“It was.”

Nkosa slapped a hand over the end of his snout and rubbed it, hard. “I really hate talking to you when you’re like this.”

“Like what?”

“A fucking Sheulek.” He dropped his hand. “You’ve been a good friend to me and I’m proud to hear you call me cousin like it was truth, but ‘Raq, are you sure you aren’t looking for reasons to do something you already want to do?”

“Why would I want to walk across the whole damned wildlands this close to winter?” Meoraq asked reasonably. “Why would anyone?”

Nkosa shrugged his spines, still looking troubled.

“For twelve years, Sheul has spoken through me,” said Meoraq. “Now He is finally calling me to Him. I have to go. My father’s…My House will wait.”

“What are you going to do when you get there and He tells you to go home and get married?”

“If that is what He has called me to Xi’Matezh to hear,” said Meoraq with confidence, “then I am sure He has a particular woman in mind.”

Nkosa looked at him for a long time before saying, quite matter-of-factly, “That sounds like you expect God to provide you the woman.”

Meoraq thought about it, then shrugged his spines.

“That is the closest thing to true blasphemy I think I’ve ever heard anyone say.”

“’Kosa, he summoned me out of Xheoth with a pillar of fire. Does that sound like He wants me to go home and take the first woman I see?”

“How many women do you expect to see in Xi’Matezh, you idiot?”

“One,” said Meoraq. “The one He means me to marry, if He means me to marry.”

Nkosa rubbed at his brow ridges, plainly choosing his next words with great care. He settled on: “I hope this isn’t what you told the exarch.”

“I don’t have to tell him anything,” said Meoraq, dropping back against the bench with a dismissive wave. “I have a whole year before Uyane has to present a steward. I could crawl to the Reaches and back in that time.”

They sat, Meoraq watching the clouds and Nkosa watching him.

“You’re going to make me say it,” Nkosa said finally.

“Say what?”

“Sheul is not going to give you a woman.”

“So,” said Meoraq, untroubled. “That will be a sign of something too, won’t it?”

“Did you sleep through the lesson the day they were supposed to teach you about sophistry?” Nkosa demanded, still trying to laugh as if this would all turn into a joke if he just believed in it hard enough. “What makes you think you’re even going to get through the doors?”

“Nuu Sukaga.”

Nkosa leaned back, his spines flaring all the way forward. “What’s that mean?”

“I have no idea,” said Meoraq and smiled.

Nkosa stared at him some more, then grunted and heaved himself up on his feet. “All right, please yourself. Give me a tap, crazy person,” he ordered, palm out.

Meoraq smiled. Ignoring Nkosa’s outstretched arm, he rose and put his hand against his blood-kin’s heart like a brother, then pulled him close in a rough embrace. It didn’t last long and wasn’t entirely comfortable, but he was glad he did it, if only the once.

“Come back before the year is up, if you can,” said Nkosa, slow to back away. “I know you won’t be able to after you take your House and I’m going to want to see the man who walked all the way to the ends of the world just to get dipped.”

“I’ll be back in the spring,” promised Meoraq. “I’ll even stay with you and do you the honor of sharing your wife.”

“Ha. Only if you share yours.”

“Done. Now get out of here,” he said gently. “I can’t stop them from whipping you every day, you know.”

“Well, in that case don’t bother coming back at all.” Nkosa raised his hand, hesitated, and then curled it into a fist and touched his heart in a real salute. He turned his back at once and went quickly to the door, checking the stair with a look of resignation, then slipped through and was gone.

Meoraq stretched back out on the bench and clasped his hands behind his head. The clouds above him blew eternally onward. To the east, he noted. Toward Xi’Matezh.

His destiny.

BOOK III

LOST AND FOUND

In retrospect, the trouble with Scott started immediately, but it took a few days before Amber caught on to just how bad it was. She knew she was as guilty as everyone else of letting him take over. She also knew that she didn’t want to be the one in charge when the whole human race was just forty-eight people on an alien world with a handful of supplies camping in spitting distance of the melted remains of a ship that could very well be radiating cancer into every living thing for miles around. Oh no. Fuck that. Scott could be in charge of that mess all he wanted.

And if there was one thing Scott was good at, it was putting himself in charge. Before the sun came up over the remains of the Pioneer, he’d made two trips to the top of the ridge and compiled a complete inventory of what they had left, which wasn’t much but was still more than they should have had.

Tents, for example. All the tents that had been up on the ridge had been incinerated in the Pioneer’s explosion. Not just burned. Erased. There was nothing left up there to prove there’d ever been a camp at all except a melted heap of glass and metal that had probably been one of the solar generators. But as bad as that was, it could have worse.

Not knowing how to set up an outpost, Scott had apparently just dumped the supplies in piles wherever he thought he might like to put a building someday. Most of those piles had been up on the ridge, but he did have a number of tents down by the lakeshore, marking the proposed site of the colony’s pump house and filtration station, to hold the necessary equipment and materials until he’d decided exactly when and where to begin construction.

“Tents?” Maria interrupted immediately upon hearing this. In her firm, furious tone, Amber heard again her threat to sue the Manifestors and their Director right down to the ground. “You said there weren’t enough tents! I was in a sleeping bag and you had more tents the whole time?”

“They’re for keeping the equipment dry,” Scott answered. “They aren’t for personal use.”

“Well they are now, bucko. It’s pouring! Where are they?”

“I haven’t decided how to assign them,” said Scott, and whenever Amber thought about it, she always came back to that as the only moment when someone might have been able to put a stop to things. But you can’t take out the guy in charge without replacing him. And she did not want that job.

So when people started arguing and those angry voices started climbing and Scott was holding up his hands in an ineffectual bid for silence, Amber said, “That was smart, Scott.”

He swung around to glare at her, holding up one hand against the storm—the miraculous storm which had probably saved their lives but which showed no sign of blowing off any time soon.

“I’m not being sarcastic,” she told him. “That was smart. If you hadn’t set that stuff aside, we wouldn’t have anything right now. How many did you save?”

And that was the word that did it. Save. Like he’d planned it. Like he’d pulled them out of the fire with his bare hands and carried them to his desperate people.

Scott squared his shoulders and gave his crewman’s jacket a brisk tug. “Six. Two command units and four bivies.”

“What the heck is a bivy?” Maria wanted to know.

“How big are they?” Amber asked.

“Not very,” someone else answered. Eric Lassiter, one of the soldiers Jonah had sent her. “What he’s calling a command unit is just your typical one-room dome tent. Allegedly, it could hold eight people.”

“If they were greased up,” Crandall added dubiously. “And drunk.”

“And a bivy is pretty much a sleeping tube.”

“More like a body-condom,” inserted Crandall.