She did run, but she kept stopping, cursing herself for the futility of it each time she flung a new door open on an empty room.

They were all empty. Every last one.

“Oh please, God, no,” she babbled, backing out of the last one—the one where Zru’itak had given birth—knowing there was nowhere else to look.

wait

A roar of rage and defiance on the stairs maybe only two or three flights up became a wet, gargling sound and a short, heavy tumble. Boots thundered down the corridor just over her head, running toward the stair.

Not away.

listen

Toward the stair…from the barracks?

Welcome to the next year of your life…Xzem lives with you now…

The baby wouldn’t be in the slave pens. It was living with Dkorm in the barracks.

Amber let out a scream of embarrassed frustration every bit as mindlessly as an angry lizard, slapping herself in the forehead. Then she turned around and ran for the stairs.

Three lizardmen came charging out of the corridor right as she reached the landing, but either didn’t see the sword in her hand or were too far gone to care. The one in the lead shoved her to one side and they all went furiously by, roaring as they threw themselves at the enemy bearing down on them. She was close enough now to hear the crash of their weapons.

Never mind. Get the baby. Get the baby, get Xzem, get out.

Amber started opening doors again.

Empty. Empty.

On the fifth try, a raider lunged out, knocking her to the ground as he sprinted down the hall, away from the stairs, and vanished around a corner, leaving a bloody trail behind him. Then empty. Empty.

She might have run right past the room where she finally found the baby if she’d stopped to think about it. From a purely logical frame of mind, the room wasn’t worth checking. The door hung open. It was quiet. Surely, it must be empty too.

But Amber was beyond reason by that time. She checked behind the door not because she hoped to find the baby anymore, but because she’d fallen into a routine of panic in which finding the next door and flinging it open was all she could do. So she opened that one.

And, looking right at the lizardlady kneeling beside the cupboard, turned around and bolted blindly for the next door. She made two running steps and staggered (just like Zhuqa, a part of her piped up) as what she’d seen belatedly processed. She turned around, uncertain, listening, and heard a very faint breathy sound—Xzem’s nearly silent tears.

The door was still open. A lamp inside was still burning, spilling a pleasant golden glow over Xzem’s thin, shaking frame as she curled herself around the limp body of the baby.

“Oh,” said Amber. (Ah, said Iziz.)

Xzem raised her head, still stroking and rubbing at the small dome of the baby’s head, its narrow chest. Tears continued to run out of her eyes even though her breaths were slow and deep and virtually soundless. She looked back down at the baby in her hands, rocked twice more, and finally sighed. She pointed.

Amber’s neck turned, turned, and ultimately dragged her eyes off Xzem. She stared instead at a thin, stained mat tossed up against the wall, a threadbare cushion, a rough blanket. And the leather-wrapped swaddle of Zhuqa’s baby, sleeping with its tiny fists tucked up by its snout.

Amber started forward, then stopped again and turned back to Xzem. To Rosek, who, so limp and quiet, had seemed as small in Amber’s eyes as a six-day old infant. She limped closer, touched Xzem’s shivering shoulder, and only then noticed the baby was still breathing. She opened her mouth—

—and closed it again. The baby’s head under Xzem’s gentle hand was round, much rounder than it should be. Amber looked at the room again and saw the rumpled bedding in the cupboard, the mat where Zhuqa’s baby slept, the open door. She looked and could almost imagine Dkorm drowsing in his bed with Rosek; someone, Iziz maybe, bursting in to raise the alarm; Dkorm dropping the baby to run. Not setting her aside, dropping her. Throwing her.

“I’m sorry,” said Amber.

Xzem rocked and stilled, rocked and stilled. The tears, soundless, kept falling. The crash and roar of combat got closer, not above them anymore, but right on the landing. Xzem showed no sign that she heard it. She held her baby and watched it breathe and sometimes tried to rock it.

Amber touched her arm. “We have to go,” she said, not knowing if Xzem would understand her clumsy lizardish or not.

Xzem sighed and looked at her.

“Please. We have to get out while we still can.”

“I wanted one,” said Xzem. Her voice was soft, but steady. “Just one to keep. After I have lost so many…” She looked down at Rosek and tried with trembling hands to arrange the baby’s arms over its chest, but the little limbs slipped off and dangled, lifeless. It breathed.

“Please!” Amber couldn’t bring herself to shake her, but she tightened her hand where it gripped Xzem’s arm. “We have to go now!”

Xzem looked at her. And then past her. Her expression did not change, but she brought the baby to her chest in a futile, shielding motion and closed her eyes.

Amber turned around.

For an instant, she thought it was Meoraq. From the moment that Iziz had burst in through Zhuqa’s door, that possibility, far-fetched as it was, had been shivering at the back of her mind. Even as she heard the carnage above her and knew it was more than one man, even her man, could make, she’d hoped…but it was still a shock to see him.

Except that the gore-splattered lizardman filling the doorway looked back at her without any recognition and she realized it was a stranger, this Ghelip person or some other raider like him. He roared, raised his swords, then focused in on Xzem. Something in his eyes sparked. He sprang at her, but it wasn’t until she saw the badly-braided loop of her own hair around his arm that Amber realized it was Meoraq after all.

And he was entirely out of his mind.

She screamed his name, flinging out her arms and legs like a screen in front of silent Xzem, but she couldn’t even begin to form the word ‘Stop’ before he hit her. His fist, wrapped around the hilt of his sword, hit her in the shoulder, spinning her hard and smacking her up against Dkorm’s cupboard door. She stumbled back, stunned, as Meoraq gave his hand an equally dazed glance and threw his sword aside. It hit the wall above Xzem’s mat, shocking Amber back to life. She leapt for the baby, but Meoraq snatched her out of the air and threw her. She crashed through a short stack of crates, her heels going madly up and dragging her over in a backwards somersault—ass over teakettle you know i’ve heard that all my life and never knew just what it meant—that ended with her sprawled, legs wide open, over a heap of dirty clothes, broken pottery, and the other detritus of Dkorm’s life.

Meoraq froze. His burning, blank gaze dropped.

“Oh God,” said Amber. She snapped her legs together. “Meoraq, it’s m—”

And he was on her.

The broken crates fell on top of him as he grappled with her. He stopped to beat them back, roaring and bashing indiscriminately with fists and sword, completely oblivious to her as she scrambled out from beneath him, but as soon as the crates were ‘dead’, he was looking for her again.

“Meoraq, it’s me! It’s Amb—”

He lunged, caught her by the same ankle Iziz had, and dragged her screaming back to him as he tore his loin-plate loose. He didn’t bother to fight with her. He didn’t have to. He was so much stronger that her struggles were completely beneath his notice as he alternately pulled and twisted at her legs, already pumping furiously at her hip and her stomach and her side until he found her opening and was in her.

She screamed his name, screamed her own, and then just screamed, groping behind her as best she could in the twisted position in which he’d bent her to slap and scratch and try in any way to make him see her. He came and just fucked harder, clawing at her stomach and kicking at the tiles to try and shove himself further and further inside her. His every breath was a snarling, hissing, slobbering grunt that spat hot, animal drool out in ropes over her skin. He didn’t know her, didn’t hear her, didn’t even want to fuck her. He was gone. And when he finally came out of it, he was going to find himself lying on top of a corpse, maybe still sunk in a hole in the back of her head like the mummies back at the ruined lab in Yroq.