“That’s enough.”

“But this could be important!” Mkole protested, looking wounded. “Statistics like these are absolutely vital in the process of—”

“Enough for now then,” said Zhan, but gently. “Just for now. Thank you, surgeon.”

“We need to make records,” Mkole insisted, retreating with the help of the burly Brunt to sit in the chair where Nuu had blown his brains out. He wiped at his eyes. “It’s important! We have to tell them about…about how it all ended!”

“It’s not over yet,” the Brunt rumbled, patting him, and Xaima, scowling at them with his arms folded and looking so much like Meoraq that Amber had to check and see that it wasn’t just his reflection in the video screen, flicked his spines and muttered, “It may as well be.”

“No! Listen! We have seen…” Mkole’s words faltered. For a moment, he merely stared at the camera, his eyes flicking back and forth like an actor reading his next troubling lines. It took Lashraq’s hand on his shoulder before he seemed to pull himself out of it, first with a shaky breath and then the continuation of his even, almost unemotional recital. “We have seen what is unquestionably only the beginning of a devastating wave of extinctions. You…You simply can’t imagine how quickly it happens. The collapse is…”

Mkole lapsed again into blank-faced silence.

“We still have some livestock in the middle districts,” Lashraq said, frowning. “Mostly ilqi. But I don’t think they’ll last much longer.”

“It turns out that cattle need feed,” Shev pointed out wryly. “And feed needs to be planted, grown, harvested and processed.”

“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with feeding them,” said the Brunt, looking very mildly surprised. “Ilqi, tuk-tuks, woolyvibs, and every other kind of cattle we keep, I promise you, even the so-called natural-grown ones—most of them are surgically altered to keep them from fucking and the rest probably couldn’t figure out how.”

“All the animals are dying,” Ichazul said suddenly. “Wild and domestic. It’s not the Wrath and it can’t all be the weather—”

“The weather’s part of it,” Lashraq muttered, glancing up as if he could see through the roof to the storm howling behind it.

“Of course, it’s part of it!” Ichazul snapped. “There’s no direct sunlight anymore, the fucking rain never stops until it freezes, and the ice storms never stop until they turn back into rain! But it’s only part of it. The real problem is the plants. Nothing grows like it used to. There’s something, some kind of chemical wash in the rain or maybe a parasite or a virus, but whatever it is, it’s killing everything.”

“Untrue,” the Brunt said. “Thorns and rockweed are growing. They’ll grow right up your boots if you stand still.”

Ichazul rolled his eyes and gave his spines an irritable flick. “Fine, it’s killing all the crops. By which I mean the stuff we need to eat.”

“By which you mean,” the Brunt corrected, smiling, “the stuff we’ve made dependent upon us. Think about it. Artificial pollination, climate control, nutrient-enriched soil…koitaan and pialhfruit were never meant to grow in Gedai. Are you really surprised it’s all dying? Everything that was already in the ground grew wild after the Wrath fell,” he added, looking directly into the computer’s camera. “But it takes men to grow crops these days and all the men were busy killing each other. So it all died.”

“I have tried on six separate occasions to grow riak,” Ichazul countered. Faint lines of color were becoming visible along his throat. “Riak! And I know what I’m doing, damn it! I’m telling you, it’s more than that! There’s something wrong, something in the soil or the rain or…something!”

“Who knows what we shot at each other?” Xaima asked, showing very little concern. “I don’t see any reason why you can’t both be right. It wouldn’t take much of a contaminant to kill off a grove of koitaan in Gedai, or for animals to eat all the crops and seed that were left. Because for a while there were animals everywhere. Not just the vermin, like you’d think, but everything. All the people were dead and the animals simply exploded to fill all that empty space. We were hip-deep in ponucs that first year and then they all dropped dead and the uzayas and ebii were everywhere until they dropped dead. You’d think all our pet apas would just go feral and be all right, but they were all gone by the third year.” He stopped there, his spines slowly lowering, and finally said, “I still can’t really believe that. I’ve had an apa underfoot all my life. But they’re gone. Everywhere. They just…”

“Collapsed,” said Mkole.

“And he’s right, it’s probably just the beginning,” Lashraq agreed quietly. “I don’t know if anything will be left at the end, but there’s always hope. We still have some ilqis and if we can take care of them, they’ll make it. There will always be yifu, I suppose, and the ghets seem to be doing all right.”

“Naturally,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at the side of his snout. “All the apas are dead, but we have ghets.”

“They’re little and furry. Maybe we can make pets out of them instead,” suggested the Brunt. “You’ve still got your apa’s collar, don’t you?”

“Fuck a fist,” Xaima snapped.

The Brunt’s spines flared lazily forward. “Is that an offer?”

“So we’ve lost most of our domestic animals and about half the native wildlife,” said Lashraq as his men visibly defused themselves, edging away from one another and taking slow breaths. “But several conservation parks seemed to have opened their doors in the first days of God’s Wrath and while most of the animals have died off, some of them actually seem to be thriving.”

“There are saoqs all over central Yroq,” Shev inserted with a laugh. “I mean it. They’re everywhere.”

“And corrokis,” grunted the Brunt. “Wild corrokis. In herds.”

“Right. The apas die. The woolyvibs die. The oshe? I haven’t seen even a track in the mud in more than ten years.” Shev leaned forward into the camera’s eye, spreading his arms and flaring his spines fully forward to make himself as impressively sincere as possible. “But there are corrokis all over Yroq. Chew on that for a while. Right this moment, there are probably five, six corrokis eating the shrubs off the Prime Chancellor’s lawn.”

“They’ll die out,” said Lashraq with finality, proving that whatever else he might be, he was no prophet. “Nothing that size could possibly survive now, but other animals might. And as long as we have something to feed on and something else to clean up after us, we have some hope of restoring and maintaining a natural balance.”

“Natural,” snorted the Brunt.

“I believe the world will survive. In our arrogance, we may have thought we could destroy it, but the world is more resilient than any weapon our mortal minds could dream up. All we can do is kill each other,” Lashraq said.

“But we are damned good at that,” agreed the Brunt, striking his chest with feigned pride. Shev and Ichazul laughed.

Zhan stared at his boots until they quieted. At last, he raised his hand and indicated the group as a whole. “Hard to believe this started out as a supply raid.”

Meoraq started again. “Raid?”

“I’m from Daophith, originally. After the cloud hit, somehow a fire got started and the whole city burned to the ground, along with Jezaana and Zethoze and half the northern states. Best thing, really. The cities were no good after the Fall, nothing but killing grounds for God’s Wrath. I ended up outside Ynanje with Shev and Ichi here, living in an old waystation. By the time the cold season came along, we were all six together and Shev made two fairly sky-shaking observations. The first was that God Himself couldn’t have arranged a better group to survive the annihilation of all life as we know it: soldier, mechanic, surgeon, historian, technician and botanist. The second was that we had no women.”

“And you all were starting to look pretty damn good to me,” Xaima remarked.