He said nothing. What the hell was there to say to that even if he knew what she was saying? God, she was an idiot.

“It’s your turn,” she said, thinking he wouldn’t say anything.

And he didn’t, at first. She had enough time to punch the last hole through her boot and stitch the new sole on, making it whole again, and then he said, “In my ninth year at Tilev, I had trouble with one of the brunts. I had trouble with most of the brunts until I became one. That’s what brunts do. But it was my first year in the middle classes and I wasn’t used to it. I tried fighting back and he beat me. I tried avoiding him and he hunted me down and beat me. So one night, I threw a blanket over him from behind as he came back from the pisser and I went at him with a practice sword. I beat him until I broke, oh, seventeen bones all together, I think they said.”

She looked up from her work, frowning. “Good God, Meoraq.”

He grunted and rubbed at his throat, then at his knobby brows. “I didn’t know how badly I’d hurt him at the time. I just hit him until he quit moving and moaning and I ran back to the billets. I didn’t even take the blanket off him. They found him in the morning on the way to watch, but by then there wasn’t much they could do. He slept six days and died.”

“Jesus!”

“The masters called us to assembly and commanded the guilty boy to come forward. I did. They had a trial and God moved for me, so that was all right, but I still think about it sometimes. I shouldn’t, but I do.”

“God moved…? You didn’t get in trouble?”

“No.”

“Not at all? Not even detention?”

He shrugged his spines.

“Jesus,” she said again, because there was just nothing else to say. She knew Meoraq had killed people, in the same indisputable yet off-screen way she knew her mom had fucked men for money, but this was different. “How many—” she began, but faltered to a stop. She didn’t really want to know, just like she didn’t want to know how many men there had been.

“Three hundred and some. I don’t keep an exact count anymore.” He was quiet for a while, staring straight ahead and thinking his own thoughts. When he spoke again, it was in a low, almost halting manner utterly unlike him. “The Word tells us that there is no sin in the lives we take as Sheulek, but I was not Sheulek for that one and I think about it. God moved for me when it came to trial, but in my heart I know He was not proud of me. Not then.” He paused, his spines flexing and flattening. “And not today.”

She dropped her eyes back to her boot and resumed sewing. “I was fine.”

“You walked in our Father’s sight.”

“Nicci said I walked in yours too.”

He glanced at her and away into the night. “You are determined to stand a watch?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

“You look tired.”

“You hear me whining about it, lizardman? I’m not falling-over tired. I’m fine.”

“Please yourself,” he said, almost exactly the same way he’d said it before he left her out in the plains. He reached into his belt and took out a small, cloth-wrapped bundle. He peeled it partway open to show her a grayish, thoroughly unpleasant-looking blob she naturally assumed was some sort of food until he said, “If you want to bathe.”

Soap? She stared at it and him, the awl poked halfway through the side of her new sole, in the kind of astonishment that she had only ever known as a child, when Bo Peep might occasionally announce a trip out for ice cream. Half the time (more than half, to be honest), it was really just an excuse to pick up her fucking drugs and little Amber would end up sitting on one side of a booth, watching her mom nod off and finally just shoveling melted ice cream into her mouth as fast as she could so they could go home. But sometimes she really meant it, so there was always that first cautious swoop of hope that something good might really happen.

He covered up the lump again and set it down in front of her. “Return it to me,” he told her. “And don’t allow S’kot to claim it for his own.” He stood up and went to his tent, resting his hand briefly on the top of her head as he passed her.

Alone again. Amber picked up the awl and the first of Nicci’s boots, then put them down again. She’d told Nicci she’d fix her boots and she would, but having honest-to-God soap in front of her made thinking about anything else impossible. Hearing about some kid getting beaten to death by the man sleeping in the tent just a few meters away should have ranked a little higher, but it didn’t. For the moment, the only thing that mattered was that everyone else appeared to be asleep, so if she wanted to clean up at all beyond just changing her clothes, this was the perfect opportunity. On the other hand, no matter how quietly she tried to go about it, taking a bath in a bag was easily awkward enough to wake someone up and it wasn’t like she had a wall to put between her and anyone else.

She pretended to debate the matter, but pretending was all it was. Even as she weighed risk against reward in her mind, her hands were busy building up the fire around Meoraq’s heat-stones. While they got hot, she found the leather sack he used for cooking, still with a little cold tea in it. She drank it off—bitter as it was, she hated to waste it—then filled it with fresh water from one of his big flasks and hung it from its tripod.

All of this moving back and forth was bound to catch some attention and it did, but only Nicci roused herself enough to actually lift her head and look at her.

“Go back to sleep,” Amber told her.

“But what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Just…Just thought I’d try and do some laundry, that’s all.”

“Oh.” Nicci pushed her pack out from under her head. “Can you do mine?” she mumbled, already rolling over and wiggling herself comfortable.

Amber went and got her sister’s clothes. It was no big deal. She really didn’t mind. It was kind of wasteful to wash just her own stuff anyway.

Heating up the water felt like it took forever, which meant in reality it probably took about twenty minutes. She kept her hands busy when she wasn’t trading hot stones for wet ones and vice versa by making grass bundles for fuel. When she had enough, she took them behind Meoraq’s tent and lit another fire, not so much to keep the water warm (although she brought the heating rocks with her) as to see by. She was careful to keep the fire small, as careful as she was to keep Meoraq’s tent between her and the rest of the camp. It wasn’t much cover, but it was all she had and she wanted to make the most of it. She took it on faith that she had privacy as she undressed, and she did for the most part. While several people woke up during Amber’s bath, the wind covered her furtive splashing and the intermittent chattering of her teeth, and Meoraq’s tent blocked both her and her little fire from sight. The only one who saw her was Meoraq himself.

One word was all it took to catch his attention. One word, her hissy little “Shit!” when she thought she’d put her live coal out, just before it caught and grew into the fire that splashed her shadow onto the wall of his tent. There was no reason to watch her once he’d identified what she was doing…but he did. He watched, first from the corner of his drowsing eye, then brazenly rolling onto his side to face her.

Amber, believing herself entirely invisible but knowing that someone could come yawning into sight to take a piss any second now, stripped herself naked and got down to business. The hard lump of what Meoraq called soap did not lather when she rolled it between her wet hands, but its pungent aroma grew immediately strong enough to fight against the wind and sting her sinuses with its sharp, green smell. Rubbing at her arm was not quite as abrasive as attacking herself with one of those green kitchen scouring pads, but it wasn’t too far from it. On the other hand, whether the dried mud got washed off or scraped off, at least it was off.