A clumsy scattering of salutes apparently satisfied Meoraq that he was still a menacing badass when he wanted to be. He turned around, and for a moment, he and Amber were unavoidably faced off.

The color at his throat visibly brightened. He turned his head, stared at the wall beyond her for a long, long time in silence while his scales faded to black. Then he left.

Only after he was gone, as the guards began to mutter and the humans whisper, did Amber realize what Meoraq had entirely forgotten.

“Hey,” she said.

The lizardmen all looked at her.

“Do any of you understand English?” she asked.

Three pairs of eyes stared blankly back at her. One of them looked at another. “Is that thing talking?” he asked.

“What are you telling them?” Scott demanded.

“Nothing. We’re going to be incommunicado for a while, that’s all.” Amber gestured at the lizards, all of whom looked alarmed to find themselves at the end of even a casual wave, all but Xzem, who actually eased a little closer to Amber’s arm. When Amber looked at her in surprise, Xzem ducked her head and offered up the crying baby.

Scott recoiled violently when Amber took it. “Jesus Christ, is that thing yours?”

Heat flared in her cheeks. She didn’t let that stop her from tucking the baby down into her wrap where it immediately quieted against her breasts. “No, of course not,” she snapped.

“Where’d you get it, if it’s not yours?”

“Stop saying ‘if’ like you think you’re going to catch me in a lie. It’s not mine!”

“You’re being awfully sensitive about it,” Scott said and Crandall muttered, “Hormones, man. She just had a baby.”

“Stop it!” Nicci hissed, so suddenly and with such violence that they all looked at her, even Amber. Nicci still had tears on her face, a firelit shine that made her anger look a lot like hate…and hate made her look like their mother. “We haven’t even been out of the cage one whole day and here you all are, cutting into her again!”

Some of them looked away. Only some. Crandall just looked back at her and Scott’s eyes turned, if possible, even colder and more contemptuous.

After a long, ugly silence during which Amber was only too aware of the watching lizardmen, she finally cleared her throat and said, “There were these people. Exiles. Bandits. That sort of thing. The baby was their leader’s. I couldn’t leave it.”

“What were you doing there?” Scott asked.

She stared at him for a moment, utterly dumbfounded by the tone of undisguised suspicion he was throwing at her. “I was captured,” she said slowly. “What the fuck do you think I was doing there? Selling Space-Scout cookies?”

“I don’t know…maybe Meoraq sold you to them. He sure acts like a raider. For all I know, he’s one of them. Maybe even their king.”

Amber had just enough time to think clearly (very clearly, that alone should have been a clue) that nothing Everly Scott said was ever worth a damn and she needed to be a big girl and let it go. Then she was on her feet with the baby pressed to her body with one arm, clocking Scott right in his big, fat mouth.

Scott staggered. Crandall started to hop up only to sit down again very fast, so that his legs kicked comically out in front of him. No one else moved and the reason no one else moved, Amber discovered upon a backwards glance, was because the guards had all drawn weapons. They might not speak English, but clearly they knew whose camp they were in and who put the scars on her shoulder.

“Call them off,” said Eric at last, in a strained let’s-be-reasonable voice.

Now Amber gaped at him. “Did I fall through a hole in time?” she demanded. “These are still not my trained alligators!” And just to make the moment complete, she turned to the guards and made settling motions with her hand, doing her best to say, “Easy…down…please,” in lizardish while pissed off right to the red line. As they slowly sheathed their swords, she swung back on Scott and said, “If you want to stay here, you better have a goddamn good apology for me in the next five seconds. One—”

“Jesus fucking Christ, sorry!”

“Two!” shouted Amber, and the baby added its own furious, if muffled, howl.

Scott put his hands up like a man being mugged. “I’m sorry, Bierce! Goddamn! I just got out of a fucking cage! Pardon me all to hell if I’m not in love with the fucking lizards!”

The word three hovered on her lips, but in the end, she swallowed it. “Fine,” she said, patting at the baby through her wrap until it settled. “You’re on edge. I’m on edge. We’ll put it behind us.”

“Jesus!”

“But you better believe that was your only free pass.” Amber glared at him. “Your days of throwing your attitude in my face are all over. You’re in my camp now and if I don’t like the way you talk, commander, I will leave your ass behind!”

He opened his mouth angrily…worked it for a bit…and finally closed it again, brick-red and actually shaking a little. He got up and moved as far away from her as he could go while still being within the boundary of the leather walls. Crandall went with him. After a moment, Dag and Eric joined him. Then they were all over there, all but Nicci, muttering at each other under the wind and looking at her with mistrustful eyes.

“What do you think that was about?” one of the guards asked quietly.

“I know it was bad,” another replied, letting his hand rest on the hilt of his sword. “And I know it’s getting worse by the moment.”

It was. And it was her fault as much as Scott’s. She only had to look at them, what was left of them, to know they’d been through hell and the first day out of it was way too soon to expect them to shake it off. Amber took a deep breath (one for the prophet) and let it out slow. She sat down.

Nicci came to sit with her, warm and alive and so much older than Amber remembered. It was like looking into her mother’s face, that last day, and knowing it was Death you were looking at. Knowing it was looking back at you.

“I’m sorry,” Amber said.

Nicci nodded without looking at her.

“This isn’t how I wanted this to go. You don’t know how I’ve dreamed of this moment…and I’ve already fucked it up.”

Nicci shrugged.

The baby in her arms began to purr.

“Was there…” Did she really want to know this? “Was there really a cage?”

“Yes.”

“How long…I mean…”

“I don’t know. You couldn’t count the days in there. Or maybe you could. I didn’t try.” Nicci stared at the fire some more, then shrugged again. “There was still snow on the ground, though. How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know,” Amber admitted. “Meoraq made us stop for the winter. We only just crossed the mountains when I got caught. That must be the official welcome in Gedai.”

“Must be.”

The quiet was not an easy one. The lizards watched them. So did Scott.

Nicci sighed. She bent her head—an eerily lizard-like gesture—and said, “We were walking along in this tunnel, you know? Only it wasn’t just a tunnel. It was a…like, a pipe. A sewer pipe. A storm drain, really. And I remember thinking how stupid that was, because of how much it had been raining. But it was mostly empty that day, and Commander Scott said it would be dry and there wouldn’t be any animals and it had to be safe because the bots were going in and out. We didn’t want to, but he kind of went off on it, you know how he does. So we went in anyway. And I knew it was stupid.”

The baby bit her, whimpered, and bit again. Amber brought it out, wrapped it regretfully in its smooth hide, and gave it back to Xzem. Nicci waited for the end of this process without watching it, then went on in the same dull, inflectionless voice.

“When it flooded, it happened all at once. And I know how that sounds, but it’s true. There wasn’t any warning. It wasn’t like it was raining and the water rose up. It had been raining for days and the water was still pretty much just around our feet, and then suddenly there was this wall of water coming at us. It hit and we all went away, all mashed together, and that was pretty bad,” said Nicci in a vague, thoughtful tone. “The lights all went out. It was pitch black and so loud. Everyone was grabbing at everyone else and all you could hear was the water and the bubbly sound people make…you know…when they drown.”