The Last Hour of Gann (143 page)

Scott
staggered. Crandall started to hop up only to sit down again very fast, so that his legs kicked comically out in front of him. No one else moved and the reason no one else moved, Amber discovered upon a backwards glance, was because the guards had all drawn weapons. They might not speak English, but clearly they knew whose camp they were in and who put the scars on her shoulder.

“Call them off,” said
Eric at last, in a strained let’s-be-reasonable voice.

Now Amber gaped at him. “Did I fall through a hole in time?” she demanded. “These are still not my trained alligators!” And just to make the moment complete, she turned to the guards and made settling motions with her hand, doing her best to say, “Easy…down…please,” in lizardish while pissed off right to the red line. As they slowly sheathed their swords, she swung back on
Scott and said, “If you want to stay here, you better have a goddamn good apology for me in the next five seconds. One—”

“Jesus fucking Christ, sorry!”

“Two!” shouted Amber, and the baby added its own furious, if muffled, howl.

Scott
put his hands up like a man being mugged. “I’m
sorry
, Bierce! Goddamn! I just got out of a fucking cage! Pardon me all to hell if I’m not in love with the fucking lizards!”

The
word
three
hovered on her lips, but in the end, she swallowed it. “Fine,” she said, patting at the baby through her wrap until it settled. “You’re on edge. I’m on edge. We’ll put it behind us.”

“Jesus!”

“But you better believe that was your only free pass.” Amber glared at him. “Your days of throwing your attitude in my face are all over. You’re in
my
camp now and if I don’t like the way you talk,
commander
, I will leave
your
ass behind!”

He opened his mouth angrily…worked it for a bit…and finally closed it again, brick-red and actually shaking a little. He got up and moved as far away from her as he could go while still being within the boundary of the leather walls. Crandall went with him. After a moment, Dag and
Eric joined him. Then they were all over there, all but Nicci, muttering at each other under the wind and looking at her with mistrustful eyes.

“What do you think that was about?” one of the guards asked quietly.

“I know it was bad,” another replied, letting his hand rest on the hilt of his sword. “And I know it’s getting worse by the moment.”

It was. And it was her fault as much as
Scott’s. She only had to look at them, what was left of them, to know they’d been through hell and the first day out of it was way too soon to expect them to shake it off. Amber took a deep breath (
one for the prophet
) and let it out slow. She sat down.

Nicci
came to sit with her, warm and alive and so much older than Amber remembered. It was like looking into her mother’s face, that last day, and knowing it was Death you were looking at. Knowing it was looking back at you.

“
I’m sorry,” Amber said.

Nicci nodded without looking at her.

“This isn’t how I wanted this to go. You don’t know how I’ve dreamed of this moment…and I’ve already fucked it up.”

Nicci shrugged.

The baby in her arms began to purr.

“Was there…” Did she really want to know this? “Was there really a cage?”

“Yes.”

“How long
…I mean…”

“I don’t know. You couldn’t count the days in there.
Or maybe you could. I didn’t try.” Nicci stared at the fire some more, then shrugged again. “There was still snow on the ground, though. How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know,” Amber admitted. “Meoraq made us stop for the winter. We only just crossed the mountains
when I got caught. That must be the official welcome in Gedai.”

“Must be.”

The quiet was not an easy one. The lizards watched them. So did Scott.

Nicci sighed. She bent her head—an eerily lizard-like gesture—and said, “We were walking along
in this tunnel, you know? Only it wasn’t just a tunnel. It was a…like, a pipe. A sewer pipe. A storm drain, really. And I remember thinking how stupid that was, because of how much it had been raining. But it was mostly empty that day, and Commander Scott said it would be dry and there wouldn’t be any animals and it had to be safe because the bots were going in and out. We didn’t want to, but he kind of went off on it, you know how he does. So we went in anyway. And I knew it was stupid.”

The baby bit her, whimpered, and bit again. Amber brought it out, wrapped it regretfully in its smooth hide, and gave it back to Xzem. Nicci waited for the end of this process without watching it, then went on in the same dull, inflectionless voice.

“When it flooded, it happened all at once. And I know how that sounds, but it’s true. There wasn’t any warning. It wasn’t like it was raining and the water rose up. It had been raining for days and the water was still pretty much just around our feet, and then suddenly there was this wall of water coming at us. It hit and we all went away, all mashed together, and that was pretty bad,” said Nicci in a vague, thoughtful tone. “The lights all went out. It was pitch black and so loud. Everyone was grabbing at everyone else and all you could hear was the water and the bubbly sound people make…you know…when they drown.”

Amber didn’t want to hear any more, but she didn’t try to stop Nicci from talking. Sometimes you had to say the bad stuff. She put her arm around her sister’s shoulder and watched the baby nurse at Xzem’s breast.

“Then the tunnel dropped away and there was this grate or something across the whole floor. It was rusty and there was a big hole through it, but some of us managed to catch it and climb out to where there was a kind of ledge. Not all of us. Just…some. We all held hands on the ledge until the water went down and we could find our way out. I didn’t think we would, but we did. After that, we kind of camped there for a few days. I guess we were waiting, you know, for you and Meoraq. But it kept raining and there were these storms…storms like I never knew could happen. The buildings we were next to fell down and then the street dropped out from under it and all this water started bubbling up and it was still raining, so what were we supposed to do?”

The wind died down, as if in sympathy, and
Scott’s voice was right there in an urgent whisper: “—need to think about what’s best for
us
!” Then silence and the weight of their stares.

“We turned south,” said Nicci, “because Command
er Scott said it would be warmer.”

“Now wait just a goddamned minute!”

“That’s a logical assumption,” said Amber, as indifferently as she could.

“And we took a vote! We all agreed it was our best chance!”

“The men took a vote,” said Nicci. “You were right about that, too.”

Scott
started forward. Lizards drew swords. Scott retreated to slap furiously at the leather wall, looking like nothing so much as an angry ape.

“That thing gets just one more of those,” said one of the guards,
pointing his sword at Scott, “and then I kill it. I am not waiting for it to come at me.”

Scott
hunkered down, muttering and swiping at his hair.

“So we turned south, but it didn’t get warmer. It started snowing. And then it started freezing. And it was so cold…” Nicci trailed off. Her head cocked—again, like a lizardman expressing interest and reluctant humor. “There wasn’t any water, unless it was coming down in sheets and freezing on our bodies, and there wasn’t any food, unless it was chasing us down and trying to eat us. And six more people died, and Commander
Scott said we should cross the mountains after all—”

“Hey!”

“—because the skyport was our only hope.”

“We all agreed, goddammit!”

The lizardman who still had his sword drawn came suddenly, swiftly forward and dropped to one knee before Amber. He bent his head, clearly unsure of the protocol, then gave her a hard stare and said, “If you understand me, keep it quiet.”

“
Scott…”

“She’s misrepresenting the facts!”

“Not by much,” said Eric quietly. “Sit down, man.” And to Nicci, just as quietly, he said, “You really are a two-faced little whore, you know that? Acting like it’s such a conspiracy that you girls didn’t get to vote. Did you even try? Hell, no. You just sat there like a bunch of dummies waiting for us to make the decisions. When it came right down to it, you wanted us to take care of you. We did, so shut up about it.”

The lizardman kneeling in the grass before Amber hadn’t moved, although he had shifted the focus of his uneasy stare.

“We went into the mountains,” said Nicci. “There wasn’t a road or anything, so we just went where Commander Scott said our chances were best. The snow was over our boots the first day and over our knees the second day and by the third day we were trying to walk on it because we couldn’t go through it anymore. We should have gone back,” she said, turning her dull eyes on the rest of them. “We all knew it. We should have gone back but we followed him anyway.”

“That’s enough,” said
Eric, still without raising his voice.

“Sabrina froze to death,” said Nicci. “Only she didn’
t just freeze. First, her fingers turned black. Commander Scott tried to rub them to warm them up and they broke off. Sabrina’s fingers broke off in his hand like…” Nicci’s head cocked the other way, thinking hard. “Like icicles breaking off the bannister back when we were kids, remember how we’d do that? Snap snap snap, all in a row. While Sabrina was watching. They fell into the snow at her own feet. And I remember how Commander Scott started to bend down, like he was going to pick them up, you know? Like he was going to
hand
them to her. And then he just walked away like he hadn’t seen it happen.”

Amber tried to say something. Anything. All she could do was breathe. She looked back at
Scott and for once, for maybe even the first time since she’d met the prick, she looked at him without any anger in her at all, only a heartsick throb of horror that was, for a change,
for
him and not aimed against him.

She didn’t know what he read in her eyes, but it wasn’t sympathy. His face turned ugly. He looked at the lizardman kneeling before her and turned away.

“Then her feet turned black and she couldn’t walk anymore. We were all standing around waiting for her to die so we could keep moving. And she did, but by then, there were others. We had to keep walking, but everyone was dying. Mr. Yao—remember him?—fell down dead. I didn’t know people could really do that. We were walking and he just fell down dead. And we kept on walking. Like we didn’t even see it. But we all saw it. We all walked right by him.”

Amber couldn’t stop herself. She reached down and plucked the sleeping baby off Xzem’s breast, cuddling him back to her own. It woke up, bewildered, then recognized her and snuggled down, purring itself back to sleep. Xzem shifted her wrap up over her nipple and waited to be needed again, watching Amber’s face anxiously.

“Every day, there was someone else dead. Every single day. But we still followed him.”

“We made it out,” said
one of the Manifestors and the others muttered agreement. “We didn’t lie down and die like you would have done, lizard-bait. We made it out because of him.”

“We did,” Nicci agreed. “All
fifteen of us. But Lani died the next morning. I don’t know whether it was cold or hunger by that point. I guess it could have been either one. And Mr. Briggs died two days later. He just walked out into the snow to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back. We never found him. I don’t know whether he got lost or got eaten…or just kept walking. And then there was Maria.” Nicci looked at Eric, politely inquisitive. “Would you like to tell her about Maria, Mr. Lassiter?”

“Go to hell, you scalie-fucking cum dumpster,” said
Eric gently.

“Maria got pregnant,” said Nicci, unmoved. She went back to staring into the fire. “Which was what I seem to recall our role was by that time. Their most precious resource, remember, Amber? We were their wombs. Only now that one of those wombs was full, suddenly our leader was saying…well, pretty much what you said when he called you a womb. Suddenly having babies was right down there with…what did you say? Building a community theater and casting for
Miss Saigon
?”

“I don’t remember,” said Amber numbly, thinking
The King and I
over and over, like the tolling of a funeral bell.

“So they took a
nother vote. It was very democratic. And after the vote, they caught Maria and while she was screaming and pleading for them to stop, Mr. Lassiter and Commander Scott took turns punching her in the stomach.”

Silence. The fire hummed and the baby purred.

After a while, Nicci said, “It worked. Eventually.”

More silence.
Scott swiped at his hair. The lizardmen watched him. The lizardladies huddled together and tried not to look at anybody.