Amber picked the cloth out of the grass and washed her face. It was cold. She dunked it in the stewing pouch, now the bathing pouch, and tried again, but the wind took away the heat before her skin had time to really feel it. She dabbed at Meoraq’s bloody scales some more; he couldn’t feel her or the wind or the cold.

She finished cleaning him up, then made one last pass for quills, not so much because she expected to find them, but just so she could keep touching him. The tough old Amber who didn’t need anybody was dead and buried; the weepy, useless Amber who was left needed to be touched tonight, even if all he did was wake up and grab her wrist and tell her to keep her hands to herself.

But she found one last quill buried in his hip. His blood had blackened it to the same color as his scales and it had broken off right at the surface of his skin, making it easy to miss and hard to get out. She spent several minutes trying unsuccessfully to pinch it between her fingernails before she had to give up. “I think I need to borrow your knife,” she said.

No answer. His chest rose and fell slowly. His eyes stayed shut.

“Meoraq?” She patted hesitantly at his stomach.

He did not respond.

Amber hesitated, then closed her hand around the bone-hilt of his favorite knife and pulled it from the sheath slung across his chest. He did not move. The tip slid in under the quill, slicing easily through even his tough scales. She sucked in a whispered curse, but Meoraq never flinched. Fresh blood welled up and trickled out around the quill; she eyed it and him uncertainly, then cut the wound a little wider, just enough to get her fingernails on it. She had to twist at it a long time before she had enough to bite, but she did eventually get it out and he slept through the whole thing.

Amber dabbed unnecessarily at the wound, which had already sealed itself. His blood was hot on her fingers, but cooled fast, darkening to black in the open air. The scent of cloves wafted up. Meoraq slept.

She watched him. After a while, she put her hands on him again, stained now with his blood and hers, and ran them gently back and forth as she stared into his face. She wondered if she would be able to tell him from other lizardmen, if she ever met one. She wondered if he were handsome, for a lizard. She looked at him, at her hands on his stomach, and then at the smooth place between his thighs.

Which was not entirely smooth.

She waited to feel something, some flare of guilt or shock or something, but didn’t, not even when she saw her hand travel down to the slight swell of his groin. She cupped him there, rolled her palm in just one gentle pass, then lightly squeezed. ‘Now his eyes will be open,’ she thought, and looked, but they weren’t. He slept.

She should have felt relief. She didn’t. If anything, she felt worse. Small and scared and lonely and…and human. The last human. The one human, and a weak, ridiculous one at that.

‘I’m useless,’ she thought. ‘I am a scared, weak, little human. I am a scared, weak, little girl.’

Tears stung. Of course. Girls were crybabies. Had she ever really thought she was tough? She would give anything, anything, to be held tonight.

Amber’s fingers flexed, kneading at his groin as if it were a woman’s breast, and discerning as she did so the solid press of something inside him. She could fathom little of its shape beneath his thick skin, only that it bulged out into a hard knot at one end. She moved her hand beneath this, exploring its dimensions, and when she squeezed him there, the scales of his groin suddenly split and extruded the blunt head of an organ.

She opened her hand. It slipped back inside him, leaving the wet shine of some clear, viscous, clove-smelling oil to show her where the opening had been. She looked at his eyes. They were shut.

You could press the mid-pad of a cat’s paw, she thought, and squeeze out its claws just like that. But he couldn’t feel it, not any of it. She rubbed low underneath that half-felt lump, then kneaded at him boldly in the same rhythm as her spike-finding caresses earlier until, with a heave, the whole of it came thrusting out.

It looked only just enough like a penis that she was sure that was what it was. Only just, and no more. It was scaled, like the rest of him, but the scales there were so fine that she could see the veins throbbing just below its thin surface and did not dare to touch it. At the base, just where the edges of his slit wrapped around it, she could see part of the hard lump she’d probably been squeezing: a thick knob of flesh, swollen to a high shine and covered in dozens of small, blunt barbs, all of them oozing more of that spicy-scented oil. The shaft that sprouted from this dubious bulb was not smooth, particularly along the underside, where it formed pronounced ridges, the very sight of which made her shiver. At the head of his cock, a short, stiff nub curled slightly back toward his body, and even seeing it for the first time, some instinctive animal part of her knew just where it would strike inside her and how it would feel.

Her hand, firmly gripping at his groin, shook. She stared into the slick eye of Meoraq’s cock and saw herself, how it would be to shift her clothes and straddle him, right here. She’d put that alien cock inside her and maybe it would fill everything that was empty and not just the useless woman-part. It probably wouldn’t take long. He might sleep through the whole thing.

Her hand opened. His cock jutted stubbornly another few seconds, and then his body took it grudgingly back again. Amber wiped at the streak of oil left on his scales, then stood up, away from him. Eyes burning, she staggered over to his tent and crawled inside, unrolling her bedroll and pulling his blanket over her head. Something big howled, not far from camp. Never far.

She began to cry without noise, without moving, like Meoraq when he slept. She slipped her hand down her pants and into urgent moisture. ‘Fear-sweat,’ she thought, rubbing. She came. She cried. She slept.

* * *

Meoraq waited until Amber was quiet before he sat up. He pulled in his legs, rested his elbows atop his knees, and stared at the tent. His flesh was not fragile; neither was it stone.

He was not fool enough to throw down his guard and sleep so soon, not with a dead kipwe in easy distance of his camp and hungry ghets prowling nearby, and he was genuinely surprised that Amber believed he would. She, who had seen death snap at her so many times, had seen it snap at him and it had made her…well, a woman. He had hoped giving her a domestic chore like bathing him would calm her down, but it hadn’t. Feigning sleep had seemed the polite thing to do, in part because it let her tears have some privacy, and in part because being bathed by a woman had a tendency to arouse him and those were Amber’s hands moving over his naked body and he was a horribly insensitive brunt who absolutely was not going to have sexual stirrings while Amber cried herself calm. So he’d shut his eyes and slowed his breath and meditated, trying to unhear her sobs with some success and unfeel her hands with somewhat less success, and he had just begun to wonder when he’d ought to ‘waken’ and maybe brew some tea when she put her hand boldly between his legs.

Of all the things she might do, that had never occurred to him. Not even in his darkest fantasies, on nights when Gann had given him a thousand burning thoughts, had he ever imagined she would put her hand on him. But she did and it was no accident. She wasn’t bathing him; she wasn’t searching for injury; she was cupping him just below his slit and gently kneading—so shocking an act that he could not at first move…and then did not want to. A Sheulek must be a master of his flesh in every situation, but her hand moved and moved and Sheul Himself could not have unfelt that. He felt himself extrude and still he did not open his eyes. He only breathed, waiting in a kind of paralytic fever for what came next.