“Can you help him?” she asked awkwardly. “If I…believe in you or…do things for you?”

“That isn’t how it works.”

“Well then how does it work, goddammit?!” She swung around, her hands in fists, but Lashraq didn’t flinch. “You don’t plan things, you don’t help people, you sure as fuck don’t care when people die, what do you do?”

“I talk,” Lashraq said quietly. “But I can’t make you listen.”

“All you’re telling me is you can’t help! What good are you? You…You son of a bitch, look at me!” she exploded. “Don’t you know what we’ve been through? And you just stand there and talk about fucking butterflies when we’ve come all this way and lived through so much and now this is how it ends? It’s not fair!”

“Suck it up,” he replied and lit another cigarette.

She cried until she could make herself stop and then she took a few deep breaths. Six of them. She looked at him. He watched the tide come in.

“Who are you?” she whispered. “Who are you, really?”

“Me?” Lashraq shrugged his spines and shoulders at the same time. “I’m the warning.”

And as she tried to wrap her head around that, he reached out and clasped her shoulder. His grip was strong; his eyes were kind.

“But there will be a boat,” he told her. “And a helicopter. So hold on, Amber. Watch for them. And take the chance when you see it, because I can only give you one.”

He tipped his head back, grunting thoughtfully in the back of his throat. “Looks like the storm is clearing,” he said.

She looked up. The sun behind the clouds turned the whole sky a blinding white. For a moment, she was back in the skyport again, and then she was nowhere at all.

* * *

Amber came around in a lamp-lit tent to the sound of lizardish laughter and the ocean. She was not alone. She rolled over with difficulty and at first tried to see Meoraq beside her, but the face was all wrong, and so were the scars and the clothes. It was Iziz, just sitting there with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped around them, staring at the side of the tent. He said, “You ever been to the mountains, Eshiqi?”

It wasn’t another dream. She didn’t wake up.

“We lived there a few years when I was very young. I spent a lot of time alone, up in the rocks. One day, I found a thuoch den with two pups and no parent. I tried to raise them, because I was a sprat and sprats are stupid like that.”

Nicci. Nicci was dead. They might all be dead by now, although it stood to reason that someone had to be alive to make the raiders all roar and laugh like that. It wasn’t any fun to torture someone who was already dead.

“I stole away every day to look in on them and fed them what I could of my own meals. God and Gann alone might know what I would have done with them if that had worked, but it didn’t. I crawled down into the den one morning to find the big one eating the little one while the little one whined and shivered in its own guts. I ran screaming down the side of the mountain until I fell and went the rest of the way down on my belly. My mother found me, fixed me up, and while she was doing that, someone tracked up the mountain to see what scared me. They brought me back the big pup, all warm and wriggling. I hugged it all night, crying while it licked my face and loved me in its dumb pup way. In the morning, I killed it with a rock.”

Amber turned back onto her side.

“My mother told me it was pointless to hate the pup. All animals kill each other when they have to, she said. We all eat each other to survive. Thuochs, dumaqs, humans. My mother was the worst fuck in that camp,” he added in a pensive tone, “but she had her moments.”

Amber did not answer. She tried to pretend she didn’t even hear.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told that story before,” said Iziz. “Unless I got drunk and maybe told Zhuqa and then forgot. Which is possible. But you remind me of that pup. The little one, I mean, getting your guts gnawed open by your littermate and just writhing while she did it. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Amber asked dully.

“Patience, Eshiqi. Patience is more than a word. Zhuqa used to say that. Made me just spitting mad, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it. I’d never heard of this place,” he remarked, looking around at the walls of his tent as though he could see right through them to the shrine. “Doesn’t look like the sort of place God would spend much time. Kind of a piss-gully, if you ask me. Druud seemed to think there’d be something big here. If I understood him right, he thought there’d be some kind of flying machine. We’ve been here for days and we’ve been looking, but we couldn’t find it. Did you?”

“No.”

Iziz glanced at her, then grunted and shrugged his spines. “None of that old shit works right anyway. If it did, we wouldn’t be scratching out nests in the ground like beetles. Zhuqa gave us as much of a city as we’ll ever know.” He gave her a longer, more assessing stare. “You ever live in a city?”

“Yes.”

“A real one?”

“A human one.”

He grunted, looking thoughtful and curious. “Describe it.”

She closed her eyes, not to help her visualize, but just to shut the sight of him away. He let her and did not interrupt during the long silence she took to put her thoughts in some kind of order. Nicci was in every one of them. At last, she gave up and simply said, “Have you ever seen pictures of your Ancients in their cities?”

“Some, sure.”

“They looked like that. Tall, narrow buildings. No walls. Lots of machines.” She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling of the tent and only vaguely aware of Iziz beside her. “It stank. Especially when it rained. Hot tar in the summer, wet gutters in the winter, just a constant nasty stink. Even the good smells, the food places and all that, reeked of hot grease and garbage if you went around the back. And our place, that was all rancid booze, pot and piss. And dead cats, that one summer.”

He put his hand on her stomach. It was neither a menacing touch nor a lascivious one, just the absent-minded touch of a man’s rough hand, there between her navel and her pubis. He gazed straight ahead at the wall. “Druud talks about your Earth-place a lot. We encourage it. We don’t have much to entertain ourselves with these days. You took all the fresh dips and Ghelip took the rest. What have I got, eh? Druud. Druud and his piss-talk of Earth. What color was the sky?”

“Blue.”

He grunted and rubbed at her belly. “That’s what Druud said. I cut off one of his toes for lying to me. Guess I owe the little piss-licker an apology.”

A gust of wordless hoots and laughter erupted outside. She thought she heard Eric in the middle of them, but couldn’t make out what he was saying, just that it was hoarse and hurt.

“You have me now,” said Amber, going through the motions without hope, without feeling of any kind. “You can let the others go.”

“I could,” Iziz agreed. “I certainly could.”

“Do you want me to beg?”

“For Druud?”

“For Scott,” she said. “For Eric. For anyone else that’s left.”

“There’s a few. Not many. Humans break easy.” He gazed at the tent wall, his spines flexing now and then as he thought, and finally he said, “All right. Beg and let’s see what happens.”

She started to roll over onto her knees, but his hand on his stomach turned hard and pressed her flat where she lay, so she just reached out her hands instead. She held them up, palms empty, but he wouldn’t look at them. She let them drop. They both stared, each into their own wall, and then she said, “Please.”

He grunted.

“Please let them go.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“I won’t fight you.”

“Mm.”

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

His fingers drummed over her stomach.