Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 72 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

The vents closed. The door opened.

Deep in the darkened room beyond, Sheul the All-Father stood, the sword of war sheathed and the light of wisdom burning in His hand.

9

Amber never doubted for a moment that she would see a big, empty room and that was just what she saw. But she knew what Meoraq was expecting too, and so she knew what was going to happen next. And oh God, it hurt to see it.

“Father,” he said, and with a flicker and a whine, lights all around the room came wearily to life. As they strengthened, the huge monitor on the far wall lost some of its mirror-like shine, but still Meoraq took two steps toward it before he realized what it was. He stopped, blinking rapidly as he stared first at his reflection and then at hers and then at the rest of the room. There really wasn’t much to see. It was nothing but a reception area, reduced by military design to six angled walls, several banks of computer consoles, one horseshoe-shaped desk with a single chair aimed at the door they’d come in through, two other doors, and of course, the enormous display monitor behind the desk in which the yellow light of Meoraq’s lamp still sparked a ghost-like echo.

He took it all in, plainly puzzled but showing no doubt, no real concern. When Amber hesitated a touch on his arm, he gave her an inquiring glance, but shrugged off her silent sympathy and instead marched over to one of the other doors and nudged the lockplate. It blatted at him but didn’t open. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said, and the door behind Amber hissed shut.

“Locks engaged. Timeout to systems restart. Doors will open in ten and ninety. Present mnabed to override.” The lockplates lit up helpfully, but no one had anything to offer any of them.

Meoraq backed away from the door, looking frustrated but not alarmed, not really. He turned around again, all the way in a circle, as if checking to make sure God hadn’t materialized behind him while he was distracted by the door. He ended up facing Amber and the two of them just looked at each other for a while.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I know.”

“Everyone hears Him!” he insisted, just as if she’d argued. “Everyone! He has to be here! It has to be…some kind of test!” He swung away, holding up his lamp and searching each shadowed, empty corner. “Father?”

The lights pulsed as if in answer and grew that much stronger. The big monitor flickered. Smaller ones evenly spaced around the otherwise featureless walls snapped on, one after the other, showing first a clean black screen and slowly spilling out lines of silent code. Somewhere, speakers thumped on at an ear-splitting level and hummed their way down to something subaudible. “Operational drive activated,” said a lizardish voice. “Systems override. Searching for file. Please wait.”

“There’s no one here,” she said softly.

“He’s here! He has to be here! Maybe…” He turned back, still not panicked, still with that awful bafflement. “Will you pray with me? Maybe we have to pray.”

The big monitor flickered again and pulled up a very obvious load-bar. As it crept toward completion, that cool, androgynous voice came back with, “File recovery in process. Please wait.”

“I’ll pray with you,” said Amber. “Tell me how.”

But he didn’t, not right away. He just looked at her, standing alone in the center of that empty room with the big screen firing up behind him. The lamp in his hand trembled. He looked at her. He did not speak.

Amber gently took the lamp and set it down on the edge of the console nearest to her. He let it go, his eyes fixed to the little flame, but otherwise, he didn’t move, not even when she came back and tried to put her arms around him.

“He didn’t lie to me.”

“Who?”

“Master Tsazr.” Meoraq pulled out of her reach and paced back to the door, pushing at the lockplate twice before going on to the next door. “I saw him. I saw his face! He heard God’s voice! That is truth! It…” His long stride slowed. He looked at her again, lost between one door and the next. “It’s me.”

“No.”

Meoraq’s spines lowered until they were shivering close against his skull, but his back stayed straight and his shoulders squared. His eyes drifted from one computer to another, beginning and ending with the big screen and the nearly-there load-bar. “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” he said, and staggered without ever taking a step.

“Meoraq, don’t. Please, don’t.” She caught his face, made him look at her, but it was a long time before he saw her. “It’s not you, I swear it’s not.” And wildly, because anything was better than this…this awful dead confusion in his eyes, she said, “Maybe it’s me, okay? Maybe women aren’t supposed to come here. You did everything right, Meoraq, you know you did.”

His brows furrowed, the knobby ridges cutting shadows down his lizardish cheeks. “I don’t…know what I did wrong…”

“Recovery complete,” said the voice. The monitor went black and then came to sudden life. It showed a room—this room, she realized. The camera was aimed down at the desk, where a lizardman in a grey and black uniform crouched. He wasn’t sitting, wasn’t standing. There was a chair, but he wasn’t using it. He was just…hunched there, holding onto the desk like it was keeping him on the ground. There was no sound, but lights were going wild all around him in that/this room, making madhouse colors dance across his scales. His mouth was open; his eyes were hell. Slowly, his head turned until he was staring directly at the camera, directly at them.

Meoraq’s hand twitched toward the hilt of his kzung, but he stood his ground. “This is a recording!” he said, and turned in a sudden, curt circle, shouting, “I know the difference! This is just an image! This is not Sheul!”

The picture on the monitor died.

Meoraq glared at it, his mouth flared open, hissing through his teeth. “I am not deceived! I am Uyane Meoraq, a Sword and a true son of—”

The picture came back. The same room. The same man. He was sitting now, his eyes staring and glazed. “I want to say that I didn’t know,” he said, and it was the voice that did it. Recognition like a hammer slammed down into Amber’s brain and she suddenly knew him, knew this room, knew that voice. The kiosk in the ruins; Scott and Nicci and everyone standing around to listen while the man in the recording—this man—told them to come to Matezh, that they had to come together, that there was still hope.

Now that man clapped a hand to his brows and clenched it there, shaking his head over and over before suddenly slapping at the desk. “How can I say that?” he cried. “How can any of us say that? After we spent years in development to make sure we got it as virulent and as violent as the science allowed, how can anyone pretend they didn’t know it would end the world?”

Something in the recording sounded a tone. The man looked around at the wall behind him as one of the green lights turned yellow. “Ghedov is gone,” he said, running out to tap at that computer. “I guess Daophith and Jezaana will be next. Saiakr is still sending me the numbers—that’s Technician Raaq Saiakr at Culvsh—and everything is working just the way we planned. I can’t…” He trailed off, staring at the screens, then shook his head again. “I can’t,” he said simply, and switched the recording off.

Amber looked at Meoraq, but he was still frowning at the screen. His spines were flat, but in spite of his obvious confusion and frustration, his neck was still dark.

The image flickered and came back. The same man at the same computer leaned back in the same chair. He was barefooted and naked to the waist, but was still wearing his uniform pants. Behind him, the wall of lights was entirely yellow.

“It’s all over,” he said. “So I guess I should talk about it. For posterity.” He snorted without much humor and bent out of frame, coming back with a bottle. He drank, then rubbed his brows and put the bottle on the desk next to his computer. “For all the people,” he said dryly, “who are going to see this and want to know what happened. So. What happened is, making war makes money. I wish we had a better reason. I wish we had enemies at least, a war that we were making the stuff for…but it was just something we were making. Just our job.”

He drank again, leaning back to put his feet up on the side of the desk, one leg crossed over the other. He looked at the camera, then at the bottle, then snorted again. “Water,” he said. “Enhanced, though. Something else we were working on. Everything the body needs in one bottle. We were all the way into development when that contract was canceled—feeding our soldiers just isn’t as profitable as killing them—so there’s a whole storage cell full of the stuff down below. It’s not bad. Tastes a little like ykara.” He drank some more, then set the bottle aside.

“So what happened?” he asked. “How did all these nice, sane people who designed the annihilation of the world let it get out? It wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t even by accident. It was just one of those things, as my daughter would say. Just one of those things. Who knew? Wait.”

He got up and walked out of frame, then came back with a small, black disc-shaped object. He held it up for the camera, then sat it down and tapped it. A second image sprang up, flickering so madly that only the most general outlines could be made out. He tapped through a few different shapes before he stopped and held the disc up. “This is Bsaia,” he said. “She’s thirteen. And if everything happened the way it was supposed to, she died eleven days ago, in the first two hours after the cloud hit. She and her mother—” He tapped back two images. “—Ylati, and our two sons—” Forward one tap. “—Tivon and Uluraq, went to the safe-room of our house as soon as the alarm went out, not knowing that the safe-room’s air circulator is not rated for a Class 5 contaminant. So. Two hours after the cloud hit, one of two things happened. Either our neighbors broke in or Tivon and Uluraq did it themselves, but my wife and my daughter were raped to death, and my sons either killed each other or were killed by one of our neighbors. I honestly don’t know what to hope for.” He looked at the images once more, then switched them off and looked at the camera.

“I keep talking about the cloud like you know what it is. So. Each of our development stations is powered by a geothermic fission system. Safest and most reliable form of power in the world. Cheap, too. Once the fixtures are in place, the generator runs itself, all the way down to the automated maintenance system. The surplus power it puts out pays for its installation before the first year is done, so naturally, only the military knows about it.” The man started to say something else, then laughed curtly and waved it away. “Never mind. I’m sure I’ll come back to that at some point. I’ve got all the time in the world to talk now…there’s just no one left to listen to me.”

The man leaned over his desk and covered his face for several long, brutally indifferent minutes of silent recording before he finally switched the camera off.

Meoraq turned around and went to the door. He hit the lockplate twice. Both times, the door clicked and counted down the minutes for him until the locks would open. He stood rigid, staring into the closed face of the door until, with a curt motion, he looked at her. He didn’t say anything.

Neither did she.

The monitor flickered. Meoraq turned his head a little more, enough to watch the man in the recording lean back in his chair. The bottle was still there beside him. He said, “Safest and most reliable power in the world. I’m sure there’s been a few close calls that I’m not aware of, but there’s never been an accident. The system maintains itself. Under optimum conditions, they say it can run without dumaq intervention for a thousand years. Maybe more. So. The military uses it for all its most sensitive installations. Because it’s so safe. And no one wants these things to get out, remember. No one built them to actually be used. That would just be crazy, right?

“Kunati exploded,” he went on without any change in his tone or expression. “Saiakr says they were working on three major projects, but the Wrath was the only one that seems to have gotten out. I guess the others were incinerated in the blast. I don’t know. I only know no one’s bleeding out their eyes or having their bones turn to jelly while they’re being fucked to death, so it’s not as bad as it could have been.

“Kunati was in a relatively unpopulated area. Protected. No one wanted this stuff to get out.” He snorted, uncapped the bottle, but then capped it again without drinking and just held it restlessly between his hands. “But the virus was designed to be delivered through explosive payload, so when Kunati blew, it did just…just what we built it to do. It turned to vapor and the wind took it away.”

The man gestured back at the wall of yellow lights without looking at it. “Saiakr says, when the virus hit, you could actually see it happen in the way people started fighting. If you were close enough, you could hear it…the roaring…coming in like the tide. He said, in the cities, the fires were opening up like flowers. Blooming. Isn’t that a pretty way to describe the end of the world?”

“Blooms,” said Meoraq, impassive. “I call it, ‘Blooms’.” He looked at the lockplate, pressed it, punched it.

“All of us were locked down by then, of course. Watching the blooms. For the first two days, we were told that it was temporary and we’d all go home as soon as the risk of contamination had dropped to acceptable levels. Like there were acceptable levels. Like none of us knew what the damn thing had been designed to do. And on the third day, a few hours before the cloud reached the capitol, the word came down that we needed to start incinerating the viruses. And firing the bombs. Because—and this was actually what they said—we couldn’t allow Tirazez to fall when the rest of the world still stood. So. So.” He dragged in a deep, shaking breath and looked right at the camera. “So, knowing that billions of people were dead and millions more would be dead by the next day, someone out there loaded up the rest of God’s Wrath and fired it. The whole world…bloomed.”

He looked at the camera stonily for a few more seconds, then switched it off.

“It’s just a recording,” said Amber softly.

Meoraq pressed his palm to the lockplate and rested the top of his head on the door. “I know.”

“It’s awful, but it’ll be all right.”

He glanced at her.

The recording came back on. The man was back. This time, he was entirely naked except for some lizardish underwear. To see him wearing something as flimsy as fabric there instead of a metal loin-plate was a little shocking. “It’s day sixty-three,” he said, dropping into the chair. “It’s late. I was exploring the administration levels today and found some koa, so I’m drunk as fuck. Celebrating,” he added, and raised his empty hand in a salute. “I saw a fire today. Which means someone’s still alive to set one. I lit the outer lamps, but no one’s come yet. I’m still hopeful.” He snorted, muttered, “So hopeful,” under his breath, and laughed.

“Saiakr killed himself this morning,” he said at the end of it, and raised his imaginary cup again. “Or as good as. He’s been talking about it for a while, although he doesn’t call it that. He doesn’t have any enhanced nutrition water at his base, just what comes out of the purifiers, so he’s been eating out of the officers’ lounge all this time. This morning, he brought out the last of it. Then he called me up to say goodbye. Said he was going to eat all he wanted and then take a transport from the garage and start driving. Said he could be here in three days. He said…Contaminant levels are still at ninety-nine percent,” he said suddenly. “But I still saw that fire and thought…”

He bent over, rubbing at his brows, and abruptly laughed. “If he makes it, I’m letting him in,” he announced. “I don’t care if he’s infected or not. Even if he’s fucking me to death, it’s still a living touch, you know? It’s still another person. And it’s still sixty-three days gone and I’m the only one left and I thought, for posterity, I ought to maybe explain how that happened.

“I’m a technician. I maintain the equipment that built the viruses. There are three other technicians that work here, so there’s always one of us on site, but we’re not soldiers. We’re not military. We’re not scientists.” He snorted. “Thank God for the cleaners or we wouldn’t have anyone to bully around. Of course, the cleaners don’t have to have someone on site at all times. Or the scientists. When Kunati blew and the base locked down, we were on dead shift. Ironic, eh? Six soldiers and me. And they were all down in the garage, playing High Six. Technicians not invited. So I was locked in when the cloud went up. And they were locked out.”

He was quiet for a moment, staring impassively into space, and then he said, “There were cameras down there. There’s cameras everywhere. And I could see them banging on the door trying to get back in, but I couldn’t override the system. I did try. Eventually. When the cloud was coming. But I couldn’t. The cloud hit and they…I shut off the monitor, so I’m not sure exactly what happened. I know there was one of them left alive, because I’d turn on the monitor sometimes and see him still…on them. But he wandered off eventually. I don’t know where. Maybe out to the base housing, eh? Maybe he was the one who found Ylati…and Bsaia…and the boys. I suppose it doesn’t matter, really. Saiakr had a full shift on at his base, though. All their people were safely locked in just like they should have been. One hundred and fifteen people, he said.

“But the word came down, like the word always does. The viruses were incinerated. Then the scientists were killed. Then the officers were told to kill the low-ranking soldiers, so they did, and I guess the commanding officer took out the officers. Saiakr was a technician, I don’t remember if I told you. Our job is to crawl around inside tiny tubes and under machines and behind panels. Nobody knows how to hide like we do. He worked his way up through the air system until he was in the floor under the commander’s office. That’s where he was when the base commander came back and shot himself. One hundred and fifteen people were saved from the cloud. One hundred and fourteen of them killed each other anyway. Because those were their orders. He told me that,” said the man, rubbing at his brows, “and what can I say? We called the stuff God’s Wrath, did I tell you? We called the stuff God’s Wrath…and maybe it was.”

He shut the camera off. The monitor flickered while Meoraq leaned on the door and took deep breaths and then the picture came back. The man was there, fully dressed, haggard, with a device in his hand that could only be a gun.

“I can’t believe I’m down here again,” he said and looked at the gun. “So. Fuck it. It’s day one-eighty-eight. Saiakr isn’t coming. No one is. I’ve been transmitting non-stop over every channel every day, but no one comes. I’ve got enough nutrition water to last a hundred people a hundred years, but there’s just me…and I’m tired. So.” He hefted the gun briefly. “So this is it. I just wanted to say, just in case there’s someone out there after all, that I’m sorry. If you find me…fuck, I don’t know. Burn me, I guess. I shouldn’t be infected, but burn me anyway. Just in case. I’ll understand if you want to piss on me first.”

He lifted his head and looked directly at the camera. “My name is Nuu Sukaga and I helped to kill the world.” He raised the gun and fired. The shot was silent, producing nothing but a pulse of light that briefly rippled across his scales. The sound of his skull bursting open and his brains hitting the back of the chair behind him was wet and loud. The body slumped over and out of frame. The camera kept recording.

Meoraq watched for a short time, then pushed himself slowly off the door. He walked out into the room and looked behind the desk.

“Is he there?” Amber asked uneasily.

“No.”

“Are you…Are you all right?”

He glanced at her, then at the monitor. “Apparently not. You understood more of that, I think, than I did. And you were not surprised.” He turned around to face her. “How long have you known?”

“I…”

“Since the niyowah in the ruins, the night of the storm,” he mused, looking away. “I think you tried to tell me. You had a word for it. I remember that.”

“Meoraq—”

“Tell me the word. I can’t say it. I want to hear it again.”

She felt her shoulders falling without ever realizing how tensely she’d been holding them. “Biological warfare,” she said softly.

“This means fighting? With…blooms?”

“With disease,” she said.

He looked at her, then at the monitor again. A cleanerbot had come silently into the room. She could just see the top of its rounded head as it hovered beside the chair, moving minutely back and forth as, presumably, it cleaned the corpse. “You built them?” he asked. “Like machines? You could actually make…madness? And hurl it, like a spear?”

The monitor went abruptly black. He looked at it, frowning, as a new image snapped on. The same room, now with several lizardmen standing around the desk. The nearest of them stepped back, his head cocked at a critical angle, and said, “There it is.”

“Is it working?”

“Says it is.” The man’s spines flared forward and snapped back in a terse shrug. “The only way to check is to turn it off.”

“Check.”

“Mkole!” one of the others groaned, but the first man, although plainly irritated, stepped forward again and the screen went briefly black.

“God, that’s awful,” said Amber, watching. “How long…I mean…Do you think that’s Saiakr?”

Meoraq grunted one of his I-don’t-know grunts, frowning.

The image came back in the middle of Mkole’s waspish, “—only to find out it was never recording!”

“Leave him alone, Brunt,” said the first man, his spines now completely flat. “Let’s just do this. My name is Oyan Ichazul.”

Meoraq startled. After a moment, Amber realized the name was familiar to her as well. Oracle Oyan was one of the Six. It could be a coincidence—who knew how many Bierces there were back on Earth?—but no sooner had this thought ventured itself into her brain than the others added themselves to the roster.

“My name is Uyane Xaima.”

“I am Surgeon Thaliszr Mkole.”

“Shev. Mykrm Shevas.”

“I was Amagar Silq. They call me the Brunt now.”

“And I am Lashraq Zhan,” finished Zhan. “It is now 3046, what some people are calling Year Seventeen after the Fall. Sometime in the spring, I think.”

Shev snorted. “Not that anyone can tell. The U’uskirs dropped their whole fucking array when they got hit by the cloud. They didn’t even aim the fucking thing, just fired whatever they had at whatever it all happened to be pointed at. Over seven thousand disruptors going off at once. Irradiated the whole fucking planet, and you can’t hear it from in here, but the storm it kicked up when it happened is still going on. I haven’t seen the sun once in seventeen years.”

“I’m sure we’ll be seeing the casualties for some time,” Mkole added anxiously, “but we seem to have stabilized for now. Death by direct exposure to radiation seems to have receded to nominal levels and the risk of related complications appears to be dropping as well. Along the eastern seaboard of Tirazez, anyway.”

“Ah fuck me, here we go,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at his brow-ridges. “Zhan, shut him down or tie me up. I can’t listen to this again.”

“Breathe, Xaima. Breathe and let him talk. This is part of why we came here.”

“What is this?” Meoraq asked. His spines were flat, his eyes wide, betraying a terrible tension and fear that had not been present even during Technician Nuu’s short series of narratives. “Who are these people? What are they saying?”

She put her hand on his arm and he looked at her wildly. “It’s all right, Meoraq.”

“Those are not priests!”

“Just listen.”

Mkole concluded his rather rambling summary of the post-apocalyptic health hazards he’d seen with the optimistic note that, “We’ve estimated that life expectancy has risen almost six months in the past seven years and although female fertility remains dangerously low, from all reports, one out of every thirty pregnancies is now being carried to term with no marked increase in infant defect or mortality.”

“That’s enough.”

“But this could be important!” Mkole protested, looking wounded. “Statistics like these are absolutely vital in the process of—”

“Enough for now then,” said Zhan, but gently. “Just for now. Thank you, surgeon.”

“We need to make records,” Mkole insisted, retreating with the help of the burly Brunt to sit in the chair where Nuu had blown his brains out. He wiped at his eyes. “It’s important! We have to tell them about…about how it all ended!”

“It’s not over yet,” the Brunt rumbled, patting him, and Xaima, scowling at them with his arms folded and looking so much like Meoraq that Amber had to check and see that it wasn’t just his reflection in the video screen, flicked his spines and muttered, “It may as well be.”

“No! Listen! We have seen…” Mkole’s words faltered. For a moment, he merely stared at the camera, his eyes flicking back and forth like an actor reading his next troubling lines. It took Lashraq’s hand on his shoulder before he seemed to pull himself out of it, first with a shaky breath and then the continuation of his even, almost unemotional recital. “We have seen what is unquestionably only the beginning of a devastating wave of extinctions. You…You simply can’t imagine how quickly it happens. The collapse is…”

Mkole lapsed again into blank-faced silence.

“We still have some livestock in the middle districts,” Lashraq said, frowning. “Mostly ilqi. But I don’t think they’ll last much longer.”

“It turns out that cattle need feed,” Shev pointed out wryly. “And feed needs to be planted, grown, harvested and processed.”

“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with feeding them,” said the Brunt, looking very mildly surprised. “Ilqi, tuk-tuks, woolyvibs, and every other kind of cattle we keep, I promise you, even the so-called natural-grown ones—most of them are surgically altered to keep them from fucking and the rest probably couldn’t figure out how.”

“All the animals are dying,” Ichazul said suddenly. “Wild and domestic. It’s not the Wrath and it can’t all be the weather—”

“The weather’s part of it,” Lashraq muttered, glancing up as if he could see through the roof to the storm howling behind it.

“Of course, it’s part of it!” Ichazul snapped. “There’s no direct sunlight anymore, the fucking rain never stops until it freezes, and the ice storms never stop until they turn back into rain! But it’s only part of it. The real problem is the plants. Nothing grows like it used to. There’s something, some kind of chemical wash in the rain or maybe a parasite or a virus, but whatever it is, it’s killing everything.”

“Untrue,” the Brunt said. “Thorns and rockweed are growing. They’ll grow right up your boots if you stand still.”

Ichazul rolled his eyes and gave his spines an irritable flick. “Fine, it’s killing all the crops. By which I mean the stuff we need to eat.”

“By which you mean,” the Brunt corrected, smiling, “the stuff we’ve made dependent upon us. Think about it. Artificial pollination, climate control, nutrient-enriched soil…koitaan and pialhfruit were never meant to grow in Gedai. Are you really surprised it’s all dying? Everything that was already in the ground grew wild after the Wrath fell,” he added, looking directly into the computer’s camera. “But it takes men to grow crops these days and all the men were busy killing each other. So it all died.”

“I have tried on six separate occasions to grow riak,” Ichazul countered. Faint lines of color were becoming visible along his throat. “Riak! And I know what I’m doing, damn it! I’m telling you, it’s more than that! There’s something wrong, something in the soil or the rain or…something!”

“Who knows what we shot at each other?” Xaima asked, showing very little concern. “I don’t see any reason why you can’t both be right. It wouldn’t take much of a contaminant to kill off a grove of koitaan in Gedai, or for animals to eat all the crops and seed that were left. Because for a while there were animals everywhere. Not just the vermin, like you’d think, but everything. All the people were dead and the animals simply exploded to fill all that empty space. We were hip-deep in ponucs that first year and then they all dropped dead and the uzayas and ebii were everywhere until they dropped dead. You’d think all our pet apas would just go feral and be all right, but they were all gone by the third year.” He stopped there, his spines slowly lowering, and finally said, “I still can’t really believe that. I’ve had an apa underfoot all my life. But they’re gone. Everywhere. They just…”

“Collapsed,” said Mkole.

“And he’s right, it’s probably just the beginning,” Lashraq agreed quietly. “I don’t know if anything will be left at the end, but there’s always hope. We still have some ilqis and if we can take care of them, they’ll make it. There will always be yifu, I suppose, and the ghets seem to be doing all right.”

“Naturally,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at the side of his snout. “All the apas are dead, but we have ghets.”

“They’re little and furry. Maybe we can make pets out of them instead,” suggested the Brunt. “You’ve still got your apa’s collar, don’t you?”

“Fuck a fist,” Xaima snapped.

The Brunt’s spines flared lazily forward. “Is that an offer?”

“So we’ve lost most of our domestic animals and about half the native wildlife,” said Lashraq as his men visibly defused themselves, edging away from one another and taking slow breaths. “But several conservation parks seemed to have opened their doors in the first days of God’s Wrath and while most of the animals have died off, some of them actually seem to be thriving.”

“There are saoqs all over central Yroq,” Shev inserted with a laugh. “I mean it. They’re everywhere.”

“And corrokis,” grunted the Brunt. “Wild corrokis. In herds.”