How horrible did a person have to be when hearing something like that made her feel a fluttering of hope? Amber rubbed her eyes and looked at her knees some more.

Scott must have saluted even though he didn’t say anything because Meoraq said, “Good. This is the last time we have this conversation, human. Get moving. We eat as we walk.”

And that was all. Meoraq crossed the camp and took his own tent down. Eric and Dag went over to help Scott, who didn’t seem to know what to do. Crandall took Nicci by the arm and led her a little ways off to whisper at her. The other humans huddled up and just tried to stay out of everyone’s way, the same as the lizardladies were doing on the other side of their dead fire.

Amber sat, alternately rubbing her stomach and her eyes, and finally got up. She headed for Xzem, because she couldn’t think of anyone but the baby who’d want to be with her after that, but she’d only taken a few steps when Nicci caught at her.

“Come on,” she said, turning Amber around and taking her by the hand. “Let’s go pee while we still can.”

Meoraq glared at them as he dismantled his tent poles, then used one of them to point. “No further than the ravine. Go and come back.”

Nicci showed him a salute. After a moment, so did Amber.

Meoraq, bending to pick up another pole, straightened up to give her a second look. “Don’t do that,” he said and went back to work.

They walked to the ravine, hand in hand. The wind was warm and light. It was about as sunny as it ever got on this planet, which meant that it was visible as a smudgy disc behind the clouds. A nice day.

They peed, then climbed back to the top of the ravine and sat down. “Funny how girls can never go to the bathroom alone,” said Nicci, plucking absently at blades of grass.

“What did Crandall want you to tell me?”

“He wanted to know if you were pregnant.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“Are you?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

Nicci shrugged and tossed some grass away. There wasn’t enough wind to carry it far. Most of it landed on her leg.

“It isn’t funny,” said Amber.

“I told him you throw up a lot when you get upset. At least you used to.”

It was Amber’s turn to pick at the grass. “I didn’t know you knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“You don’t like it when people think you have…you know.”

“Problems?” Amber offered with a listless smile.

“Feelings.”

That was ugly. The wind stayed warm.

“I used to figure that if you were bulimic, you’d be losing weight,” Nicci said after a little time had stretched itself out to the snapping point. “But you weren’t, so I figured you were fine. And then, at the end, when you were losing weight…I just didn’t care that much. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure it was.

The walls of the windbreak were coming down. Nicci twisted around to watch, plucking more grass. “Mom used to get morning-sick,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.” Most of the time, it was how she knew to go to the aborters.

“So did I.”

Amber closed her eyes and pressed at them.

“Want to see where they took it out?”

She didn’t, but Nicci leaned back and opened up her tunic to show the raised pink dash of the scar over her belly. It was surprisingly neat.

“They had something so I didn’t feel it,” Nicci said, rubbing at it. “And it kept me pretty high afterwards, too. It was nice, while it lasted. I don’t know how they knew I was pregnant. I wasn’t showing. But I guess they were doing these exams almost every day…and they’re not, you know, cavemen. They know what they’re doing. It’s amazing, really, what they can do without a real hospital. But when you stop and think about it…scalpels and needles and things…none of those are machines. Anyway, I guess they might have heard the heartbeat or something. I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry, Nicci.”

“I’m not. I didn’t want it. It was one of them.”

Amber watched her little sister close her tunic and tie up her belt again, trying to make that make some kind of sense. “What do you mean?” she asked at last. “That…That it would turn out like…like Scott?”

“That would be pretty bad, too,” Nicci agreed with another careless shrug. “But I mean it was one of them. One of the dumaqs.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Whatever. I saw it come out of me. I know what it was.”

“But…But they’re aliens!”

Nicci picked some more grass and dropped it.

“It’s not possible!” Amber said, louder.

“Commander Scott said it was probably the Vaccine.”

“What?”

“It mutates, remember? So that we don’t catch any alien viruses. We just sat there in the Sleeper for God knows how many years, soaking in that Vaccine, letting it change…whatever it felt like changing. You know the only thing that stops us from catching pregnant from any old…you know? Stuff? It’s that our bodies don’t know what it is, so it doesn’t take. Everything has to match up, you know? All these, I don’t know, millions and millions of connections.”

“But—”

“But we had the Vaccine,” said Nicci in a thoughtful way, “and here’s what I think. You know how regular vaccines work, right? They’re little teeny tiny pieces of the virus that makes you sick, just enough so that you make the, I don’t know, the anti-virus. But our Vaccine works on all of them. How is that possible, Amber? You went to the seminars. You remember all this. How can one shot be made up of billions and billions of different diseases, even alien ones?”

“Because it…it changes,” said Amber. “It finds the bug and it copies it so we can make our own cure before we ever get sick.”

“Right,” said Nicci, nodding. “It finds the bug. And it copies it. It takes our cells, with our DNA, and it changes them.”

Amber stared at her.

“Well…every new drug has unexpected side-effects, right? Headaches. Dizziness. Insomnia.” Nicci looked back into the sky to watch the sun climb higher. “Ours just may cause lizard-babies.”

Zhuqa. Zhuqa, over and over. It was impossible and she didn’t believe it and she didn’t care what Nicci thought or what she said she’d seen, but oh God, not with Zhuqa.

She looked back and saw Meoraq standing at the edge of camp with his arms folded, watching them while all the other lizardmen rolled the windbreak into bundles and shouldered supplies. Her heart ached once, as sharply as a stabbing, and then bled down into her belly.

‘He is never going to want to touch me again,’ thought Amber, almost calmly.

Then she bent over without warning and threw up again.

“Yeah,” said Nicci, watching her. “You’re just upset. That’s what I told Mr. Crandall. Come on. We’d better go.”

* * *

They walked the day out undisturbed either by men from Praxas or from Gann, not that there was much of a distinction. They had a stream to keep their flasks filled and good stony ground that would not show their tracks and always the cover of trees around them, so if that made a day good, it was a good day, but they made miserable distance.

Onahi’s men marched in pairs around the rest, relieving Meoraq’s burden considerably as he watched for the ambush that never came. The women were slow, still fearful of the open wilds and unused to so much walking, but they were obedient and not difficult to manage even so. The humans, now. Oh, the humans…

They walked as if they had only just learned how that morning, constantly staggering and catching at one another, constantly out of breath, constantly whining at his back. Meoraq wasn’t completely insensitive to their condition. He knew they had been penned all winter, ill-fed and ill-used. He knew they were trying. He let them rest an hour for nearly every hour walked and never said a word against it. Some muttered thanks, but not many. Some clustered around Scott and whispered, but not all. It did his bitter heart good to see that the polish was finally dimming on that gilded lump of ghet-shit, but he could still feel color itching in his throat all that interminable day.