“Where are you going?”

“Patrolling. There is tachuqi-sign nearby.” Sheul’s hand slipped; Gann’s gripped him. “Join me, S’kot. We’ll hunt them down together.”

The human’s eyes narrowed. His smile was a cold gash across his face.

“No? Ah well. I suppose you are too important to your people to risk.”

“They need someone to be able to make decisions without waiting for a sign from God first.”

Meoraq laughed scornfully. “And you do that very well. In fact, I think that’s about all you do. But I note that even you don’t call them good decisions.”

And he walked on, taking a low pleasure in imagining the look on Scott’s ugly face as he was left behind to steep in hate. As he circled his camp, he warmed himself with thoughts of Scott sulking on his rock, maybe for an hour, maybe even all night. He supposed he’d ought to ask Sheul to heal him of his spite, which was a poison and a shameful thing to live in the heart of a Sheulek…but he’d already asked Sheul for so much tonight.

In reality, Everly Scott left right after Meoraq did, and while he did sit in his tent for about twenty minutes, he wasn’t sulking. He was thinking. And when he was decided, when everyone was sleeping, he slipped out again.

Amber was a light sleeper, but she didn’t hear him. It was the cold that woke her—the cold that blew down her back as a careful hand pulled her blanket away from her neck. Even then, there was no prescient leap of fear, only a sleepy annoyance. “I’m up, I’m up,” she mumbled, rolling over. “Back off, liz—”

She saw the medikit, oddly. Just the kit, which she had last seen the day Mr. Yao placed it in Scott’s hands. The medikit, open, and a blurry field of dirty crimson behind it that she never had time to recognize as the uniform jacket of a crewman for the Pioneer.

Then there was a hand in her hair, shoving her head back so that all she saw was night sky and a few sparks from the fire riding smoke out on the wind. She took a breath and something bit her on the neck. It was her last conscious thought: Snakebite. She heard it hissing again and again, hissing as it bit and bit, and she tried to scream, but her lungs were full of lead and the black got so much blacker and there wasn’t time to think Nicci’s name even once and that was it for Amber.

Elsewhere, not far, Meoraq walked, a bit too spiteful in his Sheulek’s heart, but ever vigilant against the beasts that hunt by night.

8

There were no tachuqis. Meoraq knew it before that first hour was out, but he made himself stand a full watch. When the night was half-gone, Meoraq returned to wake Amber so that he could have a few hours’ rest before moving on. He’d ought to meditate before he slept—he had indulged plenty of flaws to meditate over tonight—but he wasn’t used to staying up this late anymore and he was tired.

The fires had been banked, giving him little light, but the humans’ blankets caught all there was and reflected it back like mirrors. He picked his way carefully through them, searching for Amber and trying not to step on anyone. Ever since waking up in his tent, she had been fairly obnoxious about not bedding down too near him. No, it was always right in the thick of her people, where she was all but invisible, and he could do nothing but creep along and peer at each protruding head while praying for patience.

Patience had become little more than a word in prayer to him these days and it troubled him. Neither the late hour nor the cold wind was Amber’s fault, but she had made herself damned difficult to find tonight. Usually she slept as light as any true warrior, rousing at the slightest disturbance, and until this night, his tromping boots had always been enough to at least provoke a shift or a murmur. Ah, there. Two pale tufts of hair, like summer-thick fronds of hillgrass, sprouting out of two silvery lumps on the ground—Amber and her Nicci.

Meoraq stomped loudly over. Nicci slept on, as usual. So did Amber, which was not. Her sleeping breaths were equally uncharacteristic—wet and heavy, as if labored. He circled her uncertainly until he saw the pale stripe of her arm lying over the edge of her mat onto the trampled grass. It was surely Amber’s arm; that was her saoq-hide pack close to her hand, with his spare tunic stubbornly folded up inside so she could pretend she didn’t have to wear it in the morning.

“Up,” Meoraq said. “It is half-past late enough and well on to later still. Come stand your watch.”

Amber did not stir.

He’d started to walk away, so much did he expect her grumbling obedience, but at this…this nothing…he paused. She’d done this before, when they were at cross-wills, but they weren’t fighting tonight, or at least he didn’t know they were. Cautiously, he turned back. “Soft-skin? I say waken.”

Nicci muttered something and lifted her head out of her bedding, giving him a bleary and blameful look before shifting her eyes to Amber. “Get up,” she mumbled, prodding at the bulk of her blood-kin’s form.

Amber rocked without waking. Her wet breaths made a brief bubbling noise as she rolled onto her face and back again, but otherwise she made no sound. Her fingers twitched, but her hand wasn’t moving.

She…wasn’t moving.

Meoraq’s spines flexed forward and slapped back hard and fast enough to hurt. He was at her side in one step and ripping away the silver nothing-skin to expose her in a splay that might well have been only sleep…save that she did not waken. Her mouth yawned when he rolled her over (and oh great Father, it was like moving meat. Only her upper body twisted toward him until he pulled on her thigh as well) emitting the same laboring sucks and gusts of air as strings of drool hung from her slack lips. She’d been lying in a great pool of her own salivations, so that one half of her face was pink and wrinkled. The eye on that side had swelled and was partially opened, so bloodshot and so dilated that it seemed a black slick upon a red sea. She had urinated on herself some time ago; the stain covered her entire left side from the sleeve of her arm to the cuff of her breeches.

“What happened?” Nicci asked shrilly. She grabbed at him and he shook her off without thought, pressing his palm to Amber’s chest, first atop her shirt and then beneath it in an effort to catch the echoes of her life’s pulse. If she lived.

“My God!” said Scott, appearing out of the dark as white and welcome as a strike of lightning. “She’s dead!”

A great storm of shock followed as humans bolted out of their beds to either crowd around him or hover away.

“Be quiet!” Meoraq roared, and while they did not obey precisely, they quieted enough that he could detect Amber’s heart beating at last. The feel of it brought him no relief, only more dread. Too heavy and too slow. Far too slow. He tried to make a count between beats, but there was no rhythm, only torpid shudders and infrequent slams, as inconsistent as the kicking leg of a dying saoq.

He told himself the freezing hand that gripped his own chest was premature. Her heart might beat this way all the time. How would he know?

His eye flicked to Nicci. He lunged out and caught her, dragged her squealing to him, and put his hand roughly between her swelled teats. Her heart hammered, rapid and strong, until she yanked herself away. He let her go, searching again for Amber’s life-beat and finding it exactly as he’d left it, indisputably wrong.

“What happened?” someone asked.

“Is she dead?” Nicci cried, already in tears. She stumbled away and Scott took her in, clutching Nicci against his chest.

“It’s going to be all right, Miss Bierce,” he declared. “We’ll all miss Amber. She had so much of the pioneering spirit and I know we will never forget her.”

Meoraq gaped, then hissed at him with such violence that it was nearly a shriek.