He half-raised his hand twice, very much aware of the other humans, even though Amber herself did not appear to see them, or him for that matter, but in the end, he reached out and nudged at her with two knuckles.

She looked at him. In spite of her obvious anger, she kept her mouthparts pressed tight together, waiting on his word. So maybe it hadn’t all been undone.

“I forgive you,” he said.

She just looked at him for a while without any apparent change to her expression. Then her eyes shifted past him so that she could watch Scott.

“I don’t find you at fault,” he said after a moment. “This place is nothing but Gann’s poison. When we are away, things will be better.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so, lizardman,” Amber said, sounding anything but glad. “But I don’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure things are only going to get worse from now on. A fucking skyport.”

* * *

The walk out of the city went much quicker than the walk in. They no longer stopped each time a window lit up or a kiosk spoke to them. If a door opened, most of them passed it without even a curious glance at what might be inside. At one of the intersections, an insectoid bot replaced lamps that had been broken in the storm, and they all just strolled by like they’d seen giant metal centipedes doing linework all their lives.

It could have been because the ruins had lost the gothic oppressiveness they’d had in an impending thunderstorm. It could have been because they were hungry and wanted to be back in the prairie so Meoraq could hunt. It could have been because several towers had collapsed during the night and seeing them instilled everyone with a natural drive to get the hell out from under the rest of them. It could have been a lot of things, but Amber knew the real reason was Scott. Scott and the ship.

One night in a crumbling old ruin with a couple shiny tiles stuck to the wall had completely reinvented his sense of purpose. They were no longer pioneers fording their way across a desolate, alien landscape; now they were also castaways orchestrating their own rescue. Street after echoing street, it was Scott’s string of outrageous skyport promises and not Meoraq’s grim-faced guidance that kept them moving.

All the way down to the river, Scott talked. Each groaning, error-thick recording to issue from a corroded kiosk brought on a fresh promise of a working deep-space transmission tower. Every intact window or undamaged wall was greater evidence of a surviving skyport than all the rest of the broken ones. They passed a massive junklot where some unseen bot had towed thousands upon thousands of derelict vehicles, stacked into a single rusted brick filling the back of the lot end to end and easily a hundred meters high; the few vehicles which the tow-bot had missed remained where they had died in the street, most strip-salvaged and weathered away to nothing but a ring of rust and a few unusable parts, yet it was the bot who did it which Scott chose to point out as undeniable proof that a starship would still be able to launch itself and fly them home.

Amber heard all this and worse from her usual place at the tail of the marching line, and not just from Scott himself. He had shot the idea of a return to Earth into them like a drug and now they were all laughing and talking what-ifs and planning the first thing they were going to eat, the first place they were going to go, the first person they were going to sue. Humming, as the Candyman would say. Amber remembered what that felt like and she knew it wouldn’t last, although Scott managed to keep them going strong all the way through town and down to the river.

The waterfront district of the ruins was just like the waterfront district in any big city. The few surviving windows of the narrow storefronts they walked along promised all the same sleaze that Amber had seen peddled on her own street back home: Cheap rooms, knock-off brands, no-questions loans and quick cash for whatever you wanted to sell, booze and drugs and sex. Even worse were the commercial bots; unlike the maintenance units which were happy to ignore and be ignored by the aliens in their empty city, the commercial bots were drawn to them like missiles. They dragged themselves behind Scott and his group, croaking advertisements and error messages and occasionally sparking out or banging into debris. The most stubborn of these limped behind Amber for six blocks, plucking at her sleeve with a damaged tendril and offering up enticements such as, “Young ones, boy- and girl-meat. Be their first, safe and clean! We catch and release. They cry!”

At last, Amber swung on it and raised her spear, but either the bot recognized the threatening gesture or it had reached the end of its territory. Either way, it turned back and crawled away, its horrible litany of services and showtimes receding as the sound of water grew louder.

They crossed at one of the bridges soon afterward—the bridge that had been vomiting lightning all night long, in fact—and not only did Meoraq not try to stop them, he gave the order that marched them across.

“Please be kidding,” Amber had said, horrified. “Nicci, stay off that thing! What, was it some other lizardman telling us that these buildings could fall down any second and God alone was keeping them up?”

He threw her an impatient, annoyed glance as he pointed people onto the bridge. They went, not without hesitation, but they went. “God will hold the bridge if it is His will we move on,” he told her. “As I believe it is His will.”

“Well, I can’t say that’s the craziest thing I’ve heard today,” she countered, looking hard at Scott. “But only because I’ve heard so much crazy.”

Wasted. The only one close enough to hear her was Meoraq himself. Even Nicci was already heading out across the derelict suspension bridge of unknown age, spanning the freezing, storm-swollen river.

“This is such a bad idea,” said Amber, following.

Meoraq fell into step beside her. “We walk in God’s sight, Soft-Skin.”

“Yeah? Seems like he’s been doing a lot of blinking lately.”

“Do not be blasphemous.”

They walked. The sound of a hundred tromping boots on an otherwise empty bridge made an ugly sound that neither the perpetual wind nor the rushing water below could drown out. She imagined she could feel the bridge swaying in time with their steps, but she was not imagining the groaning, twanging, snapping sound above them as the ancient suspension cables had to carry them. Amber didn’t realize just how much she expected a collapse until she stepped off the bridge onto solid ground on the other side and felt, not relief, but the unmistakable rush of surprise.

She turned around to stare for a while, but the bridge stubbornly refused to fall down, even now at the most blackly appropriate time.

At length, Meoraq tapped at her shoulder. “We are not stopping here.”

“It’s not fair.”

He frowned, rubbing at the side of his scaly snout for a few seconds before gruffly saying, “We will rest a short time then.”

“That’s not what I meant. I don’t want to rest here. I don’t want to spend another damn minute here.”

“And yet here you stand.”

She threw him a scowl and started walking. Scott and the others were well ahead of her, beyond all hearing. She knew he was talking by the way he moved, gesturing at the windows as they lit up and at the commercial bots that came skulking in from the alleys. In his exuberance, he turned all the way around to make some point or another, walking backwards and pounding his fist into his open palm. She saw him see her, pause…and then wave her way and say something that made all the others look back.

“Deep breaths, Soft-Skin,” said Meoraq. “A count of six, deep and slow.”

“Don’t you even care what he’s telling them?”