“Coming down hard enough,” Crandall commented. “Could probably just stand outside with your mouth open and drink just fine.”

“Give it another hour and you could probably drown that way,” Eric added. “Sheesh, did the lizard die in there? What is keeping him?”

“Keep your voice down,” Nicci said. “They’re sleeping.”

“Sleeping, hell,” Crandall muttered. “They’re probably screwing.”

Amber frowned, then caught herself reaching to scratch again. Dammit, this was going to drive her crazy!

He’d put some sort of plant in there that first day. She didn’t recall it itching—the pain had pretty much occupied all her nerve-endings at the time—but maybe that was the trouble now. He probably wouldn’t like it if she just opened up her own bandage and took his leaves out, especially since they might be working, but she couldn’t stand this and anyway, he was asleep and therefore did not get a vote.

Casting furtive glances at the alien snuggled up beside her, Amber began to extract herself from his uncharacteristically clingy grip. He slept on, oblivious, even when she picked his arm up and put it down again on her thigh. Next to go was the sweaty (and now smelly) blanket. She could see the bandage now. It wasn’t even tied on. Maybe it tickled because it was loose. Felt like a bigger tickle than that, though. God, it was all she could do not to get in there with both hands and just go to town.

She pulled the bandage off, already reaching with her other hand to gingerly pick away whatever voodoo he’d packed in there. For a moment, she thought it was rice.

For a moment.

Her breath caught, but she sucked it in and shrieked anyway, tearing up her throat like her screams were made of fishhooks. Meoraq bolted up, banged his head, and dropped back down with a snarl of sound she could not begin to process, much less translate. If she hadn’t been frozen by horror, she might have dug the maggots out then, but the split-second it took for her to act was all the time he needed to recover. When she did slap wildly at the boiling mass of their pearly little bodies, he caught her.

“The hell is going on in there?”

“Getthemoffmegetthemoffmegetthemoffme!”

“What is wrong with you, woman?! Lie still!”

She fought, but there was no fighting, not before he straddled her thighs and bore down on her from above, and certainly not after. Kicking was futile under the blanket. Bucking dislodged some of the maggots, but only so they could rain their repulsive little bodies down over her stomach and her hip and oh God what if one bounced high enough to land in her mouth?!

Screaming for release, screaming for help…just screaming. It was all she knew, all she was capable of. There were maggots in her!

Then the cupboard door flew open and there was her baby sister’s half-glimpsed face, staring at the lizard atop her in open-mouthed shock. And then she screamed.

Meoraq looked around, startled, because even an alien had to know that wasn’t a human scream of fear, but of rage. Little Nicci dove at him, clawing for his eyes, so that Meoraq was forced to release one of Amber’s twisting arms to shove her back. Amber immediately went for the maggots. He caught her again, swearing vigorously, and pushed her arms together, wrists-to-elbows. Now able to restrain them one-handed, he reared back and whipped his belt off. He used it to bind Amber’s arms together so that she was unable to scratch anything but her own arms, which she did in helpless panic.

The next time Nicci came for him, he was ready. He caught her in one hand and dragged her with him as he flipped athletically from the cupboard onto the floor, and from there across the room to the water bucket, where he dunked her head repeatedly.

Nicci’s screams turned to sputters. Amber’s went on, but they were dying in spite of her, torn to hoarse shreds by their own violence. No one else was making a sound.

Meoraq turned in a full circle, hauling Nicci with him, to face off against the rest of them. “Are you all mad or is it just your women?”

“Hey, do what you want with them,” said Crandall, holding up both hands as Amber howled for help.

Meoraq tossed Nicci in a heap by the hearth where she curled herself up small, sobbing, and returned to the cupboard. He studied Amber while she struggled in her bondage, then reached out and laid his hand over her mouth.

She stared up at him in weepy dismay, unable to believe he could be so calm when there were bugs eating her.

“I have Gann’s own headache,” he informed her after a moment’s meditation. “So I am going to ask just once what is wrong with you and you are going to answer quietly. Now. What is wrong with you?”

He removed his hand.

“I’m rotting,” she whispered, and felt tears drop hotly out of her even though she couldn’t blink. “I’m rotting! There’s maggots in me!”

Behind him, the others recoiled and immediately began to mutter at one another. None of them looked very upset, only a little wary and a lot disgusted.

Meoraq, on the other hand, just kept staring at her. After a while, he closed his eyes and went someplace private with his God. He was gone a long time. His eyes opened. His head cocked, demonstrating resignation and some small amount of humor. He took a deep breath and said, “I know there are maggots in you, insufferable woman. I put them there.”

And as Amber still reeled from that, he bent down and began to put them back.

The panic was gone and the adrenaline with it. She could do nothing but sob out wailing, incoherent pleas as he scraped up all the disturbed maggots and placed them carefully back in the wound. He put the compress back on. He loosely tied the bandage. Then, in that same calm, deliberate, God-alone-knows-how-hard-it-is-not-to-slap-you-woman voice, he said, “The maggots eat only dead flesh. They will clean your wound and at day’s end, I will wash them away.”

Amber cried harder.

“They will eat the beetles as well, but—”

“Beetles?!”

“—but you have had many good days of healing, and—”

“You put beetles in me too?!”

“—and I think the wound will not reopen if you are careful.” He gave the bandage a final light tug and glared at her. “Being careful means you will lie still. Agreed?”

Still weeping, she made herself nod.

He unbound her arms. She had to keep clutching her elbows to stop herself from immediately grabbing at her side. She could feel him looking at her, his stare almost as physical a thing as his irritation.

His thumb brushed at her cheek. That was all for a while.

“Get out,” he said, adding crossly, “Not you,” when she tried to sit up. “The rest of you. Get out.”

“It’s raining.”

Meoraq clamped both hands suddenly to his brow-ridges and bellowed, “I don’t care!”

Dag wisely shut his mouth and backed away.

After a minute and several deep breaths, Meoraq began to speak in the tight, rapid way of the kind of anger he usually reserved for dealing with Amber herself: “God has given me the strength thus far not to knock the head off your skinny neck but don’t try His patience, human, because mine is gone!” he finished at a shout and had to stop for some more deep breathing. “I suffer your presence as a gift to my woman’s gentle heart and for no other reason, so get up and leave my camp one damned hour or be turned out for all time at the point of my blade! Don’t whine at me! Go!”

A shuffle of feet and murmurs marked their obedience, but sniffling told her Nicci, at least, had stayed.

Meoraq let her. He sat down on the edge of the bed, prodded broodingly once at his brow-ridges, and then put his hand on Amber’s thigh and waited.

What was she supposed to tell him? Knowing intellectually that the maggots served a useful and even necessary purpose meant nothing compared to the feel of them crawling and writhing inside her own body. Inside her own meat! It wasn’t just a bunch of maggots, it was a premonition of her own mortality in a universe without a God—a playful sampling of an afterlife in which she was nothing but food for the lowest forms of mindless life—and Meoraq could never begin to comprehend that. Oh no, he rode around in God’s back pocket all the damn time!