“Zhuqa seems to think that you’re smart,” Dkorm was saying, running his thumb idly up and down along his shaft as he toyed with her hair. “But you’re not smart enough to know that making me happy is much better for you in the long term than showing me how fierce you can be.”

All this with his dick right in front of her. Amber felt a moment’s nostalgia for the days of Crandall and subtle innuendo. She started to twist her face away from the hook-tipped thing Dkorm kept aimed at her, but then flinched a little and stared right at it.

“I wish you would take a stab at me, Eshiqi,” he said, and let her go again to grip his cock, squeezing once wistfully before pushing it back, grimacing with effort, into his slit. “There’s not a scale on me you could poke through with that toy you had, but if you at least tried, maybe Zhuqa would give me one hour to poke b—”

Amber reached out and caught him by the narrowing tip of his cock before he could force it all the way out of sight. He let go with a startled hiss and out it came, thrusting through her fist in oiled urgency until the knot at its base bumped her hand.

And there it was.

Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing, she’d thought, looking at the fish hook, but she hadn’t meant it, not really. Not even Meoraq could magically make that insignificant bit of metal into a murder weapon when every part of a lizardman’s body was armored and every vein protected.

Every vein…but this one. That thick, black, throbbing vein that crawled along the surface of the bulging knot at the base of his cock.

“Get off me,” Dkorm warned, glancing over his shoulder at the workpit door, but he didn’t try to pry her off. Zhuqa could walk in at any moment, and if he found her here with her hand on this man’s dick, he’d probably do all the killing she could ever want for her, but it wasn’t Dkorm she wanted dead.

‘I could do it,’ she thought, stunned. ‘Even with a fish hook.’

“Get off me, I said!”

Amber looked up past the slick head of his cock to his strained, somewhat dazed face. His spines were low, but not flat, and the color was coming in at his throat. If she gave him a stroke, she had no doubt that would be the end of his objections.

‘Because he’s sick,’ she thought, staring. ‘Once his neck lights up, it all about sex…or killing…and all they want to do is more of it. It’s only, what? Seventeen years of training that keeps Meoraq more or less under control—’

Training that Zhuqa shared. Training that just might give him that one moment’s pause to think, ‘Hang on, this is suspicious.’ And then he’d kill her.

And how was she going to smuggle a fish hook out of the workpit anyway? More importantly, how was she going to smuggle it into Zhuqa’s room? He’d strip her as soon as he got her home and as soon as he saw a weapon, even if it was a silly little finger-length fish hook, he’d kill her.

And even if he didn’t, even if by some miracle she killed him, there was no way out except up ten flights of stairs, past ten pairs of guards and then past all the rest of them living in the ruins on the surface before running out into the wildlands to get lost and die anyway.

‘So stay,’ she thought in the voice of her dead mother. She looked at her hand on Dkorm’s dick and it was Bo Peep’s hand. It was Bo Peep’s heart inside her feeling nothing but hopelessness and hate, feeling it so completely that it was almost comforting. ‘Stay and be Zhuqa’s Eshiqi. Be a mother to his kids. Help train the new slaves he brings home for his men to fuck. Suck it up or blow it out, little girl. There’s no such thing as a fate worse than death.’

In the stillness of that moment, she was tempted.

“Fuck you,” Amber whispered, appalled. She let go of Dkorm and wiped her hand on her shift.

He socked her in the ear. Probably not as hard as he could have, but hard enough. Whether he hit her for grabbing his cock or letting go, she didn’t know and he didn’t explain. He just knocked her aside and pulled Yllgami back to finish him off.  Less than a minute later, he was back on his throne of crates and sacks, swearing at Rosek and drinking.

Amber sat on the floor. The other women worked around her. She watched them; they did not watch her.

Meoraq was looking for her. She still believed that, but every time she woke up beside Zhuqa, it was getting harder to believe he’d find her. And if God told him to get on with his life—if he saw a funny shape in the clouds or if the fire burned a weird way or if any one of a thousand random things happened—he’d do it.

Maybe he’d already done it. With Bo Peep sitting so close beside her, it was easy to imagine him coming back to camp and praying instead of looking for her. She could see him kneeling beside the dead raider all night and then leaving him to rot on the ground in the morning. Why burn him? He’d gone to Gann. He was corrupted beyond all forgiveness. And so, perhaps, was she.

‘No one is going to save you, little girl.’

“Fuck you,” Amber said again.

Bo Peep shrugged inside her head, smiling her mean, drunken smile. ‘Sometimes you have to say the bad stuff. Hope is nothing but pretty lies, like those storybooks they gave you in state-care, where the dragon always dies in the end and the prince climbs the tower and carries the prisoner away to be a princess forever and forever. Bullshit, baby. In the real world, nobody saves you. In the real world, it’s live in Zhuqa’s House…or die there.’

Amber opened her mouth to tell her mother’s fake ghost to fuck herself for a third time, but couldn’t. Bo Peep was right. And since the only part of Bo Peep that was still around was a figment of Amber’s own imagination, she guessed she knew what she was going to do.

She was going to escape.

* * *

They finished three nets by the end of the day, with little enough for Amber to do that she also learned how to repair them. She needed the distraction, badly. With nothing to think about except the hook—not even the hook, but the possibility, the potential, of the hook—she had become tense enough to make her neck and back ache. Aching muscles needed to be stretched. Walking helped the stretching, but made the other lizardladies distinctly nervous. So she picked up a pair of the odd wooden tools Ena was using and watched until she figured out how to fix a hole in a fishing net.

She kept at it long after the rest of them were gone. Hook and pull, wrap and knot, wrap and hook. It made the time pass.

Zhuqa came. Amber put Meoraq’s needles back in Meoraq’s mending kit and set it carefully on the table where she had been working. Then she turned around to face him, tipping back her head in case he wanted a nuzzle. He did. She stood very still until it was over and then followed him out into the hall.

Alone in his room, Amber took the initiative, stripping away her clothes before he gave the order and standing patiently by while he searched her. She could feel the plan throbbing behind her eyes like a headache, until she could not bear to meet his gaze and had to look away.

“You should know,” he murmured, stroking at her throat, “I find coyness deeply arousing. Come and greet your man, Eshiqi, before we share our meal.”

Amber stepped close, still staring at the table to keep her thoughts, her plan, away from his too-piercing stare. She pressed her cheek perfunctorily to his chest and her hand to his groin, thoughts racing. She loosened his belt to work her hand beneath his metal loin-plate and kneaded at him, seeking the hidden hardness of his cock beneath his skin.

“Enough of that,” said Zhuqa, chuckling as he patted her hip. “Food first. Then we play.”

“Believe me, I’m not playing,” said Amber, resisting his nudge toward the table and moving her hand instead to his slit.