“It doesn’t feel like you’re teaching me anything. It just feels like you’re mad at me.” She rolled her eyes, hating herself for the stupid goddamn girly thing she was about to say, and said it anyway. “We never just talk anymore.”

He didn’t say anything at first, only frowned. Then he stood up, very suddenly, as if throwing his height like a wedge between them. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. Don’t get up!” he snapped, and she settled back into her blanket and stared at the ground. “I’m not angry with you, damn it! I just…can’t have you around me all the time!”

A little ways off, Nicci rolled noisily over and mumbled, “Come on, it’s the middle of the night!” and a few other voices sleepily agreed.

Meoraq hissed at them and rubbed his snout. “Stand your watch,” he said finally, walking away.

He was gone. Amber got up, carrying her blanket with her, and trudged over to sit by what was left of the fire. There was a scrap of leather there, folded around an unappetizing lump of marrow and a few charred roots. She wrapped them up again and set them aside. Later, if her stomach settled, she’d have to try and eat them. She was going to need her strength for tomorrow. When she had to do it all again.

6

It was on a chill, gray morning, early enough that everyone was still in a line (a thick line, since people tended to group up on these walks), when it occurred to Amber to wonder if Scott just might be crazy. Not in the hearing-voices sense, or the kill-people-and-keep-body-parts-in-a-jelly-jar sense, but in some real and tangibly crazy way beyond the mere what-is-wrong-with-this-guy sense.

She didn’t think she was wondering just because she was feeling bitchy, although she supposed she might be. She knew she didn’t like him. It had been another cold, wet, miserable night and she wasn’t in the best mood. And she also knew he really wasn’t doing anything different today as opposed to every other day, so objectively, she had no reason to suddenly call his sanity into question.

But once that question popped out there, it couldn’t be ignored. You couldn’t put toothpaste back in the tube; once you’d seen Waldo, you might as well throw the book away. So if it couldn’t be unseen, it had to be answered: Was she or was she not looking at a crazy man?

It started benignly enough, with everyone hiking up a rocky, thorn-covered hill in what was almost rain, and when Scott, who was in the lead just behind Meoraq, reached the top, he turned around and started his speech. She was used to that. He liked to begin every day with a speech, and since Meoraq wouldn’t wait for him to make them at camp, he had to find the time and the breath to make them on the trail, and it was a rare day that he didn’t make at least three of them in his constant effort to keep morale up. The fact that it actually did keep morale up instead of piss people off continued to surprise and annoy her, but it took his, “This is just like the westward expansion of the 1850s,” to finally put the word ‘crazy’ in Amber’s head, because for the first time it occurred to her that he might not just be talking them up. He might really believe it.

She understood that not everybody had a Bo Peep in their lives conditioning them since birth to suck it up or blow it out, and that was fine. She understood that not everyone could look at being marooned for life on an alien planet unless they had some kind of happy lie they could tell themselves (for example: I’ll be fine once the lizard shows me what to do), and that was also fine. In the beginning, Scott’s fixation with having authority and proving it with speeches had certainly seemed harmless enough. It made it easy for everyone else to avoid responsibility and he was actually pretty good at keeping the larger crowd calm in the face of overwhelming horror. But like a cheap pair of boots—such as the boots she wore now as she slogged through the mud that was made when fifty people walked ahead of her in the early morning drizzle—even the smallest defects got bigger with wear. In fact, if Scott’s ability to bullshit his fellow Manifestors could be likened to the sole of her boot, the talent, like the tread, could stay more or less intact even as the glue behind it failed. Now, although it left a fairly solid-looking print behind in the mud and no one looking at that print would ever suspect the boot that made it of damage, it sure didn’t keep the mud out, and every step that Amber took came with the slap-slap sound of a loose sole tearing itself further and further open.

What all this meant to Amber was that, even though Scott still sounded sane enough as he went enthusiastically on comparing the survivors of the Pioneer to the true pioneers, who had also gone on foot over the endless American wilderness with their savage (and not entirely trustworthy) native guides, and seemed to have no trouble convincing his fellow colonists that their trail, like that of the Oregon-bound pioneers of old, would end in the eventual comforts of home, all Amber could hear was that slap-slapping sound. Scott may not be foaming at the mouth and wearing panties on his head, but ultimately she decided that, yes, if he believed what was coming out of his mouth, he was a little bit crazy. Also, her boots were falling apart.

“Let me ask you something,” she said, turning to Nicci. “Hypothetically. When somebody consistently refuses to accept reality, when does that stop being optimistic and start being dangerous?”

She thought that was vague enough, but Nicci gave her a look of immediate and undisguised horror, and the two ladies who’d been chatting with Nicci closed ranks and sped up like the conversation was catching.

“Nothing’s wrong with him!” Nicci hissed. “Nothing!”

“He’s still calling this a colony. We’re his pioneers!”

“So? What’s wrong with that? What do you want him to call us, his victims? Why do you have to think that if no one is freaking out and terrified all the time, we’re not taking it seriously enough? God, this is so like you!”

That gave her a twinge. “Okay, okay. Whatever. Calm down.”

“Stop telling me what to do! I don’t have to listen to you anymore!”

“I said, okay,” said Amber, more harshly than she meant to. People were watching and now they were whispering too. “Forget I said anything. Jesus, Nicci.”

“He’s right about everything he says about you,” Nicci said. She sniffed and gave her head a little snap, tossing her hair just like their mom used to do when she’d drunk enough to get pouty, not quite enough to get mean. “You’re trying to turn me against him.”

That managed to be ludicrous and infuriating both at the same time.

“You know what?” said Amber. “Right at this moment, I don’t give a rat’s ass what either one of you think about me.”

Nicci tossed her hair again, this time with their mother’s mean little snigger. “He says you only say stuff like that because you already know nobody likes you. He says you have a psychological need to push people around because you don’t have any self-esteem because you’re fat.”

“I bet he’d say lots of things to get in your pants,” said Amber, but before she could add something even nastier (not a bitch i’m not and i’m not even that fucking fat anymore so there), another dried creeper hiding in the trampled mud caught in the toe of Amber’s slap-slapping boot for the umpteenth time. She gave it the same little shake she always gave it to free herself, but when she tried to keep walking, she found that it hadn’t let go. There was a swift ripping sound, a flare of pain across her toes and down the bottom of her foot, and then the monotony of another day-long hike in the rain abruptly interrupted itself by pitching her onto the ground in this world’s first belly-flop. Without a pool, no less.