“You’ll have the first word after me,” Jazuun said, but he was already moving away. “Go. Now.”

Xzem’s rough hand tapped at hers. She offered her sleeve and Amber took it. They left, keeping low and close to the wall, passing a small group of running lizardmen in the hall just outside. Meoraq’s doctors. Amber lingered until the door had shut them away, but then there was nothing else to wait for, nothing else to see. She let Xzem take her away.

She didn’t count the turns they made or the doors they passed. This wasn’t like Zhuqa’s camp; it wasn’t someplace to escape. It wasn’t home, either. It was a waiting room, that was all.

Xzem came to a door, guarded on either side by lizardmen in highly-polished boots, which were all that Amber could see with the blanket pulled so low. “The Sheulek-kin of my lord is returned,” Xzem said softly, bowing. “My lord commands his wife receive the wife of Uyane Meoraq.”

The boots moved aside. With a dull clank, the door opened to reveal another door right on the other side. One of the lizardmen, maybe Xzem herself, knocked twice, but the sound of running feet over tiles told her the knock was unnecessary. The second door rattled impatiently on its hinges and whooshed open.

“My lady, my lord commands—”

A kitten bawled. And even knowing she was untold lightyears away from all the kittens that ever were, that was still what Amber heard—the sickly, ear-piercing mew of a newborn cat. Before she could react, she felt herself seized by the shoulders and towed over the threshold.

Xzem followed, patiently continuing her introduction half-heard beneath an urgent chorus of kittens, and shut the door. The guards on the other side shut theirs, and whoever was impersonating the cat grabbed Amber’s blanket and pushed it back.

Maybe it was just because of the sounds she made, but she actually looked like a cat…at least as much as a lizard ever could. Her eyes were wide and curiously slanted. Her cheekbones were rather broad and her snout exceptionally pointed. But most of it was due to the odd ornament she wore over her hood, which capped her short spines and then arced off to either side of her head in twin points of glittering metal and beads. The edges of her hood were even trimmed in wispy bits of fringe like whiskers.

“Oh.” The lizardlady’s left hand rose to tap delicately at her breast. The right went even higher, cupping the end of her narrow snout. “Oh,” she said again, her dark eyes brimming with sympathy. “The poor deformed creature.”

“Lady, she knows our speech,” Xzem murmured respectfully.

“I don’t imagine it’s any secret to her that she’s deformed. It would be more impolite to pretend otherwise, I think. I am Nraqi, little creature.” Nraqi reached to take Amber’s hands and bring them to her heart. She made another weird animal sound, wordless and mushy, like a knife right to the ear, before adding, “Your mother in Chalh.”

“I don’t need a mother,” said Amber and pulled her hands back.

“Does it have a name?” Nraqi whispered.

“Eshiqi,” said Xzem, bowing.

“It’s Amber, actually.”

“Eshiqi.” Nraqi leaned back, cupping Amber’s face gently between her hands and smiling. “Such a pretty name for…well…such a pretty name!”

Amber detached herself as gently as she could and went back to the door, straining to hear through it—and the ten or twelve walls that stood between her and Meoraq. She couldn’t even hear the two guards she knew were just outside. She couldn’t hear anything except her own breath bouncing off the door into the suffocating echo-chamber of this stupid blanket.

Amber yanked it all the way down around her neck and then, in a sudden illogical fury, she took the whole damn thing off and threw it in a heap on the floor, going as far away as the room allowed, to the only window. The glass was stained a deep red and had a weirdly bubbled and streaked appearance. ‘Like blood,’ she thought.

Bo Peep’s reflection floated in the window, slack-faced, loveless. Then it was Nicci’s face, the eyes sunken and accusing. She didn’t see herself, and never would, she realized. The last time she’d seen a mirror had been in the Manifestor’s compound the day of the flight, just a sidelong glance as she climbed out of the shower, the memory stained with resentment because it would be right across from the shower and how many people really looked their best naked first thing in the morning? The old Amber. The tough Amber. The Amber who could be a bitch and a bully, but who by-God got the job done, who took care of things, who had been born old and was nobody’s little girl, where was she now? Who was this scrawny, useless person with her eyes brimming with blood? Who had God, ha, picked to be the last human left alive on this whole planet?

The last…

The thought had been creeping in on her for days, but with Meoraq to look after, she’d always been able to push it away. Now it crawled up her spine and bit in deep. Fifty thousand people, winnowed down just that easily to only one, only her.

She was alone. And if Meoraq…left her…she’d be lost.

“Eshiqi?” Nraqi’s reflection fretted with her sleeves and then said decisively, “Tea, I think. Tea and cakes. Poor thing hasn’t eaten and everything seems worse on an empty belly. Xzem!”

“Yes, my lady.”

Hungry? Tea and cakes? “No!” said Amber in choked lizardish. She wasn’t sure which ‘no’ she used, but she used it loud enough to halt Xzem in her tracks. Covering her stinging eyes, Amber turned back to the window.

“Just the tea, then,” Nraqi said after a moment.

“No.”

“Water.”

“Lady, I know you’re trying,” said Amber in dull English, “but if you don’t leave me alone, I think I’m going to lose my mind.”

Xzem slipped quietly out through a side-door. Gone to fetch drinks, no doubt. Which Amber would have to choke politely down while the friendliest cat-lizard in the universe chatted her up and Meoraq died somewhere in this God-forsaken house.

Amber squeezed her eyes shut until they quit leaking and opened them again to stare out the blood-red window at an empty world.

Quiet footsteps heralded Xzem’s return, but instead of the clinking glasses she expected, Amber heard a muffled purr—the sleeping song of Zhuqa’s baby. She turned around and there it was, wrapped in a clean, plush blanket. She supposed it had outgrown its need for smooth skin, but it woke when Xzem passed it into her arms and snuggled up to her the same as it had always done. Its tiny fist punched once at Amber’s breast, then found a gripping place on her tunic. It sang.

How long Amber stared into its tiny, pale face, she couldn’t know, but when she raised her eyes at last, there was Xzem.

“I never had the chance to thank you,” said Xzem, reaching out to brush her fingertips along the tiny ridge on the top of its skull where someday, spines would grow. “Or to show your lord my gratitude. Now that I have that chance, I cannot find the words. Your lord raised me out of darkness and put me in the sight of Sheul. He placed my Nali in God’s hands and placed this one in mine. He made me a mother, after all this time…after so many lost and left behind me. He made me a wife. He made me a good woman—” Her voice broke. After some short time, she went on. “—to a good man. This child, when it is grown, it will be a good woman or a good man, and it may never know there was another way to be.”

Amber could only look at her. A part of her knew what Xzem was saying and another part even vaguely knew what her own response should be, but both of these were only whispers beneath the silent screams of i don’t care lady i don’t care it isn’t equal it isn’t fair god gives and god takes and maybe he thinks that’s a fair trade but it‘s not! In the end, she only gave the baby back, her throat too tight to let her speak anyway, and turned back to the window. The baby woke and fussed a little, but its mother soothed it back to sleep and soon it had forgotten Amber again.