Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

“But we could have done a lot better,” Eric said quietly.

“Well, you just tell him we need this equipment,” said Scott, turning back to Amber. “And while you’re at it, you might find a nice way of suggesting that he pull the stick out of his scaly ass or someone just might have to kick it for him.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? He understands English just fine!”

Scott frowned at her, then looked at Meoraq.

Meoraq slapped him.

“And we’re not slowing you up for the fun of it,” Amber told him as Scott staggered back. “This stuff is heavy.”

“Then leave it behind! I have never seen you so much as open those crates! How can they be so essential?”

“What is he saying now?” asked Scott, cradling his jaw just as though Meoraq had broken it.

“He wants to know if what we’re dragging around is important,” said Amber.

“What we’re dragging around is none of his business. His only job is to act as our guide.”

“No, human,” said Meoraq, darkly amused by the man’s audacity in spite of himself. “My only true task is to serve Sheul as his Sword and his Striding Foot, and in that pursuit, I am given all liberty. All, S’kot. To defy me is to defy Him, and the cost of that defiance is death.”

Scott continued to glare, although his brows creased above his snapping eyes with a human expression of confusion. “What did he call me?”

“He didn’t call you anything,” Amber replied. “He just said he doesn’t work for you. And…something about God, I’m not sure what. And I think that bit at the end was him telling you to quit arguing with him.”

“I’m not arguing with him! He’s arguing with me! Look, Meoraq,” he said, turning briskly to face him even as he edged out of easy striking reach. “I can appreciate your concern and I share it. If it was within my power to expedite our progress, I would.”

“You could carry something,” Amber remarked in a dry tone.

“Your input is not requested, Miss Bierce,” said Scott without looking at her. “If you can’t act as an interpreter without inserting your uninformed opinions, I will end this discussion right now.”

She opened her mouth.

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning and squeezed it. Miraculously, she silenced herself, even if she had to roll her eyes first. “I am prepared to hear you, human,” he told Scott. “But so far, I have heard only your insolence and a lot of human whining. I will not carry you all the way to Xi’Matezh!”

“It isn’t his decision, Miss Bierce!” Scott said loudly once Amber had repeated this in their own rumbling tongue. “It’s mine! And you can tell him that we aren’t going to be walking forever! Someday, we’re going to have to make a permanent home with a permanent infrastructure! These things are essential to our ultimate goal and, regardless of how he thinks this inconveniences him in the short-term, we’re keeping them!”

Meoraq cocked his head. “He has a tendency to use longer and stranger words when he thinks he’s losing an argument, have you noticed?”

“Oh boy, have I noticed.”

“Don’t talk to him!” Scott snapped, glaring from one to the other of them, his face coloring up high in the cheek. “You’re just the translator!”

Meoraq acknowledged this with a grunt and did his best to address Scot without sarcasm. “If the things you insist on carrying are vital to your settlement, I will allow you to hold them for now, but the weather is turning and I will not be caught by it.”

“How bad is it going to get?” Amber asked, frowning.

“If this day is anything to measure by, the mountains will be hip-high in ice before we come to cross them,” he told her, then gave her a hard rap on the brow with one knuckle. “Speak my words. And tell him that he must prove these things to be truly needful before I allow them to anchor us further.”

“It’s all necessary!” Scott barked before she had hardly begun to obey. “Every single item is absolutely imperative to our survival in the new colony—”

“Oh Christ, not this again,” sighed Amber, rubbing at her eyes.

“—except you!” Scott finished, rounding on her.

“I’m the translator,” she told him. “And the translator would like to know what fantasy you’re living in where half a filter pump and fifteen bags of concrete is useful.”

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning. “My words, human. Give this fool my words now and have your own arguments later.”

“What did he just call me?” Scott demanded. “Did he just call me an idiot?”

“Oh, that you understand, eh? Then understand this.” Meoraq moved Amber aside and pointed at Scott with the whole of his hand in undisguised contempt. “I do not ask your will. I declare mine. Open the crates and I will judge them for myself.”

Scott looked at Amber.

“He wants to see what we’re carrying,” she said.

Scott’s face filled with color. “No!”

Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. He folded his arms, lay his first fingers along the hilts of his sabks, and calmly said, “I would be very clear, human. Do you answer her or are you defying me?”

“It would be pointless!” Scott insisted, backing away. “He couldn’t possibly understand anything we showed him!”

Meoraq drew his samr and looked at Amber. “Did he just call me a fool?”

“Oh come on!” Scott was now retreating rapidly, trying to shield himself among his people except that they kept moving out of his way. “Look at him! How am I supposed to explain a solar generator to a…a…”

“Lizard?” Meoraq hissed, advancing.

Scott bumped his back end into a crate and scuttled around it at once. “It’s highly sophisticated technology and you…that is, your species…You’re not very advanced!”

“So now we are all fools!”

“Meoraq.”

He looked back at Amber, catching at Scott’s clothing to keep him close. His samr remained in his hand, raised and ready to use. He grunted an inquiry, but kept his spines flat, a silent warning that he was not of a mood to entertain foolishness.

“I know this is going to be hard to believe,” she said, “but he’s not insulting you on purpose. We really do have stuff in there that…that you probably won’t understand.”

He eyed her while the human in his grip held very still, and at last, not without some reluctance, the truth she spoke found resonance in him. He was not Sheul, after all. It was not for Uyane Meoraq, born of clay, to know the infinite workings of the world and all things in it. So it may well be that the land which had vomited out such creatures as these humans had also allowed for the making of many equally unknowable things.

Meoraq raised his spines with some effort. He let go of Scott’s shirt-front. He prepared himself to abide by another’s judgment and gestured roughly at the crates around him with his samr. “Do you say these things are necessary then?”

“Yes,” said Scott.

Meoraq turned all the way around and stared at him until Scott backed away, tugging at his clothing and turning various shades of red. Meoraq looked at Amber again. “We have a long way to go and the weather has already begun to turn. We will never make the crossing into Gedai at a quarter-span’s travel each day. You must understand this. If the things you carry are indeed so vital as this cattle’s ass insists, you will have them, but if they are not, you must give them up. I will carry tools, human. I will carry shelters. I will carry any instrument of your profession that will help to settle you at our journey’s end. I will not carry sentiment.”

She sighed and rubbed at her face.

“What’s he saying?” Scott pressed.

She looked at him and then rubbed her face some more. “Scott, we have to leave some of this stuff behind.”

“Out of the question!” Scott turned an extremely unwise sneer on Meoraq. “This discussion is over!”

“Is it now?” he hissed, raising his samr.

“I don’t want to fight,” said Amber. “I’ve been hauling a sixty-pound bag of frigging concrete around just so I wouldn’t start a fight, but for God’s sake, enough is enough. Maybe it used to be the cutting edge of colonizing technology once upon a time, but it’s all junk now, Scott! The only really useful things are the crates themselves and only if we empty them out and use them as shelters!”

“I don’t know whether you’re really this stupid or just short-sighted, but in either case, if you can’t see the big picture, it is not my job to draw you a new one, Miss Bierce. I’m done talking to you,” Scott declared, turning around. “Both of you.”

Meoraq had been right on the verge of sheathing his samr until he heard that. And although he managed not to run the pompous little piss-licker through the middle when he did hear it, he had reached the end of his patience with these negotiations. He stormed over to the nearest of the crates, jammed his samr into the topmost seam, and pried the thing open to look for himself.

He didn’t know what he expected to see. A Sheulek did not involve himself in the menial task of guarding those infrequent caravans that traveled between the cities and he had not the smallest notion of what was involved when households moved themselves. He supposed he had anticipated furniture—Scott’s furniture, no doubt, which he would recognize by its overwrought and garish making—and he had even the sour tickle of a notion that he might find rich food or wine or something of that sort too luxurious to share out with the likes of those who served him. It might have been works of art or chests filled with official robes or coffers of coin or anything at all.

Anything but this.

Meoraq ripped his samr free and leapt clear of the thing in the crate. It did not move. The light of the fading day gleamed dully off its metal hide, showing him a square body, armless, faceless, motionless.

“Meoraq, it’s okay,” Amber said.

He swung on her, pointing back at the crate with an arm that actually shook. “You knew about this?” he demanded. “You?”

She wrinkled her soft brows at him.

“Where did you…” His samr trembled again. He shook his head to clear it and aimed his blade with force at Scott instead. “Where did you get this?”

“Okay, well, he’s obviously decided to freak out,” Scott began, rolling his eyes. “So as soon as you figure out what he’s saying, come and get—”

“Stand and be judged!” Meoraq roared. “I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand and I will cut you down if you do not answer just as if you answered for Gann! Did you build the fucking machine?”

“Meoraq, what’s wrong?”

Her voice, so timid that it might have been Nicci’s instead, somehow fell on him as a hammer, knocking the wind from his lungs and the bones from his body. He dropped his arm limp at his side and stared at her, his thoughts in such storms that even he didn’t know what he was thinking.

Perhaps they had only stolen it. They weren’t using it, after all. It had been crated all this time. He’d never even seen anyone near it, except to sit on it. A man could pass through the old ruins without offending Sheul, open those doors, fill flasks at those pumps. He had himself read by the light of those ancient lamps without a twinge of conscience. The only unforgiveable sin…

“Did you build it?” he asked her. “Say truth.”

“No, but why?”

“Why? How can you…” He backed away from her, shaking his head harder and harder. “How can you ask? How can you pretend not to know?” He fought with words and his temper, then lost both and shouted, “How can you bring that…thing into my camp? How dare you stand against the Word of God in a Sheulek’s camp!”

“This is exactly what I was afraid he’d do,” Scott said from the distance he had taken during this distraction. “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing so he…he thinks it’s a demon or—”

“I think it’s a machine!” hissed Meoraq, never taking his eyes from Amber’s. His chest hurt. He wished he’d killed her the day she’d first dropped gasping at his feet in the thornbreak than come to this moment, this betrayal. How could she dare to look at him like this, as if she did not know what he was saying? “And you must tell me the truth. Is it one of the Ancients’ making or your own?”

“It’s ours,” she said. “But no one here made it, if that’s what you keep asking. It was made clear back on Earth. That’s kind of my whole point,” she added, directing herself to Scott. “It’s broken and no one here knows how to fix it, so why are we still hauling it around?”

He seized on those words. “It cannot be restored?”

“No, and before you say one stupid word, Scott, look at it! What, are you going to chisel a solar panel out of stone? Make wire out of grass? It’s dead. The only reason we’re dragging it around with us is because it came from Earth.”

“From…your homeland? You carry it…as a keepsake?”

“Something like that. But if you honestly expect us to start putting the miles behind us, we are going to have to drop the dead weight.”

“I can think of some weight we can drop,” said Scott.

“Quiet, all of you. I must pray.” Meoraq bent his head and closed his eyes, shutting away the immediate whispers of the humans around him. The Second Law forbade the children of Sheul from seeking to remake the machines or to master them as the Ancients had done. In the Word, it was written that the man or woman who removed those devices from the ruins to be restored or put to use had broken faith with Sheul and could not be redeemed. He could think of no passage that forbade the keeping of a dead machine, but he certainly was not easy with the idea of carrying it about in a closed litter like an unholy relic.

Meoraq opened his eyes and there were Amber’s, impossibly green, unafraid. They showed him no guilt, no stain of sin. They were the very eyes of innocence.

But even a child could touch a naked blade in innocence and go to Gann for it. The machine was here, dead or not, and Scott at least spoke as if restoring it for use were part of his ultimate goal, this thing he called colony. Amber did not seem to think that possible, but still the humans were carrying it, revering it, and if it was not a working machine, what did that make it but an idol to Gann?

“Get your things,” he told her. And turned around. “I share no camp with the trophies of Gann’s age of dominion. We move on, humans.”

“We are not leaving our—” Scott began, and for a wonder, Meoraq did not have to say a word. One of his own men reached out and caught his arm. Meoraq could not hear what was said, but Scott looked hard at his samr when it was done and made his face change colors. He had no more objections.

“How far do you want us to go?” Amber asked. She had gone only as many steps as were necessary to take her Nicci by one hand and the strap of her pack in the other, but both dragged behind her. “Because I know you don’t think we were trying very hard, but…but I just don’t have a whole lot more left in me.”

Some of the other humans agreed, softly at first, but adding more and more voices until it seemed they were all whining at once. They were hungry. They were tired. They had walked all day. Their feet hurt and their backs and their shoulders and every other part of their malformed bodies—a growing litany of complaint that scraped and scraped at him until it finally stabbed itself in.

“Damn it, why can’t just one of you do what you’re told without whining at me?” he exploded, and turned on Amber. “You tell these bawling calves that I am slapping the very next mouth that opens!”

The furry stripes above her eyes rose in arches. “Wouldn’t I have to open my mouth to do that?”

He tipped his head back and took a deep breath, letting it out very slowly.

“What did he say?” Scott asked after a moment.

“And why would he want her to open her mouth?” asked Crandall.

Amber started to turn toward them. Meoraq caught her chin and made her look at him instead. “I am a Sword of Sheul and I honor Him always. Always. To see His laws broken and do nothing is to break them myself. Do you mark me?”

“I think so.”

“If the land of your birth makes such machines, then your land is lost to Gann. But you have left it, and that, at least, may be some sign that you can be redeemed. Perhaps this is why you were set in my path. Tonight, I choose to believe so. But not even for one hour will I tolerate Gann’s corruption among us now that I know of it. Do you mark me?”

She stared at him for a long time while her people whispered at each other behind her. “Are you telling me the Devil built our solar generator?” she asked at last. “Because I’m all for leaving it behind, but that’s just stupid.”

“What I tell you is that I honor Sheul. And if you honor Him also, you will not require me to enforce His laws. You will obey because it is His word and you love Him.”

“Because I what?” Her face puckered as if in pain, although she huffed out a laugh at him. “Meoraq, I don’t even believe in my own God, much less yours.”

“Jesus, Bierce, don’t tell him that,” said Crandall, more amused than alarmed.

“Well, I don’t. So please don’t ask me to haul my tired ass another two miles or even two meters because God hates our broken solar generator, because I won’t do it. I’ll stay here and take my chances with the smiting.”

“I ought to let you,” Meoraq said, releasing her. “That would teach you a very brief, very profound lesson. But I won’t. If you will not go for Sheul’s sake, go at my command and I will honor Him for both of us. Nevertheless, we are leaving.”

“The hell you say.”

“I do say.” And despite the seriousness of the situation and the insult he surely would have taken had it been anyone else who stood against him in this way, he felt the stiff set of his body ease and heard his voice quiet. “And you will not defy me,” he told her, only her, “even though you are sore and weary, because you know I would not give that order without cause. Get your people ready.”

She pressed her hands to her face and shook her head several times, but at last she sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

This was all that Scott could stand. “Goddammit, Bierce, you are not in charge! You don’t have people here and you don’t give orders to any of mine!”

Meoraq caught Amber by the shoulder as she began an answer and moved her firmly aside. He advanced, and kept on advancing as Scott retreated, until he’d backed the human up right against the machine’s shining carcass. He put his hand on the hilt of his samr and leaned over, face to ugly human face. “What are your orders, S’kot? Do you walk with me or go to Gann?”

Scott glared at him, deeply colored in parts of his face and very pale in others. A paradox, like his mouthparts, which were tightly pressed together and yet trembled. “Someone, say something.”

“You’re a dick,” said Amber, somewhat less than obediently.

Meoraq snorted, stirring the hair on the human’s head, and tapped his samr. “If I draw this again tonight, it will be to strike the head from your skinny neck. Mark me, human, or do not mark me. My patience is gone.”

He did not see much of understanding in the sullen face that stared back at him, but when Scott spoke again, it was to command his people to gather their things. The few tents and small packs they carried did not take long to set in order and soon the whole grumbling herd was following in Meoraq’s wake. Whenever they found air enough to whine at one another, Meoraq quickened his pace until at last they were quiet. He meditated as he drove them, thinking this was the first ordeal of his pilgrimage that he truly felt as though he’d conquered, and even if the humans were angry (or even if he cared if the humans were angry), it was still a far easier walk than it had been all the rest of that day. Tomorrow, they might even thank him, but even if they didn’t, they would walk. He was Sheulek; they were his, and it was long past time they knew it.

2

Once upon a time, Amber Bierce lived in a two-bedroom apartment. She shared a closet with her sister and had a shelf and two drawers for her other clothes. She had four pairs of shoes, two coats, a scarf she never wore, a new pair of gloves every year because she could never find the old ones, and socks. Once upon a time, Amber Bierce had her own bed, a mattress and boxsprings both, sheets and blankets and pillows that had to be just right or she couldn’t get to sleep. Once upon a time, food was nothing but a phone call or at the most, an extra stop on the bus ride home, and she could curl up on the couch and eat as much as she wanted even if she wasn’t hungry, just because it tasted good, and maybe even drink a beer or two before she took her shower…washed her hair…brushed her teeth…went to bed.

Once upon a time.

Now and then, as Amber lay on the rocky ground with the cold rain trickling in under the emergency blanket to warm against her reeking body, that apartment and that life seemed as hazy and unreal as the fairy tale words she used to invoke them. It was occurring to her more and more often these days that life wasn’t going to get any better. Easier, sure. Already, it was easier. They still hadn’t managed to walk far enough in one day to make Meoraq happy, but they were making a hell of a lot better distance without the concrete and crates. They ate almost every day, not a lot, but enough. No one was sick, no one had tripped over a rock and broke his head open, no one had found a thick limb on a short tree and hung himself. Perhaps even more impressively, no one had pissed Meoraq off to the point where he left. Bad enough when he stomped around, hissing and hitting people, and praying as loudly as he could for patience; it was so much worse when he got quiet and just watched them.

Watched her.

She could never tell what he was thinking on those nights, but she was often gripped with the fear that those were the nights he thought the hardest about leaving, and if he did, it would be her fault.

Because they weren’t friends. She wanted to be, tried to be, but she’d never been good at making friends and now that her life actually depended on it, she had no idea how. He was gone in the mornings when she woke up and he didn’t walk with anyone on the daily hike, just kept moving around them, ever vigilant and increasingly pissed off. By the time camp was struck, he was rarely in the mood to be bothered by anyone, let alone her, but sometimes he sat with her when the time came to feed his whining humans and sometimes he stayed to talk while everyone else went to bed. On the nights he didn’t, she sat up alone. She had no friends and when she was stupid and girly enough to feel bad about that, she just told herself that Amber Bierce didn’t care what other people felt about her. Once upon a time, it had been true. Once upon a time and far, far away.

“Are you sorry you found us?” she asked one night, one of the good nights, when she’d been able to pretend that she wasn’t just some pest he had to take care of.

And he said no, said it without even seeming to think about it first. But he also didn’t seem surprised by the question or her (not quite) teasing expectation that he might say yes.

“You think you’ll be sorry when it’s over?”

“That would depend on how it ends, but I doubt it.” The blunt bony spines on the top and back of his head flared forward and relaxed back in that shrugging way he had. “Right now, it’s too easy to imagine that it will never end.”

“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 sweat 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.