Watched her.

She could never tell what he was thinking on those nights, but she was often gripped with the fear that those were the nights he thought the hardest about leaving, and if he did, it would be her fault.

Because they weren’t friends. She wanted to be, tried to be, but she’d never been good at making friends and now that her life actually depended on it, she had no idea how. He was gone in the mornings when she woke up and he didn’t walk with anyone on the daily hike, just kept moving around them, ever vigilant and increasingly pissed off. By the time camp was struck, he was rarely in the mood to be bothered by anyone, let alone her, but sometimes he sat with her when the time came to feed his whining humans and sometimes he stayed to talk while everyone else went to bed. On the nights he didn’t, she sat up alone. She had no friends and when she was stupid and girly enough to feel bad about that, she just told herself that Amber Bierce didn’t care what other people felt about her. Once upon a time, it had been true. Once upon a time and far, far away.

“Are you sorry you found us?” she asked one night, one of the good nights, when she’d been able to pretend that she wasn’t just some pest he had to take care of.

And he said no, said it without even seeming to think about it first. But he also didn’t seem surprised by the question or her (not quite) teasing expectation that he might say yes.

“You think you’ll be sorry when it’s over?”

“That would depend on how it ends, but I doubt it.” The blunt bony spines on the top and back of his head flared forward and relaxed back in that shrugging way he had. “Right now, it’s too easy to imagine that it will never end.”

“Will you miss us when we’re gone?” she asked, grinning and expecting a resounding lizardish version of ‘Hell, no,’ but to her surprise, he took the question seriously.

“There are qualities I’ll miss,” he said after a considering pause, adding with a glance toward Scottt, “If the company were better, I imagine I’d miss it more.”

She waited, but he seemed content to stare into the coals all night, so she said it for him: “Aren’t you going to ask if I’m going to miss you?”

He looked at her for a very long time, then told her to go to sleep.

She did. She dreamed about the ship again, the night it blew up, filling the whole sky with that tower of howling fire. This time, everyone got away okay, and they were all there, thousands of them, even Jonah, but Scott was there too, telling everyone in his soothing, determined way that they could leave as soon as they were all on board and so they were walking, all of them, in a neat, orderly line right back into the fire. Eric and Maria went together, holding hands. Jonah followed, the bloody sweat on the side of his bald head already turning to steam. Then Nicci, shaking off Amber’s clutching hands and crying. Amber tried to chase after her, but the heat pressed her back, and still they all kept walking until there was no one left but her and Scott.

“Your room is ready, Miss Bierce,” he told her, savagely triumphant in the firelight. “All you have to do is say you’re sorry and I’ll let you come too.”

She woke up too damn close to the fire, with Meoraq on the other side of it, just watching her. The dream died at once, tangling itself up as it receded until she was left with only few vague images and an upset stomach. And a staring lizardman.

“I don’t talk in my sleep, do I?” she asked, trying to smile.

He didn’t smile back.

Her stomach flipped slowly over and curled into a hot knot. “What did I say?”

“You said you were sorry.”

She stared at him in horror. He looked back at her without expression.

“Well, I’m not!” she blurted.

“Should you be?”

“No!”

“It was a dream,” Meoraq said, getting up. “Dreams don’t mean anything.” He came over to her side of the fire and pulled her blanket back. His body was cool and rough and heavy on top of her, and it felt good in ways that sort of thing never had back on Earth. He caught her chin in a pinch, made her look at him when he entered her. “Dreams are only dreams,” he told her seriously. “This is real.”

She came hard, kicking and thrashing, and suddenly found herself alone in the mess of her blanket with rain falling into her stupidly gaping face and Meoraq once more on his side of the fire, watching her.

He didn’t speak, didn’t move, certainly didn’t come over and have sex with her.

“I don’t talk in my sleep,” Amber whispered shakily. She didn’t try to smile this time. “Do I?”

His spines twitched forward. “No.”

“You’re talking in my sleep,” Nicci muttered, curling up tighter.

Amber pulled her blanket up and rolled onto her side, away from Meoraq. Her thighs clenched on the useless heat of an empty place that still stubbornly insisted it was having sex. She wanted to cry so bad it hurt as much as her stupid dreaming womanparts, but Amber Bierce was not a crier. Or at least, she never used to be, once upon a time.

Everything was different now. She didn’t know what she was anymore.

She closed her eyes and although she didn’t think she slept, it seemed that she only floated in that black pool of misery a few minutes before she heard the heavy leather flap of Meoraq’s tent slap open. She sat up, raising one hand to shield herself from the grey light of morning. He thumped her on the shoulder with a knuckle as he went by, but didn’t look at her. His spines were already pretty flat. It was going to be one of those days.

She felt awful. She was stiff and crampy and sore all over, and her feet started screaming the second she stood up on them, but the worst was her head, which felt swollen and throbby and almost hung over. Dehydration, she guessed, but what the hell was she supposed to do about that? They filled Meoraq’s huge waterskins every chance they got, but there were fifty people drinking from them and there wasn’t always enough. And her stomach hurt. She couldn’t possibly be getting her stupid period again this soon; she thought this was plain old hunger and there was nothing she could do about that either.

She wanted more than anything to go back to sleep, but she could hear Meoraq stomping around, rattling poles while he took down his tent and making conversation with God on the subject of all the lazy humans he’d been saddled with, so Amber rolled up her blanket and put it in her duffel bag. Even that hurt and it only hurt worse when she picked it all the way up and hung it on her shoulder.

‘I don’t think I can do this again today,’ she thought, just like she had a choice.

Where were they going? Meoraq had a name for it, but he’d never bothered to tell them what the name meant and no one had asked. He could be taking them to the human-zoo or home to meet his parents or to the world’s tallest cliff so he could pitch them off. No one knew. No one cared, as long as they had someplace to go and some way to pass the time until they were all dead.

‘It’s not that bad,’ thought Amber, and it probably wasn’t.

Not yet.

Meoraq was making more noise, deliberately she was sure, and when he ran out of patience for being passive-aggressive, he’d swing into aggressive-aggressive and expect her to translate while he told everyone off. Like people didn’t hate her enough already.

Amber bent down to give Nicci’s shoulder a shake. Nicci moaned and pulled her blanket over her head.

“Come on, don’t do this. We have to get ready to go before the lizard blows a gasket.”

“You smell.”

“Everyone smells,” said Amber, but she backed up and put her arms down at her sides. “We’ve all been wearing the same clothes for, like, six weeks. You’re no bed of roses yourself.”

“I’m rosier than you are,” Nicci muttered under the blanket.

“What do you want me to say?” Amber asked, blushing dully. “I’m fat and I sweat a lot. Feel better? You have to get up now.”