“Nothing. I brought your, uh, entrails. Thanks for the food. Go back to sleep.” Amber set the leather pack down by his mat, trying to get in and out of his space fast to disturb him as little as possible, but he was faster.

His scaly hand locked around her arm. He sat up, frowning at her, then beyond her, and then let go. He grunted, pointed at the ground and picked up his pack.

“I don’t want to keep you awa—”

“Sit down.”

She sat.

He rummaged through the organs, pulling out this or that disgusting lump of bloody grossness and occasionally grunting to himself. One of them he set on the ground, hesitated, then picked it up and gave it to her.

“What is it?” she asked dubiously, eyeing the pile of blood-streaked yellow mush and hoping it was not edible.

It was marrow, as he eventually managed to explain, and he wanted her to eat it.

“How do I cook it?” she asked.

He looked at her. “I have roasted it already. Eat.”

“I’ll just save it for later,” she hedged, easing it toward the ground behind her.

“Eat it!” he snapped.

She scooped a jiggly blob of it up in two fingers and sucked it squeamishly down. It tasted pretty much just like bland, vaguely blood-flavored jelly, which made it easily the most disgusting thing she’d ever had in her mouth and that included the time Bobby Wykes up the street knocked her down and made her eat a slug.

Meoraq reached over and helped himself to a heaping palmful, licked his fingers, then went back to untangling intestines.

“I saw the spear,” said Amber after a while. “It’s nice.”

He grunted. “It belongs to you.”

“I figured.” And, inanely: “I’m glad you didn’t have to kill me.”

“So am I.” He glanced at her. “Where did you get the knife?”

It wasn’t an unexpected question. “I’m not going to answer that.”

“So be it.” He took more marrow. “He would be well-advised to be rid of it. If I see it in his hand or the fold of his clothes, I will kill him. That is not a threat, mark me. That is the vow of Uyane Meoraq and God hears me. I will kill him and I will not burn his body. It can lie there and rot. And I hope ghets scatter his fucking bones.”

“Hypothetically speaking, if someone did give me the knife, he wouldn’t have done it to get me killed.”

“Only because he didn’t know the law. If he had, he would have urged the knife on you the first day of our meeting because he is an evil little clay-born smear of shit.” He said this without inflection or any sign of interest, yet long patches of scales on either side of Meoraq’s throat were turning yellow. He was doing that a lot lately.

The yellowing intrigued her, especially as it seemed to go hand in hand with high emotion. Maybe she’d been wrong about the ‘he’ thing this whole time. Maybe he really was a girl, and he was PMS-ing. It was something hormonal, plainly.

“Can I ask you a question?”

He grunted, put his empty pack aside and pulled out one of his many knives.

The knife gave her some pause, but now she felt more or less obligated to finish. “You are a man, right?”

He stared at her. Then the double-row of spines on his head kind of flicked forward and he looked at the knife in his hand. “Ah,” he said. And looked at her again. “I am a man. I am also Sheulek, born of the warrior’s caste to serve God as his Sword and his Striding Foot. Blades are not forbidden to me.”

“Oh.” Amber waited, choking down marrow and watching the yellow patches on his throat fade back to black as he sliced the saoq’s intestines into long strips. She didn’t say anything until he was done, but once he had, she said, “So…what did I do to piss you off this morning?”

He frowned, glanced at her, and kept working.

“I thought we had an agreement and yeah, okay, I didn’t wake you up, but is that really a good enough reason to go at me like that?”

He ignored her.

Amber picked at the marrow, then put it aside. “Do I bother you?” she asked bluntly.

He made a few half-hearted passes at the stripped bowel, then leaned the blade of his knife against his boot and rubbed at his brow-ridges. He didn’t answer.

“That’s a yes,” said Amber. She made an effort to sound cheerful, or at least, the sarcasm-laden sort of cheer she usually dished out when she was in a good mood and her feelings weren’t hurt. “It’s okay, Meoraq. Believe it or not, I understand.”

“No,” he said quietly, still rubbing. “You do not.”

“Yeah, I do. I wouldn’t want to be stuck with us either. For what it’s worth, I appreciate everything you’ve done for us. I’ll try to give you your space. I know I’m in the way and I’m not the easiest person to live with even when I haven’t been stranded on an alien planet, that’s for damn s—”

“Enough.” He moved his hand and looked at her with eyes that pierced but were impossible to read. His voice had not risen, but there was something new about it that she did not imagine because she could see people looking their way and wearing pretty much the same expressions they’d worn when they’d thought he was about to cut her head off.

It bothered her even more now that no one was doing anything to interrupt than it had then.

Meoraq tipped his head back and looked at the sky. He stayed that way as Amber picked at her bootlaces and rubbed traces of marrow off on her pants. She’d never been good at social stuff. She got the feeling he wasn’t, either. The silence sat between them like a cancer, squeezing everything else out as it grew.

“I don’t—” he said, and then just sat there, watching the clouds roll by.

There were too many ways that sentence could end to walk away from it.

“You don’t what?”

Silence. And just when she’d decided he wasn’t going to answer, he said, quietly and without a shred of emotion either in his voice or anywhere on his body, “I don’t know what to do with you.”

“I thought…I thought you were taking us to this temple place.”

He grunted. It could have meant anything. Then he finally looked directly at her, if only for a second. It seemed to her that he flinched a little before he went back to staring at the sky. “I know you want to learn things. It may even be that this is God’s will as well. But I don’t…I don’t think I can teach you. You…upset me.”

Her heart sank. She could actually feel it sinking.

“Meoraq, I know I haven’t given you a lot of reasons to believe me, but I swear I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I’ve just been in the city all my life. I can figure this out. Please, just give me a chance.”

“You do not mark me,” he said, but he didn’t say how and after another long stretch of cloud-watching, he abruptly changed the subject. “Did you kill the saoq I saw you roasting?”

She huffed out a little laughter. “Yeah. With my broken spear. Like the stubborn bitch that I am. And then I had to drag it all the way home. I was trying to be careful, but it still looked like I’d rolled it off a cliff by the time I got it back. Plus, it tasted like shit because all the blood was clotted inside. Some of the guys told me I should have drained it, but how the hell was I supposed to do that?”

He frowned, but didn’t answer.

“Then you show up with two of them, already skinned and roasted, on a friggin’ sled…” She tried to smile, but the bitterness in her tone made the effort somewhat wasted and Meoraq was just looking at her, so she let it drop. “And I felt like a fool.”

He stared into the sky.

“For about three seconds. And then I felt like a walking dead woman. You are one scary son of a bitch when you want to be.”

“I know.”

He wasn’t in the mood to talk, clearly, and she was all out of things to say, except for the stuff she’d had seething through her head all day—you made me run out of here like a fucking little girl you yelled at me for no good goddamn reason you broke my spear you made me cry no one’s begging you to stick around and I don’t like you either so there—and the stuff she’d never say even if he stuck another knife to her throat—I thought we were friends—so she guessed they were done. Amber managed another wan smile for the road and started to get up again.