by R. Lee Smith
They didn’t look like ruins. There were no skyscrapers, no buildings at all more than a few stories tall, just a few metal towers like antennae around the perimeter, and they were still standing. The roads were all flat—no overpasses pancaked to the ground—and they were all extremely well-lit. It didn’t appear to be the protruding tip of an overgrown metropolis, but something small and complete, built to fill exactly the place it occupied. From here, so far away, any damage that time and neglect had invariably caused was hidden. The rain gave the illusion of movement to the lights that burned in every building and along every street. The wind could have easily been the sound of all the traffic Amber couldn’t see. And looking at it, Amber suddenly understood how people could believe in Scott’s starship. Looking at it, even Amber had a moment, however dim and fleeting, when she wondered if one of their old ships might really be able to fly after all.
Of course, she didn’t say that. All she said was, “Let’s go down there and look around until this blows over, what do you say?” and he said, “No.”
And wasn’t that what marriage was all about? Communication and compromise. Jerk.
“Hey,” she said, and then had to shout it because of the wind and the fact that he was still walking. “Hey!”
She knew he heard her because his spines flattened, but he kept going.
“Hey!” That wasn’t working. Amber gave in and ran after him. “Can we please stop?”
“No,” said Meoraq.
The sky grew noticeably darker.
“Nicci and the others might be down there!”
“They aren’t.”
“You don’t know that!” She grabbed at his pack, since she knew he’d just shake her off his sleeve, with far more success than she’d expected. He skidded, arms flailing, but quickly recovered his balance and before Amber could think to let go of his pack, he’d shrugged out of it and swung around. Lightning snapped across the sky, throwing her shadow in stark relief over his chest.
“Woman!” he bellowed. “Don’t paw at me!”
“Then don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”
He snatched his pack out of her hands and glared right back at her. “This is not a discussion. We do not stop until I give that order!”
“So what I want doesn’t matter?”
“Not in this instance.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Don’t whine at me. Start walking.”
Amber had often heard it said that after a while, married people achieved such a state of togetherness that they could finish one another’s sentences. Apparently, there was an intermediary step in which one could see how the sentence was supposed to go without actually finding it necessary to fill in the blanks.
“I haven’t asked for a damn thing in—”
“That doesn’t buy my assent for—”
“Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t—”
“God Himself commands—”
“I said a good reason, not more of your Bible-thumping bullshit! Why can’t you just admit—”
“Why can’t you?!”
They stopped as if by some prearranged signal to allow thunder to smash overhead and roll away behind them.
“You don’t want to go down there because you don’t want to find them,” Amber said at the end of it. She was shouting, she supposed, but only because the storm made it impossible to be heard any other way. The thunder was still rolling, no louder but no softer, like a distant train that just kept roaring by.
His eyes narrowed, sparking white with reflected lightning. “You don’t want to look for them down there,” he countered, also shouting. “You just want to hide from a little winter storm!”
“Little winter storm? Look at that!” She pointed back the way they’d come, and because she was pointing, she looked that way too.
The last time she’d seen it, the storm had stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, all churning wind and the flashpop of lightning, black as a solid wall above the barest stripe of sky that could be seen beneath it. Now it was a lot closer and Amber saw for the first time thin tendrils of black, dangling down from the storm above and groping at the ground below if it were pulling itself along in some lurching, predatory fashion.
Thin tendrils…dozens and dozens of them…
A wall of tornados, as far as the eye could see.
“Oh my God,” she said, except she might have only mouthed it. She couldn’t hear herself speak, couldn’t hear anything at all but the sudden pounding of her heart and the howling of the storm. Her pointing arm dropped slowly; her other arm came up like a counterweight to clutch at her throat, which had tightened painfully. All at once, she couldn’t catch her breath. “Oh my God,” she said again and she heard it this time, just barely. “Meoraq, look at that!”
He looked, but his annoyed expression never changed.
“We have to get inside!” she said (not shouting, not yet, or if she was, it was just because the wind and rain were so loud. She wasn’t panicking. Amber Bierce had never had one moment of panic in her whole life). “Right now!”
“Not here.”
“We’re going to die!”
He rolled his eyes, then took her arm and pointed to a rocky outcropping in the middle of the empty plains, so far distant that she could see nothing beyond its general shape and some shadows around its base that might be crevasses or maybe only dark brush. “Do you see the caves? We’ll weather down there.”
“We’ll never reach it! There’s shelter right here! Damn it, Meoraq, we have to get out of this now!”
As if God Himself agreed, lightning slammed into the ground not half a mile away—which still seemed like a long ways off, until it was lightning hitting there—shattering the skeletal finger of a lone tree down to the ground. The storm-monster in the sky picked up its splinters, tasting them as it scoured the earth and tossing away the bits it didn’t like.
Meoraq looked at that, too, but his expression hadn’t changed. “There is no shelter here,” he told her, raising his voice to a bellow in order to be heard, and turned around.
Amber stood with her mouth hanging dumbly open and the rain sluicing in, watching him walk away. Then she looked at the storm and the storm looked back at her. Never mind how that sounded, even in the privacy of her head, it looked and it saw. It hovered for a moment, drawing up all of its little grasping fingers, seeing her, seeing Amber alone and helpless, and then it opened the roaring funnel of its mouth and came right for her.
She panicked and ran.
Her boots skidded in the wet grass; twice, she tripped over juts of stone and went tumbling, but she was always up again at the end of it and if there was pain, she didn’t feel it. When something snagged at the back of her tunic, she tore it off without stopping, and ran half-naked in the bruising rain until she hit the wall that surrounded the ruins. The towers that were arranged at points around it lit up all kinds of yellow when she climbed over, but nothing shot her down. As soon as she fell into the street—the flat, solid street—she was off and running again.
She didn’t think about where she was going. The dumb animal directing her flight kept her going past this building or that one, dismissing them without explaining its reasons. Notsafe was the closest she came to a real thought. Those three long structures so much like airplane hangars, open at both ends and filled with half-glimpsed hunks of machinery, notsafe. That tall, three-story building with the windows all around it, mostly broken into jagged-glass smiles, notsafe. Those rows of solid-looking boxes at the other end of the ruins, they were all right, but the all the empty streets and slowing fences standing between her and them, notsafe.
But she had to go somewhere. She had to go somewhere or die here in the empty street. Amber staggered to a halt, gasping for breath and spitting out rainwater, but behind her eyelids, the world suddenly lit up red. Through the storm’s roar, she heard a popping sound, followed by an almighty crash of thunder that sent her screaming forw
ard again. There was a light ahead of her, burning calmly above a door, and in the split-second before she crashed up against it in a panicked attempt to beat it down, the door just opened.
She hurtled over the top of the bot standing in the doorway, hit the polished floor boobs-first and went spinning wild across the room until she crashed into an extremely solid object.
“Please present—” the bot began, and then there was a shunk, a hot-smelling pop, and Meoraq kicking the husk out into the rain.
She opened her eyes and saw him with the storm howling at his back. He dropped her pack on the floor, then her spear (she couldn’t even remember losing them), and finally tossed her tunic—his tunic, really—down on top of them. He looked wet and muddy and pissed.
Things kind of greyed out for a moment, or perhaps she only thought they did because of the suddenly silencing effect when the door shut again. Amber tried to get up and fell uselessly onto her face. Nothing seemed to be broken, but the run, the rain and her disastrously comical fall had taken all the breath out of her. She listened numbly to Meoraq’s footsteps striding swift and heavy toward her (he didn’t slip; life was full of unfairness) without moving.
“Light,” he said, picking her up and thumping her unceremoniously on her feet.
A light came on overhead. It did not happen quickly, as of someone flipping a switch, but slowly, sickly, accompanied by an insectile whine of effort that grew until, just before Amber clapped her hands over her ears, it died away entirely and left the lights brightly burning.
Meoraq glared at her until her eyes started stinging and then he turned his back on her. She saw his hands draw into fists and slowly uncurl. He took six breaths and said, “I cry. We’ll stay here until the storm passes. Put your clothes on.”
She limped over to their packs and picked up his tunic.
“Put dry clothes on,” he snapped.
She dressed. Thunder rolled out in the plains, making the metal hum beneath Amber’s feet.
“Is there a basement?” she asked. “Something below this? Something…safe?”
“How is it safer to be buried under a fallen building than to simply be crushed by it?”
“Please, Meoraq!”
“There is no place safer than within the sight of Sheul, woman. It doesn’t matter how deep you burrow—”
“Can’t I hide my atheistic ass just once without a sermon?”
Meoraq hissed at her and stomped away, shoving at what little blockish furniture had survived the ages and slapping at the walls until he found a panel that opened into the next room. “Stay here,” he snarled when she started to limp after him, so she leaned carefully against the wall, rubbing at her aching hip, and waited for him.
The storm raged. She’d heard the cliché used before, had even believed she’d heard storms raging in the past, but never knew it could be like this. The walls had to be at least half a meter thick, all metal and concrete—or whatever they used for concrete on this planet—and the wind still shook it. She was alone with that, alone with the muted thunder and howl of a tornado that might be even now passing directly overhead, alone without even Meoraq’s high-handed religious fervor to comfort her. The lights blurred; she looked up fearfully, thinking they were going out and she’d be trapped in the dark, then realized she was crying. And once she realized that, it was as though something broke inside her and suddenly she was sobbing so hard, she could barely breathe.
Something huge hit the wall with a deafening bang. Amber screamed helplessly and sank down the wall, sobbing because she’d banged her hip at some point in her wild spin across the floor and now it hurt to stand and it hurt to kneel and it hurt worst of all to sit. She couldn’t remember the last time nothing had hurt; she didn’t think she was ever going to feel that way again. This was it. She was never going to feel better and she was going to die huddled in a corner and crying.
She didn’t know Meoraq had come back until his hands slipped under her arms and pulled her back up onto her feet. He didn’t let go of her right away.
She kept her hands over her face, trying to shut her stupid self up and be the person she’d been all her stupid life without any effort at all, but the tears kept coming. He didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to see him trying to think of something to say to this ridiculous, fretful, useless alien he’d been saddled with. She wanted to die.
Thunder savaged the walls. Amber wailed and then Meoraq’s arms were closed fast around her, locking her against his broad, scaly chest. She wished she were the old Amber, the Amber who would have smacked him away and been tough and just fine, the Amber who wouldn’t have been crying at all. Instead, she clung to him, weeping blindly, and grateful for every cautious touch as he kneaded her back.
“Come,” he said after a moment. “The storm will pass. We will wait below.”
She nodded, still weeping hard, painfully aware of tears and snot and even drool streaming down her damn face. Humans were disgusting.
He took her with him, his arm close around her, through a series of doors to a wide stairwell. He led her down several flights, leaving the sound of the storm behind them until all was silent except for her sniveling.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. Her voice, weak as it was, echoed.
Meoraq stopped to muscle a door open. He must have done it before, because the lights were on in the hall beyond and he’d known to throw his weight at it from the start, but it still took a great deal of effort and his only answer was a grunt.
She knew she should keep quiet, but no sooner had Meoraq finally managed to shove the door-panels apart than it came bleating out of her again: “Please don’t be mad at me.”
He’d started to walk on through the doors, but just as suddenly stopped (she bumped hard into his back and had to stagger to catch herself). He stood there for a second or two, not moving, then swung around and hissed, “I am not S’kot, damn it! I won’t leave you!”
The words and the vehemence with which they were spoken might have each been sufficient on their own to take her aback. Together, they entirely overwhelmed her.
He resumed his prowling, pissed-off stride, leaving her there in the stairway to stay or to follow as she wanted.
She followed, but slowly, not daring yet to speak. The hallway they entered was wide but not tall, with a rounded ceiling and featureless metal walls that made it seem a lot like walking through a pipe. Here and there, other corridors intersected, but there were few doors and Meoraq did not stop to test any of them.
“They left you,” he was saying. “They left you and I have tried and tried for your sake to be sorry, but I’m not. You say I don’t want to find them and you say truth. I would go so far as to say I dread finding them, but I will take them back if I do. For God, yes, and for you, because you think you need them and you think it would make you happy if they liked you, but they never will!”
She flinched, surprised by how much it hurt to hear that out loud, even though it was hardly something she hadn’t thought herself. “I don’t care if they like me,” she mumbled. It used to be true.
“If they were right here in this room—” His fist lashed out and thumped a panel on the wall as he stormed by. The door beside it wheezed halfway open, showing her an empty room, small and stark as a prison cell, before groaning shut again. “—you would take them back. Not just your N’ki, but all of them! And you would be glad you found them, glad to take them in and let them piss on you all over again!”
“What do you want me to say?” she asked dully.
He stopped and swung on her again. The stripes were out on his throat and brilliantly yellow. “I want you to tell me why you want them back! I want you to tell me why I—” He smacked himself on the chest hard enough to make her jump. “—am not enough for you! I want you to tell me why you can’t just let S’kot go and be glad he’s gone!”
“Because everyone else is dead.”
He stared at her, breathing hard as the color
on his neck faded. When it was almost gone, he looked away, then turned around and started walking again. She followed. Their footsteps echoed, making it seem like more than just the two of them, like Scott and all the others were walking invisibly right behind them.
“Say it,” Meoraq said abruptly, disgustedly.
“Say what?”
“What you always say when I act like this.”
She frowned, bewildered, and suddenly got it. “Scaly son of a bitch.”
“That’s it. I’m sorry,” he said, in the impatient manner of a man unused to making apologies. “I should not be so harsh with you. This place—and all places like it—just put poison in my mouth.”
“It’s all right.” Amber followed him around a corner, only to stop in her tracks almost immediately.
There was a corpse in the hallway.
Meoraq kept walking, talking back at her just as if he weren’t also stepping over the blackened, mummified arm of a lizardman as he went. “No, it isn’t. I don’t want to be here, but I know you only want to come in from the storm and look for your people, and you should not be ashamed to want either.”
“There’s a dead body here,” said Amber.
Meoraq looked at it, then at her. “Yes,” he said. He did not say, ‘And your point is…?’ but she heard it just the same.
“Is this place safe?”
Meoraq looked at the corpse again, a little longer this time, and at her, a little harder. “What exactly do you expect dead men to do to you?”
She had no ready answer for that, so she asked instead, “Do you know what this building used to be?”
Meoraq backed up into the room behind him and looked around at whatever there was in there to see. “It somewhat resembles a niyowah.” He glanced at her. “A place of display, such as one might exhibit trophies of battle or holy relics. Except that these were people,” he added as Amber moved past him to see.
A niyowah, he’d called it, which she’d taken to mean a museum or something. But the word that leapt at once to her shocked mind was laboratory.