The Last Hour of Gann (66 page)

“Meoraq?”

Amber.

“Leave me,”
he ordered, looking at the pole he was assembling and not at her.

She stood there a moment more while the color throbbed in his throat, and then knelt down next to him. She picked up two pole-quarters and threaded them together.
“I know you’re upset,” she said in a low voice. “I’m sorry.”

“
Are you?”

She recoiled a little
. “Yes!”

And she probably was, but he didn’t feel like forgiving her. He was, as she said, upset. He supposed he had been angrier than this several times in his life, but he didn’t think he’d ever been so angry for so long, and it was wearing on him. He needed to pray, but
here in the ruins, surrounded by humans, that peace was well out of his reach. Even Amber (whose arms had been around him, wholly around him) put an itch under his scales—the kind that could not be unfelt once you were aware of it, the kind that just grew and grew until even the sanest, calmest man alive wanted to take a knife and cut it
out
.

Cursing under his breath, Meoraq put his hand to his throat and rubbed, trying to cool the hot throb there
or at least cover the color he knew he was showing. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay, always.

Amber was watching, no longer even pretending to fuss with his tent-poles. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t really care much.

That itch…

Meoraq leapt up and backed away from her, still glaring, still rubbing. “Assemble this,” he ordered curtly. “I need to make a patrol.”

“
Are you crazy? No, Meoraq, it’s too da—”

He snapped his pointing finger around in fron
t of her face; she recoiled as if she thought it were a knife. “You do not give me orders,” he said, and even though he said it quietly, all human chatter ceased at once. Amber’s eyes were huge and green and baffled; seeing them should have made him feel something other than this black itch, but it didn’t. It made it worse.

“
You are in my camp,” he told her. He should have been telling all of them, but it was only her. She was, in that moment, the only thing in the world he was aware of. “You belong to me. You give me your obedience and you do not argue with me.”

Thunder crashed and groaned. She looked up fearfully until the reverberations faded, but as soon as Meoraq
turned to go, she was on her feet and clutching at his arm with her naked hands.

“Please, don’t go! I know you’re pissed at all of us and I wouldn’t blame you for leaving, but please don’t, not tonight!”

He found himself staring at her hand—her soft, pink hand—where it lay in stripes across his black scales. His mind was moving. He could feel it move, even though he could not quite catch his own thoughts. His mind was moving, but he couldn’t hear it. Like the hand that touched him, the hand he could see but not…quite…feel.

Meoraq closed his eyes and took a breath. Just one, for now. One for the Prophet, the wide open eye.

“Please,” she was saying, still touching him. “Okay?”

He opened his eyes and studied her from the quiet of his moving, uncatchable thoughts. He leaned forward slightly and took another breath—two for his brunt—and held it. She smelled like smoke and unwashed skin. She smelled like mud and dead grass and the animal dung she bundled for burning. She smelled of Gann and those were good smells, but they were all on the surface. Beneath all that was something different, something shiny and strange, like tiles pressed into a wall, like lights in the sky at night.

‘I have to get away from you,’ he thought, and it was not until he saw her immediate flinch that he realized he’d said it out loud.

She let go of him and stepped away, anger rising up fast in her ugly face. “Fine. You do what you want to do, but
let me tell you something, lizardman. You may think God will protect you out there, but when you jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you. His divine protection ends when people insist on doing stupid things they know better than to do!”

“Where was this insight when you followed S’kot into this place, eh?” he asked acidly. “Or do you think he will catch you when you all leap from his wall?”

“Hey!” said Scott.

Meoraq swung on him. Scott vanished behind his people like smoke in the wind and all at once, the urge to go after him, to hack his way through the whole, monstrous mess of them until the screaming had stopped
…but the thought was wrapped in some unfathomable way with the memory of Amber’s body slapping up against his and her arms going around him. He began to feel distinctly indistinct…the way he felt in the arena…just before the blackness of Sheul took him.

He pulled himself away, turned his clay toward the door and started walking.

“Then I’m going with you,” Amber declared.

He swung
back, but she was already leaving his unmade tent to collect her spear.

“You are not!” he said loudly.

“Give me a flashlight,” she told Scott.

“You are not leaving this room!”

“If you go, I go,” she said. “Fine, be a dick. Someone, give me a flashlight.”

Yao provided one. She thanked him. Everyone else was watching Meoraq.

“I have given you an order, human! You stay here!”

“I’m going with you,” she insisted, and struck the butt of her spear onto the floor for emphasis. “Someone has to be there to run for help after a building falls on you!”

He cocked his head, his spines flat to his skull, but she would not bend her neck. She trembled, but she stood and stared him down.

“So,” he said at last,
when he was calm. Truly calm, as opposed to the burning, thoughtless unquiet which had been as close as he could come to it most of this miserable day. He even smiled. “Give me your hand,” he said, offering his.

She eyed it, the stubborn set of her human jaws easing, then slowly moved her spear from right to left and took it.

He had her spun, disarmed, and on her knees with both arms behind her before the first wail was out of her mouth. He unbuckled his belt one-handed, whipped it free of his waist, and bound her wrists together. He seized her spear—every human in the room took a long step back, but none interfered—stabbed it low into the nearest wall at a steep angle, then picked her up and threaded her over the pole, accepting her kicks in grim good humor. He thumped her down, gave her a tap for farewell, and left her there, screaming curses at his back.

* * *

Amber thought she knew storms. They were the occasional nuisances that knocked out the phones and TV for a few hours, made a little noise, and got the garbage wet. She had never lived through one like this, didn’t know they could be lived through: Thunder you could feel; lightning you could smell; rain that made the floor you slept on vibrate like an idling car. The thought that the roof might drop on top of them was not a fear, but an inescapable fact.

So she waited for it, leaning up against the wall with Nicci’s head in her lap, stroking her as she would an anxious cat, watching people sleep. That part was easy enough; the overhead lights were still burning. Lots of people had looked for a switch, but no one had found one yet, so either the lights were programmed to stay on as long as there were people in the room or only the bots could turn them on and off. A few people complained, but in the end, it didn’t stop anyone from sleeping. Amber understood that perfectly. She was exhausted, in spite of the lights and the thunder and the general creep-factor of the ruins, but
she couldn’t sleep. She wished Meoraq was here, or failing that, that he’d let her go with him when he went out on his insane patrol, and failing
that
, that he hadn’t tied her up and hung her on her own spear before he’d left, thus subjecting her to a roomful of humiliation and snickering before Crandall and Mr. Yao finally dared the lizard’s wrath and set her loose.

She’d considered going after him even then, but two things stopped her. First and most sensibly, she knew she’d never find him. The quintessential dark and stormy night was raging on just outside and even though the lightning was coming in sheets, so was the rain, which made visibility a big fat zero. And secondly, more personally, she was afraid that he’d come back and find her gone, then have to go out and get her, and yell at her some more when he found her.
So she’d stayed in. She’d finished setting his tent up, even put his pack inside
without
first opening it and flinging crap around at random.

It wasn’t really her he was mad at and she knew
it. He just didn’t want to be here. She didn’t doubt that he’d search the area thoroughly for bandits or animals or whatever he was looking for, but mostly she thought Meoraq just wanted to be alone.

It was time to come to terms with the fact that
he was not going to stay much longer. He may believe that God had given him this babysitting job, but she also knew that if he started looking for divine signs to quit, they were one funny-shaped cloud away from losing him. And when that happened, they were dead.

Another clap of thunder banged down on the roof, the first to do more than grumble in quite a long time. Immediately afterward, the muted falling-nails sound of the rain picked up and up until it drowned out all the sleeping sounds that nearly fifty people could make in one big, empty room. Nicci shifted beside her, then rolled over, shrugging off Amber’s hand. Amber let her. Nicci was putting her leg to sleep anyway.

She decided to take a walk. Not outside, but just around the building. Meoraq wouldn’t like it, but Meoraq wasn’t here, so there. She’d stay away from the windows, but she needed to stretch her legs.

Nicci raised her head when Amber stood up, but she didn’t say anything and after a few bleary-eyed seconds, she just lay back down. It gave her a twinge—not the
usual feeling of helpless guilt as she watched over her baby sister, but something low and ugly and resentful. She swallowed it quickly, told herself she’d never felt it at all, and bent down to touch Nicci’s shoulder so she’d know that Amber was there and loved her. Nicci did not respond, but that was okay. She was sleeping.

The hall outside was dark and quiet. Only half the lights came on when Amber
went through the doors, and most of those were slow and sputtery. She wandered from shadow to shadow, listening to the thunder, stopping to inspect each picture on the wall, each empty pot that used to hold a plant, each award for excellence in whatever the hell field this used to be. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, so of course, she ended up at the closet full of bones. She didn’t want to open it, but she did. She didn’t need to look at it, but she did that too.

She had no idea how long she stood there, just staring into the
closet. It was not until lights that had been dying further back in the hall suddenly struggled back to life that she really woke out of whatever hypnotic hold the sight of the bones had on her.

“Hey,” said
Crandall, walking up behind her.

“Hey.” She closed the closet door.

“Can’t sleep?” he guessed, sympathetic.

Thunder boomed. She heard the muffled clatter as bones tumbled out of place.

“You’ll get used to it,” said Crandall. “Tell you the truth, this shit makes me feel more homesick than anything else.”

She didn’t want to talk, not at all and not with Crandall in any case, but she supposed she’d ought to make an effort. He’d already called her a bitch once tonight.

“You must get a lot of this in, um…”

“Kansas. Yeah. Where are you from?”

“Earth.”

She’d meant it as a joke, but it came out flat and unfunny. Amber looked at the nearest framed piece of
time-whitened nothing, wishing he’d go away.

“You worried about the lizard?”

“He can take care of himself.”

“You still pissed
at him?”

“No.
I don’t really want to talk about him right now, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Come on, I want to show you something.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing huge, just something
cool.” He gave her his aw-shucks smile, the one she trusted least, and walked off.

Probably another dead bot, or maybe some other sample of ancient lizard technology like the spiders in back. Maybe even another closet full of bones. Amber couldn’t think of anything she might find in this place that she’d actually want to look at, but God knew she had nothing else to do.

She followed him.

He led her around a few corners, down a few halls, and opened one of the office doors. She stopped at once, but he went on in without her, so what was she going to do, stand out in the hall alone? She wasn’t really a bitch, despite what everyone thought. She went in after him, determined to see whatever stupid little man-toy he though
t was so cool and get out again before Meoraq came home and found her disobeying his direct order not to wander in the halls.