“Amber?”

“Nicci, you were sitting right there when Jonah and I talked about this. You know what I think.”

Nicci’s arm bumped hers. She’d started crying again, quietly this time. Amber watched Scott move around the camp—inspecting his troops, improving morale, being a dick—amazed that her sister could still have any tears left after all the crying she’d already done. They said catastrophe stripped away the masks. A person could be almost anything with enough time to prepare for the part, but it took a disaster to show the world who you really were. Maybe even to find out for yourself. And she sure didn’t need the ship to crash to know Nicci was a crybaby.

‘And I’m a bitch,’ she thought disgustedly, and held out her arm in a silent invitation for Nicci to come in under it. “We’re going to be okay,” she said as they huddled together in the grass. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’ll be fine. I’ll take care of you, you know that.”

“I don’t believe you!” Nicci sobbed.

“Oh come on,” said Amber, smiling to hide how deeply those surely thoughtless words had hit her. “When have I ever let you down?”

“When you brought me here!” Nicci shouted, turning heads all around the camp. “When you pushed me around and made me come here! I hate you sometimes, Amber! I hate you!”

And with that, she shoved herself back and out of Amber’s stunned embrace, stumbling back to the group. Amber tried to follow, but her legs collapsed under her, all the hurt in the world not enough to undo that hellacious uphill hike. She had to sit and watch as the people at the fire took Nicci in, patting at her back and rubbing at her arms and closing in around her until she was lost to sight.

Scott looked over at her across the tops of all their bent, consoling heads. She couldn’t tell if he was giving her a commander’s frown of censure or just an asshole-smirk.

She turned her back on him, on Nicci, on all of them. She watched the ship burn.

* * *

Nicci came back, of course. And there had even been a mumble of apology and lots of hugging, but the hugging felt forced and when it came time to make their beds, they made them well apart, even though sharing heat would have made more sense. The tent Amber had half-killed herself lugging up here had been given to Mr. Yao, partly because Mr. Yao had carried the much-heavier packs of rations and had already agreed to do it again in the morning, and partly because Scott decided he had the authority to pass out tents and was being a dick about it.

If it had been anyone else…but it was Mr. Yao, who had apparently been told during the many hours it took Amber to catch up that it was his tent all along, and so even though taking it clearly made him uncomfortable and even though he offered to let the sisters share it with him, Nicci and Amber slept outside in the grass under the thin silver sheets of the laughably inadequate emergency blankets. Amber kept waiting for it to rain, since that would have perfectly frosted the shit-cake and some part of her was still tensely waiting for the other boot to drop, but it never did. If anything, the storm eased up a little and the night would have been quiet, except for the constant rattle of the wind shaking the tents and all those emergency blankets. Between that noise, the burning ship (and the smell that came with it, that horrible sneaky smell that was like burnt hair and batteries but was probably charbroiled people), and the aching of her overused muscles, Amber didn’t think it was possible to sleep.

But she did.

And in the middle of that first night, when she had been so sure that nothing could get any worse, Amber woke up to the most godawful howling roar she had ever heard or could have imagined. She was on her feet in an instant, aching muscles or not, and so, it seemed, was everyone else. Half a dozen filmy silver sheets went flying as the people who had been wrapped in them scrambled free to stand, helpless, and listen.

It roared again, this time in quick, forceful bursts, as if God Himself were bent close to the ground and shouting, “Ha ha ha!” at them in an especially vindictive fashion. Then, quiet. They all looked at each other, waiting for the noise to be repeated, but the minutes dragged on and nothing happened.

“What the fuck was that?” Crandall asked at last.

“Sounded like a moose,” said a woman. Amber couldn’t see which one, but it didn’t sound like Lawsuit—like Ms. Alverez.

“It sounded like a fucking dinosaur!” Crandall corrected with a shaky laugh. “Jesus, all night long, I been thinking, ‘What next?’ Now I’m gonna be eaten by a fucking dinosaur. Why the hell did I join the Fleet?”

“The wind could be carrying the sound, right?” someone said. “From miles away, maybe.”

“It didn’t come from upwind,” said Eric. “It came from downwind. I don’t think sound carries against the current.”

A flashlight came on and there was Scott, standing at the lip of the ridge and shining it down at whatever was on the other side.

“Are you crazy?” Crandall hissed, jumping to snatch the flashlight away.

Scott simply pointed back at the Pioneer, which was no longer going like a Roman candle but still glowed out strong like the dying ember she supposed it was.

“They can see us,” said Scott. “Furthermore, the wind is blowing right across us and down this hill, so they can smell us too. As long as they can already see us and smell us, I’d just as soon see what’s out there, especially if it’s thinking about coming up here.”

He put out his hand. After a second or two, Crandall gave him his flashlight. Scott switched it on and aimed it back down the ridge.

Amber couldn’t help herself. She limped over and looked with him.

“Go sit down, Miss Bierce,” he told her, sweeping the light back and forth over the dark water that was down there—the lake Nicci had mentioned—either looking for whales or having trouble remembering where the shoreline was. Although honestly, one was as sensible as the other. There was no law saying alien whales couldn’t roar and she sure as hell didn’t know where the shoreline was.

She needed to start making peace with this idiot.

“What do you think we should do?” she asked.

He gave her a long, narrow stare that faded out at the end into uncertainty before making a few more passes over the lake. He finally found the bank, but between them and it, the grassy slope seemed entirely empty. “I…I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Whatever it was, it seems to have moved on. But if there’s mud down there—”

“Yeah, there is. We checked it out earlier. I almost lost my boot.”

“Then it might have left footprints. They won’t tell us much, but we can at least get an idea of size.”

“Good point.” He gave the grass one more sweep with the flashlight and then nodded—a firm, commanding nod. “Okay, Bierce. You’re back on the team.”

She opened her mouth to point out that, as far as she was concerned, she’d never been off the team, but mutely closed it again. Just like when Nicci had come shuffling back with her half-hearted, “I didn’t mean it, Amber. You know that,” Amber just nodded and kept her fat mouth shut.

“Listen up!” Scott was saying, now oblivious to her and her status on the ‘team’. “We’re going to go down and check it out. Now we’re not going to go look for it,” he said as people began to rumble out their first startled mob-protests. “We just want to look at the mud and see if it left any footprints.”

The rumbling died down.

“I’m not saying everyone has to come along,” Scott continued. “But if there are prints, I think we’d all probably feel better for knowing exactly what they look like. And if there aren’t, I’d personally feel better knowing that you all saw there was nothing instead of me just saying it and you all thinking I’m covering something up.”