“I know how to make them,” said Amber. “Meoraq can get some more of the roots before we leave today and the next time we get a saoq, I’ll help you make your own, okay?”

Meoraq spat at the fire and kicked one of the burning bundles of grass.

Nicci petted the mat.

“Okay?” Amber said again. “I don’t know where they are, Meoraq, or even what they look like! Please?”

“You can make another one,” said Nicci. “And I can use this one, okay?”

Meoraq glared at her.

Nicci ignored him, but at least looked up at Amber. Her eyes were big and her smile, small and fragile. “Okay?”

‘Little girl,’ said the ghost of Bo Peep, laughing her drunk ass off in the back of Amber’s mind, ‘you are being played.’

Yeah, so what else was new? They were making up, and however it happened, that was a good thing, right?

‘You call this making up?’ Bo Peep inquired, smirking. ‘Do you really? Because I admit things have gotten a bit fuzzy since I died, but I’m pretty sure that’s usually called being bent over and fucked.’

No. They were sisters. Nicci loved her.

‘I loved people too. When they paid me. You selling, little girl?’

“No,” she said.

Meoraq’s head tipped slightly back and his spines twitched forward.

Nicci looked at him—a flustered, accusing stare, which he shrugged back at her with a singularly spiteful grimace—and then at Amber. “W-What?”

“No,” Amber said again, to Nicci this time. “You can make your own. I’ll help you, but I’m not doing it for you.”

“How is that fair?” Nicci demanded shrilly. “You’re a total hypocrite, you know that? You didn’t make that! He gave it to you! And everyone knows why!”

“Oh?” Meoraq’s spines rose a bit higher. “Why?”

Nicci looked at him, hesitated, then swung back on Amber. “Why do you always have to be such a bitch? All I’m asking you to do is share!”

“Yeah, share. You sleep in it and I carry it. Is that about right?”

Nicci burst into noisy tears and clapped her hands over her eyes. Her dry eyes, whispered Bo Peep. “You said you’d take of me!”

“I am,” said Amber. Her stomach cramped and rolled, but she made herself pick up the resin and go on sealing seams like nothing was wrong. “But it’s time for you to start meeting me halfway, Nicci.”

“You owe me! This is all your fault!”

“Lies,” said Meoraq, folding his arms.

“You stay out of this!”

“It is a lie,” Amber said. “And I’m getting awfully goddamned tired of hearing it. Maybe I did put you on the ship, but I didn’t crash it. If you want to be a victim for the rest of your life, you go right ahead, but I’m done taking your blame. I’ll teach you how to make a mat like this if you want, but you better be sure you really want it, because I’m not carrying it for you.”

“I hate you!” Nicci shouted, scrambling to her feet.

“Grow up,” said Amber, painting resin onto the last bit of stitching.

Nicci stood over her, silent except for her harsh, angry breaths, and when Amber finished her pack and picked up the pouch with Meoraq’s little brick of proofing wax, Nicci abruptly turned on Meoraq. “You made her say that!”

“I would love to think it true,” he replied evenly, and left.

Nicci stumbled after him, her mouth working, and finally screamed, “Lizard!” at his retreating back.

He stopped walking. His head cocked. He thought about it.

When he turned around, Nicci tripped over Amber’s mat backing up and fell sprawling. Amber reached for her hand, but Scott somehow got the other one, catching her between them like a tug-O-war rope. A sudden pop from the fire (O god her arm i pulled her arm off) made Amber let go, and Nicci spilled onto Scott’s leg and hugged on tight, babbling apologies that even Amber couldn’t fully understand.

Meoraq went past her without a word and into his tent. A moment later, he was out again, hanging his little metal flask around his neck.

“This is my third gift to you in a single day,” he said without looking at her. “A pack, a bed, and a reprieve for your blood-kin’s beating.”

‘And everyone knows why.’

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Will you…Will you please…?”

“I’ll gather the lhichu. But I won’t give it to you. She’ll have it when she asks my forgiveness and if that means she never has it, so be it.”

Nicci could probably hear him, but she did not react, except with sniffling. Scott helped her stand up, patting her shoulder and murmuring. She looked so wounded as she stood there under his arm, so little and bruised, and so goddamn much like their mother that Amber wanted to throw up. Fighting that urge meant squeezing the bar of proofing wax hard enough to leave finger-shaped impressions along the edge.

Their eyes met—Amber’s and Nicci’s—with half a camp and whole worlds between them. This time, Amber supposed she was the one who looked like their mother, the Bo Peep who wasn’t playing for sympathy, the Bo Peep who had none. “You better say you’re sorry when he gets back. And you better act like it too, at least as well as you act like a fucking baby.”

“Hey now,” someone said in a startled voice, and someone else, one of the ladies, said, “Hey nothing. We need him. She’s lucky I didn’t smack her.”

“Amber!”

“Go somewhere else for a while.” Amber made her first savage swipe of wax across the mat. It took a surprising amount of force, but the violence struck a satisfying resonance down in the Bo Peep part of her. “I love you, Nicci, but I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

Beneath the wind and the rasp of wax scraping over scales, she could hear Scott telling Nicci that she didn’t have to grovel for Meoraq’s amusement, that if their guide insisted on an unfair dispensation of resources, she could always come stay in his tent, and furthermore, if Amber was going to insist on fomenting a hostile environment within the confines of his camp, she might just find out that she wasn’t welcome on the ship when they reached the skyport.

“Why don’t I just fly a pig home?” Amber snapped, shoving harder. The wax left whitish smears across the top of the hide and she had to stop and wipe them away. “I declare there will be a pen full of flying space-pigs. You’re right, Scott. That’s so much easier than facing reality.”

Scott’s jaw tightened, but it was Nicci who balled up her fists.

Amber stopped waxing and glared up at her through the hanging tangle of her hair. “You don’t want to mess with me right now,” she said flatly.

Nicci faltered to a stop, hesitated, and then clapped her hands over her eyes and cried, “I wish you’d just let me stay home!”

“So do I,” said Amber. “Shut up, Nicci. I mean it. Unless you’re really crying, you shut the fuck up.”

Nicci stared at her, pale and silent. Her eyes were dry and open wide. She shivered. Amber didn’t. The wind was cold. Amber, it seemed, was colder.

Slowly, Nicci turned around and stumbled away, either back to Scott or back to her friends from the Resource Tent. Amber didn’t really care at the moment. She bent her neck and went back to work. Her arms began to hurt. She worked harder. She worked until that was all she could feel.

6

Days. Nights. Wind and rain and walking. They left even the shadow of the ruins on the horizon to make their way through a dense, swampy thicket. Three days later, they left that behind to climb a steep, stony incline onto a crumbling stretch of what Meoraq called a road. They followed that another three days before Meoraq herded them off it and east again, back into the plains, which were growing increasingly hillier.

The only animals they saw in all that time was a single group of corrokis lumbering south, which Meoraq had led them cautiously around, downwind and at such a distance that the car-sized monsters blurred into an uncountable blob. There were no more saoqs, although Amber occasionally glimpsed old spoor that proved they had passed through. The streams, swollen by all the rain, held no eel-things, only frothy, storm-clotted water. When he went hunting, he brought back only bitter leaves and tough roots to eat, and he had a tendency to slap the people who complained about it.