“Woman!” he bellowed. “Don’t paw at me!”

“Then don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”

He snatched his pack out of her hands and glared right back at her. “This is not a discussion. We do not stop until I give that order!”

“So what I want doesn’t matter?”

“Not in this instance.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Don’t whine at me. Start walking.”

Amber had often heard it said that after a while, married people achieved such a state of togetherness that they could finish one another’s sentences. Apparently, there was an intermediary step in which one could see how the sentence was supposed to go without actually finding it necessary to fill in the blanks.

“I haven’t asked for a damn thing in—”

“That doesn’t buy my assent for—”

“Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t—”

“God Himself commands—”

“I said a good reason, not more of your Bible-thumping bullshit! Why can’t you just admit—”

“Why can’t you?!”

They stopped as if by some prearranged signal to allow thunder to smash overhead and roll away behind them.

“You don’t want to go down there because you don’t want to find them,” Amber said at the end of it. She was shouting, she supposed, but only because the storm made it impossible to be heard any other way. The thunder was still rolling, no louder but no softer, like a distant train that just kept roaring by.

His eyes narrowed, sparking white with reflected lightning. “You don’t want to look for them down there,” he countered, also shouting. “You just want to hide from a little winter storm!”

“Little winter storm? Look at that!” She pointed back the way they’d come, and because she was pointing, she looked that way too.

The last time she’d seen it, the storm had stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, all churning wind and the flashpop of lightning, black as a solid wall above the barest stripe of sky that could be seen beneath it. Now it was a lot closer and Amber saw for the first time thin tendrils of black, dangling down from the storm above and groping at the ground below if it were pulling itself along in some lurching, predatory fashion.

Thin tendrils…dozens and dozens of them…

A wall of tornados, as far as the eye could see.

“Oh my God,” she said, except she might have only mouthed it. She couldn’t hear herself speak, couldn’t hear anything at all but the sudden pounding of her heart and the howling of the storm. Her pointing arm dropped slowly; her other arm came up like a counterweight to clutch at her throat, which had tightened painfully. All at once, she couldn’t catch her breath. “Oh my God,” she said again and she heard it this time, just barely. “Meoraq, look at that!”

He looked, but his annoyed expression never changed.

“We have to get inside!” she said (not shouting, not yet, or if she was, it was just because the wind and rain were so loud. She wasn’t panicking. Amber Bierce had never had one moment of panic in her whole life). “Right now!”

“Not here.”

“We’re going to die!”

He rolled his eyes, then took her arm and pointed to a rocky outcropping in the middle of the empty plains, so far distant that she could see nothing beyond its general shape and some shadows around its base that might be crevasses or maybe only dark brush. “Do you see the caves? We’ll weather down there.”

“We’ll never reach it! There’s shelter right here! Damn it, Meoraq, we have to get out of this now!”

As if God Himself agreed, lightning slammed into the ground not half a mile away—which still seemed like a long ways off, until it was lightning hitting there—shattering the skeletal finger of a lone tree down to the ground. The storm-monster in the sky picked up its splinters, tasting them as it scoured the earth and tossing away the bits it didn’t like.

Meoraq looked at that, too, but his expression hadn’t changed. “There is no shelter here,” he told her, raising his voice to a bellow in order to be heard, and turned around.

Amber stood with her mouth hanging dumbly open and the rain sluicing in, watching him walk away. Then she looked at the storm and the storm looked back at her. Never mind how that sounded, even in the privacy of her head, it looked and it saw. It hovered for a moment, drawing up all of its little grasping fingers, seeing her, seeing Amber alone and helpless, and then it opened the roaring funnel of its mouth and came right for her.

She panicked and ran.

Her boots skidded in the wet grass; twice, she tripped over juts of stone and went tumbling, but she was always up again at the end of it and if there was pain, she didn’t feel it. When something snagged at the back of her tunic, she tore it off without stopping, and ran half-naked in the bruising rain until she hit the wall that surrounded the ruins. The towers that were arranged at points around it lit up all kinds of yellow when she climbed over, but nothing shot her down. As soon as she fell into the street—the flat, solid street—she was off and running again.

She didn’t think about where she was going. The dumb animal directing her flight kept her going past this building or that one, dismissing them without explaining its reasons. Notsafe was the closest she came to a real thought. Those three long structures so much like airplane hangars, open at both ends and filled with half-glimpsed hunks of machinery, notsafe. That tall, three-story building with the windows all around it, mostly broken into jagged-glass smiles, notsafe. Those rows of solid-looking boxes at the other end of the ruins, they were all right, but the all the empty streets and slowing fences standing between her and them, notsafe.

But she had to go somewhere. She had to go somewhere or die here in the empty street. Amber staggered to a halt, gasping for breath and spitting out rainwater, but behind her eyelids, the world suddenly lit up red. Through the storm’s roar, she heard a popping sound, followed by an almighty crash of thunder that sent her screaming forward again. There was a light ahead of her, burning calmly above a door, and in the split-second before she crashed up against it in a panicked attempt to beat it down, the door just opened.

She hurtled over the top of the bot standing in the doorway, hit the polished floor boobs-first and went spinning wild across the room until she crashed into an extremely solid object.

“Please present—” the bot began, and then there was a shunk, a hot-smelling pop, and Meoraq kicking the husk out into the rain.

She opened her eyes and saw him with the storm howling at his back. He dropped her pack on the floor, then her spear (she couldn’t even remember losing them), and finally tossed her tunic—his tunic, really—down on top of them. He looked wet and muddy and pissed.

Things kind of greyed out for a moment, or perhaps she only thought they did because of the suddenly silencing effect when the door shut again. Amber tried to get up and fell uselessly onto her face. Nothing seemed to be broken, but the run, the rain and her disastrously comical fall had taken all the breath out of her. She listened numbly to Meoraq’s footsteps striding swift and heavy toward her (he didn’t slip; life was full of unfairness) without moving.

“Light,” he said, picking her up and thumping her unceremoniously on her feet.

A light came on overhead. It did not happen quickly, as of someone flipping a switch, but slowly, sickly, accompanied by an insectile whine of effort that grew until, just before Amber clapped her hands over her ears, it died away entirely and left the lights brightly burning.

Meoraq glared at her until her eyes started stinging and then he turned his back on her. She saw his hands draw into fists and slowly uncurl. He took six breaths and said, “I cry. We’ll stay here until the storm passes. Put your clothes on.”