But there was life. The total lack of cities, roads or any other distraction made the small groups of animals grazing on the plains impossible to miss. To Amber, whose personal experience with animals could be almost entirely summed up by dogs, cats, rats and roaches, they didn’t look too scary. Long-necked bodies and four thin legs made them look more or less like deer, except that they also had long tails. Instead of antlers, they had a set of back-sweeping horns, in addition to which they also had two huge jutting tusks. Their shiny, scale-covered skin was brownish on top and black underneath, with a white stripe on their bellies that only showed if they stood up on their hind legs, which two of them kept doing, gronking and clawing at each other with their hoofless, taloned feet.

People began to murmur in an uneasy way.

“They’re not going to bother us tonight,” said Scott firmly. “Let’s establish our camp and secure a perimeter. Over there.”

He pointed at a hilltop not too steep or too far off, with a few trees around it, but not so many that they had grown into impassable thorny walls. It wasn’t right up by the stream anymore, but maybe that was a good thing, if the native animals decided to wander over in the middle of the night for a drink.

That first night wasn’t bad. The wind never let up, but no one complained; it felt good just to dry out a little. There was enough deadwood lying around to start a couple fires and Scott pulled out a pocketknife, of all things, so that people could take turns cutting grass and dried thorns to keep burning. Dag roasted his ration on a stick, so a couple other people did too. Amber didn’t have another ration. She sat next to Nicci, watching her sister try to heat bites of concentrated protein supplement on a stick, and listened to the scaly deer-things bawl and gash at each other.

When it got dark and the talk died down and Nicci wrapped herself inside her laughably ineffective emergency blanket and fell asleep, Amber picked up one of the roasting sticks and fingered thoughtfully at its heat-hardened point.

* * *

Early the following morning, Scott crept out of his tent and gathered the Fleetmen for his usual meeting. Amber woke up as they filed quietly out of the sleeping area and over to the crates and things, stacked at one end of camp to form Scott’s idea of a windbreak. It hadn’t worked.

She drowsed for a few minutes to let them have their male-bonding time during the morning pee, and when she heard their low voices begin to pick up again under the wind, she got up. She rolled up her blanket, stuffed it in her duffel, picked up Nicci’s roasting stick, and headed over to join them.

“—unless we can provide them with some kind of future,” Scott was saying, but he stopped when the others looked at her and turned to see her for himself.

He blushed, which was a weird reaction. “This is a debriefing, Miss Bierce. Please go sit down somewhere. I’ll pass out the MREs when we’re done.”

There were so many things she wanted to say about the democratic process he kept insisting they still had in this so-called colony, but instead, she forced on a smile, held up her hands, and said, “Truce, okay?”

They all looked at the stick she was holding.

“I’m aware that you haven’t sorted out the priorities yet,” began Amber, picking her way very carefully toward her goal in her most diplomatic tone, “but when you get around to wanting a closer look at those animals, I think it would be a good idea if the people in your scouting party had something like this with them. Just in case, you know?”

Eric reached out and plucked at the tip of the stick.

“You’re not anywhere on my list of people to go on that scouting mission, Miss Bierce,” said Scott bluntly. “So get it out of your head right now. I need people in peak physical condition for that.”

“No fat chicks, I get it.” Amber made herself stop there, then pinned up that smile again and started over. “Even if I can’t do the running around that’s involved, I can at least help with the preparations. If I could borrow your knife, I—”

“Not a chance.”

“—could spend the whole day making grown-up versions of this,” Amber said stubbornly, but softly. “So when you get a team organized—”

“That is not where my priorities are right now, Miss Bierce.”

“Then let me do it. I’ll ask for volunteers, I’ll make the spears—”

Scott stepped forward so fast and so unexpectedly that she jumped back, banged the back of her knees into a crate of pipes, and went down hard on her ass. He leaned over her, absolutely furious, but barely speaking above a whisper, careful not to wake anyone in the camp beyond them. “Before you start re-enacting The Lord of the Flies around here, you might want to remember what happened to Piggy. You’re not the only one who ever thought of sharpening sticks.”

Before Amber could decide how to respond to these bizarre but unmistakably hostile statements, Scott turned around and stalked off.

Baffled, Amber looked over at Eric and Dag. “What the hell was that about?”

Eric shook his head, looking away in a vague manner, frowning.

“It’s from a book they made everyone read in school,” said Crandall. “About some gay Brit kids who get stranded on some island.”

“Did he just call me a pig?”

“There was one in the book.”

Amber eyed him narrowly. “What happened to it?”

“I think the kids fucked it or killed it or both.” Crandall shrugged. “Yeah, it didn’t make a lot of sense in the book either, but I had to write a whole page on how incredibly fucking profound it was, I remember that.”

“So…” Amber sent a searching gaze across the camp, but Scott had gone inside his tent. She tried to laugh the whole thing off, but no one joined her in it and the sound she made was clearly an angry one. “So what the hell kind of threat was that?”

“You just need to back off a little,” said Eric quietly. “That’s all.”

“Back off what? All I want to do is think about hunting! I didn’t say it had to be today! I just want him to plan for it! How is that so wrong?”

Eric and Dag exchanged another set of glances. She followed their gaze afterwards to the stick in her hand.

“What?” she said, tightening her grip.

“It just doesn’t look good,” said Eric. “Arming yourself. Calm down. It’s nothing serious.”

She turned to him fast and hissed, “He! Doesn’t! Feed me! That feels pretty fucking serious to me!”

They shuffled a little and avoided her eyes.

“I asked for his permission! I gave him every opportunity to go back and pretend like it was his idea! Does he think those stupid rations are going to last forever? What does he think we’re going to eat when they’re gone?”

Eric shrugged, still not meeting her eyes. “He’ll come around. Just let him figure it out on his own. Let him decide when it’s time.”

Amber threw up her empty hand and slapped it loudly down on the top of the crate. “Wait until the food runs out, is that it? Look, we don’t have guns here. We don’t even have bows. We have Scott’s pocketknife and a whole lot of stupid sticks.”

“I know, I know—”

“No, I don’t think you do. I don’t think you get it yet that when it comes to hunting, we’re going to have to chase things around and stab them! How many meals do you think we’ll have to skip before that becomes impossible?”

“Okay, calm down.”

“I don’t want to calm down, I want you to get pissed! Scott can talk all he wants about how a human being can live three weeks without food, but I guarantee you, two days after we eat the last of those crappy ration bars, no one is going to be able to run down one of these fucking deer!”

Eric and Dag went for Round Three of the meaningful looks. At the end of it, Eric sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “Yeah, I know,” he said, and sat down on a stack of cement bags.