Ruins.

‘And it’s nineteen spans from Praxas if it’s a damned step,’ he thought. The boy was no better at gauging distance than he was putting a choke on a man.

Not even for a moment did he question whether these were the ruins where his Amber had been taken. Neither did he stop to wonder how many raiders were nesting in its belly. Some things were manifestly obvious. Some things didn’t matter. He knew.

* * *

She stole the fish hook. She meant to wait until the end of the day, the last possible minute, so the chances of being caught with it were at their lowest, but as much sense as that made, she was only able to stand touching them, sewing with them, staring at them, for so long before she just had to take one. And the opportunity, when it came, was too golden and glorious to overlook: Hruuzk, out of the room; all the slaves, occupied with work; the children, who were the most wildly unpredictable variable, up top with Hruuzk; and into this almost-perfect scenario, Rosek suddenly peed on Dkorm. Swearing, he scooped her up and stomped into the next room where there was water to get cleaned up.

Amber didn’t watch him go, didn’t hesitate, didn’t think. She stopped sewing on one hook, reached into the box, and hooked another on the inside of her sleeve where it was out of sight and could still plausibly have gotten there by accident. Then she went back to sewing. She attempted a few deep breaths—a slow-count of six, as Meoraq would say—but only made it as far as three before her nerve buckled and she looked around to see if she’d been caught.

Dkorm was still in the other room, scrubbing at himself with a rag and hissing at the baby. The slaves were right where they ought to be, necks bent, silent. Xzem—

Xzem was looking at her. She ducked her head when their eyes met, rocking Zhuqa’s baby and trying to coax him back onto her breast, but she had definitely been looking. What had she seen? What would she say?

She didn’t have long to agonize over it. Dkorm came storming back into the room while Amber was still sewing on the same hook, her hands too weak and fluttery-feeling to manage the simple knots. He shoved Rosek roughly into a crate and threw himself down, still wiping at his chest and muttering. His mood infected the other lizardladies with enough anxiety that her own went unnoticed.

The fish hook pulled at her sleeve, a thousand-pound piece of metal smaller than her thumb. Everything was relative.

Somehow the day passed. She sewed mindlessly on the same net for most of it, forced to go back over the same places again and again when she consistently put hooks in upside down or sewed folds of the net together. When she was finally finished, it looked worse than the very first net she’d done, but at least it was finished and she could go clutch at Zhuqa’s baby and calm herself down.

Xzem sat very still beside her and did not look at her.

The baby purred, its tiny hand squeezing Amber’s goliath finger. It slept and Amber cupped its small, warm head and stared into its snouted face and thought, ‘I’m going to get you out of this, baby. It’s you and me, all the way to the top.’

When it woke and began to bite sleepily at her breast, Amber gave it reluctantly back to Xzem and returned to her work-table. Ena had another net waiting, the last net. Amber got to work.

She had nearly finished when Hruuzk came at the end of the day to gather up his slaves. He took Meoraq’s mending kit and tucked it back into his belt. She protested. Stupid of her, but she wanted to finish the net and she was at least three lengths of sinew from done.

“Eh, it’s good enough,” Hruuzk told her, inspecting the net. “I’ll talk to Zhuqa about putting you in the kitchen. Shame to waste your energy doing sprat-work like this.”

He patted her on the head and gave her his usual, “Good girl,” and ambled away with his ladies all in a slumped, silent line. Dkorm left, taking Xzem and the babies. Amber sat down with a pitcher of xuseth oil tightly gripped in both hands and waited for Zhuqa. If he found the hook caught in her sleeve here in the workpit, she might still be okay. Maybe.

Hours, each one ticking away at its own elastic pace. She could hear herself breathing. She didn’t think she’d ever heard herself breathe in this room before.

Zhuqa came. He smiled at her, filling the doorway. “Where is my greeting?”

Amber took one step toward him and froze. The hand she usually put on his chest was attached to the arm wrapped in the sleeve with a fish hook in it. If she raised it up as high as his heart, he would be looking right down the fucking thing, wide as the Lincoln Tunnel, with the lamp on the table blasting light right on it. If she used her other hand, would he notice?

‘He’s noticing this pause, little girl,’ the ghost of Bo Peep drawled. ‘That’s what he’s noticing. Get the stick out and do something.’

Her next step was something of a lurch, but it was movement and it took her to him. She put her arms around him (the hookless arm considerably tighter than the other) and pressed her cheek to his chest instead.

“You must want something,” Zhuqa remarked, patting her back. “As it happens, so do I. Come, Eshiqi. We’ll take our game below.”

He took her out into the hall, keeping her at his side all the way to the stair. Her arm, the one with the hook, hung between them, threatening at each step to snag on his scales when he brushed against her. Amber began to feel distinctly light-headed. Was she even breathing? No, she was not. God.

At the stair, he went ahead of her, but there were guards at every landing, their faces all pointed up at him, at her. When he stepped off into the hallway, he stayed ahead of her, but there were guards at every crossway, standing at attention, showing their salutes. When he came to his door, he stopped to take out his squarish keys, and it was there, in the two short seconds it took him to unlock the door, that Amber pulled the hook out of her sleeve and put it in her mouth. She heard fabric tear even over the sound of the key turning in its lock, but Zhuqa never glanced back. The hook felt enormous clenched between her teeth, as if it were stretching out her whole face into a Halloween mask, but Zhuqa only smiled and beckoned for her to precede him.

“Zhuqa has come home,” he said.

She walked in and began undressing without waiting for his order. Surely it was her imagination that made her think he looked at her for a heartbeat longer than usual before he took her shift, her imagination that made her think he was more meticulous than usual when he felt his way through it. He tossed it aside the same as ever, that she was sure of, and then his hands were on her.

‘God, don’t let him feel my heart pounding,’ she thought. Prayed. No atheists in foxholes, wasn’t that the saying? Well, there were no atheists in Zhuqa’s room with fish hooks in their mouths, waiting for him to finish checking them for weapons either. In that moment, for as long as it lasted, Amber Bierce was a True Believer.

Zhuqa finished feeling between her thighs and stood up. He checked her armpits—sweating so much he has to notice that why is he pretending not to goddamn sadistic lizard—then moved on to lift her breasts in his hands, slipping his thumbs between them like always just in case she had a—fish hook—weapon stowed away beneath one of them.

And there he stopped.

For one illogical instant, Amber thought he’d found something. Her mouth tried to drop open in a gape; she clenched it shut and then had to relax her jaw so it didn’t look like she was clenching it. She stared at him, fighting not to stare, knowing she had to be either white as a sheet or blushing to the roots of her hair, or heck, both.

Still cupping her breasts, with absolutely no sign on his lizardish face that anything at all was amiss, Zhuqa bent down and nuzzled at her throat.