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.