Or maybe spending the night in a tent would make all of Scott’s people want to go back to the ship. And if that did happen, if they all left, would she go with them? Was it worse to do something she thought was stupid, like make herself at home in a burning ship, or something she already knew was stupid, like sit alone in the wilderness on an alien planet?

‘Wait for it,’ she told herself. ‘There are enough real problems here, little girl. Start making plans for those and stop worrying about what may not happen.’

“Amber?” That was Nicci, coming to fret over her. Probably wondering if she was having a heart attack or something. There’d been times on that hike that Amber had wondered herself. Even the Candyman’s humming little shots hadn’t made her feel like this. “Are you okay?”

“I’m getting there.” She smiled to show how much she meant it. Nicci flinched a little. Amber stopped smiling. “I’ll be stiff as hell tomorrow, but if they all go back to get more supplies and people and stuff, I’ll just stay here and…I don’t know. Guard the camp. From what, I don’t know, but…” Amber trailed off with a frown and looked around—at the ridge, at the scarred plains with the ship burning in the middle of it, at the sky. “Do we know yet if there’s any animals on this planet?”

“Mr. Yao was just talking about that,” said Nicci, sitting gingerly in the grass beside her. “And he says there’s plants, so we should expect there to be animals who eat them.”

Sensible. Although by that logic, if there were animals who ate plants here, there were probably animals who ate meat, too. Forty-eight unarmed humans made an awful lot of meat.

“But no one’s seen any?” Amber pressed, already thinking that even if there weren’t animals, that was a whole new kind of trouble, because those MREs wouldn’t last forever and she wasn’t exactly seeing fields of wild corn and apple trees out there in all that grassy nothing. “Not even bugs?”

“Well, yeah, bugs. The ground kind. And Mr. Yao says there’s a lake on the other side of the ridge.”

“So there might be fish?”

“I guess, but Mr. Yao says if there are animals, we might see their footprints and stuff down by the water.”

“Oh. Yeah, right. Makes sense.” Amber knew nothing about animals except the little she’d seen on television and in most of those programs, they wore clothes and talked. Times like this made a girl wish she’d paid attention in Biology to something besides Trevor Macavee in the second row.

Nicci drew up her knees and hugged them, shivering a little. They watched people mill around in the camp, opening packs, eating ration bars, lighting fires. Nobody seemed to be talking much, but no one was crying and no one was wearing that empty survivor’s stare. The outlook was just as bleak as it had ever been, but at least they had something to do.

That made her think of Jonah and so she turned listlessly that way, seeing nothing but the ship like a guttering torch in the growing dark. She wondered if he’d organized all the people Scott had only half-convinced into being his search and rescue team. She wondered if they’d found anyone alive to save. She wondered who he’d roll around with tonight to help him sleep.

She wondered if she was doing the right thing.

“Commander Scott wants to send you back,” said Nicci suddenly, softly.

Amber rolled her eyes, once more firmly in this moment, on this hill. “Crewman Scott can kiss my pudgy white ass.”

“He says there’s no room for stubbornness out here. He says if someone can’t do something to help, they need to get out of the way.”

“I was miles behind everyone else most of this damn day. I couldn’t have been more out of his way.”

But it bothered her. Because he talked a great line and people listened. And applauded.

“What does everyone else say?” she asked finally.

“Nothing much. Except Mr. Lassiter said that Mr. Lamarc told them to go with you, not him, and Ms. Alverez said she didn’t see him pulling people out of the ship when we were first waking up so he should just shut up, pretty much.”

“I didn’t pull anyone out of the ship either,” said Amber, startled.

“Yeah, that one lady. From the room next door.”

“Oh. Yeah. Lawsuit-Lady.”

“That was Ms. Alverez.”

“Oh!” Amber looked at the camp again. “Which one is she?”

Nicci stared at her.

“I don’t remember what she looked like.” Amber hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t think I looked, you know? I was kind of…out of it.”

Nicci frowned, but pointed. Scott, not quite at the end of her arm, immediately noticed and looked their way. Nicci put her hands back around her knees.

Amber glanced at her and uttered a huffy, humorless laugh. “What, are you afraid he’s going to write you up for creating dissension in the ranks?”

“He’s in charge.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He says he is. No one says he isn’t.” Nicci chewed at her lower lip for a moment, then lowered her voice to say, urgently, “And he really doesn’t like you.”

“He can suck it up. We’ve got real problems to worry about. I am not in the mood to compete in his personality contest.”

“Well, Sabrina says—”

“Who the hell is Sabrina now?”

Nicci looked surprised. She raised her hand to discreetly point, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Over there, with Lani and Rachel, see?”

Amber looked, but saw only a loose knot of people—Manifestors, indiscriminate to her eyes—sitting on the concrete bags to keep off the wet ground. “Which one? The redhead?”

“No, the…” Nicci hunched and whispered, “The black lady,” before nervously looking to see if she’d been overheard.

“I think she knows she’s black by now, don’t you?” Amber asked, smiling.

Far from returning it, Nicci recoiled with a look of embarrassed horror. And what had she expected, really? Neither of them had much of a sense of humor, at least not around each other. They were sisters; they loved each other, and nothing made Amber feel better than to know she was taking care of her sister, just as nothing made her feel worse when she couldn’t. Amber had fed her little sister breakfasts and dinners, washed her clothes, walked her to school, but they didn’t talk very much and they didn’t joke around even when they did.

“Okay, so who else am I looking at?” Amber asked, pretending to care as she looked back at the other people where ‘Sabrina’ sat with ‘Lani’ and ‘Rachel’. “Do you know them all?”

“I think so.” Nicci hesitated a few glances that way, her eyes darting from face to face. “There aren’t that many.”

“I guess not.” But there was no guessing about it. Forty-eight people was nothing. It was less people than had shared a classroom with her in school, less than half of the number that worked with her at the factory, less than a quarter of those who had lived at the apartment complex. There was nothing amazing in Nicci’s knowing everyone’s name; it was, come to think of it, a little disturbing that Amber didn’t.

The wind blew. Nicci sat and rocked beside her, hugging herself and rubbing at her sleeves. The ship burned.

“Do you think they found anybody?” Nicci asked. “You know…alive?”

“I don’t know.” Amber’s gaze drifted up to the men’s dorm mods, still burning high and hot. “I kind of hope not. We may not have a doctor or a medico or anyone like that, so if someone’s hurt…and they’d have to be hurt…what could anyone do about it?”

Nicci ducked her head and rubbed her arms some more. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’ll find the beacons?”

Amber glanced at the burning ship and away again. The sky was now completely black, but the Pioneer gave them more than enough light to see each other by, even at this distance. If there were animals, either they’d stay well away or they’d probably go investigate there instead of here. She wondered if Jonah was prepared for that. She thought he probably was.