An hour ago, he might have been here to stop it.

They had not left her body behind, only that of their companion. Perhaps she was alive still…or perhaps they had taken her corpse away as trophy. No, he must believe she lived! Lived and fought, as fiercely as the evidence here proclaimed, knowing he would follow.

“Sheul, O my Father, show me the way. Set me upon their path if she lives! Give me my right of vengeance if she does not!” He struggled with his fear and broke upon it, suddenly roaring, “How could You have sent her to me just to take her from me now?”

It was not for men to demand answers of God, no more than it was the recalcitrant son’s right to demand forgiveness of his father. Meoraq knew this. He bent his back beneath the weight of guilt and silence, one hand splayed open in cooling blood, and knew—for the first time in all his life—no love for God.

The moment passed away eventually, but the Meoraq who rose from his knees at the end of that bad time would forever be changed from the man he had been and he knew it. He collected his weapons, cleaned and sheathed them. He gave what fuel remained to the fire so that he could count his remaining provisions by its light and make them ready for the next day’s travel. Then he lay down and closed his eyes.

There was nothing he could do until morning.

4

Amber woke up to the sound of what she thought was an engine stuttering. In that moment, before she opened her eyes or even really had a chance to process sound or smell or anything lucid, she felt the overwhelming rush of relief that she had dreamed the whole damn thing. They’d said there would be no dreams in the Sleepers, but they’d been wrong, because she felt as though she’d been locked in that one for years. But she was awake now, which meant she was on Plymouth with Nicci right in the room beside her. There had been no crash. There were no lizardpeople. There was no Meoraq…

That hurt and it was the hurt that pierced her enough to drag her eyes open and see for herself what was real.

The first thing she saw was the wall. A leather wall, dyed black and stretched between some rough-cut poles, not so much to keep the weather out as to keep the light of their fire in. The crudity of this enclosure assured her at once that, for good or ill, she was still marooned on an alien planet with a race full of lizardmen.

Only after this fact sank in did she recognize that she was still bound—wrists to elbows, ankles to each other—and tethered to one of the poles holding the wall up. The belt that had gagged her had been loosened but not removed; it hung around her neck like a dog collar. The next thing she saw, what she probably should have seen first, was a small, slender lizardman—a lizardlady, maybe—hunched over with its wrists tied to a length of pole along with several other lizards, stuttering hoarsely without words.

Crying. All this time, she’d thought Meoraq had never seen anyone else cry but her. The sight of the lizard in a posture of such helpless, terrified surrender, coughing out its sobs as quietly as possible while the raiders (a lot more raiders, she noticed) talked around a campfire close by, pulled at Amber’s heart in a way only Nicci’s crying jags had ever been able to do before.

“Hey,” she said before she stopped to think that nothing she said was going to make any kind of sense to these people. “Hey, don’t cry. It’s…well, it’s not okay, but it will be. It might be.”

The lizardlady (she was positive now that was what the captives were. They had smoother, more delicate features and, more to the point, they appeared to have a breast. Only one. It wasn’t much—just a slight swelling in the center of each slender chest, more like a broad wedge than the round bubbles Amber had, but plainly a breast) gave her a fearful, shivering stare and began to stutter harder.

“What in the grip of God’s loving arms did I just hear?” The leader rose from his place at the fire, silencing his men with a wave of one hand before aiming it at Amber like a gun. “Did you just talk?”

She clamped her bloody lips together and said nothing. Her jaws still ached and the taste of blood was still bitter in her mouth. She could be as defiant as she wanted in her heart, but the rest of her didn’t want the gag again.

The raider’s leader was not deterred. He crossed the small camp in just a few steps to hunker beside her and prodded at her shoulder with one blunt finger. “Say something.”

“Fuck off,” she said. Stupid thing to say. She could have wished him a Merry Christmas for all the good it did her.

“God blows blessings up my ass,” someone else said, standing up. “It can talk!”

“You’re both imagining things,” said a third lizardman. “It’s just making sounds, those aren’t words.”

“Those aren’t dumaqi words,” the leader corrected. He drew a knife—he wore a pair high on his arms, like Meoraq—and showed it to her. “I think it’s time I had a better look at you, little one. Hold still and this won’t hurt. Toss around and I guarantee nothing.”

He did not untie her. He left her hands behind her back and her legs cinched together and simply cut along the seam of her tunic, severing each clumsy stitch she’d sewed on herself, until it just fell open. He grunted, flicking at strands of her hair with the tip of his knife, then stabbed it into the ground for safe-keeping and cupped her chin in his hand. He turned her head this way, then that, nudged at her lips, her ear, the ticklish flesh around some healing scratch on her cheek. Then he let go and dropped his gaze.

He touched her breast, then gripped it, kneaded it. His scales and the cold popped a nipple out for him; his thumb rolled over it thoughtfully, gave it a pluck, a careful pinch. He stopped when she winced, eyed her, then moved on to finger her bellybutton. He seemed to be trying to push his finger into it and when he finally decided that wasn’t going to happen, he leaned back on his heels and just grunted again.

“Where do you suppose it came from?” someone asked.

“Washed in on some storm.” He flexed the spines on the back of his head in a shrugging motion. “If you’d ever read the Prophet’s Word, you’d know that the first years after the Fall brought all manner of new and terrible life out of Gann.”

More than one raider cast his eyes skyward or hid them entirely behind a rubbing hand, but only the one called Vek, with a bandaged arm and a glazed look in his eye, was reckless enough to actually say, “Zhuqa, my missing hand is screaming at me in ways you can’t imagine. I can’t hear that piss-talk tonight and stay sane.”

“You go north far enough, you will find monsters. Hairy beasts as tall as three men standing on each other’s shoulders, swinging tails that can knock a man dead without even knowing he was there. Legless things in the rocky cracks that come up and bite, steal the feeling from a man’s body, and while he lies there unable to move, they crawl up into his slit and make a den in his guts. Even the trees have teeth there and will eat a man if he stumbles too close. I have been to the northlands,” he went on as his men murmured uneasily at each other. “I have seen all these things. This—” He gave Amber’s breast another rough, almost petting squeeze. “—is new to my eyes, but if they have monsters in the north, they must have them elsewhere as well.”

“This isn’t a monster.” Vek took a deep swallow from a small flask and came a little closer to them. “It’s a person.”

The leader grunted agreement.

“And I,” Vek went on, bending over to blow a particularly pungent and strangely sweet cloud of breath at her, “am going to kill it.”

“Ease off, Vek.”

“I mean to take a few days doing it, too,” he added, pointing at Amber. “I hope you understand me, you little smear of ghet-shit. I am going to cut off your hands and your feet and eat them in front of you.”