“So with the lofty goal in mind of acquiring, in no particular order, food, water, supplies and sex,” said Zhan archly, “we set out from our cozy waystation to see what was left of the world. Somehow, that turned into a two-year trek across the fucking country, stopping in at every house with a lit window along the way.”

“Got dipped once in a while, didn’t we?” Shev grunted.

Zhan acknowledged this with a shrug of his spines. “So. The Brunt back there pointed out that we were probably the first people to really get a good look at the world beyond the one little piece we inhabited after the Fall and we had what he called a divinely-ordained obligation to record our findings.”

“Fuck you, O noble leader,” said the Brunt, amused.

“Records are important,” Mkole whispered, and the Brunt patted his shoulder.

“Records are important,” Zhan agreed, his spines lowering. “Because when we sat down to really talk about it, we realized we’d actually learned something pretty damn amazing. I think it was…I think it was you who noticed.”

“In Reqann, yes.” Xaima stepped up as Zhan moved back, eyeing the camera with an expression of rueful humor and contempt. “By that time, we’d been to a few of these military outposts and finally found out just what the fuck had happened. Most of them had some kind of survivor’s journal left for us to find, like the one this poor pisser made, but with the exception of that crazy woman with all the dolls, they were dead. We couldn’t ask any questions and if we didn’t have Ichi along, we could never have run the damn videos in the first place.”

“Almost every one of them were technicians,” Ichazul remarked, “and not one thought to put their video on automatic playback. Sure, the recording will last until the end of Time or until their roof caves in, but in fifty years, everyone who knows which buttons to push is going to be dead.”

“So here we are,” said Zhan and snorted. “And I don’t know how happy you’re going to be when you hear what we have to say, but if you’re standing there to hear it at all, then our plan probably worked. Just remember that.” He glanced at the other men, grunted to himself, and looked back at the camera. “If we did our job right, you may have heard that we came here to meet with Great Sheul and that we heard His words and wrote His laws,” he said. “But honestly…we’re going to make it all up.”

* * *

Amber and Meoraq listened. There were plenty of words she didn’t know, but she was able to work most of them out by context; there must have been just as many words he didn’t know, and set down in ways just as foreign to him, but Meoraq asked no questions. Her awareness of him faded as the men on the screen talked about the virus Nuu had called God’s Wrath with the kind of clinical callousness that came so easily to survivors. They didn’t pace, rarely gestured, and had a habit of looking right at the camera even when they weren’t talking so that it began to feel uneasily like they were alive—that they were here in this room, in this very moment—so much so that Amber found herself nodding now and then to show them she was listening.

Beside her, Meoraq remained motionless. He listened and did not react at all.

“The virus had absolute communicability in its first stage, the cloud stage,” Xaima said, gesturing vaguely towards the consoles surrounding them. “And if Ichi really knows how to read these machines and isn’t just lying us along for the dips and the good times—”

“Oh fuck me, my secret is out,” said Ichazul dryly.

“—then it’s still at ninety-six, seventeen fucking years after the Fall. The shit is in everything now. The air, the ground, the water…everything. So I guess it’s safe to assume that everyone has it. Why isn’t everyone dead?” He paused. “I have it. I woke up alone in the streets of South Thuure covered in blood. Caked in it. And I don’t know what I’d been fucking, but I’d scraped half the scales off my dick doing it and what was left was also caked in blood. I found a—” He stopped himself there, rubbing restlessly at his throat, which was still safely black. At last, he tipped his head slightly and went on.

“So. God’s Wrath is finite. Eventually, no matter how deep in you are, you run out of things to kill and things to fuck. You calm down. Of course, you’re ready to rage again the instant Mkole starts talking or, hell, even if you get a little too deep into a nice, tight woman, but if you feel it coming on, you can sometimes get clear of it. It’s not like being crazy, at least not all the time. You’re aware when you start to burn. You can stop it if you try. The problem is what the problem’s been with us dumaqs all along: Trying is hard and we don’t want to do it.”

“Burning is easy,” added Shev. “Especially when we can all tell each other that it’s the virus and how impossible it is to stop once you’ve let go. We’re not in control. It’s all the virus.”

“But there is a scale,” Ichazul put in. “Some of us let go slow and come out of it fairly quick. And some of us go completely fucking out of their scaly skin and stay there for days. So far, we haven’t found anyone who’s actually immune, but there’s obviously some kind of resistance. And since we’re starting to see the first generation after the Fall coming into their maturity, it seems like it might be genetic.”

“Right,” said Xaima, flaring his spines with irritation, although the interruption itself hadn’t appeared to have bothered him. “Now I’m going to talk about a place called Nishi, which used to be some holy site two or three thousand years ago—I guess it still was—but for the most part, it was a city like pretty much every other city except for the eastern edge of town, which was occupied by the Sheulists.”

Amber glanced at Meoraq. He seemed calm enough, but only if one didn’t look at his eyes.

“When the cloud hit Nishi, it went down exactly like every other city we’ve visited…except along the eastern edge. There were over a thousand people living there after the Fall, and just in case you don’t understand how significant that is, I don’t think we’ve come across a thousand more people anywhere else in the world, even if we lumped them all together. When we first found them, we didn’t know what to think except that maybe they were somehow immune or maybe they’d all been underground or maybe they’d been transmitting their location to survivors and most of them were refugees, but no. The only difference between eastern Nishi and the rest of the world was the Sheulists, and the biggest thing about the Sheulists is not just that they believe in their god, but they believe that their god is in control. These people work, and I mean work, for hours every day, systematically reinforcing the idea that nothing a man does has any lasting effect and any perception to the contrary is only part of God’s plan.”

“We’re not in control,” said Shev, in exactly the same tone he’d used before and with only the slightest arch twist to his expression. “It’s all God’s will.”

“That shit is maddening,” Xaima commented, glancing that way. “I had to be tied down for eight days because of the rage those fools put in me with that.”

“I didn’t handle it too well at first either,” Shev admitted. “But it was hard to ignore a thousand people in one place where everywhere else, you couldn’t count fifty. I’m sure Mkole can fill up a few hours talking about the altered mind states of meditation or how it suppresses this chemical or excites that gland or what the fuck ever it does. It worked, that’s the important thing.”

“Right up until their high priest decided they should all go to Sheul’s Halls together,” Ichazul said with a snort. “Crazy fucking zealots drank deathweed. Brewed it up with honey, lined up and drank it. Like they were drinking tea.”

“Yes, but they were calm when they did it,” said the Brunt. “And when we moved on from there to Maiaq, Zhan told the leader of those refugees that if he gave himself to Sheul, the Wrath couldn’t take him. Maybe it helped that none of them had ever been a Sheulist themselves or knew much more than whatever you pick up listening to some idiot pray up a transport dock. Zhan told them—correct me if I exaggerate, noble leader—the most outrageous packet of lies ever emitted by the mouth of a man.”