Amber looked at Meoraq again. His spines were flat and shivering slightly against his skull, but other than that, he looked only very mildly interested.

“When they believe it, they’ll pray,” said Zhan. “When they pray, they’ll calm down.”

“We give them all the women they want—”

“Provided they respect the sacred number of creation—”

“He said it with a straight face,” murmured the Brunt.

“—and raise any children they make as members of their caste.”

“What the hell good does that do?” Xaima burst out. The patches along his throat began to pale ominously. “Why the fuck would you go out of your way to find the worst fucking strain of the virus and breed more carriers?”

“Calm down, Xaima.”

“It makes no sense!”

“Xaima. Breathe.”

Xaima clapped both hands to his snout and bent himself in half, choking in air and hissing it out while the others watched warily. Gradually, very gradually, his scales faded back to black.

“The idea,” said Zhan, “is not to breed carriers, but to isolate them. We start them praying as soon as they can talk and keep them at it all their lives. We let them fight each other away from the public eye and we make them kill each other when they do. We give them women so they don’t have an excuse to riot through people’s homes and take them. We take the children away and start them praying and on it goes. If we do this long enough, with any luck, we’ll breed whatever quality it is that makes some of us so predisposed to the virus into the smallest percent of the population, which will then kill itself off.”

“Never work,” said Shev.

“Probably not, or at least not for a long time. But it will keep them under control. Look,” said Zhan, his own scales lightening although his tone never changed, “if you throw a man in a cage, he will spend the rest of his life fighting to escape. But if you tell him no one else in the world gets the cage but him, dress it up and throw in a few pillows, then he’ll walk in on his own.”

One breath. That was all Meoraq did. Just took one breath a little harder than the rest. Amber took his hand impulsively. He looked at it, then at her, and then up at the screen again, all without expression.

“What a shining flood of ghet-shit!” Xaima was exclaiming.

“They’ll believe me,” said Zhan, not looking up from his boots. His scales were already returning to their normal color. “They want desperately to believe in something, anything, and there is nothing else left. Yes, it’s a lie. But the lie will be glorious. If it’s the one lamp left burning in the whole world…everyone will come to see it.”

The doors clicked. The androgynous lizardly voice informed them that the timeout had ended, the locks were released.

Meoraq turned around.

Amber started after him, but he stopped her with the cut of one upraised hand.

“Stay,” he said in a hoarse voice that strove for calm. “Stay and hear them. I need to…I need to think.”

He walked away. Amber watched the doors groan open and shut as Zhan kept talking, outlining the principles of a gospel Meoraq could probably recite in its polished form from the first invocation to the final amen. His glorious lie.

10

It couldn’t have been much more than an hour before the recording finally finished, but if someone had told her that it had been three hours or even six, Amber would have believed it. She felt older, right down to her bones.

She didn’t want to move, but she didn’t linger. The lights were already fading, the room powering down, and she did not want to be trapped in here when the doors died. Human voices weren’t the same as a dumaq’s. She wasn’t at all sure ‘Nuu Sukaga was going to work for her.

But the lockplate took her tap and the doors hissed open and there was Meoraq, sitting just outside, his knees drawn up and his chin resting on his arms, staring at the mark of the Prophet on the wall. He’d lit some of the candles. He’d stomped on a few too, but at the moment, he was just sitting there.

“Hey,” she said.

He did not reply, not even to look at her.

“Do you want to hear any of it?” she asked, because she felt she’d ought to offer, even though she knew damned well he didn’t.

No response.

She went over and stood next to him, fidgeting unhappily with the front of her tunic. She felt awful, too awful to cry, too awful to even throw up. She touched his shoulder—it was stone wrapped in leather—and then petted at the top of his head. His flat spines flicked hard, throwing off her hand. She took it back and kept it to herself, clutching at her girdle. “Please talk to me,” she said.

Silence.

“Can I talk to you?”

His faceless stare wavered and finally shifted up at her. He still didn’t answer, not even to grunt, but he watched as she moved around and sat down in front of him.

“There’s this saying I used to hear a lot,” said Amber. “It goes, ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ I used to think it was total horseshit, to tell you the truth. I mean, intentions matter, so if someone tries to do something good, I mean really tries, that ought to count for something.”

Meoraq remained immobile, silent.

“I can only imagine what you’re feeling,” she said. “And I don’t think I can imagine it very well. But…he had good intentions, Meoraq. People were killing each other. The last people on the whole planet, the very last ones, were still killing each other. He stopped it the only way he knew how.”

“He lied.”

The words were wounds in Meoraq’s throat. She could hear them bleeding.

“Why?” he asked suddenly. “Why did he have to leave a message? Why couldn’t he just do it and let us have the lie if we needed it so much?”

“Maybe because…he wanted to believe you wouldn’t always need it. He was a teacher once. He knew the value of preserving the past for the future. And he—Listen to me, Meoraq!” She caught his arm and refused to be shaken off. “He thought he was doing the right thing. And maybe he was. If people could change on their own, don’t you think they would have in the seventeen years before this guy Lashraq came to Xi’Matezh?”

“Don’t call it that,” Meoraq said harshly. “This is no shrine.”

“Yes, it is. It may not be the one you thought it was, but it is a shrine. When it would have been so easy to make sure no one ever heard any of that, Lashraq wanted it heard. He wanted people to know what he did and why he did it. Meoraq—” Amber moved her hand from his shoulder to touch the heaving plates over his heart. “He wanted people to know the truth.”

“Truth? What is the truth, eh? Yesterday, I was the Sword in His hand! Today, I am sick! Today, God’s hand on my heart is a poison in my fucking brain! Today, I have murdered hundreds of people!” He slapped a hand hard over his snout and shut his eyes, taking several deep breaths before he spoke again. “Stop trying to comfort me. I have been well-trained by their lies. A Sheulek is always calm.”

“You told me once that truth isn’t always just what someone says,” said Amber after a moment. “But what something is. What it means.”

“This place means nothing. Sheul’s Word means nothing.”

“So God didn’t open up the door and shake their hands and say things out loud while Lashraq wrote it all down, but so what? When God talks to you, do you hear it with your ears? It’s…hard to believe in God, but if there is one, I can believe He brought them here. I saw that whole tape and I can believe it because I believe it was the only thing that could have helped your people save themselves and maybe God knew it too.”

“There is no God!” hissed Meoraq. The stripes along his throat brightened visibly in surges, throbbing with his pulse. “There’s nothing here! He lied! They all lied and I can live with that, but right now, damn it, just shut up! There is no God and you knew it all along, so just let me be!”