Amber started scrubbing at her face and worked her way down. The water was nice and warm at first, but it didn’t stay that way. She felt each blush of warmth as she splashed hurried handfuls over her neck and breasts and shoulders, but the wind was always there, turning blessed heat to icy pins and needles in seconds. She wanted to stop almost as soon as she’d started, but she made herself keep going and didn’t let herself half-ass it. Who knew when she’d get another chance at a bar of soap?

So she got it all, even the spots she’d never given much attention before: her belly, her hips, her thighs. It was like washing a stranger’s body. Gone were the soft curves and smoothness of her old self. In its place, the new Amber’s body was all rough-chapped skin, bony joints, hard muscle. She had lost all the weight she’d ever been teased for, but it hadn’t made her thin and pretty the way she used to tell herself she didn’t care if she ever was. It just made her uglier. Haggard. Hungry. She closed her eyes and refused to look.

In the tent, Meoraq watched her bend herself in half and bounce with the vigor of her scrubbing motions. Silently, he sat up, drew in his legs and rested his palms lightly on his knees, unthinkingly adopting the relaxed yet intent posture of any child at lectures. He studied every line of the silhouette she showed him and yes, he knew she was only cleaning herself, and no, there ought not to be anything remotely sensual in such a process, and yes, he supposed it said something about his character that there was this fire in his belly as he sat in the dark and watched her, but no, he felt no pressing urge to meditate until he had resolved it. Not yet.

When she reached her knees, Amber stopped. She was freezing, but that was only part of it. Half her hot water was gone and her fire was getting low. She straightened up to stretch her aching back, then bent over again to dip her hair clumsily in the stewing pouch. Rubbing the soap over her head did not appear to do anything except rough up the knots in her hair, but she rubbed anyway, then poured what was left of the hot water over the matted results in a slow trickle. Even if the soap wasn’t doing anything for her, the hot water might loosen the grime enough to rinse…well…clean-er. Clean was probably one of those things, like pizza or television, that had made the eternal transition from reality to memory. But cleaner was better than nothing and when she was done, she thought the effort had been worth it, assuming she ever warmed up.

Shivering, Amber crouched down by her pack and rifled through it for almost an entire ass-freezing minute before she realized she didn’t have any more clean colonists’ pants, just her old blue jeans, the ones she still thought of as her ‘skinny jeans’. It was darkly hilarious to think that they still weren’t going to fit. They were her ‘fat jeans’ now.

The fire was only getting lower and colder and she doubted like hell the clothes fairy was coming tonight. Amber fished out some panties, put them on, straightened up to shake out her jeans…and her panties fell off. Somehow the prospect of being caught with her underwear around her ankles was more mortifying than being caught bare-naked. Amber yanked them up again, held them uselessly at her hip while she looked in vain for a WalMart lingerie department to spring up behind her on this alien planet, then gave up and tied them on with handfuls of her panties’ own excess fabric. She stepped into her jeans fast, as if to hide evidence of a particularly ugly crime, but as she bent over to fish out a fresh shirt, those fell off too.

“Motherfuck!” Amber hissed, hugely embarrassed. She looked around again, this time for the women’s wear section of that WalMart. What was she supposed to do now? She couldn’t tie the jeans on, for Chrissakes!

‘Suck it up, little girl,’ she told herself in Bo Peep’s dry, half-drunk voice. ‘You’ve got bigger problems out here, so quit whining about your clothes and just put them on.’

“I am not whining,” she whispered fiercely, and put a shirt on. It was another of the Manifestor-white ones, one of only two clean ones she had left, and there was no kidding herself that it was just loose. She couldn’t walk around in this damn thing. She needed a belt.

Motherfuck.

Holding her jeans in one fist, Amber kicked the fire out and picked up her dirty clothes and her greatly depleted pack. She trudged around to the front of Meoraq’s tent and half-knelt to work the flap open. “If you’re awake, don’t stab me,” she whispered. “It’s just me. Amber.”

No response. She peeked inside. The light of the fire out where Nicci slept turned one wall of his tent a hazy orange, letting in just enough light to suggest Meoraq’s body beneath his blanket.

“Are you still awake?” she whispered.

A lizardish grunt was her only answer. Hearing it, she felt her stomach knot inside her. She’d woken him up, obviously. She should have waited. She was going to get him for his turn at standing watch in a few hours anyway. What was she doing here?

“You’re letting the wind in,” he said without moving, not even raising his head.

“Sorry.” She started to let the flap drop, then, not without a nervous glance over her shoulder, she crawled inside. He still didn’t move, but she could feel his stare even if she couldn’t see it. Fidgeting with her handful of denim, Amber awkwardly settled herself in the furthest corner from his mat and whispered, “Do you…Can I…Look, I’m sorry I woke you, but do you have an extra belt I can, um, borrow?”

Wordlessly, the dark lump of a lizardman propped itself up on one elbow to open the pillow of his own pack. Rustling sounds. The shape dropped back down. His arm reached out to her, holding the folded length of a leather strap.

She took it, her cheeks flaming. “Thanks.”

He grunted.

“Sorry I woke you.”

“You didn’t.” A pause. He shifted. “Tie the fastens, woman. You’re letting the wind in.”

“Sorry.” Belt in hand, she crawled back out into the freezing night and tied his tent down. Threading his wide belt through the loops of her jeans was not exactly effortless, and figuring out the buckle took several minutes, but as soon as it was on, she felt a lot better. She guessed she was ready to do the laundry.

The heating stones went back in the coals of the fire next to Nicci. Amber moved the cooking pouch and its tripod back and filled it. Meoraq probably wouldn’t be thrilled to discover how much water she’d gone through in one night, but maybe she could get them filled again before he noticed. Unlikely. He noticed everything. But maybe. And as long as she was imagining things, why not imagine that he’d forget all about being woken up early for her wardrobe malfunction.

And speaking of clothes, how exactly was she supposed to do this? Amber was no stranger to the chore of laundry, but it had always involved pre-measured packets of detergent and a handful of tokens. She doubted rubbing a little soap over her clothes was going to do the job. Still, like her own bath-in-a-bag, it had to be better than nothing.

Amber gathered up all the shirts, pants and underwear she and Nicci owned and waited for the water to heat back up. It wasn’t a very big pile, and for the first time since the crash, Amber made herself think about just what they were going to do for new clothes, because they were going to need some soon. Not in some hazy future sense, when these wore out completely (although that day probably wasn’t as far in the future as she was pinning it), but soon, before it got so cold that people stopped just bitching about the weather and actually froze to death.

She’d have to ask Meoraq. Maybe he could teach her how to make new clothes, although it was difficult to imagine how he could turn the rough, scaly hide of the saoqs into anything like the supple leathers he wore. If it was as much of a process as she suspected, he might not want to take the time. For that matter, he might not know how. In spite of the fact that he dressed in leather, they weren’t all ragged edges and rawhide ties. They were evenly stitched, trimmed and decorated, with metal buckles on his harness and belt. In other words, they were probably store-bought. She could hardly ask Meoraq to take them to the nearest LizardMart and buy everyone new outfits, but she did find herself uneasily wondering why he wasn’t at least taking them to town. The fact that they hadn’t so much as seen one on the horizon meant that he had to be deliberately keeping them away. In spite of how dangerous he insisted the wildlands were, he wanted to keep them here. Where no one else knew about them but him.