It was a big one, a male in its prime, and it was breathing almost as hard as Dag after its run. There were a few broken spears still stuck in its side, quivering along with the rest of its quills as it raked a paw over the ground, tearing up roots and winter-hard earth with ridiculous ease. It stared them down and in its eyes, she could see the ponderous weight of its animal thought: People running was one thing. People standing, challenging…that was something else.

Amber’s instinct was to run, but she made herself stand her ground. This wasn’t a hungry predator, just a big, mean animal that handled being startled and stabbed at badly. It was dangerous, yes; it would chase whatever ran and kill whatever it could, but it wouldn’t die trying. If the odds weren’t in its favor, it would go.

“Get up,” said Amber, moving closer to Dag and the Manifestors. “Everybody, come together. Don’t r—”

“Run!” Scott shouted and the two Manifestors with Dag immediately bolted for camp.

The kipwe roared and charged them.

There wasn’t time to think about it and if there had been time, she’d have only thought what a stupid thing she was about to do. She dropped the useless spear and ran to meet it, screaming in perfectly mingled fear and frustration as she swung the heavy kzung and hit the kipwe square in the throat. Her moment of surprised triumph was damned short; the blade skated harmlessly over the creature’s quills and drove itself in somewhere in the chest. Suddenly the hilt in her hands was shoving back at her. Amber flew back, hit the ground, caught a glimpse of half a kzung with two tons of kipwe behind it coming right at her, and rolled. The hilt hit the ground where she’d been and the rest of the blade vanished into the beast’s body. The kipwe bellowed, backed up, then saw her on the ground. Amber lunged out to grab the spear, which she knew damned well was nothing but a pointed piece of dead wood. She scrambled up, turned around right as the kipwe stood up on its hind legs, and stabbed as it swung.

She missed its eye, missed its nose, even missed the gaping open target of its mouth, but the stick went in somewhere. She felt it puncture flesh in the split-second before its paw connected with her side. There was no sense of flying, only the second, immediate-seeming impact as she hit the ground and slid across it. Damp earth sluiced up over her arms and into her face, clogging her nose, filling her mouth with the taste of the grave she wouldn’t even get. She rolled over, spitting and swiping at herself with one hand and digging frantically for another weapon—a stick, a rock, one of the Ancients’ plasma cannons, anything!—before climbing to her feet again. She had nothing but her bare hands, but she ran at it again, because it was just a kipwe for God’s sake, and maybe it would turn around if she charged it, maybe it would run.

The kipwe reared again…then listed, swatted drunkenly at its face. It bellowed, shook its head hard, grunted, and then toppled over.

Amber slowed her run to a stagger and then to a stop. The beast stayed down. It did not appear to be breathing. She stared at it for a while, still breathing hard, alert enough that she knew she was winded, not so much that she knew she was hurt, and finally took the last three steps and gave it a cautious kick.

It did not move.

“No way I killed it,” she said to herself in a remarkably calm and conversational tone.

The kipwe did not reply. It was very dead.

Amber started to bend over for a better look, but pain washed out from her side enough to prevent that. She clapped a hand over the hurt (wet hurt, not a great indicator of things to come) and knelt instead, prodding at the beast’s body.

She found fragments of her spear imbedded harmlessly in its cheek, beneath the spiky tuft of its hilarious muttonchops where it had done no good at all. It took a little longer to find the kzung, buried to its hilt in the thick, prickly quills. Getting it out meant tugging, shaking, and finally planting a foot on its head and heaving back in spite of the hell in her side. The kipwe’s wound wheezed at her, blowing a foul slip of air in her face with a wet, farting sound. Swimmer’s air, they called that. She’d stabbed the kipwe through the lung.

And it had still taken it that long to die.

“Jesus,” said Crandall behind her.

She turned around, holding Meoraq’s sword limply in one hand, trying to think of what to do next. People saved, check. Dead kipwe, double check. Moving on.

“I’m going to need your help cutting it up,” she announced. “There’s no reason it should go to waste, you know? Oh. And I may have a few splinters.” She held a hand up and sure enough, there were half a dozen kipwe quills sticking out of her arm at various points. “So if you think you can grow up just long enough to take them out without masturbating all over me…”

The rest of that bitchy comment lost itself in Crandall’s silence. He was still staring, not at the kipwe, but at her.

Amber looked down, past another half-dozen broken quills all down her side to her left hip. “Goodness, that’s a lot of blood,” she remarked, watching it stream down over her thigh.

And then the world turned white.

* * *

She came around slowly, not to the pain, which was tremendous, but to the relatively innocuous sound of laughter. She’d been tucked beneath a blanket, which was hot and scratchy and unbelievably heavy on her right side, where the pain lived. Her skin felt far too tight over the swollen, throbbing hell of her side, threatening to split whatever bandage had been tied over her. It hurt to breathe, it hurt not to breathe, and she was reasonably certain it would hurt to open her eyes, so she just lay there and concentrated on not embarrassing herself with a lot of loud moaning. The laughter came and went, curiously high-pitched for a camp mostly filled with men…and slightly crazed.

Actually, a lot crazed. Less laughter than full-on lunatic gibbering. She wasn’t the only one who seemed to be concerned; she could hear Scott holding court close by in a tone of deep concern. He was using all his old familiar catch-phrases, too. Explore our options. Make decisions. Take command. The only thing he didn’t do was tell the people laughing at him to shut up and she kind of wished he would.

‘No one’s laughing, little girl,’ Bo Peep told her.

Beneath the heavy blanket and the heavier pain, Amber pulled the scattered pieces of her brain together and listened.

That sound…that high, chattering, lunatic sound.

Her eyes heaved themselves open. She tried to bolt upright and managed only a slightly deeper, choking breath. Her cry of, “Those are ghets!” came out as little more than a hoarse gasp and a rusty groan. The world went briefly grey on her and came very slowly back.

“She’s awake,” Crandall said in the distance.

A blurry shadow grew over her—Scott, looking down. “I don’t think so,” he said after a moment’s study.

Amber tried again to speak and again could only push air around. She was beginning to think she might be seriously hurt this time.

A second blur appeared, bringing with it a cool hand that wiped the sweaty hair out of Amber’s face. A woman’s hand, although not a soft one. Her mother’s hand, she thought, and it was her mother’s face leaning over her now, looking haggard and bitter and way too solid for a dead lady. “Amber?”

Nicci? Impossible. Nicci was half this woman’s age. But no, it was Nicci, and as soon as she realized it, much of the woman’s hard edges seemed to soften until she could see her baby sister above her instead of their mother’s ghost.

“You look like Mama,” Amber tried to say, but of course, all that made it into the world was a whispered, “…mama.”

“She’s delirious,” Scott declared, sounding annoyed and she couldn’t really blame him. He hated it when his speeches were interrupted.