands on his knees and drew a deep, grunting breath. I stopped preparing my bed and waited for him to begin.
    “This place,” he said, taking it all in with a nod. “You kids did