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.