Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 51 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

It was not for men to demand answers of God, no more than it was the recalcitrant son’s right to demand forgiveness of his father. Meoraq knew this. He bent his back beneath the weight of guilt and silence, one hand splayed open in cooling blood, and knew—for the first time in all his life—no love for God.

The moment passed away eventually, but the Meoraq who rose from his knees at the end of that bad time would forever be changed from the man he had been and he knew it. He collected his weapons, cleaned and sheathed them. He gave what fuel remained to the fire so that he could count his remaining provisions by its light and make them ready for the next day’s travel. Then he lay down and closed his eyes.

There was nothing he could do until morning.

4

Amber woke up to the sound of what she thought was an engine stuttering. In that moment, before she opened her eyes or even really had a chance to process sound or smell or anything lucid, she felt the overwhelming rush of relief that she had dreamed the whole damn thing. They’d said there would be no dreams in the Sleepers, but they’d been wrong, because she felt as though she’d been locked in that one for years. But she was awake now, which meant she was on Plymouth with Nicci right in the room beside her. There had been no crash. There were no lizardpeople. There was no Meoraq…

That hurt and it was the hurt that pierced her enough to drag her eyes open and see for herself what was real.

The first thing she saw was the wall. A leather wall, dyed black and stretched between some rough-cut poles, not so much to keep the weather out as to keep the light of their fire in. The crudity of this enclosure assured her at once that, for good or ill, she was still marooned on an alien planet with a race full of lizardmen.

Only after this fact sank in did she recognize that she was still bound—wrists to elbows, ankles to each other—and tethered to one of the poles holding the wall up. The belt that had gagged her had been loosened but not removed; it hung around her neck like a dog collar. The next thing she saw, what she probably should have seen first, was a small, slender lizardman—a lizardlady, maybe—hunched over with its wrists tied to a length of pole along with several other lizards, stuttering hoarsely without words.

Crying. All this time, she’d thought Meoraq had never seen anyone else cry but her. The sight of the lizard in a posture of such helpless, terrified surrender, coughing out its sobs as quietly as possible while the raiders (a lot more raiders, she noticed) talked around a campfire close by, pulled at Amber’s heart in a way only Nicci’s crying jags had ever been able to do before.

“Hey,” she said before she stopped to think that nothing she said was going to make any kind of sense to these people. “Hey, don’t cry. It’s…well, it’s not okay, but it will be. It might be.”

The lizardlady (she was positive now that was what the captives were. They had smoother, more delicate features and, more to the point, they appeared to have a breast. Only one. It wasn’t much—just a slight swelling in the center of each slender chest, more like a broad wedge than the round bubbles Amber had, but plainly a breast) gave her a fearful, shivering stare and began to stutter harder.

“What in the grip of God’s loving arms did I just hear?” The leader rose from his place at the fire, silencing his men with a wave of one hand before aiming it at Amber like a gun. “Did you just talk?”

She clamped her bloody lips together and said nothing. Her jaws still ached and the taste of blood was still bitter in her mouth. She could be as defiant as she wanted in her heart, but the rest of her didn’t want the gag again.

The raider’s leader was not deterred. He crossed the small camp in just a few steps to hunker beside her and prodded at her shoulder with one blunt finger. “Say something.”

“Fuck off,” she said. Stupid thing to say. She could have wished him a Merry Christmas for all the good it did her.

“God blows blessings up my ass,” someone else said, standing up. “It can talk!”

“You’re both imagining things,” said a third lizardman. “It’s just making sounds, those aren’t words.”

“Those aren’t dumaqi words,” the leader corrected. He drew a knife—he wore a pair high on his arms, like Meoraq—and showed it to her. “I think it’s time I had a better look at you, little one. Hold still and this won’t hurt. Toss around and I guarantee nothing.”

He did not untie her. He left her hands behind her back and her legs cinched together and simply cut along the seam of her tunic, severing each clumsy stitch she’d sewed on herself, until it just fell open. He grunted, flicking at strands of her hair with the tip of his knife, then stabbed it into the ground for safe-keeping and cupped her chin in his hand. He turned her head this way, then that, nudged at her lips, her ear, the ticklish flesh around some healing scratch on her cheek. Then he let go and dropped his gaze.

He touched her breast, then gripped it, kneaded it. His scales and the cold popped a nipple out for him; his thumb rolled over it thoughtfully, gave it a pluck, a careful pinch. He stopped when she winced, eyed her, then moved on to finger her bellybutton. He seemed to be trying to push his finger into it and when he finally decided that wasn’t going to happen, he leaned back on his heels and just grunted again.

“Where do you suppose it came from?” someone asked.

“Washed in on some storm.” He flexed the spines on the back of his head in a shrugging motion. “If you’d ever read the Prophet’s Word, you’d know that the first years after the Fall brought all manner of new and terrible life out of Gann.”

More than one raider cast his eyes skyward or hid them entirely behind a rubbing hand, but only the one called Vek, with a bandaged arm and a glazed look in his eye, was reckless enough to actually say, “Zhuqa, my missing hand is screaming at me in ways you can’t imagine. I can’t hear that piss-talk tonight and stay sane.”

“You go north far enough, you will find monsters. Hairy beasts as tall as three men standing on each other’s shoulders, swinging tails that can knock a man dead without even knowing he was there. Legless things in the rocky cracks that come up and bite, steal the feeling from a man’s body, and while he lies there unable to move, they crawl up into his slit and make a den in his guts. Even the trees have teeth there and will eat a man if he stumbles too close. I have been to the northlands,” he went on as his men murmured uneasily at each other. “I have seen all these things. This—” He gave Amber’s breast another rough, almost petting squeeze. “—is new to my eyes, but if they have monsters in the north, they must have them elsewhere as well.”

“This isn’t a monster.” Vek took a deep swallow from a small flask and came a little closer to them. “It’s a person.”

The leader grunted agreement.

“And I,” Vek went on, bending over to blow a particularly pungent and strangely sweet cloud of breath at her, “am going to kill it.”

“Ease off, Vek.”

“I mean to take a few days doing it, too,” he added, pointing at Amber. “I hope you understand me, you little smear of ghet-shit. I am going to cut off your hands and your feet and eat them in front of you.”

The leader reached up and caught Vek’s harness, gave him a small shake to make him look at him, and quietly said, “Ease off, I said. If I decide to sell it—if—I will give you the first offer. Until then, it belongs to me and you keep your distance. I’m feeling tenderly toward you at the moment, for the sake of all the years your two good arms have done me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t put you right into Gann’s open mouth if you keep giving me reasons.”

Vek moved off, grumbling and drinking, to collapse in a heap by the fire. He picked something up and looked at it—his hand, Amber realized—and threw it into the coals hard enough to send up a cloud of hot ash.

The leader picked up his knife again and resumed cutting. Her pants, as crudely made as her shirt, put up a little resistance at the waistband, and then he was able to put the knife away and just tear along the seams. Soon, she was lying there in her boots and the belts he’d used to tie her up and not a damn thing more. She tried to keep glaring, but the wind cut across her and the effect was completely spoiled by her sporadic shivers.

“What’s it doing?” someone asked.

“She’s cold,” the leader said after a moment’s silent contemplation.

All of them exchanged glances. It was some time before one of them said, “She? Are you sure?”

“No.” He thumbed at her nipple again. “But I believe these are teats of some kind. And this—” He started to move toward her pussy; she yanked her bound legs up. He dropped his hand back to his knee with a look of tolerant amusement and finished, “—looks open to me. That means female.”

“Oh that is disgusting,” one of them said, almost exactly at the same time as another said, “That is so much money…”

The leader grunted. Then he leaned in a little and tapped at his forehead with two fingers. “Zhuqa,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Say it,” said the leader. He tapped his brow again. “Zhuqa.”

Amber glared at him, shivering under her thuoch hide. She kept her mouth shut.

He flexed his spines again as he gently cupped her cheek. Then he lifted his hand, showed her his open palm, then slowly drew back his arm.

“Zhuqa,” she spat.

All the lizards but one recoiled.

“She said it,” one of them breathed.

“She tried.” Their leader dropped his hand to her forehead and gave her one of Meoraq’s friendly knuckle-taps. “Zhuqa means me. And Eshiqi…that means you. Say it.”

She didn’t think about it consciously, with words and arguments and a rational balance of pros and cons, but once again, that sense of helplessness welled up. It wasn’t despair, only a ruthless acknowledgment of her new situation and the very few options before her: Fight and be overwhelmed (and probably killed), or play along and hope for something better a little further down the road.

All this had time to sink in before Zhuqa ever had the chance to show her his slapping hand.

“Eshiqi,” said Amber.

“Good girl. Now look at me, Eshiqi. I want you to see this.”

He untied her left hand, just the one. She watched as he took her gently by that arm, holding it not quite straight out from the shoulder. He smiled, cupped her elbow, then slid that hand in an unmistakable caress down to her wrist, down to the Manifestor’s docking bracelet that she’d worn so long, she had forgotten it entirely.

“This,” he said, prying the thin metal off with his eyes locked on hers, “is over.”

He took it off, held it up briefly for his men to see, and then set it down. He drew a knife, the one he’d used to cut her clothes away, and as she struggled in vain to yank her hand out of his grip, suddenly stabbed it down. Into the bracelet.

Amber stopped fighting and looked at that. His men muttered and nudged each other. One of them rattled out a particularly nasty lizardish snicker. Zhuqa merely sheathed his knife again and tied her wrists back together, leaving the bracelet dead on the ground.

“Now you are mine,” he told her, and lifted her back onto his shoulder. The moment ended. He gestured to his men and they started taking down the walls and kicking the fire out. “Water for the slaves and get them moving,” he ordered, already walking. “I want to be home before dawn.”

* * *

When the sun came up, Amber raised herself up as best she could as she swung over Zhuqa’s back, searching for any dark speck that might be Meoraq, but she couldn’t see anything. Not saoqs, not corrokis, not any living thing. Just hills and trees…and ruins. And where Meoraq avoided the fallen cities of the ancients, the raiders headed right for them.

Headed home.

The ground beneath Zhuqa’s boots gave way to cracked pavement as the weathered framework and crumbling heaps of overgrown buildings slowly enclosed them. Ancient machines lay in rusty piles here and there along the streets, but their placement only seemed random at first glance. When she was behind them, looking out, Amber could see the sentries positioned behind them. One of them cupped his snout and let out a loud yodeling cry that Amber might have mistaken for a ghet’s howl if she hadn’t seen him do it. In the distance, someone else joined in and someone else beyond that, and then there were dozens of voices all raised together.

Soon, she could hear them coming, heavy boots tromping over the overgrown roads and speculative voices made indecipherable by the wind. The captives began to cry again, struggling in their bonds until the men walking at their sides were forced to cuff at them to keep them moving, but all Amber could do was hang there.

Trotting feet crunched up to them unseen and some new voice coughed out a laughing, “What is that?”

“The short answer is, ‘Mine’.” Zhuqa didn’t even slow down. He passed a raider who fell into step behind him, his head cocked and gaze traveling freely over Amber. “You didn’t want to come, remember, Iziz? All the way to Praxas, you said? In this cold? Fuck that, you said.”

“Is it the first time I’ve ever been wrong?” the other asked. “What is it?”

“I call her Eshiqi.”

“Her?” Iziz hooked a finger under Amber’s chin and tipped her head up. “Gann’s breath, that’s eerie. It looks almost like a person.”

Zhuqa laughed. “Almost,” he agreed.

“You selling it?”

“You buying?”

“I might toss a bid out. Can you fuck it?” he inquired, looking more and more interested.

“It’s got a slit in the right place. I haven’t tried yet. She killed Godeshuq and took a hand off Vek.”

Yet. He hadn’t tried yet.

“And gave you a good bite, it looks like.”

“Not half so good as she would have liked, eh, Eshiqi?” He shrugged to jostle her into a slightly different position as he ducked through a door into the ruined mouth of a building. More raiders lounged around in various stages of idleness, getting to their feet at the sight of her, only to be distracted by the captive lizardladies. Zhuqa showed no interest in any of them, only led the way through torchlit halls to a wide, echoing stair. He started down, bumping Amber hard against his shoulder on each step.

Iziz followed, toying with Amber’s hair. “You never said if you were selling.”

“If I do, I’ll see that you know before the open bidding. Here.” She felt him shift and saw a metal plate flicker as he tossed it over his shoulder for Iziz to catch. “Make yourself useful and take the new slaves to my pen. My men will want a wrestle; I ran them all night. Take one for yourself, since Godeshuq won’t be needing her, but be polite. Take the one the others leave. And give Vek first choice. His feelings are bruised.”

Iziz raised his fist and turned around to take charge of the slaves, herding them down another hall and out of Amber’s sight. Soon she had nothing to look at but torchlight on the walls, another stairwell, another corridor, and then—

“Home,” announced Zhuqa. bumping her in another good-natured shrug. She felt him shift again, heard the small scrape of a key turning in a lock, and then he took a few steps forward into darkness. “Not much, but better than wind and rain, even to fierce little snap-jaws like you. Did you note how many guards we passed on our journey to my chambers?”

Many. One at every landing. One or two at every crossways in the halls. Amber said nothing.

“I am going to put you down now and unbind you. Mark me, I don’t have to unbind you, but I choose to. You may get the idea to run. If you do, I swear before God the All-Father I will let you. You won’t get far and I will not come and get you for one full day and night because I will be rather cross with you. Do you hear me? Kick your legs twice if you do.”

She kicked sullenly. Once. Twice. And stopped.

“Good girl.”

He heaved her off and set her with a jarring thump on her feet, holding her at the waist until she steadied. Then he let go and moved away.

The door was open just behind her. She could see the red light of the torches in the hall. ‘If my legs were only free, I could run,’ she thought. Useless, suicidal thought, but it still had to take its tumble through her brain. Turn right at the second crossways, run to the end. Up one flight, run to the left. Up four more flights and out.

Stone scraped along metal. Sparks spat and caught on a narrow wick set in a mirrored bowl of oil. Zhuqa glanced over his shoulder at her, grunted, and walked away to light another lamp.

Amber didn’t run. She looked instead at the room around her, a room which had perhaps been office space in the years before the Fall. She could see an open cupboard heaped with furs to serve as a bed, a scattering of mismatched armor and other clothing, a few small trunks and one very large one, a small table set with an empty plate and a cup, a chair crowned artistically with a tachuqi skull, and on the cracked walls, a few shelves and some hooks, one supporting a large and well-stained leather flask.

Her eyes came back to Zhuqa in the end. He was waiting for it, waiting for her to see him when he reached out to catch the door.

And pull it closed.

She glared at him. The glare was stupid, maybe, but she couldn’t stop it from happening. She could stand there without running and she could keep her mouth shut, but she couldn’t help glaring. It was too easy to imagine how it might be to snatch up that lamp and throw it, too easy to see him coated in oil, flailing, burning.

He saw it too. He glanced at the lamp beside him and, with insolent slowness, dipped his finger in the bowl and passed it over the flame. It didn’t catch.

“Animal fat is far too valuable to burn,” he told her. “We use xuseth oil here. It burns clean, as you see, but catches slow.” He dipped his fingers again and rubbed the wick itself; the light guttered and nearly went out. “Learning to make wicks and seeing that I have enough light in my chambers will be part of your duties.” He knelt to unbuckle the belt that held her ankles, the belt at her knees, the belt at her thighs…and there he stopped, gazing speculatively at the mound of her pubis.

“Easy now,” he murmured, raising his hand.

Her thighs clenched, but she made that be all as he worked his finger between her folds. Well-oiled by xuseth, he moved back and forth along her opening several times before finally pushing up and inside her. Amber heard the angry sound catch in her throat and made it be the only one; felt her body tighten in a vain effort to force the invader out and made herself relax. It was going to happen no matter what she did, and the harder she fought before she lost, the more weapons she’d give him in all the fights to follow.

Zhuqa grunted pensively, questing deeper but with caution, until he withdrew and simply turned her around to unbind her arms.

“I keep my promises, Eshiqi, do you see?” he said, and straightened up to watch her rub painfully at her wealed skin as he coiled his weighted cord and set it aside. “I am told I’m not a hard man to serve. I won’t hurt you unless you demand it of me.” He studied her for a moment. “Say something. When I speak, you answer.”

She rolled her eyes. “Four-score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty. Fuck you.” She turned away.

“I doubt very much any of that wished me well. Watch yourself, little one. The day I learn that tongue may well be the day you lose yours.”

Amber licked her bloody lips and was quiet.

“The fact has not escaped me that you must have learned our words from someone. And the things we found at your fire were man-made. Where is he?”

If they were asking, they hadn’t found him. Amber hesitated, then glanced back at him and drew her finger across her throat.

He grunted, eyeing her with a smile. “You are going to some lengths to convince me that you are a dangerous slave to hold, Eshiqi. I appreciate your efforts, but I do mean to hold you. So. Here we come to it, little one. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if that’s the only way you’ll have it.”

He began to unfasten his harness.

Someone knocked.

Amber didn’t bother to look around. It wasn’t word of Meoraq, she knew that already. If her man were killing his way through the lot of them, no one would bother with this hesitant triple-tap. But somehow, the fact that they knocked at all came with its own vague feeling of offense, as if knocking were some fundamental human behavior they had usurped.

Zhuqa finished removing his harness before he answered it, letting his half-nakedness make a silent point to whoever stood beyond. He gave no word of greeting, not even a ‘What do you want?’ He held the door and waited.

“I interrupt you,” said an unfamiliar voice, amused but not apologetic. “Shall I wait in the hall?”

“Do you have a report?”

“I have the seeming of one. The bones of it are: No change. How many did you—What is that?”

“That is what you are interrupting. Get on with it.”

The raider in the doorway visibly wrestled with a remark, then apparently decided not to test his leader’s good humor any further. “Our westward patrol encountered some of Ghelip’s men the day after you left. They denied they were sent as an attack party at first—”

“Attack party? From Ghelip? How many were there?”

“Three, sir.”

“And they were killed?”

“Yes, sir, after interrogation. Salahkthu will have their full confessions—”

“Three.” Zhuqa gave his brow-ridges a knead. “Tell Salahkthu to resume normal patrols and to make his miserable skin available when I come up. Any other deaths to report?”

“No, sir.”

“No?”

“Only slaves.”

“How many?”

“I…”

“Make Hruuzk available as well.” Zhuqa started to shut the door, then opened it wide again, catching the other lizardman just about to slink off. “Zru’itak.”

It wasn’t a word she knew and the answer was no clearer when the other lizard said, “Not yet.”

Zhuqa grunted and shut the door. He stood, deep in thought, then strode past Amber to collect the waterskin from the hook on the wall. He uncapped it and drank, glanced at her, then held it out.

She shook her head.

He continued to hold it, now beginning to frown. “Come and take it, Eshiqi. You are for my comfort, not I for yours.”

She started to shake her head again, but then just went over and put out her hand. She was thirsty. If that made her a coward or a traitor or a weak little girl, too bad.

She drank. It stung her lips badly enough to bring tears smarting to her eyes and tasted so fantastically bilious that her first swallow came retching explosively back out of her. She heard him cough out a curse as he snatched up the waterskin she’d dropped, but he didn’t hit her and he even grabbed her by the arm when she staggered, supporting her until she knew she wouldn’t fall over.

“Don’t do that again,” he said coldly. “This is difficult to come by and I punish those who waste it out of spite.”

“I didn’t want it in the first place!” Amber spat, wiping her mouth, but she didn’t get in his face and shout it, and when he started to cap the neck, she reached out her hand again. She knew what was coming and as foul as the drink was, she sure wasn’t going to face the rest of this night sober if she didn’t have to.

Zhuqa studied her for a second or two before relinquishing his grip on the flask. She took three deep swallows, paused for a shudder and a grimace, and took one more. A smarter girl would start ingratiating herself now, thank him, maybe even flirt with him; Amber couldn’t, not yet, but she wasn’t going to fight him either.

Zhuqa hung the flask back up, then unfastened the ties of his breeches. Amber watched him undress without flinching, letting her head swim comfortably out of this moment, this room. Meoraq was coming for her.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said when he turned, naked, to face her. “I’m not afraid of this.”

“Fierce little thing,” he murmured, taking her chin in his hand. He stepped forward, pushing her before him until her back struck the wall. “There is not so much as a spark of fear in these eyes. I think you may have done this before. Ah, so you have.” He released her to brush her hair back from her shoulder, revealing Meoraq’s bite-scars. He traced them, then stroked his way over her smooth skin down to her wrist. He brought her hand between them to the slight swell of his loins. “Gently now,” he murmured.

She closed her eyes and let her hand lie limp in his grip as he made her stroke at his scales. Once. Twice. The drink, whatever it had been, made it easy for her mind to drift out beyond these ruins. He could do what he wanted with her; Amber didn’t have to be with him.

“You are determined not to make this easy on yourself,” Zhuqa said, somewhere in the world. “So be it.”

His hand became a fist around her wrist. Tendons creaked. Bones ground together. Amber let out a startled wail, her legs buckling instinctively. This time, he let her drop. Cold stone sent shockwaves of fresh agony up both knees, but all she could do was scratch at his restraining hand while he gazed coolly down at her.

She didn’t know how long it lasted. Probably not long. A minute, maybe. Maybe only half that. When it finally stopped, the relief was enough that she sagged gasping against his thigh, actually clutching at it like a lifeline, her hate like shards of glass in her chest and pain like throbbing hell everywhere else.

He gave her a moment to recover. Then, the lightest of tugs. “Up, Eshiqi.”

She got up, climbing his hip and then his chest, hating him.

He moved her hand back between his legs. “Gently now,” he said again.

“I’m going to kill you,” she whispered, cupping and kneading at the hard lump she felt beneath the cover of his scales.

His head cocked warningly even as his spines flexed in mild good humor. “Was that a threat, little one? I think it was. You’re fortunate I’m feeling so forgiving, but if you want to keep me there, you’ll have to make an effort. Find my slit. I’m ready for you, but I think you need the practice. There you are. I want to feel your hand through my belly-skin. Good. Now, carefully, get a good grip. Squeeze. Gently. Release. Now squeeze again. Steady. Like the beating of a sleeping heart.”

“I’m going to put a knife through yours.”

“Just so,” he told her, color rising in the thin scales along his throat. “Keep your hand at work, but move your thumb up along my slit and when you feel moisture, push inside. It was easy, wasn’t it? I could have been freed well before now, but then how would you know the way to do this? Someday, I will come home to you in Gann’s own humor and you will be glad that you know how to do this, glad that all it takes is a skilled hand to coax me from a killing mood. Ah!” He closed his eyes, spines rigid and neck striped with brilliant gold, and in a strangled voice said, “What you feel beneath your thumb is my sa’ad. Stroke. Use small circles. Gently.”

And before she’d made a single revolution over the prominent nub he meant, his cock shoved itself out in slick insistence.

“Enough lessons,” he grunted, pulling one of her thighs up and around his hip. “You are easily the most deviant—” He broke off with a tight rattle as he penetrated and shuddering with pleasure when their hips finally met. “—thing I have ever done,” he finished, and drew back his head to grimace at her. “How does that feel, Eshiqi?”

How did it feel? How else could it feel with his oils hot inside her and the blunt hook of his ridged cock rubbing insistently at the soft place just beyond her pubic bone? She bared her teeth at him like a dog, hating that she could feel him this way, hating that it didn’t at least hurt. He grimaced back at her in good humor as he began to move, working in curt punching movements that drove her up along the rough side of the wall until her scrabbling toes lost contact with the floor entirely and it was either hang suspended on his stabbing cock or put her arms around him.

“Ah, that’s good,” he murmured, nuzzling at her while she twisted her face away. After that, there was no more speech, no more instruction, only his body like a spear inside her and hate, helpless hate, bleeding out into the wound it left.

* * *

As a child, Bo Peep Bierce’s little girl discovered the elastic quality of Time. Until that golden summer of state-care, Time had always been a constant—precisely measured, easily predicted, immutable. Only after the lady in the flowery dress sent her and baby Nicci back to their mother did she understand that Time was more like a faucet, that it could run hot or cold, pour out fast or drip out slow, and that, if you knew the trick of it, you could put your hand on the knob and shut it off entirely.

Little Amber sat in non-Time in the closet at Holland Mills while her mother fucked men in the bed where she would have to sleep that night. Teenage Amber made it through two years of high school one non-Time class after another before giving up and getting a job. Grown Amber worked non-Time shifts at the factory, unaware of her aching back and feet and head until she had to walk to the bus station afterwards. And in Zhuqa’s lair, Amber drifted in non-Time until he was done with her and tied her up again.

He left her on the floor and after he was gone, Time came creeping in again. The anger came with it and then the tears, which accomplished nothing except to make her head feel thick and heavy. Eventually she slept. It was not a restorative sleep. She woke when the door opened, feeling more exhausted than before, as well as sore and hung over and dried out. She raised her head and saw him in the doorway, holding a covered bowl in the crook of one arm, and suddenly she was hungry too.

Amber tried to sit up, wiggling worm-like in her bonds in an effort to get her back against the wall and lever herself up it. Zhuqa bumped the door shut, set the bowl down and came to help her. His hands were rough, but he was gentle. She hated him all over again, for what he’d done, for what he was going to do, and most of all for not being entirely hateful when he did it.