“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.”