“And as far as I’m concerned,” Scott was saying, now struggling to pick up the stone in the coals and move it into the stew, “you can have her.”

“I don’t need your permission,” said Meoraq, thinking of Amber sitting on that bank, Amber tumbling down a hill, Amber crawling into his tent in the dark and whispering his name. “I am Sheulek here and what I want, I take.”

And with that, he turned his back on Scott and the rest of his humans and went to find her.

BOOK V

SCOTT AND THE SHIP

It was raining the day that they came to the ruins, which was nothing really new. It had been raining off and on for several days, but this was a whole new kind of rain. Dawn came, nearly as dark as dusk, and the wind that came with it was almost a warm one. The rain alternated between tiny pellets as harsh as hail and fat blobs of icewater that plastered Amber’s hair to her scalp and wormed freezing trickles underneath her clothes.

Walking in the rain was bad enough, but on this day, there were also hills to contend with. Not tall ones, but very steep and rocky as hell beneath the tangle of creepers and thorns that covered them. All day long, they trudged up and down, hunched against the weather, stumbling and swearing but otherwise not speaking. Throughout the morning, the clouds pressed claustrophobically close, smothering them with wet slaps of wind to make their already uneven footing even more treacherous, but when the dim smudge of the sun reached its highest point, the clouds suddenly lifted, as if Meoraq’s God had chosen to maliciously swoop back a curtain and show them their options.

Door Number One was the southwest, the direction of the odd, warm wind and its icy rain, where they could all see the real storm not just growing on the horizon, but filling it, overfilling it, seemingly motionless but as solid a thing as the land it crawled upon. In the east, Door Number Two opened half a dozen needle-thin rays of light over a crumbling sprawl of what her eyes tried to see first as stones, then as giant trees, before finally showing her buildings.

The city had been huge in its day, straddling both sides of what might be a picturesque river, if all the rain hadn’t turned it into this swollen, frothing nightmare. Most of the bridges that had joined the city together had fallen in, but at least two appeared to be all right, from this distance anyway. As for the city itself, it too had mostly fallen in. Grass grew right over the crumbled remains, forming hundreds more of those steep hills they’d been climbing all day. Toward the middle of the ruins, these hills grew taller, sprouting eroded chunks of masonry and metal, and occasionally whole walls held together by the small prairie trees that had rooted themselves in windows and along broken ledges. And here and there among the centermost section of the ruins were pockets of shocking normalcy where the roads were not only cleared and the buildings sound, but the lights were on.

Bluish lights.

Electric lights.

Amber had stopped walking when these two tableaus revealed themselves, and she had been staring back and forth between them for some time before she realized that everyone else had stopped too. On every face, she saw the same bewildered apprehension, as if both choices were equally disturbing.

Even Meoraq had stopped, she saw. He stood motionless ahead of everyone else, his spines forward and one hand toying at the hilt of the knife that hung around his neck while his gaze moved from east to west and back again. One by one, all heads turned to watch him. They waited, some drawing up into familiar groups, to hold their own low conversations until he came to a decision.

At length, he raised his hand, beckoning without bothering to look at them, and started walking again. From that first step, it was obvious he had no intention of taking them to the ruins. He was instead turning them south, not quite straight at the storm but certainly not away from it.

The murmurs gusted at once into a wave of alarmed babble. Nicci clasped onto Amber’s hand. Scott gestured for everyone to stand still even though no one—not even Amber herself—had made any attempt to follow, and quickly caught up with Meoraq. Amber couldn’t hear what was said, but it didn’t appear to go the way either one of them wanted. When Meoraq started moving again—south—Scott turned around.

“Okay, people, listen up!” he shouted, clapping his hands a few times. “We’re going down into that town there.”

Meoraq stopped and looked back at him, his head cocked in what Amber was coming to understand more and more was never a gesture of curiosity on a lizardman. Sometimes there was amusement in that look and sometimes irritation, but regardless of what emotion accompanied it, it was always a warning, always the way he silently said, ‘Stop and think about what you’re doing,’ usually with some variation of ‘you insufferable human’ at the end. Amber gave Nicci’s hand a squeeze and got a little closer.

“We’ve got plenty of time before the storm gets here,” Scott was calling, oblivious to the stare at his back. “Everybody relax. Let’s just stay close and keep moving. The storm will be over before we know it, but there’s no reason—” He paused and amended, “No good reason we can’t wait it out where it’s dry. Let’s go.”

People murmured in a relieved way, not without a few nervous glances at the distant storm, and drew themselves back into their sprawling approximation of a marching line.

“He doesn’t look happy,” Nicci whispered.

Meoraq had moved exactly one muscle: the one it took to lower his spines.

Scott waved at him gallantly. Lead on, O faithful native guide.

Meoraq’s head took on a distinctly deeper tilt. “God’s own Word forbids His children from dwelling again within the cities of the Ancients.”

“We’re not going to live there,” Scott said, rolling his eyes back at the others and letting everyone know how patient he was being. “We’re just going to hike through—”

“No.”

“—and wait out this storm where it’s dry—”

“You will obey the Word as it was given.”

“—and then we’ll use one of those perfectly good bridges—”

“You will obey me.”

“—to safely cross the river instead of swim it, which is what you apparently have in mind.”

“Watch your next words to me, S’kot, or I will show you exactly what I have in mind at this moment.”

Scott’s broad smile faltered. Meoraq’s stare did not.

Behind them, a low grumble of thunder reminded everyone of the storm slumping inevitably toward them. Scott took advantage of the distraction and deliberately started walking toward the ruins. A few people followed. Then a few more, breaking away in larger and larger groups until they were all trailing in Scott’s commanding wake. Nicci tugged at Amber’s hand once, then let go and walked quickly away to join the other women. Meoraq watched them go the way another man might watch a parade, but if Amber thought for even a moment that he was annoyed by this defection, that ended when he looked at her.

He was furious.

With a sigh, Amber trudged over to him. He took her arm and turned around, but that was as far as she was going and when he felt it, he stopped too.

He didn’t look at her again, didn’t speak, didn’t take his hand off her. She stood quietly behind him and watched the yellow come in on the side of his throat and fade slowly out again.

She said, “If it was you or Scott, you know it’d be you. You know that.”

His head turned, not enough to look at her.

“But you’re asking me to choose between you and my sister. And that’s not a choice.”

His head turned the other way, turned fully, staring after Nicci.

“Please don’t leave us here,” said Amber.