“Why?”

“Meoraq wants to get moving soon.”

Nicci rolled over.

“Come on.” She gave her sister’s shoulder another shake and was again shrugged off. “We’ll get washed up before we have to go, okay?”

“How?’

“What do you mean ‘how’? Down at the stream.”

“You go.”

“Come with me.”

“No. It’s freezing.”

“Please, Nicci.”

“You’re the sweaty one, you go.” But she rolled back over and peeled her blanket down. “I’ll be ready when you get back, okay? I just need a few more minutes.”

“Come on, please? I…I don’t want to go by myself.”

“I didn’t want to come here at all.” Nicci pulled the blanket back up over her head. “But you didn’t care then and I don’t care now. Leave me alone.”

Amber waited, but her sister ignored her…and she did smell. She looked around, but although she could hear Maria talking to Eric inside their tent, none of the other women were up and she sure didn’t want to ask a guy to come with her.

It didn’t matter, she decided as she started for the tangled clot of trees that grew around the stream. She’d be close enough to shout if something did happen and nothing was going to happen. She didn’t want anyone to see her naked anyway. She didn’t even like to see that.

The walk felt a lot longer than it was. Her feet crunched over dead thorns in the grass and stumbled over rocks. The wind blew her hair in her eyes and her hair stank. She felt awful, but she couldn’t decide if it was feeling sick or hurt or just ugly. She took her boots off down by the water and walked out into the cold mud and looked down at her reflection in the slow-moving stream. She couldn’t see herself at first, just Bo Peep after a bad night.

She got undressed and didn’t look at herself again.

The water was very cold, but it wasn’t freezing. She lost the feeling in her feet pretty quick, which was something of a relief, but the cold water and the wind started her shivering, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t bear to wade in any deeper, so she splashed and rubbed as best she could, wishing she had soap, knowing it wasn’t enough. Crouching awkwardly over the stream, she dunked her hair and rinsed until it stopped smelling like smoke and sweat, and smelled like smoke and sweat and wet hair instead. Eventually she gave up and waded out to get dressed. She still stank, but she’d done her best, so okay, what came next?

She dipped her old shirt in the stream and started to wring it out, then gave up and just tossed it on the bank on top of her pants. There was no point in cleaning them…or pretending to clean them, seeing as she had no soap. She wasn’t going to drag her dirty laundry around with her if she didn’t have to. She put on a clean pair of underwear. The elastic was going; she hitched it up over her hips twice, but it kept sagging. Nothing she could do about it. Nothing lasted forever.

“So suck it up,” she told herself. “Amber Bierce, fearless Space Adventurer, can live with loose underwear.”

Which was great, because sooner or later, she was going to have to live without it, too.

Never mind. Don’t think about it. Worry about today. Worry about walking a million miles in the rain gasping like a beached whale. Worry about Meoraq being too disgusted at the end of the day to look at you. Worry about Nicci.

Amber opened her duffel bag and pulled out her last fresh pair of pants. She put them on, at first only seeing how blindingly white they were, and then noticing with a start that they were big on her. Not quite to the falling-off stage, but not just loose either. She was actually going to need a belt soon and where the hell was she going to find one?

Uneasily, she put on her shirt. It was the same size as the one that had been so stiff and tight over her belly the day she’d gone into the Sleeper, she knew it was. And it was still stiff; the excess fabric stuck out on either side of her like wings, flapping loudly in the wind.

“Big deal,” said Amber, pulling at the front to make the reassuring roundness of her stomach stand out. “It’s not like you didn’t have it to lose, little girl. If it comes to that, you could stand to lose some more.”

But not a lot more.

“Everybody’s losing weight,” she reminded herself.

But not like this.

“You’re not starving, for God’s sake!” she snapped. “Nobody is starving!”

And this was true, thanks to Meoraq. So far, he’d put a dead saoq on Scott’s fire practically every single day, not that Amber had ever been invited to share it. Her meals came from Meoraq’s own portion and although she tried to be grateful, it was all the grossest bits: gut-kebobs, or worse, gut-stew, made from liver, heart, lungs, and who knew what else, along with whatever scraps she could peel off a roasted head. She tried not to be presumptive about it and she’d never asked for it right out loud, but when that head went over the coals, Amber Bierce knew she’d be chewing on a tongue in a few hours while Scott and his happy Manifestors got all the good parts. But she wasn’t starving, nobody was starving, and if she was showing it more than the others, it was only because she had more to lose.

Never mind. She didn’t need to worry about how her clothes fit or how much weight she (or Nicci) was going to lose before they figured out how to feed themselves. She had to think about today and how the hell she was going to survive that fucking hike. Meoraq was right; she needed to stop holding on to the stuff that couldn’t save her life.

Amber dragged her duffel bag over to a rock and sat down to rummage through it. The first book she pulled out was the one on gardening. It wasn’t the heaviest, and she knew that if Scott knew she had it—or any of these books, for that matter—he’d turn her wanting to leave it behind as an act of colonial treason. She didn’t really want to leave it either, but she also knew that just being from Earth didn’t make it holy. It wasn’t any good for gardening, not here. All the advice it had for her was about testing the pH balance of the soil or how to use the power tillers and set up the irrigation network. What was the point of knowing the optimum climate and humidity range for growing tomatoes or that planting cucumbers with radishes made them both grow healthier when she was never going to see tomatoes, radishes or cucumbers ever again?

So she tossed it and after that, it was easy to toss the rest of them: Canning Made Easy, Fundamental Agriculture, A Beginner’s Sewing Pattern Book, the Manifestor’s five-year planner and their even less-informative guidebook to planet Plymouth. Once she’d tossed them into the bushes and kicked some leaves over them, she’d halved the weight of her duffel bag, easy. And she could stop there if she wanted. She didn’t have to give up anything else. Maybe they couldn’t save her life, but they weren’t heavy. She could keep them.

“Oh suck it up,” said Amber, but she didn’t sound tough at all. She sounded like a fat chick in flappy clothes, hugging on to a pair of fucking coffee cups.

She brought them out and held them, staring until rainbows and kittens and sunflowers and letters all blurred together. They were just things, like the books. They couldn’t help her. They weren’t sacred. They were just things.

The only things she had left from that whole life. Two lousy coffee cups.

* * *

Meoraq counted them three times before he convinced himself that, yes, he’d lost a human. The very morning after he’d told them all to be ready to move out at sunrise, one of them had wandered off. Well, the sun was up, and he’d had time enough to wake every still-sleeping human and make them take their camp down and herd them all together and then count them three damned times, and he was of a mind to leave anyway and let that be a lesson to the rest of them. But he counted a fourth time, just to be sure, and on that fourth count, he realized just who was missing.