“When I told Druud to pick one of his for mine to play with, he did it. He would have sold them if I’d offered him coin. He promised me you before I even knew he knew you.” He smiled with his head cocked and the yellow throbbing on his neck. “I’ll make it easy for you, just tonight. I’ll let you choose Druud.”

Scott made a cawing sound, but she didn’t look at him.

“It’s not the fresh poke I promised, but then again, it’s nothing new to Druud either,” Iziz said. “Point him out to me and I’ll even let you sit with your man tonight where you don’t have to watch. No?” The tilt came out of Iziz’s neck. He leaned very close, his breath hot and bitter on her lips. “Say it, then. Tell me no. Say it like the fierce little thing Zhuqa always said you were.”

Amber did not answer. Her jaws ached from keeping them clenched. Her palms hurt where her fingernails dug at them in fists. Her heart hurt, but it kept beating.

Iziz turned his head slightly while keeping his eyes on Amber. “Nicci!” he called.

“You stay the fuck away from her!” Amber shouted, and she must have lunged too because there were hands all over her all at once, yanking her back and holding her tight. “Leave her alone! I’ll kill you, motherfucker! I’ll kill—”

Iziz slapped her. He didn’t let her see it coming like Zhuqa would have done. She scarcely saw him move at all. There was a black blur and a white light and then she was sagging back in a raider’s grip, staring dazedly at the sky while her face swelled with heat.

“You had the first choice,” Iziz spat. “You threw it away to score points off me. How many points was it worth, eh? Nicci!”

Nicci came. No one brought her. She just came. Her neck was bent, like a lizardlady’s, to an subservient angle. “Can I pick someone else?” she asked.

Iziz, one hand on the buckle of his belt, paused. His spines flicked, then flared curiously. “Who?”

Nicci looked at Amber.

But of course that didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t. They were sisters. They were all each other had. Amber had taken care of Nicci all her life. She’d tucked her in at night, got her up in the morning, walked her to school, done everything their mother was too strung out to care about. Amber was the one hiding with her in the bathroom when Bo Peep brought her bad dates home. Amber was the one stealing fruit cups and milk cartons off the lunch line so Nicci would have something to eat that night. Amber had fought off big kids and alley dogs and their mom’s drunken punches and every other goddamn thing the world had thrown at them and they loved each other, they were sisters, and this was not happening!

“Take her,” said Nicci. “She’s the one who deserves it. Not me. So you take her. You make her feel it.”

“You don’t mean that,” Amber heard herself say. Heard someone say, at any rate. It sounded more like their mother, when she was stoned and half-asleep.

“She looks like she means it,” Iziz remarked. “But I’m not bargaining with you, Nicci. Not tonight. On your belly.”

“Don’t hurt her!” Amber lunged again, but she was held fast. “Please! You can take me, just please let her go!”

Iziz finally looked at her, but he never had a chance to answer.

“Go?” said Nicci. “Go where? Look where we are! You…You made me come here!” Nicci shook her head in an incredulous, angry series of jerks. “How could you do that? How could you do that? You were supposed to take care of me!” she screamed suddenly, throwing open her arms. “Me! And you picked him! So fuck you, Amber! You hear me? Fuck you! I hope you choke on their fucking cum and die!”

“You don’t mean that!”

“Let’s find out.” Iziz offered the fish hook.

Nicci looked at it, then snatched it from his hand and stepped up, holding it in her shaking fist.

The hands pinning Amber to this moment tightened, but she wasn’t struggling. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even feel the air in her lungs. This wasn’t happening. It just…just wasn’t.

“I hate you,” said Nicci. “I want you to see this. I want you to know that this happened because of you.”

She swung. But not at Amber, motionless, stunned.

The curved edge of the fish hook sank as easily into Nicci’s throat as it had into the soft inner meat of Zhuqa’s body. She screamed again and ripped, grunting with the effort to make the hook move. A hot, heavy gush struck Amber in the eyes. She slapped at them, screaming and tasting her sister’s blood—swallowing it—and still somehow heard Iziz’s quiet, “Ah,” just exactly the way he’d said it over Zhuqa’s corpse.

The fury of Nicci’s features slackened, twisting into something merely bewildered in the moment before she staggered. Amber lunged to catch her, punching at the lizardman who tried to restrain her, but Nicci’s weight was too much to hold and her hands were slippery. They went down together in a hot, wet heap with Amber on top, trying desperately to push the blood back in through the open gash in her baby sister’s neck. It didn’t last long; she could have counted the seconds by the slowing spews of fresh gore if she could have counted anything at all, but there weren’t many. Nicci clutched once at her arm and once at her hair. Her lips moved, but there was no sound, no way to say for sure just what she would have said. It looked like ‘help’. Or ‘hate’. Then she was dead—warm clay in the shape of Nichole Sarah Bierce—and nothing was left to move her blood except gravity.

“That was even better than I hoped for,” said Iziz, but so far away and through so many muffling layers of cotton that she could barely understand him. “Stand her up.”

Someone must have tried because it seemed to Amber that she fell upwards for a moment, then downwards, then both at once and then she was gone too.

* * *

The lights came on, vast bright lights with no particular source, whiting out the world to a clean, featureless blank in which Amber stood alone. After a while, it occurred to her that she was standing in a line, and sure enough, there was a string of people in front of and behind her. They were all in white, like the lights, like the walls and floor and ceiling. She was in the Manifestors’ skyport, she realized, and there it was, the Pioneer, not in space at all but sitting right there on the tarmac, waiting to board.

She looked to her left and there was Nicci, hugging her duffel bag and crying because she didn’t want to go. She looked down and by God, she was fat again, her belly straining at the stiff fabric of her brand new colonist’s shirt.

None of it had happened yet. She could stop now, walk away. There’d be fines to pay, but she could figure something out. Get another job. Lose the weight (again). Hell, she could leave the city and watch on the tiny television above the bar where she worked just down the road from the trailer where she and Nicci lived as the whole world wondered what had happened to the Pioneer, and on the other side of the universe, Meoraq would go to Xi’Matezh without her.

Scott was waiting to scan her thumb, only she didn’t know he was Scott yet. She didn’t ever have to know. She could still walk away.

And Meoraq would walk home from Xi’Matezh alone.

“Let him.”

She turned to her right and there was her mother, somewhere between Bo Peep and Mary Bierce, wearing a white t-shirt and no makeup, smoking a cigarette. She smiled with half her mouth, not mean but just tired, the look of a woman who knows. “You can’t save everyone, little girl.”

Maybe it was the dream that made her do it, although none of this felt like a dream yet. Maybe it was her bitchy nature. Maybe it was just because it was Mama saying it, but Amber suddenly had to argue.

“I could save them,” she said. “I could shout the place up right now, tell them the ship’s going to crash, tell them everyone who goes is going to die.”