The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (7)

 

BOOK V

 

 

 

SCOTT AND THE SHIP

 

It was raining the day that they came to the ruins, which was nothing really new. It had been raining off and on for several days, but this was a whole new kind of rain. Dawn came, nearly as dark as dusk, and the wind that came with it was almost a warm one. The rain alternated between tiny pellets as harsh as hail and fat blobs of icewater that plastered Amber’s hair to her scalp and wormed freezing trickles underneath her clothes.

Walking in the rain was bad enough, but on this day, there were also hills to contend with. Not tall ones, but very steep and rocky as hell beneath the tangle of creepers and thorns that covered them. All day long, they trudged up and down, hunched against the weather, stumbling and swearing but otherwise not speaking. Throughout the morning, the clouds pressed claustrophobically close, smothering them with wet slaps of wind to make their already uneven footing even more treacherous, but when the dim smudge of the sun reached its highest point, the clouds suddenly lifted, as if Meoraq’s God had chosen to maliciously swoop back a curtain and show them their options.

Door Number One was the southwest, the direction of the odd, warm wind and its icy rain, where they could all see the real storm not just growing on the horizon, but filling it, overfilling it, seemingly motionless but as solid a thing as the land it crawled upon. In the east, Door Number Two opened half a dozen needle-thin rays of light over a crumbling sprawl of what her eyes tried to see first as stones, then as giant trees, before finally showing her buildings.

The city had been huge in its day, straddling both sides of what might be a picturesque river, if all the rain hadn’t turned it into this swollen, frothing nightmare. Most of the bridges that had joined the city together had fallen in, but at least two appeared to be all right, from this distance anyway. As for the city itself, it too had mostly fallen in. Grass grew right over the crumbled remains, forming hundreds more of those steep hills they’d been climbing all day. Toward the middle of the ruins, these hills grew taller, sprouting eroded chunks of masonry and metal, and occasionally whole walls held together by the small prairie trees that had rooted themselves in windows and along broken ledges. And here and there among the centermost section of the ruins were pockets of shocking normalcy where the roads were not only cleared and the buildings sound, but the lights were on.

Bluish lights.

Electric lights.

Amber had stopped walking when these two tableaus revealed themselves, and she had been staring back and forth between them for some time before she realized that everyone else had stopped too. On every face, she saw the same bewildered apprehension, as if both choices were equally disturbing.

Even Meoraq had stopped, she saw. He stood motionless ahead of everyone else, his spines forward and one hand toying at the hilt of the knife that hung around his neck while his gaze moved from east to west and back again. One by one, all heads turned to watch him. They waited, some drawing up into familiar groups, to hold their own low conversations until he came to a decision.

At length, he raised his hand, beckoning without bothering to look at them, and started walking again. From that first step, it was obvious he had no intention of taking them to the ruins. He was instead turning them south, not quite straight at the storm but certainly not away from it.

The murmurs gusted at once into a wave of alarmed babble. Nicci clasped onto Amber’s hand. Scott gestured for everyone to stand still even though no one—not even Amber herself—had made any attempt to follow, and quickly caught up with Meoraq. Amber couldn’t hear what was said, but it didn’t appear to go the way either one of them wanted. When Meoraq started moving again—south—Scott turned around.

“Okay, people, listen up!” he shouted, clapping his hands a few times. “We’re going down into that town there.”

Meoraq stopped and looked back at him, his head cocked in what Amber was coming to understand more and more was never a gesture of curiosity on a lizardman. Sometimes there was amusement in that look and sometimes irritation, but regardless of what emotion accompanied it, it was always a warning, always the way he silently said, ‘Stop and think about what you’re doing,’ usually with some variation of ‘you insufferable human’ at the end. Amber gave Nicci’s hand a squeeze and got a little closer.

“We’ve got plenty of time before the storm gets here,” Scott was calling, oblivious to the stare at his back. “Everybody relax. Let’s just stay close and keep moving. The storm will be over before we know it, but there’s no reason—” He paused and amended, “No good reason we can’t wait it out where it’s dry. Let’s go.”

People murmured in a relieved way, not without a few nervous glances at the distant storm, and drew themselves back into their sprawling approximation of a marching line.

“He doesn’t look happy,” Nicci whispered.

Meoraq had moved exactly one muscle: the one it took to lower his spines.

Scott waved at him gallantly. Lead on, O faithful native guide.

Meoraq’s head took on a distinctly deeper tilt. “God’s own Word forbids His children from dwelling again within the cities of the Ancients.”

“We’re not going to live there,” Scott said, rolling his eyes back at the others and letting everyone know how patient he was being. “We’re just going to hike through—”

“No.”

“—and wait out this storm where it’s dry—”

“You will obey the Word as it was given.”

“—and then we’ll use one of those perfectly good bridges—”

“You will obey me.”

“—to safely cross the river instead of swim it, which is what you apparently have in mind.”

“Watch your next words to me, S’kot, or I will show you exactly what I have in mind at this moment.”

Scott’s broad smile faltered. Meoraq’s stare did not.

Behind them, a low grumble of thunder reminded everyone of the storm slumping inevitably toward them. Scott took advantage of the distraction and deliberately started walking toward the ruins. A few people followed. Then a few more, breaking away in larger and larger groups until they were all trailing in Scott’s commanding wake. Nicci tugged at Amber’s hand once, then let go and walked quickly away to join the other women. Meoraq watched them go the way another man might watch a parade, but if Amber thought for even a moment that he was annoyed by this defection, that ended when he looked at her.

He was furious.

With a sigh, Amber trudged over to him. He took her arm and turned around, but that was as far as she was going and when he felt it, he stopped too.

He didn’t look at her again, didn’t speak, didn’t take his hand off her. She stood quietly behind him and watched the yellow come in on the side of his throat and fade slowly out again.

She said, “If it was you or Scott, you know it’d be you. You know that.”

His head turned, not enough to look at her.

“But you’re asking me to choose between you and my sister. And that’s not a choice.”

His head turned the other way, turned fully, staring after Nicci.

“Please don’t leave us here,” said Amber.

His hand on her arm tightened minutely, then let go. He started after Scott and the others, taking long strides but hardly moving, so that he seemed almost to be gliding through the grass like a hunting cat. She could not help tensing when he came up behind Scott, but he simply moved on ahead and took the lead.

Scott smirk was obvious even in his voice. “Glad you decided to join us.”

“Don’t talk to me,” said Meoraq curtly.

“You need to work on this attitude of yours. There’s no reason we—”

Meoraq swung around and slapped Scott clear off his feet, sending him crashing into Dag and Crandall. Then he drew his hooked sword. Without a word, he turned back around and kept walking.

After that, no one said anything. It made the mood, already low, that much worse, which in turn made the landscape around them seem even bleaker than it was. To Amber, the fallen towers looked like tombstones in some forgotten cemetery, and why shouldn’t they? She knew now that they had been walking across the burial mounds of this city all morning. For hours. And a city that size didn’t just curl up and die on its own. Something had killed it.

An unnecessarily theatrical turn of phrase, perhaps, especially considering the already bleak landscape, but no sooner had it taken its crawl through Amber’s brain than it was underlined by the first hint of rot in the air.

She wasn’t sure at first. No one else seemed to have noticed, or at least, no one else had reacted. The wind was at their backs (and pushing the storm steadily toward them) and the smell came and went with the force of its gusts. But the closer they got to the ruins, the stronger that smell became, until Amber finally turned to her sister in some desperation and asked if she could smell it too.

“It’s nothing,” said Nicci. And in a sudden, angry rush, “Stop trying to make trouble all the time! You always do this!”

Startled, Amber stopped walking. Nicci did not. If anything, she went faster. Even after Amber started moving again, the distance between them kept growing, until Nicci was up with the women from the Resource Tent and Amber was alone.

‘So let it go,’ she thought, watching some sympathetic Manifestor respond to whatever Nicci was saying with a sidelong, walking hug. ‘Let it go and she’ll come back. She always does.’

But something stank. Something was dead and rotting. Something big.

“Doesn’t anyone else smell that?” Amber called.

Immediately, half a dozen Manifestors groaned at her to shut up, but Maria turned around and called back, “God, yes! I feel like I’m going to puke!”

“It’s nothing,” said Scott.

Meoraq, his sword still drawn, threw a flat, unforgiving glance back at him.

Scott moved over to put a few more people between them. “Probably a dead deer,” he told Maria. “It won’t be as bad once we get into town.”

If Maria had a reply apart from the scornful look she gave him, Amber couldn’t hear it, but no one else said anything.

The grass began to thin. There was pavement beneath, so weathered that it looked more like gravel poured out and glued in place, but obviously pavement. A street. The hills to either side got steeper and lumpier as the grass receded, until suddenly they weren’t hills at all, but heaps of broken concrete, metal, glass, and all the wreckage one might reasonably expect to see when a city block has been demolished.

Except that the streets had been cleared. Had to have been. Buildings did not fall straight down and pile themselves up like that, leaving the weathered pavement beyond the curb largely uncluttered. And as they traveled deeper into the ruins, the streets not only got wider and cleaner, they also began to show signs of repair. Likewise, the devastation lining the streets gradually changed from piles of debris to hollow shells, missing one, two, or even three walls, but upright and recognizable buildings. And then even those were behind them, and they were there in one of those lamplit pockets which had looked so much like it might still be inhabited when viewed from a distance.

Scott stopped, so everyone stopped, bunching up there at the first intersection where things had gone from knocked down but cleaned up to empty but sort of functional. Meoraq alone moved on, a sword in each hand and eyes in constant motion, to check each of the crossing streets and peer through each broken window. He had almost made it back to them when Scott suddenly cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered out a hello. The wind, greatly deflected by the buildings now surrounding them, ate the echoes after one or two bounces, but that was enough.

No one came out to greet them and although the fine hairs on the back of Amber’s neck were standing straight up and prickling almost painfully, she got no real sense of being watched. There was movement—furry things scurried in the shadows, considerably smaller and less threatening than the rats Amber had grown up with—but no life. The city was dead; the last of its concrete bones, rotting; and whatever was keeping the power on and the streets swept probably did not want its rest disturbed.

Meoraq was staring at Scott, his head cocked, his throat striped with bright, bright yellow, silent.

“I think maybe we should move on.” Scott looked back at his loyal lieutenants. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s creepy as fuck,” Crandall replied with half a shrug, “but creepy won’t kill us.”

Eric seconded that with a firm nod. “That storm is going to hit us before we even get near one of those bridges, much less check it out and see if it’s safe to cross. Any salvage you expected to find here is long gone, but even if shelter is the only thing we get out of this place, that’s good enough for me. Having said that—” He glanced up, up, and up at the nearest tower. “—I am not comfortable bedding down right here.”

“Plus, it stinks,” Maria announced.

“Miss Alverez, this is an official debriefing, so please be quiet,” Scott told her, and to the rest of them, announced, “For now, we’re going to keep heading for the bridges, but we’ll be keeping our eyes open for a good spot to take cover. Don’t worry, people. We’ll all stay dry tonight.”

Exclamations of relief met this rather lofty promise, but looking around, Amber could see doubt for the first time in a number of faces as they eyed the height of the broken towers enveloping them and perhaps reflected on the fact that rain was not necessarily the worst thing that could fall on a person’s head.

But Scott had decided and there was no point in arguing. He chose a street and headed out. Eric followed him and Maria followed Eric, and that started the first group, which started the next one, and pretty soon they were all walking. Even Amber, so what did that say?

 

* * *

 

After so many days struggling through hip-high grass, wading streams and climbing rocky slopes, a little stroll down the street should have been an easy feat. Distance, like time, could be subjective without a mechanical means of assessing it, but Amber knew they couldn’t be much more than a mile from the first of the bridges and it was taking all day to get there. The ground still rose and fell, but gently, in city-hills that had been smoothed and paved and was unquestionably easier on Amber’s feet than Meoraq’s wildlands. It wasn’t what they were walking on that slowed them now, but what they were walking through.

It wasn’t quite silent. Passing too close to the dark shops made the windows sputter and light up, playing out the corroded remains of advertisements for whatever products had once been on display, but few of those recordings played for more than a few seconds before dying out and one of the windows shattered from the effort. On another street, the remains of what had obviously been a restaurant groaned out some of the daily specials and wheezed its door open at them, showing anyone who looked in the desiccated carcass of a saoq who had apparently wandered in and been unable to get out. Several furry heads poked curiously out of the nest that had been built in its dried belly.

When the whole crowd of them stopped at an empty intersection so that Scott could ‘get his bearings,’ the remnants of some ancient public address system fired up and blatted out noise. What little she could make out through all the audial corrosion were mostly unknown words, peppered with odd, random-seeming numbers or verbs. The longer she had to stand there and listen to its tortured, droning gibberish, the easier it became to imagine how the blanks could be filled: system pressure rising warning warning severe storm watch in effect until nine hours and three error trafficeye six reports all lanes open on Cinoq Bridge please drive safely error trafficeye seven reports error error error no lanes visible on Jaavi Bridge please drive with caution the current time is three hours and sixteen contagion risk seven percent error error threat level high but stable tune to error error error for news and updates—

“This way,” Scott decided, and set off.

Amber lingered as the group moved on, reaching out to touch the cracked, dead window of a kiosk on the curb. It flickered and came on, spilling writing and static across its face until the whole window was filled and then going black again after voicing the grim message, “No response. No arrival,” in a dead, metallic voice. She shivered and moved around to the next window, reaching.

Meoraq caught her wrist. “Don’t.”

“What happened to this place?” she asked as they went together after Scott and the others.

He shrugged his spines, but they snapped pretty flat when he was done. He looked okay and he sounded okay, but he was still pissed, clearly.

“Do you even know where we are?”

“It was a city once, is that what you need to hear? No longer. The Ancients fell and all of their works fell with them. There is nothing to find here.”

“That smell is getting worse!” Maria called, trying to cover her face in her sleeve. “Can’t we just leave?”

“We are leaving!” Scott said irritably. “We’re just…taking a shortcut!”

“How can this be a shortcut when you don’t know where we’re going?”

“I know it’s shorter to go through something than to go around.” Scott gave Eric something of a dirty look and turned up another street, seemingly at random. It took them to the bottom of a long hill lined on both sides with clean, burned-out buildings.

“Oh my God, really? Uphill?”

Eric put his arm around Maria’s shoulder. “Ease up, baby. We’ll be out of here in just a sec.”

“You’ve been saying that forever. God, what is that smell?!”

Amber tried to exchange glances with Meoraq, but he was looking down another street. “We’re not going to see a huge pile of bodies over that hill, are we?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.”

“But is that what a huge pile of bodies smells like?”

“It would depend on what they died of,” he said, sounding distracted and a little annoyed with her, but not particularly bothered by the idea.

“You don’t believe in ghosts on this planet, do you?” said Amber, only half-kidding. At his puzzled glance, she added, “Dead people…walking around after they’ve died? Ghosts?”

“Ah.” He glanced down another side-street. “Yes, we do.”

“You do?”

He grunted.

They walked.

“Do you think this place is haunted?” Amber asked, just as a soft, cool hand slipped into hers.

She didn’t scream, but what she did was bad enough: grabbing at Meoraq’s arm, who already had a sword in his other hand and aimed over her shoulder at what turned out to be just Nicci.

His head cocked. His sword did not immediately lower.

“You scared the ever-loving Christ out of me!” Amber snapped.

“I was just…I only…” Tears, the big, slow kind, dribbled down her baby sister’s pale cheeks one at a time and dropped off her chin. “I don’t like this place,” she whispered. “Can’t I please come walk with you?”

Amber took her hand at once, pulling her into an awkward hug as Meoraq slowly let his sword-arm drop. “Yeah, of course you can, you know you can.”

“You’re always yelling at me!” Nicci wept.

Meoraq flared his mouth open at Nicci’s shaking back and exhaled soundlessly through his teeth.

“I don’t mean it,” said Amber, glaring at him. “You know I don’t mean it. We’re sisters, Nicci. I love you. You’re all I’ve got.”

Thunder clapped and rolled, not on top of them yet, but close enough to echo in the empty streets. Nicci jumped in her arms and wailed even louder.

“And now it’s going to rain,” groaned Maria, somewhere at the head of the crowd. “Perfect.”

“Baby, please. You know I love you, but please.”

At the top of the hill, Scott suddenly stopped walking.

Maria threw up her hands. “Fine, I’m shutting up!”

Scott didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn around right away and when he did, he looked greyish. He looked at his people, and then he looked past all of them at Meoraq. He didn’t say anything.

“Stay here,” Meoraq said and ran, jostling people roughly aside and reaching the top in maybe half a minute. He saw what there was on the other side. His spines came forward. He slowed to a walk, sheathing his sword.

So it couldn’t be that bad. Amber gave Nicci a squeeze and let go of her. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

By the time she got to the top of the hill, a crowd had formed, thick enough to shield whatever they were looking at from view, but loose enough that she could slip through it without pushing too many people. She heard Scott (who sounded just as grey as he’d looked) asking if this was bad, if they were in trouble. Then she saw it for herself.

It wasn’t a pile of bodies after all.

It was a pit of them.

It looked like it was miles across, although it probably wasn’t. It was just the shock of seeing something so big thrown down in the middle of the city which had followed such neat, orderly lines. It was perfectly round in shape, with a raised lip of broken pavement all the way around it. The sides appeared smooth but uneven, melted. It had partially-filled with water—if it could be assumed that black foulness had started out as water—and although that might smell bad enough on its own, there could not have been less than a hundred bloated corpses mushed together along the sloping sides.

Somehow worse than what was in the pit was what was around it: small triangular flags had been set around the lip, outlining the whole thing in a hundred shades of fluttering yellow. Whatever had caused this crater had happened long ago and the animals might be falling in on their own, but someone had planted those flags.

Staring at them, trying to estimate how many hundreds or even thousands of flags she might be looking at, it dawned on Amber that the only reason she was able to see the pit at all was because virtually everything between it and the top of this hill had been flattened. There were no more buildings down there, no kiosks, no lamps—only the grey crazyquilt of their foundations and the nice, clean streets that ran between them. It was not perfectly flat; the ground buckled at regular intervals, forming concentric rings around the pit, almost like ripples in a pond after someone has dropped a rock in it.

‘Or a bomb,’ thought Amber, creeping forward in sick fascination.

Meoraq pulled her back, started to push her toward the crowd, then yanked her around and gaped at her, all his spines up and quivering for a split-second before they slapped loudly flat. “I told you to stay where you were!”

“I, uh, thought you were talking to Nicci.”

He thrust a finger in her face, leaning close enough that she could feel his breath against her skin. “That is a lie and it had better be the only one you ever tell me!”

Amber looked back over her shoulder at the pit…the crater…and felt Meoraq blow a fuming snort against her throat. “What killed them?” she asked, eyeing the bodies. From here, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought they were all animals. She just didn’t know yet if that made her feel better or not. “Did they…Did they just fall in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we go check it out?”

A flash of far-off lightning made his red eyes spark. “Why?”

“I want to make sure the animals fell in and then died instead of, you know, the other way around.” She gave the pit another backwards glance, as if to make sure it wasn’t creeping any closer. “And I want to make sure they’re all animals. And not people. Especially if it was the other way around.”

“I’ll go with her,” said Crandall, stepping forward.

Meoraq immediately swung her around and behind him, as if Crandall had been offering to cut her throat instead of walk with her down to the crater, but when the thunder caught up to the lightning, he seemed to shake out of it some. He didn’t let go of her, but he grunted and raised his other hand to rub at the yellow patches on his throat. “No one is going anywhere.”

“Meoraq—” she began.

“Insufferable human, I said no! Mark me, if there are men who feed that place of death, they are men to stay well away from. If it is a trap of Gann’s making, so too should you stay clear. And if it still holds the poison made at the time of the Fall, we are too damned close already!”

“Okay! Jesus, okay! Now will you please let go of me?”

“No!” he shouted.

Thunder groaned.

“Okay,” said Scott. He still looked a little grey, but he sounded more like himself. He turned around, raising his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, I’ve made my decision—”

Meoraq hissed, then clapped his free hand to his throat and started rubbing again. Amber could hear him muttering under his breath as Scott listed all the reasons why everyone was still perfectly safe but they should all get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. Meoraq muttering at himself was hardly a new phenomenon, but he didn’t seem to be praying this time. He was counting.

“Are you okay?” Amber whispered.

He looked at her and for a second—a very long second—there was absolutely no recognition in his eyes. Then there was, but it wasn’t a better moment. His head tipped slightly; his spines flicked forward; his hand stayed knotted in her shirt and even clenched a little tighter.

“Am I in trouble?” she asked, trying to laugh.

He didn’t smile.

“You look like you’re going to bite me.”

His gaze shifted to her shoulder, lingered, and came slowly back to her face.

Another flashpop of lightning distracted him before Amber could make the leap from concerned to nervous. He looked up as the thunder rolled, a whole lot closer than it had been, and closed his eyes while the wind blew over him. He took a deep breath. He took another one. He let her go.

The urge to run was extremely strong in those first few seconds.

“All right.” Having consoled the masses, Scott was back and at his most in-charge. “I think we should go around this, um…new development and keep our distance as much as we can.”

Meoraq grunted. His eyes were still shut.

“So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to turn around and go that way for a bit, see if we can’t find a building that’s more or less intact and hole up for the night.”

“What, here?” asked Amber.

Meoraq began to count again, very softly.

“Do you see that storm blowing this way, Miss Bierce?”

She looked. Lightning obediently forked.

“That’s going to catch us before we’re out of this place. No one’s going to want to walk in that.”

“Want to…” Meoraq murmured. He took a very deep breath, held it, let it out, and began to count again.

“So we need to find some shelter, preferably before it starts dumping directly on our heads. All I want from you, Meoraq, is a little help finding our way out of here without accidentally getting any closer to that, um…thing.”

The yellow patches on Meoraq’s throat brightened fast and slowly faded. “Accidentally…” he breathed.

“Why can’t we just go back the way we came?” Amber asked. “There were lots of buildings back there that were still standing.”

“Because I don’t want to lose ground, Miss Bierce, and I’m not going to stand here and argue with you. All I want right now is for the liz…Meoraq here to do his job.”

Amber cast a cautious glance up at Meoraq to see how he was taking the news that he was now in Scott’s employment. Meoraq did not appear to have reacted in any way. He breathed, counted slowly to six and started over again. The yellow stripes on his throat fluxed, but seemed to be dimming overall.

Scott waited, growing first an impatient frown and then a puzzled one and finally the worried one that Amber had been working on for some time. “Is he okay?” he asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know.”

The storm crawled steadily closer. The smell of the crater stayed pretty much the same. The people watching them began to whisper at each other.

“Okay,” said Scott at last. “You stay here with him and I’ll take the others—”

Meoraq tipped his head forward and opened his eyes. He looked at Scott with a solemn, vaguely curious expression as the rain came down harder and the lightning worked its way closer. He said, “I really don’t like you,” in the way of a man who has suspected this for some time but only recently found it to be true and perhaps worthy of some response.

Scott took a step back. So did Amber.

Meoraq started walking back down the hill. He didn’t tell them to follow, didn’t look to see if they needed to be told. He showed no sign that he even saw the humans shuffling out of his path, just marched himself through them and onward.

“What’s his problem?” Scott demanded, but he made sure to ask it well out of earshot.

“We are,” said Amber, her heart sinking.

“Can’t you talk to him?”

“And tell him what?” she asked. “That he’s not doing his job?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Besides, you pissed him off before I even opened my mouth.”

“Yeah. I know.”

They started walking together, well behind all the rest of them, side by side and silent. The rain came—fat, infrequent drops that became a pouring downfall in seconds, plastering her hair to her skull and her clothes to her body—and the thunder got louder and longer. Lightning came in spears and sheets and sometimes just going off in crazed sky-broad flashes deep behind the clouds. It was going to be a bad one, all right, and she guessed it was silly to camp in it when there were all these empty buildings lying around.

“Truce,” Scott said, angrily enough to make the offer a lie at its inception. “Truce, okay? Look, Bierce, I have got to know…Is this guy safe to have around?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“It doesn’t do a whole lot of good to ask when you don’t trust me.”

“Why should I? I know you and I know what the two of you are doing,” he added in a petulant sneer. “I don’t know why I thought that you might actually put the safety of your own kind—”

“What the hell do you mean, you know what we’re doing?”

“Don’t even try to deny it, Bierce. He doesn’t. The only thing that matters is whether we can trust him to look out for us or not, because the last few days, all I’ve seen is an armed, dangerous alien getting increasingly hostile and unbalanced.”

‘You mean he’s not putting up with your bullshit,’ Amber thought, but didn’t say it. She also thought, ‘And while we’re on the subject of people becoming increasingly unbalanced,’ but didn’t say that either. What she did say, as mildly as possible, was, “I trust him. I don’t think he’s crazy. He’s just not a people-person.”

“People-lizard,” Scott muttered. “Look, just tell me how I’m supposed to get through to him. How do I make him listen to me?”

She had to laugh. “Sure, like he listens to me.”

“I’m serious, damn it! I can’t afford to have all this…confusion! People need to see him respecting me!”

“Yeah, well, I think marching us off into the middle of Plaguesville today has pretty much shot that dream to shit, but maybe the next time he tries to ‘do his job’ and guide us safely around a place like this, you ought to let him.”

Scott didn’t answer, just walked and fumed and glared at Meoraq’s back as the city receded. The wind picked up as streets narrowed and the buildings shrank, although everything was still clean and well-maintained. The rain fell harder, throwing sheets of water up from the pavement directly in their faces. The first of the really big clouds reached them, bringing on the dark too early and making up for it with near-constant waves of high, flickering lightning, like a visual metaphor for Scott’s bad mood.

The street ended at a neat square of disturbingly well-manicured greenery. On the other side of this little park were more buildings—great, grey cubes with smaller blocks butting up against them, all of them connected by second-floor corridors, fanning outward from the only building that made any effort to look nice. Warehouses, then, or some sort of shipping company. It seemed they’d come out of the downtown area into the industrial district. Here, Meoraq stopped and looked back, counting heads as they all came out of the street to stand in the grass. He saw her alone with Scott, away from everyone else, and even at this distance, she saw his spines go flat.

But Scott didn’t notice. He was looking at the buildings beyond the little park. One of the cube-shaped warehouses had a hugely gaping wound in one wall where a tree had fallen. Scott jogged away through the rain to get Eric and investigate, leaving Amber to trudge over to Nicci under Meoraq’s baleful stare.

“You okay?” she asked, and was distantly dismayed to realize she didn’t care how Nicci answered.

“I’m soaked,” said Nicci, shivering. “And my feet are killing me. Can you carry my bag?”

Amber took it wordlessly. In the next instant, a scaly hand snatched it out of her grip. Meoraq slung the pack onto his shoulder, not looking at either of them. His spines were still flat.

“Yeah, but admit it. You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” said Amber.

He gave her a scathing sidelong glance and did not reply.

“This is perfect, Meoraq!” Scott called.

Meoraq opened his mouth and hissed quietly through his teeth. Scott, busy climbing the fallen tree that had bashed through the wall of the warehouse or whatever this place was, did not notice. He checked whatever lay inside, made some gestures to Eric and then climbed down and came running back to them.

“Perfect!” he said again, giving Meoraq a clap to the shoulder.

Meoraq stiffened and looked at his shoulder. Yellow flared on his throat and began to fade again almost immediately. “Don’t do that again,” he said in a distracted, indifferent way that Amber felt sure hid a deep desire to snap someone’s fingers off.

Oblivious to danger, perhaps thinking that he was showing his faithful Indian guide some appreciation in the hopes that respect would soon be reciprocated, Scott moved off and started herding people across the park.

Amber followed, holding Nicci’s hand but looking sideways at Meoraq. “Are you all right?”

“You keep asking that.”

“You keep scaring me.”

He grunted—one of his sarcastic grunts—and said, “You’re not scared enough, human, or you would not be here.”

“Oh come on, look at that!” Amber waved her hand toward the approaching storm, which threw out a strobing flare of lightning that lasted several seconds without stopping, almost as if it were waving back.

Meoraq gave it an incurious glance. “So?”

“So we can’t walk in that!”

His flat spines shifted against the top of his head, trying to flatten even more. “A man can walk anywhere in God’s favor.”

“Yeah, well, maybe God wants us to sleep here tonight, did you ever think of that? If he can put trees and people in your path, why not this place?”

“Do not be blasphemous,” Meoraq said curtly. “His Word commands His children to let the ruins and all the trappings of the Ancients fall to dust. This is not shelter. It is nothing but a grave.”

Ahead of them, Scott was busy directing people into a queue. Dag boosted them up onto the sloping trunk of the tree, while Crandall waited on the wall to help them over. Eric was nowhere to be seen; presumably he was inside, helping people down. Amber watched people climb, crawl, and drop in this orderly procession, with the black wall of the storm howling ever closer in the background. She could understand Meoraq’s hesitance, given his beliefs (his stupid beliefs, if he really thought strolling through a thunderstorm was somehow more righteous than sleeping in an empty building), but she didn’t see any alternatives.

“For what it’s worth,” she said finally, “I’m sorry we didn’t listen to you earlier. But we’re here now. I don’t know how bad this storm is going to get—”

She stopped there, frowning at the tree. Then she looked at the ground, turning in a slow circle so that she could see the whole park stretching out behind them.

“What’s the matter?” Nicci asked, watching the line move on without them.

“The tree,” said Amber, beginning to be alarmed. She turned around again, this time looking beyond the park and in all directions, her hands cupped against the weather. At one side, Nicci fidgeted, hugging herself and casting longing looks at the promise of shelter. At the other side stood Meoraq, unmoved by the wind or rain, watching only her. And on the tree itself, waiting impatiently for Nicci to notice him and need the hand he kept holding out to help her up, was Scott.

“For Christ’s sake, Bierce!” he shouted finally. He had to shout, and even that was scarcely perceptible over the howl of the storm. “What are you looking for?”

“Trees!” she shouted back. Amber pointed at the massive thing under his feet. “Where did that come from?”

Scott raised himself up cautiously against the wind and looked around, then dropped down again to clutch at the trunk of the broken tree. “Who cares?” He twisted around to say something to someone on the inside, then came back around to shout, “Right! Maybe they grew it here! You never heard of landscaping? Get in here!”

“There’s no hole!”

“What?”

“Amber, come on!” Nicci moaned. “It’s raining!”

“There’s no hole!” Amber pointed at the root ball of the broken tree, where huge clods of disturbingly fresh dirt still clung, then at the unbroken ground.

“So it fell a long time ago!” Scott shouted. “I repeat, Bierce, who gives a damn?”

“No, it didn’t!” Amber insisted. “The wood is too fresh!”

“Oh for…What, you think it fell out of the sky?”

Amber looked around again, past Nicci and her imploring, wind-burned face, past Meoraq and his thoughtful stare, past the empty waste of the ghost-city, to the distant clumps of prairie trees, which were all of the small, whippy-limbed variety. She looked back at Scott. “Yes!”

He glared at her, then shook his head again and started to work his way down the tree and into the building. “Fine! Stay out here and freeze!”

“Wait!” cried Nicci. She took a step, looked back at Amber.

She waved her sister on ahead, but moved closer to Meoraq. “Where did it come from?”

He glanced at the tree without much interest, then pointed out into the nothing.

She looked, but could still see no large trees. “How can you tell?”

“By the angle of impact,” he told her.

“But how did it get here?”

He cocked his head at her, then bent over and plucked a blade of brown grass. He held it up for her inspection, then opened his fingers and let the wind rip it away.

Amber looked at the tree—thicker than she stood tall, a broken stub still fifteen meters long at least—and tried to picture the storm that could uproot it, much less bring it hurtling through the air from who knew how far away to land here.

Meoraq’s hand closed around her upper arm. He propelled her forward a few steps, then released her and looked away, frowning, back at the city.

“Are you sure you want us in there?” Amber asked uncertainly.

“I am sure I don’t, but I want you together. If it has to be together in that building, so be it. Go.”

She let him push her toward the tree, but didn’t start climbing. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“Soon. I need to make a patrol.”

“I’ll come with—”

“No. Stay here and keep your people together.” He walked away into the storm.

Amber struggled up into the tree, which was not as easy as even Nicci made it look. Her hands, numbed by freezing rain, couldn’t seem to hold their grip; her technique consisted of lunging and sliding until she could climb onto the broken wall itself. There was a large heap of debris directly beneath her, so she wiggled over as far as she safely could before dropping down. Her boots hit the ground with a painful shock that went straight to her knees, which buckled and pitched her directly into the pile of concrete chunks and tree bark she’d been so careful to avoid falling on. It wasn’t a bad fall; she scraped her palms, thumped her elbow, bunched up her shirt and scratched her side, but that was all. She was fine.

“Nice dismount,” said Crandall, and a few people laughed.

“You okay?” asked Nicci.

“Yeah.” Amber swiped away the pain-tears that stung at her eyes and rolled off the worst of the debris. Mr. Yao was there to help her up and he kept his hands on her until her eyes adjusted to the considerable dark of the ruined building.

What she saw struck her briefly speechless.

This wasn’t a warehouse. She didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a warehouse. Dominating the first floor of the cube they had invaded was some sort of inner chamber with perfectly round, perfectly seamless, transparent walls. It reached all the way up to the ceiling and through it, up through the next floor and however many floors were between them and the top of this building, where it let in plenty of grey stormlight, enough that she could clearly see the spiders and the web.

They weren’t really spiders, only three wiry legs around a shiny, metallic ball, but that was all she could think to call them. There didn’t seem to be many of them, but since they were all exactly alike and moved so fast, it was impossible to say just how many there were. They swarmed back and forth, effortlessly leaping, climbing and sliding along the thousands of filaments that filled their chamber. When Amber reached the inner wall (she had not been aware of walking toward it) and craned her neck to see up past the dark ceiling, she could see the entire web, with something like a spider’s egg sac the size of a man suspended in the very center. On this side of the spider-chamber, a bank of perfectly recognizable, if alien, computer stations formed a tight ring right up against the glass. Evenly-spaced between monitors were clear tubes that made Amber think of hamster cages. Now and then, a spider would slip through one of these tubes and extrude a proboscis of some sort from its stomach into the back of a computer, insert whatever it thought it was inserting into the entirely dead system, and then scuttle back out and onto the web.

“What is it?” Amber asked, dimly aware of what a stupid question that was. No one here could possibly know the answer.

“Besides creepy?” asked Maria.

Beside her, Eric turned back to give the spiders a speculative looking over. “If I had to guess, I’d say either some sort of power generator or maybe a data storage and retrieval system. But yeah, all it is now is creepy.”

Scott brought out his flashlight and clicked it on, painting the glass with a sudden pool of white radiance. The spiders scuttled on, oblivious. Scott watched them for a second or two, his face flexing uncertainly between wonder and revulsion, before a sudden gust of howling wind reminded him he was supposed to be saving the day. He swung the light around and almost immediately illuminated a door.

Everyone looked at it, at each other, at the door. Scott took a tentative step forward, then abruptly changed his mind and went to examine one of the computer panels instead.

There were chairs, Amber saw. Most of them were still neatly tucked in under their matching desks, as if the workers monitoring this station had only just stepped away for lunch and turned out all the lights behind them. There was a coffee cup at one of the desks, or whatever kind of cup they called it when they didn’t drink coffee. It had writing on the side, almost aged entirely away but still just perceptible in the fading light. ‘Gann’s Best Dad,’ maybe, or ‘Techies Do It With Tools’.

“Where’s the lizard?” asked Scott suddenly.

“He wanted a look around,” said Amber, still staring sickly at the cup.

“But he’s coming?”

“That’s what he told me.”

Somewhere, Crandall snickered, whispered, and got a few more people to laugh.

“Why is it so clean in here?” Nicci asked suddenly.

Amber, once more blushing, looked back at her baby sister and then around at the room. It was clean, she realized. The glass she’d been staring through for who knew how long now was damned near spotless. There was no stain of long-emptied drink on the inside of the coffee cup. The dead eyes of the many monitors were dust-free. The rain had brought in a spreading slick of water, but there was no sign of previous flooding. Amber had fallen on a good-sized heap of debris caused by the tree crashing through the wall…but ‘heap’ was definitely the operative word, and it was a clean, well-managed little heap at that.

“Someone’s living here,” said Dag. “Someone’s living here right now.”

And the door opened.

Amber jumped along with everyone else. A few people screamed. She didn’t, but only because Nicci slammed up against her and knocked the scream out of her throat.

Scott’s flashlight beam came swinging wildly around, shining a spotlight over the open door, the blank wall, the ceiling, and then finally at the floor where the little robot came whirring in.

The second group-scream was almost as loud as the first, but the thing reacted to the sound no more than the spiders reacted to light. Short, squat, and rounded—a metallic blister with many panels and a black scanning plate that ran around its middle, it looked so completely like one of the cleanerbot models that you sometimes saw advertised in tech catalogues or (if you didn’t mind a plastine model) on TV late at night that no one screamed again even when it came at them.

It rolled inside, sending a thin bead of light ahead of it, indifferent to the rapid retreat of the many humans before it. When it reached the glass wall, it hesitated, then opened a small panel and sent out a thin, metallic tendril, like the questing arm of a squid, to tap and test at the surface it found. It clicked at itself under the anxious weight of fifty alien stares, then withdrew its tendril and opened a second panel. It sprayed out two careful bursts of some kind of greyish foam, paused as if undecided, then added a third. It turned away, leaving the ‘soap’ to bubble and gradually start to slide up the glass, picking up speed as it climbed.

“It’s a cleanerbot,” said Scott. He sounded utterly astonished. “The lizards have cleanerbots! Just like ours!”

Amber leaned a little closer to the glass in spite of Nicci’s tugging hands and saw a thin, spreading mass of tiny beads. Metallic, like the spiders, and like the spiders, lifeless as they went about their work. “Not quite like ours.”

The bot had moved on, rolling slowly through the shuffling feet that surrounded it until it reached the first puddle of rainwater. There it stopped, testing, tapping. It began to roll from side to side, trying to map out its dimensions, and, finding that it reached from wall to wall, retreated a short distance to think.

“Is it okay?” Nicci asked nervously.

Amber shook her head.

The bot sat immobile, ‘arms’ retracted, ‘face’ dark. Every so often, that bead of light would dart out and flicker off the water. Twice it opened a panel, half-extended some unidentifiable tool, hesitated, and retracted it again. It hummed now and then, audibly and for no reason that Amber could determine, as if it were talking to itself.

“Oh my God, I have got to get out of here,” Maria whispered.

“It’s okay, baby,” said Eric, watching the bot with a queasy expression.

“It’s not okay, it’s a fucking zombie!”

The bot slid out its tendril again. It felt at the water, then opened a third panel, reached in decisively and brought out a small triangular flag. It planted this firmly in the puddle and turned around. It moved on.

“We’re not really staying here, are we?” Maria asked. She was trying to laugh, but it was the kind of gape-faced laughter that sounded more like someone working herself up to a scream and no one joined in. “Come on, people! We’re not…We’re not really going to sleep here?”

Outside, a crash of thunder answered in unequivocal terms.

The bot came to the pile of broken concrete and bark. It felt at it, paused, and felt at it some more. It made another soft, electronic sound—a sound that struck Amber as one that was almost distressed. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, she thought, a nonsensical accusation gleaned from some forgotten fairytale back in those bygone days of state-care. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, oh dear, oh dear. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed and she’s…still…HERE!

It ran out a second tendril to join the first and slowly, methodically, began to stack the debris back into a neat heap, talking to itself in its worried way.

“No,” said Maria, backing rapidly away as it went about its fussy work. “Seriously. I will sleep in the rain. I don’t care. Get me away from this place.”

The bot retracted one of its tendrils and ran out a brush, cleaning the concrete chunks. It began to hum.

Without warning, Eric picked up a basketball-sized chunk of concrete and brought it smashing down on the bot’s head. The bot caved in on itself without resistance, smooth sides bursting to spew out guts of wire and jelly. One fat, blue spark spat out from its core, leaving a plume of greenish smoke and some ungodly, hot stink in the air behind it. There was no last metallic cry, no dying grope of its tendrils, no planting of a final caution flag to warn people not to slip in its spilled oils. It was dead.

“Thank you, baby,” said Maria.

Eric checked the mess under the chunk of concrete and then brought it down again, giving it a little twist and shove this time. He wiped his hands unnecessarily on his shirtfront; the concrete had been quite clean.

“I don’t see why we have to wait around in here,” announced Scott, striding forward to stand in front of Eric. “It’s out of the wind, but it’s just as cold and not a lot drier.”

“And it’s creepy,” muttered Maria, eyeing the bot’s leaking, smoking corpse. Eric put an arm around her, watching the spiders instead. Amber found herself watching the ‘soap’ as it made its way doggedly across the glass wall. And when it reached the end, she wondered, what would it do? Would it just cluster up and wait to be collected? Or would it come trickling across the floor to crawl back inside the broken husk of the bot and sit there forever?

“I’m going in.” Scott waited, either for protests or applause, but there was nothing and his awkward hesitation looked so much like the bot’s that Amber actually shuddered.

He noticed. He blushed. He gripped the flashlight like a weapon and marched over to the door, which slid itself open as obediently as any automated door back on Earth. Scott walked through. The door slid shut.

Dag followed. Then Eric and Maria. Crandall. Mr. Yao. And then all of them, shuffling along in a subdued line past the spiders and out of the rain.

It was cold out here. And wet. “Come on, Nicci,” Amber said, following.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Meoraq?”

Amber spared the (murdered) bot a final glance, unsure just why it bothered her so much. It had been a creepy little thing and a part of her was very glad to know it would not be rolling up next to her in the middle of the night to clean her while she slept. “He’ll know we were here.”

They went through the door.

And like some magic door in a fairytale, they came out in Earth. Or so it seemed to Amber, as she found herself confronted with an ancient alien civilization that was none of it ancient or alien enough. Whoever the lizardmen of yore were, they kept keepsakes on their desks. The decorative pot for some sort of plant still stood in the corner of one office, its occupant long turned to dust and swept away. There were pictures on the walls, but after so many years exposed to light, their images had faded entirely out to white. There were trophies in a glass case in the hallway, monuments to the office Lizardball league. There were no aliens here; there were only people, and they were all gone.

She knew that she was being left behind as she lingered in the halls, but someone had to look at it, someone had to witness. She drifted from room to room in silence, until she came to a door, just another door. Recessed lights in the ceiling came on with a drill-bit whine when she opened it. On the other side, she found a bathroom.

And that was the end for her. That was where it all swelled up and shut down. Seeing the sinks and the stalls and the corroded mirrors, recognizing them in spite of the little differences because no matter the minutiae of design, the function was still the same. Aliens gotta pee, after all. Lizardmen were going to want to wash their hands before they put them back on their keyboards. Lizardladies were going to want to touch up their cosmetics and adjust the lie of their lizardish clothes.

Skyscrapers and bridges, offices and bathrooms, desks and chairs and coffee cups—none of it was the product of uniquely human invention. They weren’t special. Forget the vastness of the universe and the infinite potential of its diversity, they weren’t even significant right here in this room. The lizards had built all this—plumbed their pipes and wired the lights and programmed the cleanerbots and even fired off the bomb that had ended it—without any human help at all. If there was some great cosmic entity floating out in space, puking up planets and scraping people together out of mud, He was doing just fine without them.

“Hey, Bierce!” Crandall was coming for her, his flashlight bobbing as he jogged up the hall. “You die back there?”

‘Yes,’ Amber thought, still staring into the bathroom. There was a dead bot next to the sink; it had been cleaned so often and so thoroughly that its hull had been worn away entirely in several places. ‘We’re all dead. This place is haunted and we’re the ghosts.’

“Hey.” Crandall glanced into the bathroom without much interest and thumbed back the way he’d come. “Space-Scout says to stay together.”

So had Meoraq. Amber backed up and let the bathroom door slide shut. She stood there for a few seconds, then opened it again. The lights, which had been dimming, whined back to life. One of them popped, throwing one of the stalls into darkness and puffing out a little plume of bluish smoke. Shards of whatever the bulb was made of tinkled down over the floor. She wondered if there were any cleanerbots left to come sweep it up.

Crandall was still there, watching her with half a puzzled smile. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. This place…”

“It’s fucked up,” he agreed at once. “Come on.”

She let him take her away, past a dozen other doors to the T-section at the end of the hall. There, instead of a directory or a motivational poster, was a door, with what was probably a bot’s charging pad pulled out into the middle of the floor in front of it. Crandall just stepped over it, turned right and moved on, but Amber stopped. After a lengthy internal debate, she opened the door to find a maintenance closet. As with the bathroom, it was easily recognizable. Here were the shelves for cleaning supplies, there were the various tools too large or specialized to come standard on a cleanerbot, and there, where the bot’s charging pad used to be, there were sixteen bodies’ worth of bones.

The skulls were lined up in four rows, easy to count. All the other bones were organized just as well—arm bones here, ribs there, vertebrae strung together and hanging where there might have been coats once. There were two columns of pelvises (not eight and eight, but four and twelve; male and female maybe) stacked one inside the other like bowls in a kitchen cupboard. The smaller bones were all in boxes with printed and precisely-centered labels, and while Amber supposed those labels might say Paperclips or Discs or anything at all, she thought it much more likely they said Fingers, Toes…Teeth.

“Jesus, look at that.” Crandall reached in and picked up a skull, working the jaws in snapping motions. “Can’t you just see that crazy thing cleaning all the bodies every day until it had bones to pick up?”

She could, actually.

“There’s other bots. We’ve found three of them so far, but none of them are working…Hey, check it out.” He put the skull down and picked up an arm bone, turning it to show Amber the evenly-spaced cuts on one end. “This was no boating accident,” he said solemnly.

“Huh?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just saying, looks like the commander was right. They really can bite someone’s hand off if they want to. Come on.” He tossed the bones back into the closet, upsetting the bot’s neat stack, and took her hand.

“I’m fine,” said Amber, and pulled away from him.

“Would you relax? You look a little freaked out so I’m trying to be a nice guy here. You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

“I don’t need my hand held so I’m a bitch?”

“Whatever, Bierce.” He threw up his hands, headed back out into the hall. “So what do you think happened here? You’re pretty tight with the lizard. He ever talk about this stuff?”

Amber shook her head. “I do most of the talking.”

“Maybe you ought to bring it up. If we’re going to be puking up our intestines from radiation poisoning tomorrow morning, I want to know about it tonight.” He threw her a grin. “Make my last night worth living, you know? Over here.”

The door he indicated opened on some sort of inner reception area or waiting room, and probably a very comfortable one in its time. It had no windows, but a few of the lights overhead were working, however noisily. Everyone else was already here, milling around the cushioned seats and many low tables stacked with flat panels of some synthetic material, not plastine or even plastic, but something colorful and fake. Scott tried to pick one up, but it broke in his hand, brittle as junkyard cellophane. He tried to catch it, but it collapsed, the greater part of it falling back onto the stack, which also shattered, and then the table under it, until the whole thing was a dusty heap with no bot left to clean it up. One of the Manifestors was dumb enough to try and sit on a chair, which predictably tore and spilled her into its frame, and while just about everybody was involving themselves in extracting her, Amber wandered out through the opposite door into the lobby alone.

The floor here was tiled and her footsteps echoed, overloud and lonely. There was a round, sunken space along the back where two walls met in a curved corner—a dried-up fountain, perhaps. The walls themselves boasted a grand, room-length mosaic, which must have been something to see when the full sunlight used to stream through the slanting front windows. Now, in the stormlight, it was just another part of what made this place so creepy: rolling fields and golden pastures dotted with fanciful wildlife far distant from either the scaly deer or monstrous armadillos she’d seen so far; forests hung with flowering vines as colorful as Chinese lanterns; cozy farmhouses along winding roads that led to a city of oddly organic-looking towers and arches; and overlooking it all from a grassy ridge, a happy lizard couple with their lizard child between them, hand in hand in hand. Alien markings in a complicated chain of base characters and accentuation formed a double row of words at the center of the jewel-green sky, dotted by wispy suggestions of clouds and a single shiny wedge of an upwards-arching aircraft.

She didn’t know how long she stood staring at it, but she knew it was the ship she saw most clearly, the ship and the cut-tile shapes of the lizardmen who probably never dreamed that one day there would be a crater in the middle of their ruined city and a neat stack of skulls in the closet where a slightly psychotic but well-intentioned cleanerbot used to sleep.

The door whispered open and shut again. She knew who it was by the sound of boots on the tiles. “See anything out there?” she asked, not turning.

Meoraq’s low grunt rolled through the whole room. “There is always something to see. I told you I wanted you to stay together.”

She pointed at the lettering in the mosaic’s sky. “Can you read that?”

The boots finished their walk and halted next to her. She still didn’t look at him, but she could feel him, dark and extremely solid at her side, even though he didn’t touch her. “Some,” Meoraq said after a moment’s consideration.

“What does it say?”

“The first bar is senseless sound and I will not give it voice. Below reads: Then. Now. Forever.” He said it without any trace of irony that Amber could detect, but spared the front windows a glance afterwards, as though measuring the fact of forever against the rosy picture put forth in the mosaic. He grunted.

She echoed the sound without thinking, her eyes lingering on the ship. Airship? Or starship? Were the tiny tile-people riding inside it bound for lands across the world? Or across the universe?

And what did it matter now, really? Any ship back then would be no better than this place now—empty, dark and dead. With effort, she made herself look away, at Meoraq. He had tracked the line of her gaze and now he was looking at the ship. She could read nothing in his face. She seldom could, but she thought he was actually trying to be inscrutable now.

“What do you see?” she asked.

His spines twitched in some tell-tale gesture he wasn’t quite quick enough to stop entirely. “Nothing,” he said blackly, looking right at the ship.

“There’s always something to see,” she reminded him.

He slowly turned and fixed her with a stare as good as a smack to the side of the head, then went back to looking at the mosaic. His spines were flat against his scales.

‘I got a real talent for pissing people off,’ thought Amber. It was not a new thought and it frequently came with an underlining of secret pride, as if some part of her were trying to convince the rest of her that it didn’t matter if the world thought she was a bitch as long as she was good at it. But the world was one thing. Meoraq was another.

“What,” he said suddenly, angrily, “do you see?”

She looked at the ship again. Airship or starship, it was just a painted piece of tile in a room no one walked through anymore. “Do you want the truth?”

He was quiet for so long, she thought she’d finally made him angry enough that he was ignoring her. That made her feel a little sick to her stomach. She was on the verge of leaving when he said, “Yes.”

“I see us.”

He frowned, his eyes moving restlessly back and forth across the few tiled shards of the ship as if reading them.

“Not you and me. Me and…the rest of us. It’s not a good feeling.”

He glanced at her and stared at the ship some more.

“It’s everything we lost, too,” she said, wondering why she was still talking.

He didn’t answer, but she felt the rough slide of his scales as he brushed the back of his hand against the back of hers. Just once. Probably not deliberately. He stepped away.

“I told you I wanted you all together,” he said curtly. “I should not have to repeat myself. Go.”

She went, but he didn’t follow right away. When she reached the door and looked back, he was still standing there, once more glaring at the mosaic. His spines were flat again. His eyes were fixed on the ship.

 

2

 

The storm continued throughout the day, growing in strength with each unmarked hour that took them into night. It was difficult to resign himself to so foolhardy a thing as making camp in these ruins, but long before the darkness made further travel impossible, Meoraq knew he would never coax the humans out into the storm. They believed themselves safe here and since convincing them of the truth would only make them more nervous, Meoraq cried surrender and let them settle in.

He was not happy with the situation and as the night stormed on, his tension only increased. He put it to use with long patrols—pacing restlessly from the foreroom where he could watch the striking of Sheul’s hammer behind the clouds, along every empty hall and through every dark door, to the rearmost chamber that lay open to the weather and all those who might be seeking an escape from it.

Because they were out there. He had seen nothing living on his first patrol, except those few machines whose eternal task it was to tend the empty city, but there were signs these ruins had been used in the past to shelter travelers—the charred ring of a bygone fire, butchered bones, a discarded boot with a sizeable gash across the heel, the clay shards of several broken bowls or pots—but it was difficult to say just how recently these travelers may have passed.

The boot troubled him. It was city-made, embossed at the cuff and toe, and worn right through its heel by the travel it had seen. A careful search of the surrounding area had not turned up the boot’s mate either. He saw no toothmarks to suggest the boot had been carried off by some four-legged scavenger, but that remained far more likely to his mind than the thought of any man wealthy enough to buy this boot throwing out one but continuing to wear the other. That kind of thrift usually meant a man who did not buy boots at all, but acquired them only as the opportunity presented itself.

Or, to say a different way, a man who stole them.

Easy shelter and far more readily defended than any tent-camp, ruins such as these made powerful lures for the raiders who dwelled in the wildlands outside of Sheul’s grace. During the fair season, the migrations of the few travelers they preyed upon and the pursuit of Sheulek who preyed on them kept them moving, but when the weather turned cold, raiders, like all creeping beasts born of Gann, denned down.

So Meoraq was cautious and, as usual, he was the only one. The humans tried all night to sprawl themselves out where he could not keep an easy eye on them in direct defiance of his orders to stay together. Even Amber slipped away more than once to stand by herself in the foreroom, in full sight of the glass wall where any scouting eye might see her, staring at the tilework. She stopped once Scott found her there, but only because Scott then saw the tiles and began an infuriating campaign to call the others in to see it.

Meoraq knew what they were looking at and it was not the fertile land or sunbright skies that made up the Ancients’ world before the Fall. It was just five shards of metal, pressed together to make a single shape smaller than Meoraq’s hand. He did not know what the Ancients meant it to be, but he knew what the humans saw.

A ship. A ship that sailed through the sky. Like the ship they claimed had brought them to this world from some other. Meoraq stood alone before that shape for a long time himself, hating it.

He did not believe in the thing called Earth. Sheul’s Word spoke of all things and never mentioned it, and therefore even to consider that such a thing may exist seemed vaguely blasphemous to his mind. There were no ships that flew above the storm and there were no worlds beyond Gann.

Meoraq had seen many lies told to his face. The humans were not always honest in the things they said, but when it came to talk of their Earth, he could not see those lies. It bothered him. Most of the time, he was able to close his mind to this conflict, since the humans had little energy during their travels for Earth-talk and even less inclination to spend their resting hours in his company, but here in these ruins, with this damned image inescapably pressed into the wall, there was no avoiding it.

Either the humans had come in a ship from another world never mentioned in Sheul’s Word or they were lying to him. All of them. Even Amber. And he did not believe that, either.

The door hissed softly open.

“Get out,” said Meoraq without taking his eyes from the tiled wall.

Retreat.

He was going to be chasing them out of here all damned night, he just knew it. Because of the ship. He thought he could chip it free of the mortar that held it, but decided the satisfaction couldn’t be worth the damage to his blades and they’d all seen it already anyway. Nevertheless, the temptation remained.

The door hissed a second time. The light of a human’s lamp-machine fell in a pool across his back, throwing his shadow as tall as Sheul’s own across the mosaic. There, the ship was a blade aimed at his heart.

“O my Father,” said Meoraq loudly. “Give me Your arm, I pray, that I might beat this human so severely, none other will dare to defy me.”

“Bring it, lizardman,” said Amber.

He grunted and moved away from the tiles at once, before she could come any closer. Useless gesture. She had seen the ship, but he didn’t want her looking at it again. “And now it is you,” he said, advancing on her. She did not so much as lower her eyes, not even when he stood toe-at-toe with her. “I do not want anyone in this room. How is it that I am still not understood after all this time?”

“I understand you just fine.” She rolled her eyes a little. “Scott sent me to find out why not.”

Some hot, red emotion stabbed him, too deeply to be identified, too bright to be ignored. “And you do his bidding now, do you?” he snapped. “Even you?”

“I can’t justify being a bitch all night, every night, for no good reason. Unlike some lizards I could mention. What’s your problem?”

“I don’t want you in here! How many times do you need to be told?”

“I’m going to need a better reason than just because you said so,” she fired back, “or my answer is going to be a big fat I’ll go wherever I want to. And if you think you’re man enough to stop me—”

There, a spear of stormlight struck down, illuminating the whole of the room with its silvery flash and cutting Amber’s words away as neatly as if it had struck her dead. She shone her human lamp past him at the window.

“If I am man enough?” Meoraq echoed, but Amber did not re-engage him. Thunder broke and boomed across the plains, making her flinch back. The lightning came in sheets overhead, filling the night with a constant, flickering illumination that periodically let out a flash of white brilliance. It wasn’t enough to read the Word by, perhaps, but it was more than enough to see Amber’s round, staring eyes.

“Go back to the others,” Meoraq told her, once it became obvious she was content to stand there all night.

She stirred, like one waking from a sleep, and shone her light on the glass again. “You don’t have tornados here, do you?”

He took her wrist and forced the light down. “Mind where you aim that damned thing! Go, I say. Obey me!”

“Quit grabbing at me. I want to see—” And there she stopped, not for the storm this time, but to give him a sudden, startled look. “Oh shit. It’s not the ship, it’s the window.”

“Eh?”

“I thought you were just being a dick about—” She started to shine her light at the tilework on the wall, then stopped and forced the beam down. She looked at him, her brows creased in alarm. “We’re not alone out here, are we?”

Meoraq flexed his spines a few times (If he was man enough, she said. If.) and finally forced them to relax. “I haven’t seen anyone, but that is no reason to set a beacon at every window.”

She tipped the lamp upwards, so that it shone its light briefly across the underside of her face, then switched it off. The storm continued, pouring light in sheets across the churning skies, more than enough to let him see the furrow of a frown on Amber’s troubled face. “Maybe we shouldn’t stay here tonight.”

“Now?” he asked irritably. “You have to say that now? Human, it is hours too late to move on, even if your accursed people would condescend to be moved.”

“I would much rather get rained on than murdered in my sleep,” said Amber, but she jumped at the next clap of thunder all the same.

“You are under my watch. No one is going to murder you, except perhaps me if you insist on ignoring my commands. Go back to the other room and stay with your people.”

She did not react to the threat. Indeed, she gave no sign she’d even heard him. She was staring at the window again, clutching her human lamp, now dark and lifeless, in both hands. Both shaking hands.

“Calm yourself,” said Meoraq gruffly. “It’s only a storm.”

“I’m calm,” she said, but in a strained and distracted way. “Do you see me freaking out? No. I’m totally calm. I just…don’t feel very safe.”

“There is nothing to be gained by worrying over the weather. We are in Sheul’s care tonight.”

“I know you think that’s comforting, but it’s not.”

“So be it. Console yourself instead with the knowledge that you aren’t sleeping in the rain. And treasure it, human, because I promise you, that is a luxury.”

“But we’re completely boxed in. If anyone bad comes, the only way out—”

Meoraq unclipped his kzung and showed her the shine of its blade in the stormlight. “—is through them,” he finished, and flared his mouth to bare all his teeth. “Is that man enough for you?”

The flicker of the storm made it difficult to tell, but he thought she smiled. And then she screamed as lightning struck the ground directly outside the window, sending shards of stone into the glass. The thunder that followed shattered what the stones had cracked; the window blew inward and smashed itself across the floor. Meoraq turned his head away from the wall of freezing wind that blasted in at them and was nearly knocked from his feet when Amber slammed up against him.

Like a little fork of lightning inside his mind, Meoraq’s thoughts washed out to white. He could not hear the storm, feel the wind. For a moment—the very briefest moment, the very longest—he was aware of nothing but the press of her body to the whole of his, her hands digging at his back, the warmth that was her breath blowing against his heart. He could not feel himself at all, except where he was defined by her touch.

Her embrace.

Meoraq returned his sword to his belt and awkwardly hovered that arm over her, lowering it by hesitant degrees until his hand just touched her shoulder.

Amber pushed herself away quickly and no sooner had she done so than the door hissed open and they were joined by Scott and several of his men. In near-perfect synchrony, they threw up their arms against the driving rain that had found its way indoors, but Scott had enough voice to shout, “What the hell happened in here?”

“Out!” Meoraq ordered. He caught Amber by the wrist and headed through the door, pushing Scott and his men before him and towing Amber after.

“What did you do?” Scott demanded on the other side, and without waiting for an answer, thrust his arm at Amber and said, “She broke the window!”

“I did not!”

A crash of thunder like Sheul’s own hammer turned the rest of her words to a scream he could not hear. She ducked down, her hands at the sides of her head to cover her human ears, and she stayed that way even after the thunder rolled away.

And she wasn’t the only one, Meoraq saw. Many other humans had assumed protective positions or had at least cleaved on to some other human. Some of the females were actually crying.

“Okay,” said Scott, and said it several times in his attempt to restore order. “Okay, just calm down. It’s only wind.”

“Yeah, so is a tornado,” said Crandall, looking nervously up at the ceiling. “I’m from Kansas. I see this shit all the time. Hey, lizardman, is this place safe?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—”

Thunder. Screams. Meoraq waited.

“I mean, this is an old building, right?”

“Yes.”

“So is the roof going to fall in on us? It’s not, is it?”

Meoraq flicked his spines forward and back dismissively. “It might.”

Some of the humans screamed some more, but this time, there was no thunder to frighten them. Scott hastened to settle them with complicated hand gestures and soothing words, but the face he turned at last on Meoraq was pale and strained. “That’s not funny.”

Anger flared and his hand snapped up, but he caught the slap before he threw it. “I am not in a joking mood, S’kot,” he hissed. “The ruins are old. The wind is strong. The walls could fall. I advise you all to pray tonight, for it will be Sheul’s will alone if this place still stands at the end of the storm.”

Thunder again, shaking the very foundations of the building beneath their feet. Humans screamed, males and females together now. One of them groped at Meoraq’s own arm and he was compelled to slap the thing away. Immediately after he’d done it, the thought came to him that he had not slapped Amber away and she’d had both her arms around him. It did not make him feel badly for the human he’d struck, but it did make him look for Amber among her people.

He found her clinging to Nicci, the two of them huddled so tightly together that he could not quite be certain whose arm belonged to who or whose head was buried in whose hair. A spark of thought—Must it be both of them?—lit and faded in his mind, as bright and brief as lightning. He frowned and turned deliberately away. “We have more shelter here than out upon the open plains,” he said loudly, determined to cut through their chatter if he could not quell it. “That is what you wanted most, isn’t it? So. This will be our camp. Remove these things,” he ordered, pointing at the chairs.

“And put them where?” Eric asked.

Meoraq pointed again, at the foreroom. “With the rest of the trash,” he said. “After which, none of you are to enter that room. Mark me, all of you. If you need to use the necessary, exit through the room you entered by, but you are to be swift about it and return here immediately.”

The humans eyed one another as the rain drummed down and the thunder shook at the walls. At last, Eric uttered a grating sort of sound in the back of his throat and began, “That sounds like a lot of work. I mean, there’s a lot of empty rooms. I don’t see any reason why we can’t spread out.”

“Because I said so!” Meoraq hissed and grabbed onto his brow-ridges as if to hold them to his head. “I don’t have to give you reasons! I give commands! Where is your obedience?”

“Okay, okay!” Eric raised both hands and patted the air. “Here is good. Be cool. Bierce, you want to come deal with this?”

“Do we get a fire at least?” asked Maria, standing close to her man’s side. “Or do we have to be cool in the literal sense as well?”

Eric dropped his hands and looked at her, his face puckering as with pain. “Baby, you’re not helping.”

“Excuse me for being cold!”

Meoraq took two swift steps forward and put his face close to Maria’s even as she tried to hide behind her man. “Stop,” he said, very quietly. “Whining. At me.”

Maria did not answer. She clutched her Eric’s shirt and did not move.

Meoraq straightened up and gave Eric a dark stare, then turned around to address Scott. “This is not a discussion. I am giving you my orders. Clear the room, settle your nests, go to sleep. No fires,” he added, glancing back at Maria. “Most of these old buildings have fire dampening devices. Some of them still work. No fires. And no lights anywhere—anywhere—where they can be seen outside. How do you mark me?”

They didn’t answer, but they marked him well enough. Eric took his Maria firmly in grip and they began to move furniture into the foreroom, Eric hauling the larger pieces and Maria picking up the inevitable debris that broke off. Some others followed their example, but most just huddled up to mutter at each other and eye the ceiling whenever the storm hammered on it. Meoraq paced as far away from the lot of them as the dimensions of the room would allow before setting out the components of his tent. It was a shameful extravagance, and he knew he could be comfortable enough with just his mat, but the lights were going to burn for as long as the room sensed occupants and if he had to look at humans all night, he was going to kill one of them. This was no longer a facetious thought. Not tonight and not in this place.

“Meoraq?”

Amber.

“Leave me,” he ordered, looking at the pole he was assembling and not at her.

She stood there a moment more while the color throbbed in his throat, and then knelt down next to him. She picked up two pole-quarters and threaded them together. “I know you’re upset,” she said in a low voice. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

She recoiled a little. “Yes!”

And she probably was, but he didn’t feel like forgiving her. He was, as she said, upset. He supposed he had been angrier than this several times in his life, but he didn’t think he’d ever been so angry for so long, and it was wearing on him. He needed to pray, but here in the ruins, surrounded by humans, that peace was well out of his reach. Even Amber (whose arms had been around him, wholly around him) put an itch under his scales—the kind that could not be unfelt once you were aware of it, the kind that just grew and grew until even the sanest, calmest man alive wanted to take a knife and cut it out.

Cursing under his breath, Meoraq put his hand to his throat and rubbed, trying to cool the hot throb there or at least cover the color he knew he was showing. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay, always.

Amber was watching, no longer even pretending to fuss with his tent-poles. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t really care much.

That itch…

Meoraq leapt up and backed away from her, still glaring, still rubbing. “Assemble this,” he ordered curtly. “I need to make a patrol.”

“Are you crazy? No, Meoraq, it’s too da—”

He snapped his pointing finger around in front of her face; she recoiled as if she thought it were a knife. “You do not give me orders,” he said, and even though he said it quietly, all human chatter ceased at once. Amber’s eyes were huge and green and baffled; seeing them should have made him feel something other than this black itch, but it didn’t. It made it worse.

“You are in my camp,” he told her. He should have been telling all of them, but it was only her. She was, in that moment, the only thing in the world he was aware of. “You belong to me. You give me your obedience and you do not argue with me.”

Thunder crashed and groaned. She looked up fearfully until the reverberations faded, but as soon as Meoraq turned to go, she was on her feet and clutching at his arm with her naked hands.

“Please, don’t go! I know you’re pissed at all of us and I wouldn’t blame you for leaving, but please don’t, not tonight!”

He found himself staring at her hand—her soft, pink hand—where it lay in stripes across his black scales. His mind was moving. He could feel it move, even though he could not quite catch his own thoughts. His mind was moving, but he couldn’t hear it. Like the hand that touched him, the hand he could see but not…quite…feel.

Meoraq closed his eyes and took a breath. Just one, for now. One for the Prophet, the wide open eye.

“Please,” she was saying, still touching him. “Okay?”

He opened his eyes and studied her from the quiet of his moving, uncatchable thoughts. He leaned forward slightly and took another breath—two for his brunt—and held it. She smelled like smoke and unwashed skin. She smelled like mud and dead grass and the animal dung she bundled for burning. She smelled of Gann and those were good smells, but they were all on the surface. Beneath all that was something different, something shiny and strange, like tiles pressed into a wall, like lights in the sky at night.

‘I have to get away from you,’ he thought, and it was not until he saw her immediate flinch that he realized he’d said it out loud.

She let go of him and stepped away, anger rising up fast in her ugly face. “Fine. You do what you want to do, but let me tell you something, lizardman. You may think God will protect you out there, but when you jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you. His divine protection ends when people insist on doing stupid things they know better than to do!”

“Where was this insight when you followed S’kot into this place, eh?” he asked acidly. “Or do you think he will catch you when you all leap from his wall?”

“Hey!” said Scott.

Meoraq swung on him. Scott vanished behind his people like smoke in the wind and all at once, the urge to go after him, to hack his way through the whole, monstrous mess of them until the screaming had stopped…but the thought was wrapped in some unfathomable way with the memory of Amber’s body slapping up against his and her arms going around him. He began to feel distinctly indistinct…the way he felt in the arena…just before the blackness of Sheul took him.

He pulled himself away, turned his clay toward the door and started walking.

“Then I’m going with you,” Amber declared.

He swung back, but she was already leaving his unmade tent to collect her spear.

“You are not!” he said loudly.

“Give me a flashlight,” she told Scott.

“You are not leaving this room!”

“If you go, I go,” she said. “Fine, be a dick. Someone, give me a flashlight.”

Yao provided one. She thanked him. Everyone else was watching Meoraq.

“I have given you an order, human! You stay here!”

“I’m going with you,” she insisted, and struck the butt of her spear onto the floor for emphasis. “Someone has to be there to run for help after a building falls on you!”

He cocked his head, his spines flat to his skull, but she would not bend her neck. She trembled, but she stood and stared him down.

“So,” he said at last, when he was calm. Truly calm, as opposed to the burning, thoughtless unquiet which had been as close as he could come to it most of this miserable day. He even smiled. “Give me your hand,” he said, offering his.

She eyed it, the stubborn set of her human jaws easing, then slowly moved her spear from right to left and took it.

He had her spun, disarmed, and on her knees with both arms behind her before the first wail was out of her mouth. He unbuckled his belt one-handed, whipped it free of his waist, and bound her wrists together. He seized her spear—every human in the room took a long step back, but none interfered—stabbed it low into the nearest wall at a steep angle, then picked her up and threaded her over the pole, accepting her kicks in grim good humor. He thumped her down, gave her a tap for farewell, and left her there, screaming curses at his back.

 

* * *

 

Amber thought she knew storms. They were the occasional nuisances that knocked out the phones and TV for a few hours, made a little noise, and got the garbage wet. She had never lived through one like this, didn’t know they could be lived through: Thunder you could feel; lightning you could smell; rain that made the floor you slept on vibrate like an idling car. The thought that the roof might drop on top of them was not a fear, but an inescapable fact.

So she waited for it, leaning up against the wall with Nicci’s head in her lap, stroking her as she would an anxious cat, watching people sleep. That part was easy enough; the overhead lights were still burning. Lots of people had looked for a switch, but no one had found one yet, so either the lights were programmed to stay on as long as there were people in the room or only the bots could turn them on and off. A few people complained, but in the end, it didn’t stop anyone from sleeping. Amber understood that perfectly. She was exhausted, in spite of the lights and the thunder and the general creep-factor of the ruins, but she couldn’t sleep. She wished Meoraq was here, or failing that, that he’d let her go with him when he went out on his insane patrol, and failing that, that he hadn’t tied her up and hung her on her own spear before he’d left, thus subjecting her to a roomful of humiliation and snickering before Crandall and Mr. Yao finally dared the lizard’s wrath and set her loose.

She’d considered going after him even then, but two things stopped her. First and most sensibly, she knew she’d never find him. The quintessential dark and stormy night was raging on just outside and even though the lightning was coming in sheets, so was the rain, which made visibility a big fat zero. And secondly, more personally, she was afraid that he’d come back and find her gone, then have to go out and get her, and yell at her some more when he found her. So she’d stayed in. She’d finished setting his tent up, even put his pack inside without first opening it and flinging crap around at random.

It wasn’t really her he was mad at and she knew it. He just didn’t want to be here. She didn’t doubt that he’d search the area thoroughly for bandits or animals or whatever he was looking for, but mostly she thought Meoraq just wanted to be alone.

It was time to come to terms with the fact that he was not going to stay much longer. He may believe that God had given him this babysitting job, but she also knew that if he started looking for divine signs to quit, they were one funny-shaped cloud away from losing him. And when that happened, they were dead.

Another clap of thunder banged down on the roof, the first to do more than grumble in quite a long time. Immediately afterward, the muted falling-nails sound of the rain picked up and up until it drowned out all the sleeping sounds that nearly fifty people could make in one big, empty room. Nicci shifted beside her, then rolled over, shrugging off Amber’s hand. Amber let her. Nicci was putting her leg to sleep anyway.

She decided to take a walk. Not outside, but just around the building. Meoraq wouldn’t like it, but Meoraq wasn’t here, so there. She’d stay away from the windows, but she needed to stretch her legs.

Nicci raised her head when Amber stood up, but she didn’t say anything and after a few bleary-eyed seconds, she just lay back down. It gave her a twinge—not the usual feeling of helpless guilt as she watched over her baby sister, but something low and ugly and resentful. She swallowed it quickly, told herself she’d never felt it at all, and bent down to touch Nicci’s shoulder so she’d know that Amber was there and loved her. Nicci did not respond, but that was okay. She was sleeping.

The hall outside was dark and quiet. Only half the lights came on when Amber went through the doors, and most of those were slow and sputtery. She wandered from shadow to shadow, listening to the thunder, stopping to inspect each picture on the wall, each empty pot that used to hold a plant, each award for excellence in whatever the hell field this used to be. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, so of course, she ended up at the closet full of bones. She didn’t want to open it, but she did. She didn’t need to look at it, but she did that too.

She had no idea how long she stood there, just staring into the closet. It was not until lights that had been dying further back in the hall suddenly struggled back to life that she really woke out of whatever hypnotic hold the sight of the bones had on her.

“Hey,” said Crandall, walking up behind her.

“Hey.” She closed the closet door.

“Can’t sleep?” he guessed, sympathetic.

Thunder boomed. She heard the muffled clatter as bones tumbled out of place.

“You’ll get used to it,” said Crandall. “Tell you the truth, this shit makes me feel more homesick than anything else.”

She didn’t want to talk, not at all and not with Crandall in any case, but she supposed she’d ought to make an effort. He’d already called her a bitch once tonight.

“You must get a lot of this in, um…”

“Kansas. Yeah. Where are you from?”

“Earth.”

She’d meant it as a joke, but it came out flat and unfunny. Amber looked at the nearest framed piece of time-whitened nothing, wishing he’d go away.

“You worried about the lizard?”

“He can take care of himself.”

“You still pissed at him?”

“No. I don’t really want to talk about him right now, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Come on, I want to show you something.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing huge, just something cool.” He gave her his aw-shucks smile, the one she trusted least, and walked off.

Probably another dead bot, or maybe some other sample of ancient lizard technology like the spiders in back. Maybe even another closet full of bones. Amber couldn’t think of anything she might find in this place that she’d actually want to look at, but God knew she had nothing else to do.

She followed him.

He led her around a few corners, down a few halls, and opened one of the office doors. She stopped at once, but he went on in without her, so what was she going to do, stand out in the hall alone? She wasn’t really a bitch, despite what everyone thought. She went in after him, determined to see whatever stupid little man-toy he thought was so cool and get out again before Meoraq came home and found her disobeying his direct order not to wander in the halls.

The overhead lights in the office were dead, but she could still see Crandall over by the window and he could see her. He waved a little. “Come and see this.”

“I can see it from here,” Amber told him queasily, and she could. The sky was alive; lightning rolled through behind the clouds so often, it actually seemed to be breathing. Now and then, white lines popped in and out of sight, hot enough to leave colorful burns hanging in the sky wherever she looked, but the worst things, the horrible things, were the smudgy greenish blobs that hovered around the high towers of the city, sometimes arcing one to another, flaring bright or winking out and occasionally splitting the difference in an explosion of showy sparks.

Meoraq was out walking around in that.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah,” breathed Amber, but she barely heard herself. Meoraq was outside in that, and maybe it was because he really believed God was looking out for him or maybe it was just preferable to babysitting a bunch of humans one more night, but he was outside in that. And he had been gone a long time.

“Come here. You can see the bridges. It’s wild.”

Did she want to see the bridges? Did she want to see the bridges Scott was going to make them cross over all lit up with green fire and throbbing? No, she didn’t, but she moved to the window and looked out anyway.

A constant thread of lightning danced and spun at the highest arch of the nearest bridge, making it seem as though it alone were holding it up. More lightning spat and crawled along the sides, spilling down almost in slow motion to drip from the bottom into the water just like a fountain. It was wild, all right. She supposed it was even beautiful. Mostly, though, it was terrifying.

Just then, something huge hit the roof with a bang and bounced off, sending Amber leaping into Crandall’s side with a hoarse, unflattering caw of terror. He laughed and put his arm around her, saying, “Relax, Bierce,” in his aw-shucks way.

“I’m fine,” she mumbled, backing up. “Cool bridge, but I’m going back now. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“What’s your hurry? Come on, Bierce, what do you want from me? Roses and violins? Why do you have to be such a bitch every time I try to get friendly?” he asked, still smiling, but sounding a little irritated with her, just as if he had every right to be. “I ain’t asking for your damn hand in marriage. Nothing else you’ve got going on has to change. I don’t kiss and tell.”

“Of course not,” said Amber, still trying to get out from under his persistent arm. “Then everyone would know you were a chubby-chaser.”

Crandall ran an appraising eye down her body. “No one can accuse me of that anymore. Naw, I’m just not a bragger, that’s all. I may not be a class act, but I’m not a total dick either. Come on.”

“And I’m not interested! How the hell more obvious do I have to be?”

He put the other arm around her. “Yeah, yeah. Big, tough Bierce don’t need a man. I get it. That’s fine. Look, no one has to know. The lizard’ll probably be gone all night, so why don’t you take the chip off your shoulder and just relax? I promise I won’t tell anyone that you’re really a girl.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped, pushing harder.

“Aw, come on. Don’t be mad. I’m just playing.” He bent down to kiss her.

“I’m not!” She gave him a real shove now, jerking her head away. “Get the fuck off me!”

He stopped chasing her mouth and looked at her without smiling and without letting go. Lightning strobed across his face, making it a stranger’s, an alien’s.

“I’m getting real sick of this, Crandall,” she said, just like her heart wasn’t pounding and her guts weren’t in knots.

The stranger in the stormlight looked thoughtful. “You know what? So am I.”

Without warning, he seized her by the collar of her shirt and shoved her hard against the wall. Before she could make a sound, he had a hand over her mouth and his thigh between her legs, wedging them apart and making that Hollywood staple of a man-dropping kick to the jewels impossible. She heard the purring sound of fabric tearing as he forced his other hand under her shirt, and although she struggled, he grabbed onto her naked boob and squeezed until she whinnied in pain and panic.

But that was all he did. His body crushed up hard against her, but his expression remained fixed in that annoyed/impatient way. He waited for her to stop struggling and when she did, he gave her boob another crude honk and said, “Anytime I wanted, Bierce. Any fucking time. But I didn’t. I ain’t that kind of guy. But the lizard isn’t going to be around forever and when he leaves, you might want to wise up to the fact that not everyone here is going to want to get with his sloppy seconds. So maybe you ought to stop acting like a fucking priss when a guy wants to be friendly, because this is going to be one lonely fucking world when you’re in it by yourself.”

One more twisting squeeze and he shoved himself off her, turning his back and walking away without another word. Amber stayed up against the wall, breathing hard and hugging her breast until the hurt was gone and only the shock remained, but the shock was plenty. She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t want to make a mess now that the cleanerbot wasn’t there to clean it up, so she waited it out and took deep breaths. She was fine, after all. He hadn’t really done anything.