Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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“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 thought was so cool and get out again before Meoraq came home and found her disobeying his direct order not to wander in the halls.

The overhead lights in the office were dead, but she could still see Crandall over by the window and he could see her. He waved a little. “Come and see this.”

“I can see it from here,” Amber told him queasily, and she could. The sky was alive; lightning rolled through behind the clouds so often, it actually seemed to be breathing. Now and then, white lines popped in and out of sight, hot enough to leave colorful burns hanging in the sky wherever she looked, but the worst things, the horrible things, were the smudgy greenish blobs that hovered around the high towers of the city, sometimes arcing one to another, flaring bright or winking out and occasionally splitting the difference in an explosion of showy sparks.

Meoraq was out walking around in that.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah,” breathed Amber, but she barely heard herself. Meoraq was outside in that, and maybe it was because he really believed God was looking out for him or maybe it was just preferable to babysitting a bunch of humans one more night, but he was outside in that. And he had been gone a long time.

“Come here. You can see the bridges. It’s wild.”

Did she want to see the bridges? Did she want to see the bridges Scott was going to make them cross over all lit up with green fire and throbbing? No, she didn’t, but she moved to the window and looked out anyway.

A constant thread of lightning danced and spun at the highest arch of the nearest bridge, making it seem as though it alone were holding it up. More lightning spat and crawled along the sides, spilling down almost in slow motion to drip from the bottom into the water just like a fountain. It was wild, all right. She supposed it was even beautiful. Mostly, though, it was terrifying.

Just then, something huge hit the roof with a bang and bounced off, sending Amber leaping into Crandall’s side with a hoarse, unflattering caw of terror. He laughed and put his arm around her, saying, “Relax, Bierce,” in his aw-shucks way.

“I’m fine,” she mumbled, backing up. “Cool bridge, but I’m going back now. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“What’s your hurry? Come on, Bierce, what do you want from me? Roses and violins? Why do you have to be such a bitch every time I try to get friendly?” he asked, still smiling, but sounding a little irritated with her, just as if he had every right to be. “I ain’t asking for your damn hand in marriage. Nothing else you’ve got going on has to change. I don’t kiss and tell.”

“Of course not,” said Amber, still trying to get out from under his persistent arm. “Then everyone would know you were a chubby-chaser.”

Crandall ran an appraising eye down her body. “No one can accuse me of that anymore. Naw, I’m just not a bragger, that’s all. I may not be a class act, but I’m not a total dick either. Come on.”

“And I’m not interested! How the hell more obvious do I have to be?”

He put the other arm around her. “Yeah, yeah. Big, tough Bierce don’t need a man. I get it. That’s fine. Look, no one has to know. The lizard’ll probably be gone all night, so why don’t you take the chip off your shoulder and just relax? I promise I won’t tell anyone that you’re really a girl.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped, pushing harder.

“Aw, come on. Don’t be mad. I’m just playing.” He bent down to kiss her.

“I’m not!” She gave him a real shove now, jerking her head away. “Get the fuck off me!”

He stopped chasing her mouth and looked at her without smiling and without letting go. Lightning strobed across his face, making it a stranger’s, an alien’s.

“I’m getting real sick of this, Crandall,” she said, just like her heart wasn’t pounding and her guts weren’t in knots.

The stranger in the stormlight looked thoughtful. “You know what? So am I.”

Without warning, he seized her by the collar of her shirt and shoved her hard against the wall. Before she could make a sound, he had a hand over her mouth and his thigh between her legs, wedging them apart and making that Hollywood staple of a man-dropping kick to the jewels impossible. She heard the purring sound of fabric tearing as he forced his other hand under her shirt, and although she struggled, he grabbed onto her naked boob and squeezed until she whinnied in pain and panic.

But that was all he did. His body crushed up hard against her, but his expression remained fixed in that annoyed/impatient way. He waited for her to stop struggling and when she did, he gave her boob another crude honk and said, “Anytime I wanted, Bierce. Any fucking time. But I didn’t. I ain’t that kind of guy. But the lizard isn’t going to be around forever and when he leaves, you might want to wise up to the fact that not everyone here is going to want to get with his sloppy seconds. So maybe you ought to stop acting like a fucking priss when a guy wants to be friendly, because this is going to be one lonely fucking world when you’re in it by yourself.”

One more twisting squeeze and he shoved himself off her, turning his back and walking away without another word. Amber stayed up against the wall, breathing hard and hugging her breast until the hurt was gone and only the shock remained, but the shock was plenty. She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t want to make a mess now that the cleanerbot wasn’t there to clean it up, so she waited it out and took deep breaths. She was fine, after all. He hadn’t really done anything.

“He’s not that kind of guy,” Amber whispered and laughed, a little hysterically.

But no, she was fine. A little roughed up, maybe. Her shirt was torn at the neck, deep enough to expose her left breast all the way to the nipple, but she could…she could tie it closed for now and…and she still had one more shirt and her sweaters and…and the bridge was still standing, right? Lightning struck…and struck and struck…but the bridge was still standing and Amber Bierce was fine.

* * *

Meoraq did make a patrol that night, all the way around the edge of the building to the front door, where he ducked beneath a sort of awning that had formed when whatever decorative steeple had once crowned this atrium had caved in. Here, mostly out of the weather and entirely alone, he knelt, slapped his hand to the ground with force enough to sting, and shut his eyes. “I am the clay upon Your wheel, my Father,” he said. Hissed, really. He hoped God could forgive that, because after the day he’d had, he didn’t think he could help it. A Sheulek was supposed to be the master of his emotions at all times, but it was all Meoraq could manage just to be master enough of his clay that he didn’t kill anyone.

But no…no. Feel the anger, Uyane. Acknowledge it. Own it. And set it aside. Even here, in the city of the Fallen Ancients, he was in his Father’s House.

“I am the new-poured sword beneath Your hammer,” Meoraq said, calmly this time. The calm was not honest yet, but it was closer than it had been. “I am the lamp You raise in the darkness. Shape me. Forge me. Illuminate me.”

He prayed for hours, unmoving, reciting the Word in the silence of his mind, beginning with the Book of Wrath, which seemed appropriate, and taking great comfort from the Prophet’s tales of his own wanderings in that first age after the Fall, and from the proof that he had found of Sheul’s dominion even over that shattered land. He meditated. He breathed. He was Uyane Meoraq in the House of his soul’s Father, and at last, his Father let him in.

By that hour, the storm had moved on. The lights still sparked in the distance and the grumble of thunder still sounded, but dully now and not often. “God’s wrath fell over every city,” Meoraq murmured. “And lo, towers did fall and walls did crumble, and the crying of all men in terror and despair did rise as flames to heaven, but even His wrath is not everlasting. Nothing there shall be in all His House that is everlasting save His judgment and His love. There is no night, however dark and filled with woe, that is not followed by dawn.”

Truth. And he would get through this, even this, somehow.

With regret, Meoraq rose off his aching knees and moved back around the side of the building to the hole that had been cut in its side. He entered past the killed machine and started down the long maze of halls that led to the foreroom, where he would make a count and where he fully expected to find that several had wandered off in direct defiance of him. He wasn’t going to lose his temper when he saw it, either. They wouldn’t have left the building, not in this weather. They had only wandered as far as necessary to annoy him because that was the ordeal which he had accepted in taking this pilgrimage. He would be calm. A Sheulek is the master of his clay and his emotions.

And no sooner had this resolution hammered itself into form in his mind than he heard the unmistakable sound of a muffled human moan behind a sealed door.

Meoraq stopped where he stood. His hands closed into fists. His head tipped back. He studied the ceiling and listened to the noises and thought a few black words to himself until he had more or less convinced himself not to be an insensitive brunt. They were probably mating and since they were people, their men had every right to use their wives when the urge took them. He had often wished they would be more careful in concealing themselves when they did so (it was a rare night that Meoraq did not have to suddenly alter the path of his patrol to avoid walking right out on top of a pair of mating humans), but tonight, keeping them under his eye was more important than their privacy.

Whoever was inside moaned again, more breathily than before. The tone was not urgent and he could hear no other sounds, no grunting, no chatter. Good. Either he had stumbled on them before they’d truly gotten started or they were right at the end.

Meoraq struck his fist on the door.

The sounds ceased at once.

“Get back to your bed,” he said bluntly.

There was no argument, no apology, no reply of any kind.

“Show me your obedience at once and I will forgive you this defiance,” he announced. “It is late. I am tired. I am in no mood for foolishness.”

The humans ignored him.

Meoraq hissed at the door, then slapped at the sealing pad and opened it.

The function of the room within was a mystery he did not care to explore at the moment, but he took idle note of its design anyway, since the humans were in no hurry to reveal themselves. It was a small chamber, not wide but rather long, separated into many walled spaces rather like stalls in a stable. Opposite them, before many mirrored panels, grew a pillar of sorts, with several fluted openings arranged over several cupped basins. The pipework and drains set in this structure made it obvious it was some kind of fountain, and it had been non-functional a very long time; one of the Ancients’ machines had died nearby, its metal face aimed at the pipework and its many arms extended in a final death-pose of silent frustration.

And of course, the humans were here. They weren’t sprawling out in the open for a change, but the lamps made by the Ancients would betray any living body no matter how well it hid from him. The humans breathed in soft, shallow breaths, believing themselves undetectable, yet their grubby little handprints were on the mirrors, on the fountain, even on the dead machine. The smell of smoke and an unwashed body was strong, very strong, but there was no sex-smell yet.

“I know you are here,” he said. “Put yourselves in order and get out.”

No response.

His patience slipped. He made no effort to regrip it.

“It would seem the room is empty,” he hissed. “I think I’ll just lock the door so that no other human wanders in.”

“Leave me alone.”

That was Amber’s voice. Meoraq took a step back, inexplicably embarrassed, and then lunged forward in an equally inexplicable fury. “Who the hell is with you?” he demanded, managing not to shout only by the aid of Sheul and half a night’s meditation.

“Nobody. Go away.”

Nobody? Meoraq took another look at the handprints marking up the mirrored walls and saw they were all the same size. But the moaning, the ragged breaths…?

“I told you to stay together,” he said at last, because he had to say something.

“You said to stay away from the windows. See any windows in here, lizardman? Go away!”

He did not see windows, only the smudgy image of himself in the ancient mirrors. His reflection—distorted by time in spite of, or because of, the ages of meticulous cleaning it had received—glowered back at him. It rendered his face unrecognizable as his own; the body, hulking and malformed.

Without warning, it occurred to him to wonder if the humans thought him ugly. If his face seemed lumpish and horrible compared to their smooth, flat ones. If he was, in fact, monstrous.

He looked at the closed doors of the many stalls. Behind one of them, Amber hid from him.

‘I hung her up like a cut of meat in a butcher’s window,’ he thought suddenly. And he’d done it in front of all her people. He’d done it with a smile. Meoraq scratched at the side of his snout, which did not itch. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing.”

And before he knew it, out came his father’s: “You can do that anywhere. Come out where I can see you.”

“No.”

He showed his teeth to the stalls and then rubbed hard at his brow-ridges. He had no experience with this sort of thing and, he suspected, no talent. “Is something wrong?”

She laughed, which was encouraging right up until she also said, “Why no! What the hell could possibly be wrong? Go away! I don’t want to talk! I put your stupid tent up, so go lie in it.”

Meoraq went to the first of the stalls and opened it. Apart from whatever incomprehensible device of the Ancients occupied it, it stood empty.

“I’m warning you!”

“Are you indeed?” he snorted, opening the next stall. Also empty. “It should be interesting to see how that plays out.” The next stall opened, and the one after that, but the fifth did not give to the pressure of his hand. “Because I rather suspect it will not go in your favor.” He tapped two fingers meaningfully on the lock-plate. “You have until the count of six,” he told her, “and then I knock this door in.”

“Just go away!” Her voice cracked on the last word. She was quiet a short time, and then calmly said, “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“One,” countered Meoraq.

“Just give me a few minutes, for God’s sake!”

“Two.”

“Goddamn alien prick!”

“Three, four, five—”

The door came open with a wheeze, its design preventing the violent bang she intended. Her first efforts to shove past him proved futile and somewhat laughable, so there she stood, furiously trying to meet his eyes while her own were wet. “What do you want?”

“Tell me what you are doing here.”

She snorted right to his face. “You couldn’t possibly understand, so no. You wanted me to go back to bed? Fine. Get out of my way and let me do it.”

“You have until the count of six—” he began.

“Oh for—I ripped my shirt! There, are you happy?”

He knew he’d heard her and yet that made no sense at all. She’d slunk off to cry over a tear in her clothes? He didn’t believe it. Maybe if it were Nicci, but not Amber.

He tipped his head to a cautious angle of inquiry. “I did not mark you.”

“I ripped my shirt,” she said again, her angry voice cracking a second time. “Now I’ve got this huge hole that I can’t fix.”

“You have no other shirts?”

“They all reek,” she said, refusing to look at him. “And they’re all full of holes too. I only have one new shirt left, but it’s the last one and if…” She pressed her shaking lips together and did not speak for a long time. “It got to me, okay? You can think it’s stupid all you want. I agree. You’re right. It’s stupid. Now leave me alone.”

Meoraq hunted for something to say while Amber stared at the wall beside his shoulder and kept her too-bright eyes dry. “You knew I have a mending kit,” he said finally. “You might ask to borrow it.”

Her mouth pressed tighter together. She did not reply.

Her clothing was worn thin. He’d marked it before this night. Long before. And the weather was only coming in colder. He couldn’t see the tear she spoke of, but by the stiff way she stood, hugging her arms to her chest, he could guess where it was. And he’d probably done it himself, binding her to her own spear. He tried to think back, but couldn’t truthfully say one way or another. It was likely, though.

He really was an insensitive brunt. Her clothes were falling off her. They hadn’t been designed for hard travel in the first place, much less this endless wear. He could order his replaced at the next city he passed by, but hers…hers were all she had.

Meoraq exhaled an uncomfortable hiss and made a half-gesture behind him at the door. “I have a spare tunic.”

Her eyes snapped to him and away, blazing. “I don’t want it.”

“Eh?”

“I said, no! Stop giving me things! Just stop! What do you think people are going to say when they see me wearing your shirt tomorrow?”

“What do you want from me then?” he exploded.

“I wanted you to leave me alone!”

“Well, you don’t get what you want!” he shouted, very dimly aware that what had begun as a poor imitation of a calm conversation had shattered beyond repair into splendidly irrational bickering. “I get what I want and I want you to shut up and wear my fucking tunic!”

She burst into tears.

“And if I tell you to wear the harness and the breeches that go with it,” Meoraq raged on, “that is what you’ll do! I’ll dress every Gann-damned sliver of you if it pleases me to do so and I will not hear another word about it!”

“You can’t make me, you scaly son of a bitch!”

“Ha!” And yes, he was entirely senseless now. “I don’t even know what that means so I can’t be offended by it!”

“It means your mother was a bitch!” she screamed at him.

“She could have been!” he roared back. “But my father was Uyane Rasozul in the sight of Sheul, twenty-six years a Sheulek, steward of his bloodline, lord over his House, and champion to all Xeqor, and it is his son who stands before you now! You see Meoraq, ha, here before God and Gann! Tell me again what I can and cannot make you do and just see what happens!”

He had to stop there for a breath, and it was there that Scott’s voice rang out with brilliant clarity: “Do you mind? Some of us are trying to sleep!”

Meoraq and Amber both stared at the door. He honestly wasn’t sure which of them moved first after that, but in another moment they were both storming back into the sleeping room, side at side, like an army of two.

Meoraq went straight to Scott, who sat up fast and scooted foolishly backwards while still wrapped in his bedding until he hit another human and had to stop.

“I have been listening to you talk all night!” Meoraq spat. “If you look into my face and tell me you were sleeping, I will stand you up and have judgment for the lie!”

“I wasn’t!” Scott said at once. “But other people were and—”

Meoraq swung around and raked his eyes over the whole of them. “Who dares order me to silence?”

“I do,” said Amber. “Shut up.”

“Oh my God,” said Eric, very quietly, almost respectfully.

Those were the words that hooked at him, not Amber’s. Which was not to say that Amber’s passed serenely through him, but it was Eric under his burning stare next. Meoraq could feel himself sway, as if his metaphorical precipice of control had caused him to physically teeter, but when he fell, it was on the side of seventeen years of training. Because God indeed was with him and His eyes were always open.

Meoraq closed his eyes. He took a breath, held it, then let it slowly out again. He looked at Amber and said, “Come here.”

Human heads turned all through the room. Human eyes watched, solemn and staring, as Amber stood alone among them.

She did not move for a long time.

But when she did move, she came toward him.

Meoraq waited. She came within his easy reach and tipped her head back just a little, a combatant no longer but only an exhausted and unhappy human in torn clothes waiting to be struck so she could go to bed.

Meoraq left her standing there and went to his tent. He found the mending kit and brought it back, taking her firmly by the wrist and slapping the case with force into her limp hand. “When you are ready to apologize,” he said, releasing her, “I may be ready to forgive you. Until then, mend your shirt and keep your mouth shut.”

Her chin trembled, but in the end, she did not answer, only took the kit and left again. Back to her stall, perhaps, and this was just as well. He was willing to take the higher path, but he wasn’t ready to forgive, not quite yet.

The humans were watching, wary. He hissed at them and went into his tent as they scattered. He lay down, tight and angry and itching beneath his skin. He thought of Amber sitting alone in that empty room, mending that worn-out shirt just so it wouldn’t be the last one she had in the world. He thought of her calling him a son of a bitch too, but he tried not to let that be the master of him.

3

Morning came, but daylight did not lessen the storm that blew without the walls any better than sleep had eased the storm of Meoraq’s mood. He kept to himself in a foul humor, hiding in his tent until the humans woke and began to mill about, talking about the rain, talking about food, talking about the building itself and the Ancients who built it…and talking about the ship they imagined they saw in the tilework. As galling as the thought of that ship was, he was glad when Scott took the lot of them away to the other room to look at it, even if it was against his expressed order, because at least it gave him the opportunity to slip out without having to deal with any of them.

But when he opened the fastens and stepped out, there was Amber, leaned up against the wall in her useless human blanket, waiting for him.

He didn’t want to talk to her yet. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her at all. He gave her a grunt of acknowledgement and left her.

Halfway down the first long hall that led to the rear of the building and the hole in the wall, Meoraq stopped and turned around. He folded his arms, hands flexing close to his honor knives, and waited. He wasn’t going to run away from a woman, by hell. If she wanted to thrash this out, they’d thrash. Ha! And she’d know how it felt to thrash with a Sheulek by the end of it.

Time, measured out by his own even breaths and the drumming of rain against the outer windows.

Meoraq waited. Waited. And finally let out a curse and stalked back up the hall and into the sleeping room.

Amber, still leaning against the wall, turned her head and looked at him.

Now he was really annoyed.

Perhaps she could tell. She looked away, fixing her eyes on her own knees without change to her expression. This act bent her neck, making her look very much like a dumaq woman, which did not mollify him in the slightest but was instead somehow grotesque. He felt himself cooling and had to stop and remind himself that she had started all the fighting and it wasn’t over until he said it was.

“I am not angry with you,” he announced, hoping to provoke her.

“Lies,” she muttered, but she looked at him. Glared at him. And that was better.

“A Sheulek is the master of his emotions,” he told her. “I have every right to be angry with you. I choose the higher path. I forgive you and we will say no more about it. Give me my mending kit.”

She reached it out from beneath her pack, but only held it for a while. “I should have thanked you for this last night,” she said finally. “I don’t know how it is with your people, lizardman, but when it comes to humans, you don’t interrupt a girl’s crying jag and then expect her to be grateful.”

He could not believe this.

“Are you criticizing my behavior?” he asked incredulously.

Her shoulders fell. “Sure sounds that way, doesn’t it? Damn it. Here.”

He did not move to take the kit and, after a few awkward moments, she let her offering arm drop again.

They looked at each other.

She said, without heat and without warning, “I’ve never needed anyone before. Never in my life. I hate that I need you.”

Meoraq cooled a little more and this time, let those fires burn out. He went over and took his mending kit from her. “I am not your enemy.”

She snorted without much humor. Without much feeling of any kind, it seemed. “No, you’re my babysitter. Or, what was it you called me? Your runaway sheep?”

“Something of the sort,” he mumbled, scratching at the side of his snout. He bared his teeth briefly, then irritably said, “You ran off, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did. So that I could have my useless goddamn girly moment in private. You were the last person I wanted to see that.”

The kit in his hands seemed suddenly to weigh ten times what it should. He looked at it foolishly, picked at a loose thread in its side-seam (it ought to be repaired and that was nearly ironic—to mend a mending kit), and put it away. “Why?”

She was quiet for a long time, long enough that he thought she did not intend to answer at all, and he was debating how to handle that when she suddenly, listlessly said, “Because I’m supposed to be the tough one. I’m supposed to be different. And I’m not.”

“You are.” He snorted and came over to give her a forgiving tap. “Hear the words of Uyane. You are without equal in the realm of the very different. I handle it…badly.”

“Maybe I wasn’t at my best last night. But you were pissed off all day—”

He grunted acknowledgement and did not point out that he had every reason to be angry when some cattle’s ass tried to take command of his camp, let alone when the one human he found tolerable turned her back on him and followed said ass into a city of the Fall against the will of Sheul and Meoraq both. He was being very patient.

“—and then you disappear all night, during the worst storm I’ve ever seen—”

“And what exactly did you expect me to do about the weather, woman?”

“Nothing! Just…and while we’re on the subject, what have you been telling Scott about me?”

His spines flared. “This is the subject?”

“It relates,” she said defensively.

“Apart from the usual death threats which he ignores, I try not to speak to S’kot at all. When circumstance forces me to do so, it certainly isn’t man-chat about you.”

She looked down at her empty lap and said nothing. It was not a look of relief. More of a flinch, if anything.

He studied her frowning face, seeing thoughts there he could not read. “Why? What does he claim I say?”

“I don’t know.”

He clapped one hand to his snout and physically pinched it shut, determined to be tactful. Then, because towering over her like this wasn’t helping even if it was entirely appropriate, he hunkered down and tapped her on the knee. “S’kot can’t open his mouth without piss falling out of it. If his people choose to believe his lies, that is their foolishness. It doesn’t have to be yours.”

“Meoraq, he’s telling them—”

He pinched her chin, silencing her. “I don’t care if he’s telling them he is Sheul Himself in human form. You know better. You know truth. How do you mark me?”

She stared at him in silence, at last waggling her head up and down in human acknowledgement.

He grunted and released her, looking broodingly around the empty room where the Fall of the Ancients went on and on in some other plane. “This land is poison. I allowed it to infect me last night, Soft-Skin, as perhaps it infected all of us. I should not have been so harsh with you. Will you take my spare tunic?”

“No.”

“Please yourself. I will not command it today. If you come to any sense, you know that I have it.” He stood. “Gather your things and pack my tent. I need to scout our path out of this God-accursed place and I want S’kot and his cattle to be ready to leave the very instant that I return for them. Tell him.”

“Okay.”

The door to the foreroom opened, drawing both their eyes. There stood Scott himself, chattering back over his shoulder at all the humans who had followed him into that room in defiance of Meoraq’s command.

He gripped his brow-ridges. He was not going to shout. He was going to be patient. He was.

“Oh good, you’re up,” said Scott. “I want to talk to you, Meoraq.”

“Sheul, O my Father, be with Your son.”

“Not a good time, Scott,” said Amber.

“Miss Bierce, this is none of your business. Be quiet. Meoraq.” Scott’s soft face became what he probably thought was very stern. “What can you tell us about the people who used to live here?”

“They’re all dead. What else do you need to know?”

Scott paused to roll his eyes at his watching people. When he continued, it was in the slow, smiling way that usually meant he thought he was talking to a fool. “Let’s start with this place. Where are we?”

“Eh? This very building?” Meoraq glanced at Amber, but she did not correct him. He flicked his spines. “I don’t know.”

“The room in back, the one with all the little metal creatures—”

“The machines,” said Meoraq, folding his arms. “What about them?”