“Take the marrow.”

She hunted around for a tactful way to say what came next, then just said it: “It’s gross, Meoraq.”

“I don’t care what you think of it, human. Eat it.” He rubbed at his brow-ridges, scowling, then crossly added, “Share it out with your N’ki if you must, but eat it.”

“Well okay, but she’s going to think it’s gross too.” She bent over to get it.

He reached up and brushed the back of his knuckles across her forehead.

It was the third time he’d done something like that and she never seemed to see it coming. She looked up, startled.

He looked back at her, frowning, silent.

She straightened up haltingly, fussing with the marrow until she had it folded again in the wide square of leather he’d used for its wrapping. ‘That was a weird touch,’ she thought, tossing the words out defiantly into the recesses of her brain just like it was all there was.

And the thought came back, like some distorted echo: ‘He’s going to ask me to sleep with him.’

Her stomach flipped over, but not in a scared and pukey way. She wrapped up the marrow some more, thinking (no he’s not don’t be stupid that’s just his half-assed way of saying he’s sorry for picking a fight this morning or even heck trying to kill you tonight except that was more of his god stuff and he probably doesn’t feel sorry about it but whatever he doesn’t want to sleep with you he’s a lizard) nothing in particular.

“I’ll do what I can with you,” he said finally. “For as long as I can stand it.”

“You won’t be sorry.”

He grunted in a way that suggested he already was, and rubbed at his knobby forehead again. “Go. Now. I…I need to pray.”

She backed away, clutching the leather with its jiggly blobs of marrow to her churning stomach and watching as he bent over and put his hands flat against the ground. His eyes closed. His breathing evened out.

He did not ask her to sleep with him.

‘Jesus Christ, you really are a fool,’ she thought disgustedly and picked her way back to Nicci, peppering herself with silent and scathing recriminations until she excused herself on the pretext of visiting the bushes, where she threw up and had a record-breaking second crying jag in one day and then went back and fell miserably asleep.

5

Things changed after that, but Amber found it difficult to say whether they were good changes or not. They should have been good. Sitting up for a few extra hours at night didn’t win her any prizes with Scott and his loyal Manifestors (although sometimes the Fleetmen might come over to sit with her for a while if they were awake. Crandall, mostly, whose profanity-thick banter was surprisingly welcome provided he kept his hands to himself, or Mr. Yao, who rarely said or did anything at all, but was still oddly good company), but she seemed to have come back from her near-execution with a smidgeon more of Meoraq’s respect.

He still hadn’t taken her hunting with him, but every morning, as soon as dawn and his footsteps woke her, he took her out into the world beyond their camp and tried to do something with her. Finding water always came first, because “water is life in the wildlands.” He could spend hours hunkered down over a mudbank, trying to make her see animal tracks in what her city-bred eyes stubbornly kept telling her was just a tore-up mess. If it was dry, which wasn’t often, he might attempt to teach her to crawl, which she would never have thought was a skill anyone over the age of two would need to have. Belly-down in the grass, she kicked and elbowed her way through thornbreaks and over rocks, while Meoraq snaked silently over the ground beside her to prove it could be done, hissing at her when she got too noisy or smacking her butt whenever it popped up too high. If it rained, crawling lessons were cancelled and he instead stood over her and made her throw the spear and fetch it back several billion times, so that she inevitably started the day’s hike exhausted. He never gave her so much as a “Nice try,” not even on those rare occasions when she thought she’d actually done pretty good, and on the really bad days, he wouldn’t even look at her when he grunted out his commands. Those were the days she was likeliest to find herself trudging back to camp just a few minutes after leaving it, with nothing to do except wonder what she’d done wrong until Meoraq came back and ordered everyone to start walking.

And then he ignored her. Throughout the day, he circled them, freely doling out cuffs and hisses if he thought people were talking too loud or straying too far from the group, but he never so much as glanced her way when he chanced to stalk by and wouldn’t offer even a grunt in return if she spoke. The only time he ever interacted with her was to use her to yell at Scott and those moments were mercifully few. He kept his distance, and the miserable planet they’d crashed on made sure there was plenty of cold whistling wind to fill it.

Once he gave up for the day and let them set up camp, she seemed to be worth noticing again, but only to work. The very first night after he’d put a knife to her throat, before she’d even had the chance to dig the rocks out of her boots, he was standing over her with his empty and almost-empty flasks. “Fill these,” he’d said, dumping them unceremoniously in her lap. “And start a fire.”

And off he’d gone to hunt.

She’d filled them, although it meant another meandering hike back and forth between promising greenbelts before she found an actual creek, but there weren’t more than a handful of trees around her, and all the dead branches she’d been able to drag back to camp burned up in less than an hour. There she’d sat, beside a clumsy ring of stones and a heap of cold ash, until Meoraq returned with an enormous, crab-mouthed eel-thing and nothing to cook it over. He let her get just three words into her excuse—“There’s no wood”—and then threw down his eel, grabbed her by the scruff of her shirt and dragged her out into the plains with him.

According to Meoraq, wood was an extravagance. The real fuel of the wildlands was dried poop.

Saoq poop was common and burned well when bundled with dried grass, but corroki poop was the best, he told her, if the beasts themselves were not around. If they were, she was not to approach. They had poor sight and hearing and were very aggressive when they believed themselves surprised. When he described them further, she quickly realized that corrokis were the giant armadillos she’d stumbled across the day Scott made her take her walk.

“I don’t see any corrokis around here,” she said, scanning the plains. “So why are you telling me all this?”

He sighed, gripping at his brow-ridges. Then he caught her head in both hands and aimed her eyes like a cannon. She stared, feeling hot and sick and frustrated, but saw nothing except grass, pale on the slopes and dark in the valleys. At last, hissing into the back of her hair, he let go and pointed.

But at what? Amber searched all the way to the horizon and back, wind stinging at her eyes (yeah right, the wind), but it was just…grass.

“Sheul, my Father, give me patience,” he muttered, and gripped hard at the back of Amber’s neck. “Tell me what you see, human.”

“Grass.”

“What color is the grass?”

“I don’t…brown. Just brown!”

“All over?”

“Light brown, dark brown! It’s all brown!”

“What makes it dark?” he asked, sounding very testy.

“How the hell should I know? It’s a shadow!”

“A shadow?” He spun her around to stare at her directly. “Cast by what?”

She looked up at the cloud-shrouded sun and felt herself blushing. Of course it wasn’t a shadow. “It’s mud, then,” she mumbled.

“It is mud,” he agreed. “Made by?”

“Water?”

“Water would grow a greenbelt,” he told her, and she blushed hotter because she knew that, damn it. He’d lectured her most of the morning about what water looked like. “What else makes a path of mud so wide and so long as to be seen at this distance?”