Meoraq’s eye wandered at that thought, drifting up over the broken walls where rooftops should be to look at the sky. High clouds, thin cover, fairly pale. He’d hoped for rain. He shouldn’t, as far as travel was concerned, but nights that it rained were the only nights Amber joined him in his tent. There was enough room for both their beds (with half an arm’s length between them, unless Meoraq arranged his bedroll just right, which he was very careful to do every night, just in case), and his blanket was wide enough to share, but she was being stubborn. Each night that the rains forced her inside, she’d perch on the very edge of her mat, wrapped in her silvery sheet, curled up small until sleep loosened her limbs. If she dreamed badly, she’d move around on her mat until some part of her found some part of him, and then the rest of her would creep in and cling.

So far, Amber’s hands (her freezing hands) had not slipped down over his belly to knead at him again, but they might. He told himself he had not decided how to handle it when that happened, but on rainy nights, Meoraq had taken to sleeping naked.

But he didn’t think it would rain tonight. He still had perhaps three hours of daylight left, and the weather could do almost anything in three hours’ time, but he thought tonight Amber would be out on her mat by the fire, stubbornly trying to hold a watch even though he’d told her not to bother anymore. They were in Sheul’s sight, just as he had been during all the years he had camped in the wildlands alone, and must trust to His watch. She did not agree.

Three hours until dark…

He supposed he could waste enough time here that they would have to camp nearby (not within the ruins, he would not allow that even for Amber’s ease of mind), but he didn’t see the need. Amber might not want to go, but if he phrased it right—We should stop here so that you can have a half-day’s rest—he was confident that she’d march herself on. They could put another span behind them in that time, even if she had to stop again.

So then. Meoraq returned his beast-killing blade to his belt and, just to be able to say honestly that he’d done all possible, cupped his hands around the end of his snout and bellowed Scott’s name. The call bounced away down the streets, unheard. Meoraq listened, waited, watched a machine wheeze out of one alley and into another, then cupped his snout and hollered again: “Humans! Come!”

A thin, metallic finger tapped at his leg. A machine coughed out some unintelligible inquiry, prying at its front panel.

“Get away,” Meoraq told it absently, and it coughed again and moved on. “Humans! Give cry if you hear me! It is Uyane!”

Still nothing. Meoraq allowed himself a smile, but only a short one. He turned around and headed back to Amber, his eyes sweeping from wall to broken wall only because that was how he’d been trained when traveling in the wildlands. He saw nothing, just stone and metal husks digesting in the open air. Time and raiders had picked the place over down to its rusted old bones, leaving nothing but wreckage and decaying relics for the machines to tend until their last spark of perverse life was spent and they died.

Or were killed.

Meoraq stopped walking and looked back over his shoulder at the dead machine that had inspired the last piece of this rambling (and somewhat smug) line of thought. A machine. A bot, as Amber would call it. It stood just inside a rather small, plain structure, whose only notable feature was that its roof had only partly fallen in. Through the broken wall, Meoraq could see it lying like a protective shield over what few furnishings had survived the years of exposure and salvage. Just a big, empty room and a dead machine…which had been smashed to death by a piece of stone broken off the wall. He had seen a machine killed that way once before.

Meoraq put his hand on the hilt of his kzung again, but didn’t unclip it from his belt. Amber was waiting. He could go. One dead machine meant nothing worth investigating further and there were only three hours, maybe less, before nightfall.

“Fuck,” said Meoraq. He climbed through the wall.

Past the worst of the debris, beneath the overhang of the surviving section of roof, he saw the char of their fire. The little that remained told him they’d burnt their sleds, and while Eric had built one of them, the other Meoraq considered his even after Scott stole it, and he was annoyed.

“Humans!” he called. “Come out, if you hear me! Uyane Meoraq stands before you! Come!”

Silence. The wind outside gusted, making a moaning sound as it blew through open windows and over roofless towers. Here, nothing stirred.

Two sleds could not have burned long, but the humans had stayed by their fire long after it had gone out. When they’d moved on, some had walked through the ashes. Smudgy bootprints led Meoraq out of this dubious shelter into an adjoining room, one with a window. There, the tracks suggested the humans had gathered, shifting aimlessly as humans did when Scott was speaking.

Meoraq frowned, looking through the window to try and see what Scott had seen, what Scott had wanted everyone to see.

He wished Amber were here. She’d see whatever it was at once, he was sure. All Meoraq saw was the wreckage of a city he shouldn’t even be in.

Had it been a machine? Decaying vehicles and other unwieldy devices littered the streets and infested the innards of the broken buildings. Any one of them might have inspired Scott to some new sermon, but he thought not. Maybe if one of them were working, but not these. Even the living machines, the bots, were so decrepit that they could only undermine Scott’s effort to convince them of a viable flying ship in Xi’Matezh. So what, then? What else was there?

Roads, walls, scrap, sky. He couldn’t even see the mountains from here because the window faced north. No, it was nothing but ruin as far as he could see, cut into slices by cross-streets, fallen poles, a canal, until the plains took it all away. Nothing.

And yet, when Scott had led his people onward, he had chosen to lead them out through this broken window.

Meoraq followed, his spines flat to his skull. The tracks quickly faded and were lost. He had to stop and search every alleyway, every open door and broken window, every small space a human might have squeezed through, but found no sign of them.

He ended at the canal, which was not a true canal after all, but some sort of stormway, collecting the rain as it ran off the roads and whisking it away through a tunnel. Stormways like these were used in modern cities to irrigate farmland or water cattle while reducing damage caused by seasonal floods. Perhaps the Ancients used them the same way. In any case, there were some machines alive to tend them, because the stormway had not filled in with the unavoidable detritus that even abandoned cities excreted in hard rains. There were some cracks in the wall, and the grate that had discouraged foolhardy children of the Ancients from exploring the tunnels had fallen, but otherwise, it seemed well-kept. The canal was quite wide and easily twice Meoraq’s height in depth, but there was only a little water in the bottom, standing clear on top of a thick layer of greenish-black sediment.

Clear enough for Scott to want to fill his stolen flasks here? Meoraq hunkered down on the edge of the canal and thought about that, trying to be objective.

He couldn’t see it. The first person who got sick drinking this piss would end Scott’s power over the rest of them.

Meoraq straightened up, scanning the ruins on the far side of the stormway, but he didn’t see anything and he saw no reason to keep looking. The slope of the canal’s sides were shallow enough that he’d ought to be able to simply walk across, but he hated to get his boots mucky and he could just imagine what that sediment smelled like when it was kicked up. Yes, Scott had been here, but even he’d had the sense to move on.