Then there was the matter of their dress. They did not wear hides, nor could he make out the lines of any belt or harness cut across their colorful clothing. He could see no weapons strapped to any back or slung in a communal heap for the easy reach of all. In fact, many of them appeared to be gloved and hooded, because what he could see of their hands and faces looked pale. Not merely grey, as with youth or bad diet, but really pale. He couldn’t imagine how they could be covering their faces like that and still see.

Then one of them got up and turned to the side and Meoraq realized they had not covered their faces after all.

They had none.

5

At the center of camp, unaware of the new eyes watching them from the shadows, the survivors of the crash of the Pioneer prepared for their first Stone Age hunt. Amber was right in the thick of them, heating up the tips of the spears she’d helped cut earlier that morning. Scott had deigned to give her his approval, and she knew she’d ought to be wired up with the thrill of that victory if nothing else, but she wasn’t. She wouldn’t leave camp at all today if it weren’t for the fact that she knew Scott expected her to chicken out when it came time to actually get out there and stab a scaly deer. He probably already had some kind of speech prepared to the effect that she was a whiny little bitch and if she didn’t like the way he did the leading around here, she could leave.

She didn’t need Scott’s help to feel like shit today, anyway. That had started last night, when the skies ripped open and dumped what felt like a bucket of water directly over her head. The rain hadn’t lasted long, but it had been just exactly like standing in the shower while it was happening. Or lying in the shower, rather. Covered in an emergency blanket that couldn’t keep the wet out no matter how she wrapped herself in it, so tired that she didn’t even care that she was lying in rainwater, Amber had thought she felt as bad as it was humanly possible to feel.

And then she’d heard Eric, jogging back from a brief midnight trip to the bushes, pause beside Maria’s blanket. “You sure you don’t want to get cozy?” he’d asked. He’d had to shout it, really. So much rain. “Two people can fit if they’re cozy.”

Amber raised her head to watch, expecting a tirade that might actually end in some kind of fair tent rotation since it wasn’t coming from Amber herself. Instead, Maria threw back her blanket almost at once, snarling, “I am so ready to get cozy. Let’s go.”

If Eric was surprised by the speed and ease of this capitulation, he hid it well. He helped her up, grabbed her pack, and the two of them splashed through the soggy grass to his bivy. It bucked and rolled for a few minutes as they worked their way in and then the flap zipped shut.

Amber put her head back down and listened to their two voices, unintelligible beneath the rain. In the dark, she could make out only the faintest outline of the bivy. When it started moving, she closed her eyes. She pulled her emergency blanket over her ears so the rain could hammer out the identity of the women who went to the other bivies. She just put her arm around Nicci to make sure she couldn’t be one of them. She pretended not to know why when Nicci started crying.

And she slept, eventually, because she was just so damned tired.

She woke up before dawn, soaked to the pruny skin, and hobbled into the bushes to pee. She thought the low ache in her belly was hunger right up until she got her pants down and saw the blood.

Terror woke her all the way up before she realized what she was looking at. Of course. Her implant was gone and the stupid umbilicus in the Sleeper had been giving her works a tune-up and oil all the way here, wherever here was. She wasn’t dying; she’d gotten her period. Her very first period. Wearing a pair of white pants.

Motherfuck.

“Suck it up, little girl,” she hissed at herself, absolutely disgusted. “Grow a goddamn sense of proportion. This shouldn’t even make your list of problems.”

So she went back for her duffel bag and took it a little deeper into the trees. She pulled some grass and wadded it into a pad of sorts and stuffed that in her panties. Off came the white pants with the red badge of womanhood stamped across the crotch and on went her only pair of jeans. As for the evidence, she stuffed it under the exposed roots of one of the trees, scraping up handfuls of wet earth to push into the hole until it was good and buried. She felt guilty doing it since they were perfectly good pants, but she was never going to get that blood out and if she had to listen to just one joke, she was going to have to kill someone. After washing the (blood) mud off her hands at the stream, she’d gone back to camp, walking right past Scott and his loyal lieutenants at their morning debriefing so she could curl up in her blanket and pretend nothing had happened.

She lay there while the sun crawled higher behind the clouds, wondering if it was supposed to feel like this. She’d had the implant since she was ten—God bless Measure 34 and Zero Tolerance—and at the moment, she felt like she could cheerfully give up anything, even her place on a lifeboat back to Earth, to get the stupid thing back. Second-grade sex-ed was a long time ago; she couldn’t remember how long this was supposed to last, only that it would happen again about once a month for the rest of her miserable fucking life. Was it normal to hurt like this? How much blood was she going to lose? Was there something she should be doing besides just packing her panties with grass and waiting for it to be over? She’d gone to so many stupid seminars preparing her for life in a colony that were about as useful now as that solar generator they were lugging around, and she’d never even thought about reading up on what was going to happen to her own damn body!

Naturally, it had been later that morning, when she could not have cared less, that Scott gave the speech Amber had been waiting for—the ration bars were almost gone and it was time to learn how to catch dinner. “Miss Bierce has volunteered to make spears,” he’d said at the end of it, and there she sat, hugging her cramping stomach in one arm and Nicci in the other, wishing he’d take that pocketknife he was holding out to her so gallantly and pound it right up his ass.

She made the spears. It wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. The first set of sticks she was able to break off the trees were way too small once they’d had their points cut. The next set—deadfall branches she’d picked off the ground—seemed okay as she did the carving and heating, but every one of them broke when Scott sauntered over to give them a practice throw, and as much as she’d wanted to sock him for doing that, even she had to admit he was right when he pointed out that if they’d break that easy, they’d be no good as a weapon. But three seemed to be the charm and the day was only half-over. The deer drifted back and forth across the plains as they had for days now, but never went far. It was almost like they were waiting for them.

“How are we doing on those spears, Miss Bierce?”

“I’m doing fine, Everly,” said Amber, testing the point of a hot spear before setting it aside in the Finished pile with the other six. “How many have you made?”

It didn’t seem to embarrass him. If anything, his officious little smirk widened. “You asked for this job, remember? You practically begged for it.”

“I remember. That was the day you called me a pig.”

“I did not.” But he looked to see if anyone else was close enough to hear. When he saw a few frowns pointed their way, he blushed. “Miss Bierce, if you can’t do what you promised to do, that’s all right. I’ll understand if your physical limitations—”