“Back off, man,” Dag said in a low voice. “There goes his neck.”

“I think she’s breathing,” said another human. “I mean, she’s looking really bad, but she’s not dead yet.”

“When did this happen?” Meoraq demanded.

They all looked at each other. “She looked all right when she went to bed,” Eric said at length. “Maybe this is some kind of, I don’t know, infection or something. From when she got…uh, hurt.”

Scott flushed and glared at him.

Yao came to kneel beside Amber and Meoraq reluctantly gave her up to his inspection. The first thing he did was to take her wrist and just hold it for a short time, frowning. Then he pulled up Amber’s shirt and felt at her soft belly. The bruise, now several days old, had lost its glossy purple-black color, gained some greenish smudges, and separated into three distinct marks rather than one massive one. “I see no inflammation…no sign of internal bleeding…pulse is weak and thready…she’s extremely hypothermic. It could be sepsis, but she’s shown no symptoms until now and her breathing is very slow and arrhythmic. This looks pharmacological to me,” said Yao, prying open one of Amber’s slack, glazed eyes.

“It’s not drugs!” Scott interrupted. “Where would she get drugs?”

“I didn’t say…” Yao paused, his narrow eyes narrowing further as he gazed into nothing. “Drugs,” he murmured. He looked at Amber. “It could well be. Bring me the medical kit.”

Scott stared for a moment and then suddenly, forcefully said, “I lost it. Back when we had to leave our infrastructure behind to avoid upsetting God. What does it matter? You can’t fix this with aspirin and bandages! And you’re not a real doctor anyway! You don’t know anything!”

Yao merely nodded, unaffected by these insults. “Then it must be something else,” he said, looking around at the dark plains. “She might have exposed herself to any number of toxic plants.”

“You are a surgeon?” Meoraq asked, following what he could of this exchange. “You can heal her?”

Yao looked at him calmly. “As I see it, there are three possibilities. If this is sepsis, a worsening of her internal injuries, she will almost certainly die. If she’s exposed herself somehow to an alien toxin against which she has no immunity, she will likely die. If she’s ill—”

A wave of murmured alarm swept outward through the humans.

“—then she might pull through, but her injuries and this environment have surely weakened her body’s defenses. Her chances are not good,” Yao finished. “We can keep her warm and comfortable and hope for the best, but I must tell you, I see nothing hopeful about her condition.”

Meoraq looked from face to flat, ugly face, but no one else had anything more to say. He gathered Amber up and stood, resting the thin skin of his neck briefly over her brow to test for fever. That, he knew how to cure, although it was by no means a certainty that he would find the necessary herbs. In any case, she was not hot with fever, but cold, as cold as if her life were already lost.

“Take her to the fire and build it up,” he ordered, holding her out. His mind was racing ahead already, battering from one point of useless healing lore to another, trying to remember if he had seen anything, anything, on his watch that might help her. There was little enough to look at in the wildlands and medicinal herbs were so precious that his eye had a way of marking them whether he had immediate need of them or not. He knew he had seen no teaberries, no healershand, not even the dangerous comfort of phesok. There might have been gift-of-God and feverleaf by the bushel were this a warmer season, but the coming winter had turned it all to hidden roots. His memory showed him nothing but grass in all directions, dead thorns, and barren trees twisted out of shape by past storms. The only leaf he recalled with any medicine at all was deathweed, down by the stream, and if that was a sign from Sheul, Meoraq chose to ignore it. He…

He was still holding Amber.

No one had come to take her. By the looks of them, no one meant to.

Meoraq’s confusion erupted in an instant to rage. “What the hell is wrong with you people?” he roared. “She could be dying!”

They shuffled back, looking at their feet or their fellows or their leader, and did not answer him. Scott, who was always first to be the voice of his people in every situation, whether it warranted a voice or not, now patted sobbing Nicci and was himself very pale and silent.

“Yeah,” ventured Crandall when it became clear their appointed leader would not step forward this time. “But, I’m sorry, that’s just a really good reason to keep her away from us. Whatever this is, it’s bad.”

And Meoraq’s first impulse, self-defeating as it was, was to throw Amber down and hit him. Throw her.

Like meat.

Amber made a sudden weak gurgling noise. With her head tipped back in his arms, she was choking on her own saliva. Meoraq hurriedly shrugged her forward and drool spilled out in a fall over her lip and onto her chest. She did not seem to be able to close her mouth. A fool’s gape…or a corpse’s.

“Gross,” someone whispered.

His throat too tight for speech, Meoraq turned his back on all the shuffling, staring humans and carried Amber to his tent. She did not resist him when he propped her up on his knee to strip away her soiled garments. Apart from the intermittent twitching of her fingers, she did not move at all as he lay her down on his mat.

So limp. So cold. Pale as snow everywhere that lying in her own urine had not burnt her to a vivid shade of pink, everywhere she wasn’t bruised. So many bruises…

He passed his hand over them, gingerly probing for some sign of a greater injury, but her belly was cool and flat. Too flat. Sheul forgive His errant son, he could see the slats of her ribs and the nubs of her pelvic girdle. But no, he could not look at that now. Whatever this was that worked in her, it was not starvation any more than it was a belly-wound. But what was it? He could see a perfectly round inflammation at her throat, shot through with numerous tiny red dots, but he did not know what to make of it. He had never seen such a bite before, but human hide was thin, as Amber’s many bruises proved. It was entirely plausible that a beetle with jaws far too weak to penetrate dumaqi scales had bitten her. Could beetles be poisonous? Twelve years walking in Gann’s land and he simply did not know.

Meoraq lay down beside her, wrapped them both in his blanket and held her close, willing the warmth of his body into hers. She did not try to speak or move. She gave no sign that she knew who was with her or that anyone was at all. “Great Sheul, O my Father,” he whispered, searching her slack face for life. “Hear Your son’s prayer. You have passed these humans into my care for a reason and surely my ungrateful complaints have made this lesson necessary, but I am humble before You now. Only you can know the cause of this terrible sickness. Therefore, I place myself in Your hands, O Father. Show me the way to heal the woman.”

He shut his eyes and listened, but Sheul did not speak, or if He did, Amber’s wet breaths were louder. And if Sheul never spoke? If He left her life in mortal hands, as He so often did, what then? He needed a surgeon and never mind that no dumaq would have the slimmest idea how to heal a human. He could follow his backtrail to the road as soon as there was light enough to see by, and while he didn’t know exactly where he was along its track, he knew he would find Gelsik to the north and Fol Dzanya to the south, but there were ten days running between them, plus three each way to run between road and camp, and it would take twice as long with the humans dragging at his heels, even longer since Amber would have to be carried. He would have to leave the humans here, leave Amber in their care, and run…knowing she would surely be dead by the hour of his return.