The Last Hour of Gann (46 page)

“Will you miss us when we’re gone?” she asked, grinning and expecting a resounding lizardish version of ‘Hell, no,’ but to her surprise, he took the question seriously.

“There are
qualities I’ll miss,” he said after a considering pause, adding with a glance toward Scottt, “If the company were better, I imagine I’d miss it more.”

She waited, but he seemed content to stare into the coals all night, so she said it for him: “Aren’t you going to ask if I’m going to miss you?”

He looked at her for a very long time, then told her to go to sleep.

She did
. She dreamed about the ship again, the night it blew up, filling the whole sky with that tower of howling fire. This time, everyone got away okay, and they were all there, thousands of them, even Jonah, but Scott was there too, telling everyone in his soothing, determined way that they could leave as soon as they were all on board and so they were walking, all of them, in a neat, orderly line right back into the fire. Eric and Maria went together, holding hands. Jonah followed, the bloody sweat on the side of his bald head already turning to steam. Then Nicci, shaking off Amber’s clutching hands and crying. Amber tried to chase after her, but the heat pressed her back, and still they all kept walking until there was no one left but her and Scott.

“Your room is ready, Miss Bierce,” he told her, savagely triumphant in the firelight. “All you have to do is say you’re sorry and I’ll let you come too.”

She woke up too damn close to the fire, with Meoraq on the other side of it, just watching her. The dream died at once, tangling itself up as it receded until she was left with only few vague images and an upset stomach. And a staring lizardman.

“I don’t talk in my sleep, do I?” she asked, trying to smile.

He didn’t smile back.

Her stomach flipped slowly over and curled into a hot knot. “What did I say?”

“You said you were sorry.”

She stared at him in horror. He looked back at her without expression.

“Well, I’m not!” she blurted.

“Should you be?”

“No!”

“It was a dream,” Meoraq said, getting up. “Dreams don’t mean anything.” He came over to her side of the fire and pulled her blanket back. His body was cool and rough and heavy on top of her, and it felt good in ways that sort of thing never had back on Earth. He caught her chin in a pinch, made her look at him when he entered her. “Dreams are only dreams,” he told her seriously. “This is real.”

She came hard, kicking and thrashing, and suddenly found herself alone in the mess of her blanket with rain falling into her stupidly gaping face and Meoraq once more on his side of the fire, watching her.

He didn’t speak, didn’t move, certainly didn’t come over and have sex with her.

“I don’t talk in my sleep,” Amber whispered shakily. She didn’t try to smile this time. “Do I?”

His spines twitched forward. “No.”

“You’re talking in my sleep,” Nicci muttered, curling up tighter.

Amber pulled her blanket up and rolled onto her side, away from Meoraq. Her thighs clenched on the useless heat of an empty place that still stubbornly insisted it was having sex. She wanted to cry so bad it hurt as much as her stupid dreaming womanparts, but Amber Bierce was not a crier. Or at least, she never used to be, once upon a time.

Everything was different now. She didn’t know what she was anymore.

She closed her eyes and although she didn’t think she slept, it seemed that she only floated in that black pool of misery a few minutes before
she heard the heavy leather flap of Meoraq’s tent slap open. She sat up, raising one hand to shield herself from the grey light of morning. He thumped her on the shoulder with a knuckle as he went by, but didn’t look at her. His spines were already pretty flat. It was going to be one of those days.

She felt awful. She was stiff and crampy and sore all over, and her feet started screaming the second she stood up on them, but the worst was her head, which felt swollen and throbby and almost hung over. Dehydration, she guessed, but what the hell was she supposed to do about that?
They filled Meoraq’s huge waterskins every chance they got, but there were fifty people drinking from them and there wasn’t always enough. And her stomach hurt. She couldn’t possibly be getting her stupid period again this soon; she thought this was plain old hunger and there was nothing she could do about that either.

She
wanted more than anything to go back to sleep, but she could hear Meoraq stomping around, rattling poles while he took down his tent and making conversation with God on the subject of all the lazy humans he’d been saddled with, so Amber rolled up her blanket and put it in her duffel bag. Even that hurt and it only hurt worse when she picked it all the way up and hung it on her shoulder.

‘I don’t think I can do this again today,’ she thought, just like she had a choice.

Where were they going? Meoraq had a name for it, but he’d never bothered to tell them what the name meant and no one had asked. He could be taking them to the human-zoo or home to meet his parents or to the world’s tallest cliff so he could pitch them off. No one knew. No one cared, as long as they had someplace to go and some way to pass the time until they were all dead.

‘It’s not that bad,’ thought Amber, and it probably wasn’t.

Not yet.

Meoraq was making more noise, deliberately she was sure, and when he ran out of patience for being passive-aggressive, he’d swing into aggressive-aggressive and expect her to translate while he told everyone off. Like people didn’t hate her enough already.

Amber bent down to give Nicci’s shoulder a shake. Nicci moaned and pulled her blanket over her head.

“Come on, don’t do this
. We have to get ready to go before the lizard blows a gasket.”

“You smell.”

“Everyone smells,” said Amber, but she backed up and put her arms down at her sides. “We’ve all been wearing the same clothes for, like, six weeks. You’re no bed of roses yourself.”

“I’m rosier than you are,”
Nicci muttered under the blanket.

“What do you want me to say?” Amber asked, blushing dully. “I’m fat and I swe
at a lot. Feel better? You have to get up now.”

“Why?”

“Meoraq wants to get moving soon.”

Nicci
rolled over.

“Come on
.” She gave her sister’s shoulder another shake and was again shrugged off. “We’ll get washed up before we have to go, okay?”

“How?’

“What do you mean ‘how’? Down at the stream.”

“You go.”

“Come with me.”

“No. It’s freezing.”

“Please, Nicci.”

“You’re the sweaty one, you go.” But she rolled back over and peeled her blanket down. “I’ll be ready when you get back, okay? I just need a few more minutes.”

“Come on, please? I…I don’t want to go by myself.”

“I didn’t want to come here at all.”
Nicci pulled the blanket back up over her head. “But you didn’t care then and I don’t care now. Leave me alone.”

Amber waited, but her sister ignored her…and she did smell. She looked around, but although she could hear Maria talking to Eric inside their tent, none of the other women were up and she sure didn’t want to ask a guy to come with her.

It didn’t matter, she decided as she started for the tangled clot of trees that grew around the stream. She’d be close enough to shout if something did happen and nothing was going to happen. She didn’t want anyone to see her naked anyway. She didn’t even like to see that.

The walk felt a lot longer than it was. Her feet crunche
d over dead thorns in the grass and stumbled over rocks. The wind blew her hair in her eyes and her hair stank. She felt awful, but she couldn’t decide if it was feeling sick or hurt or just ugly. She took her boots off down by the water and walked out into the cold mud and looked down at her reflection in the slow-moving stream. She couldn’t see herself at first, just Bo Peep after a bad night.

She got undressed and didn’t look at herself again.

The water was very cold, but it wasn’t freezing. She lost the feeling in her feet pretty quick, which was something of a relief, but the cold water and the wind started her shivering, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t bear to wade in any deeper, so she splashed and rubbed as best she could, wishing she had soap, knowing it wasn’t enough. Crouching awkwardly over the stream, she dunked her hair and rinsed until it stopped smelling like smoke and sweat, and smelled like smoke and sweat and wet hair instead. Eventually she gave up and waded out to get dressed. She still stank, but she’d done her best, so okay, what came next?

She dipped her old shirt in the stream and started to wring it out, then gave up and just tossed it on the bank on top of her pants. There was no point in cleaning them…or pretending to clean them, seeing as she had no soap. She wasn’t going to drag her dirty laundry around
with her if she didn’t have to. She put on a clean pair of underwear. The elastic was going; she hitched it up over her hips twice, but it kept sagging. Nothing she could do about it. Nothing lasted forever.

“So suck it up,” she told herself. “Amber Bierce, fearless Space Adventurer, can live with loose underwear.”

Which was great, because sooner or later, she was going to have to live without it, too.

Never mind. Don’t think about it. Worry about today.
Worry about walking a million miles in the rain gasping like a beached whale. Worry about Meoraq being too disgusted at the end of the day to look at you. Worry about Nicci.

Amber opened her
duffel bag and pulled out her last fresh pair of pants. She put them on, at first only seeing how blindingly white they were, and then noticing with a start that they were big on her. Not quite to the falling-off stage, but not just loose either. She was actually going to need a belt soon and where the hell was she going to find one?

Uneasily, she put on her shirt. It was the same size as the one that had been so stiff and tight over her belly the day she’d gone into the Sleeper, she knew it was. And it was still stiff; the excess fabric stuck out on either side of her like wings, flapping loudly in the wind.

“Big deal,” said Amber, pulling at the front to make the reassuring roundness of her stomach stand out. “It’s not like you didn’t have it to lose, little girl. If it comes to that, you could stand to lose some more.”

But not a lot more.

“Everybody’s losing weight,” she reminded herself.

But not like this.

“You’re not starving, for God’s sake!” she snapped. “
Nobody
is starving!”

And this was true, thanks to Meoraq. So far, he’d put a dead saoq on
Scott’s fire practically every single day, not that Amber had ever been invited to share it. Her meals came from Meoraq’s own portion and although she tried to be grateful, it was all the grossest bits: gut-kebobs, or worse, gut-stew, made from liver, heart, lungs, and who knew what else, along with whatever scraps she could peel off a roasted head. She tried not to be presumptive about it and she’d never asked for it right out loud, but when that head went over the coals, Amber Bierce knew she’d be chewing on a tongue in a few hours while Scott and his happy Manifestors got all the good parts. But she wasn’t starving, nobody was starving, and if she was showing it more than the others, it was only because she had more to lose.

Never mind. She didn’t need to worry about how her clothes fit or how much weight she
(or Nicci) was going to lose before they figured out how to feed themselves. She had to think about today and how the hell she was going to survive that fucking hike. Meoraq was right; she needed to stop holding on to the stuff that couldn’t save her life.

Amber dragged her
duffel bag over to a rock and sat down to rummage through it. The first book she pulled out was the one on gardening. It wasn’t the heaviest, and she knew that if Scott knew she had it—or any of these books, for that matter—he’d turn her wanting to leave it behind as an act of colonial treason. She didn’t really want to leave it either, but she also knew that just being from Earth didn’t make it holy. It wasn’t any good for gardening, not here. All the advice it had for her was about testing the pH balance of the soil or how to use the power tillers and set up the irrigation network. What was the point of knowing the optimum climate and humidity range for growing tomatoes or that planting cucumbers with radishes made them both grow healthier when she was never going to see tomatoes, radishes or cucumbers ever again?

So she tossed it
and after that, it was easy to toss the rest of them:
Canning Made Easy, Fundamental Agriculture, A Beginner’s Sewing Pattern Book
, the Manifestor’s five-year planner and their even less-informative guidebook to planet Plymouth. Once she’d tossed them into the bushes and kicked some leaves over them, she’d halved the weight of her duffel bag, easy. And she could stop there if she wanted. She didn’t have to give up anything else. Maybe they couldn’t save her life, but they weren’t heavy. She could keep them.

“Oh suck it up,” said Amber, but she didn’t sound tough at all. She sounded like a fat chick in flappy clothes
, hugging on to a pair of fucking coffee cups.