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Back on Earth 22, I got the tattoo just after my nineteenth birthday. I'd been hooked up with Nik for over a year, and he'd gotten me a present. That's why I did it. I don't even remember the gift anymore, but it made me feel happy and loved and I couldn't stand it. So I got the tattoo for him, thinking we'd be even. H...
When I finally wake from the dream about Nik Nik I'm sober enough to know I'm drugged, which makes the fuzzy disconnection terrifying. I am in a bed with something soft at my back propping me up. There's a cloth over my eyes. The cool material is thick enough to keep me from seeing anything, but my nose is telling me t...
The next time I wake I am actually alert for the first time since leaving Earth Zero. Whoever has been watching me must have understood my plea, because the stronger opiate seems to be out of my system, though I'm still held in place by the pods. Pods, plural. It's not just the one plastic dome like the last time I was...
You're paralyzed but don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. It seems impossible that he said those words to me. Don't be afraid? It's like a lion telling a gazelle not to run, when everyone knows that's how he likes his prey best. I kept my eyes closed and waited for him to retaliate for the mess I'd made of him, and myself...
It was a list that brought me to Nik Nik, and a list that took me away from him. I've written thousands of lists since Pax first taught me to read in the kitchen of the House during his off hours. Even when my mother was kicked out, the House was open to me. I'm sure Pax already knew I wouldn't be cut out for the work,...
When I wake up again the sun has risen and Nik Nik is sitting in a chair at the foot of my—our, I mean, his—bed. He may have slept somewhere else, but he's settled in like he's been waiting a while even though the light tells me it's not yet full day. He sees my eyes open and smiles. "Good news, as of this morning you ...
Back on my home Earth, and I'm guessing every Earth where Nik Nik rules, the story is always the same. Everyone stopped speaking of the boy after he was killed; he was taken out of the records as if he'd never existed. Only I know, because his younger brother loved me and mourned him, that his real name was Adranik, fi...
Nik Nik has programmed the pods, and I intend to get into them as soon as he leaves, but he doesn't. He sits in the bedside chair, still in his tunic and glasses, looking every bit the holy man instead of the hunter he has always been. I should rush him out. I can feel the warning pulse of my veil losing charge, but I'...
"I told you to go. You weren't supposed to come back. He's going to find you." I blink up at him, surprised at the lecture. "Did you really come back to him? He's going to kill you. He tried to kill you." He looks confused, but also tired. "I can't find you like that again." We lock eyes, me not understanding him, and ...
There are slight advantages to being so often treated as prey. For instance, you tend to watch others more than others watch you. You tend, also, to only ever be minimally disoriented by a sudden loss of safety. But the most important benefit to being so often hunted is that you always know when it's happening. So when...
In the dungeon, I add up the hours I've been gone and wonder if Dell has started to miss me. If she ever will. It's too early for her to be really worried. I've missed check-ins before, so she won't think anything's wrong tomorrow either. She'll go to Jean, probably, who will remind her I have history in the area. He'l...
I've thought a lot about how I could die. Most gits do. There are ways that are acceptable, and ways that are not. Of course, sometimes we fantasize about not dying at all...but it's best to be practical. My mother knew I would die in a palace. One night, toward the end, she said, You'll never keep your place, always r...
I'm making a list of options with too few entries when I hear the scratching travel up the wall and across the ceiling. It's the sound of a sandcat—a fanged rodent whose name makes no sense, except that they do eat other rodents, as a cat would, if there were any left small enough to fit the title. The scratching is a ...
How does Adranik become the bloodiest emperor? This is the question I mull over when I'm awake again but still paralyzed. He was the softer child, the one who couldn't even hunt without crying. How did he preserve the runners' parade when his carnivore brother didn't? How did he break his mistress's jaw when his own fa...
Mr. Cheeks goes to free Daniel from the supply cabinet, and the rest of us wait in his office. "You shouldn't stay," Nik Nik says. "It's not safe." "Have to." "You haven't seen what he does to you here." "I can guess." We're standing too close in a corner. His voice is low, but Esther is only pretending not to hear the...
We leave as soon as we can round up the gear, but it's not soon enough. Really, it's been too late since sunrise. Even under the reflective tarp, my cheeks and forehead begin to burn. "Not far." He yells it like there's a risk I won't hear him, but the world is so still it's like the sun has an invisible hand pressed d...
Time is flat. We process it linearly, but everything is happening at once, always. Right now I am kissing Nik Nik. I am leaving him. I am killing him, because surely I've done that before or will somewhere in the infinite. I am home with Dell. We are happy. We are not. We used to be happy and now she resents my lower s...
When we go back outside, the car is just as hot as before, but no hotter, which means we're on the plateau before the downside of the wave. Nik starts to drive back to the church, but I direct him to the riverbed instead. "We'll have to take another break if we go out that far," he says. "But I know a place." At first,...
In Exlee's office, Nik Nik suffers through an interrogation about what kind of ruler he would be and why the providers should show up at his meeting. It may not have been planned, but it's good we came. News spreads from the House faster than a yell, and before the meeting even starts everyone will be talking about Nel...
I thought the House would fill me up, but it's just left me raw. My heart hurts, and for the first time I'm actually feeling the loss of 22, my first Earth. I did keep Mixxie's gloves, and Helene X's pin. I preserved every gift and lesson the workers ever gave me. But I didn't have them with me when I came over. I migh...
"Miss me, kitten?" Nelline says, biting at the rough skin on her lip. Her hands are chained to a cot. Even from here I can see the straps cutting into her wrists. I picture Mixxie's face, trying to hate this version of myself, but I can't. I just feel sad, like I've failed somehow. I step forward. "I think it's a trick...
I cannot, at first, process what she's saying. Guns haven't existed in my lifetime. But I remember when I was a girl, people saying that if runners had to use guns instead of vehicles, they would do far worse than killing one or two people each. There has never been weapons manufacturing in Ashtown, but it was Nik Seni...
The church isn't nearly as packed as it was at the dedication, but there's enough nervous energy that it might as well be. Esther's invited representatives from different groups, rather than whole populations, so what stands before me is a handful of the most powerful people in the wastes. Most I don't recognize, but s...
"The doors! get away from the doors!" Nik Nik cries out his warning while I'm still speechless. But of course, he's lived with the parade every day, and I haven't heard them in over a decade. "We don't run in the Rurals," says one of the runners, but no one responds. "Are you still sheltering my people here?" Tatik ask...
I haven't done the math of how many hours have passed since I last spoke to her, but I'm expecting someone from the night shift when she answers. "You had better be calling for a pull." "I am. My collar is broken, so it's not clasping. I need a proximity retrieval." "How wide?" I look at Adra. "Four-feet radius?" "Ther...
I am the first to enter the space between worlds, because I was at the center of the pull. It feels familiar like a recurring dream is familiar—something that is not real, but you've been there before just the same. The handbooks explain that anything unbelievable you see is a hallucination, images pulled from the subc...
"If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once." —Ocean Vuong
When the recruitment campaign began, we learned Eldridge needed a very select group of people—those who lived with enough risk to have died over and over and over again...but had somehow survived here. And the scientists said, Interstellar travel has always belonged to the few. Of course the people we seek are a parado...
Eldridge's physician has been clucking over my scans since they came in. Except for a few hairline fractures that reopened during my jump back home, the injuries I sustained getting to Earth 175 are just dark shadows of new healing on the projection. But the doctor can tell how bad it was, because he keeps looking from...
Somewhere along the way, Dell has learned where I live. She walks slightly ahead of me, but never looks back to ask where we're headed. Or if we're moving too fast. Or how I'm doing. But who's bitter? Not I. I realize too late that being alone with Dell while I'm this wrecked is probably a bad idea. All of the little a...
Adra visits me in the night. I see him bend and break. I know I couldn't have seen his face, not once he was snapped backward, but I've invented it—eyes wide as stars, a blood curtain hanging from his mouth—turned toward me in accusation. Somehow, too, I've added sound into the void. I replay the memory and make myself...
With her fair, uninked skin and her biblical, x-free name, my sister could probably slip through Wiley City without a pass. But that's not Esther. Esther does things by the book, not just the Book, but any book. She spends the first five minutes of our visit touching my face and scolding me for not telling her I was hu...
The day of my debriefing at Eldridge, I'm woken by the proximity alert on my doorcam. I shuffle forward and make it to the door just in time to see someone retreating, ducked down so I can see only a shape I first assume is a black-clad shoulder. Too tired to be cautious, but just awake enough to be curious, I open the...
Jean is waiting for me just inside Eldridge's doors. His eyebrows go up as he studies my face. "They didn't fade." I touch my cheeks. I've mostly forgotten about the stripes that begin at my cheekbones and continue all the way down my body, just slightly darker and more purple than my own skin. He's wrong, they did fad...
"Right, this mysteriously broken collar that seems to have disappeared from our inventory," says the second investigator. "It what?" I touch my neck, half expecting the collar to be in the last place I remember it. I look at Jean, but he seems as confused as I am. Dell leans forward, looking straight at me even though ...
The nightmare that wakes me the next day is another quiet one, more sad than horrifying but a nightmare nonetheless. Nelline, who was somehow also Caramenta, and somehow also my mother, was lying beside me in bed, telling me over and over again that she's not here. That she is gone. That everyone is gone. Except me. I ...
Border patrol stops us the moment we cross into Ashtown proper from the ambiguous stretch of desert that separates it from Wiley City. This time, I pull far off the road and into the dirt, so they'll know I mean to deal. I get out before he can make it to my window. He stumbles a bit, but then so do I. I'd forgotten th...
We've made it to the edge of the deep wastes, and I've just told Mr. Cheeks my plan. "It's not much farther." "It's not the distance that worries me; it's the obstacles. No one's supposed to even go near the bogs." "Is that strictly true?" Dell says. "I'd always heard that was where you took all the Wiley citizens who ...
Mr. Cheeks helps Esther build a small fire as we wait for the sun to go down. Only once it is no longer visible in the sky can we leave without a guilty conscience. Leaving in the light means you don't really care if the dead find their way. Only the truly arrogant arrange morning funerals, putting that much faith in t...
"How long have you known?" I ask. I realize now that she wasn't checking the body to see if it was me; she was checking to see if it was her real sister. "From the very beginning." My mind stutters. I think back to every interaction we've ever had, and all along she knew I wasn't her sister. A phone call stands out. Wh...
Esther stays the night with me, and we hardly sleep for all our talking. She asks me questions she couldn't ask Caramenta, or any other Ruralite, even though I try to answer as if I am one of them. She even asks about my last job. I don't hold back, so by the time I'm finished my little sister knows everything about me...
"Where did you get this?" Jean asks. Since Jean went to meet Adam right after my debriefing, I've had to wait until my first day back to bring him the note. I've been watching him read it carefully. At first, the shock on his face was total. But then it gave way to anger. I made the right choice. He didn't send it. "So...
I don't realize I've developed a fear of traversing until it's too late. I hadn't been afraid as I made my way to the elevator to meet Dell. Sure, I'd hesitated to get in until a co-worker behind me—Maintenance, I'm guessing, given the black jumpsuit—cleared his throat and growled It's open at me. But that hadn't been ...
The meeting place is on 80, so before I go I dress in the kind of clothes I learned to value by watching Dell. I'd checked before, and the coordinates on the note lead me to a public garden owned by Adam Bosch, which adds evidence to the "employee" column on my list of suspects. A runner would probably want to meet som...
All the words I could say crowd at the front of my mouth until only the smallest can squeeze through. "No. Yes. What? You...yes." His next laugh is loud enough to echo off his house. He laughs like Nik Nik, utterly unconcerned about disturbing others. I'd envisioned many reactions to him finding out I killed Adra, but ...
My list grows and spreads in the days after my meeting. It started out small, a handful of scientists who expressed regret about Bosch's breakthrough because they'd been so close. Three names, all Wileyites, with a mortality rate that rivals mine. Those three represented just over a thousand murders, but rivals have co...
Three hundred and eighty-two worlds and I bet every Hangars Row smells just like this: sweat, dirt, gasoline, and smoke. It smells a little like the side rooms at the House, but mixed with a zoo. The smell hits me like a wall that is half revulsion and half memory, but I can tell it hits Esther harder, a hell of a smel...
Dell catches me sleeping at my desk the next morning. I'd stayed too late at my family's house, first to comfort Mom, then to help Esther and my stepfather arrange a prayer to send Michael safely into his new life. The whole thing felt like a funeral, and if you judged by my mother's wailing, you'd think it was. By the...
Someone pokes my side while I'm loading up on free food before the assembly. I turn with a scowl that instantly melts. "Dresden, Dresden, Dresden, look what the sandcat ralphed up." "I do so miss your idioms," he says, reaching over me to load up his plate on the company dime. His eyes settle on my face. "I'd heard sur...
"You know damn well there is no inoculation. You have felt Nyame. You can't inoculate against her." Jean sits down behind his desk. I didn't have an appointment, so after the meeting I just went to the elevator and started bleating into my cuff like a goat. Eventually he sent the elevator down. Unlike Dell—and, really,...
The smell of food wakes me long after the beeping of my cuff should have. At first, I don't move. I'm thinking about yesterday, about everything I've learned. Does knowing Adam is planning another kill campaign change things, when I've already agreed to ignore the ones in the past? I have never considered my own moral ...
When I'm summoned to the hatch for my first pull on Monday, a man is waiting for me. "Oh sorry," I say. "Must have double-booked." "Wait. Caramenta, right? I'm really excited to meet with you. I've never seen a traverser who's done a three-hundred-pull year." His smile is almost blue-bright, standing out against his go...
When i finally see Jean again, I'm ready for a fight. Working with Carrington has spoiled my mood like milk on a bright day. The watcher and I have nothing to talk about, but that doesn't stop him from talking. I sit down, sliding Jean his fob across the desk. He looks more irritated than surprised. "You know, if I'd r...
It's illegal for Wiley City to investigate a citizen without their knowledge, so I'm sure enforcement will be here soon to inform Adam Bosch of the case. If they come to interview traversers, I won't hide who I am. Once Adam reads the complaint, he'll know it's me. I was mostly anonymous in the letter, but I made sure ...
When asked what this discovery could teach us about what mattered, about death, and human nature, and how to make the world a gentler place, both parties were silent. But we were right, the scientists said. And so were we, the spiritual said.
We used to believe the universe was stable. We saw its cycles, the reliable circles it traced, and called the pattern static, meaning unmoving. Then we learned its wildness—asteroids that leave their own clusters and impact with planets that've also abandoned their orbits, everything dancing off track to the music of c...
Jean's funeral is a Wiley City event. His family is there, down to the smallest member, eight rows of love with their arms entwined like a net to carry the heaviest burden. And that is what they will have to do now, because Jean's absence is exactly that. The mayor speaks about Jean as a treasure, an explorer, one of t...
I take off my mourning dress for the second time in a month, and put it in the top of my closet. My hand glides against the cold jar, and without thinking I take it down. I'd tried fruitlessly to get Esther to take Nelline's mourning candle back, but Esther had insisted like only the princess of the Rurals can. I light...
I drive into Ashtown so slowly that even the most distracted runner could have clocked me. But when the heavy boots walk up to my window, it's not who I want to see. "Where's Mr. Cheeks? I need to talk to him." The runner tilts her head. At first I think her tight expression is suspicion, but then I realize it's less s...
When I'm summoned to the hatch I expect to see Carrington again, but it's Dell. Seeing her so unexpectedly, bent over a screen while light from the window turns strands of her dark hair to pure shine, is a fist in the throat. I manage to control my reaction enough to keep from running to her. I walk quietly, like I'm t...
Esther buzzes at my door as aggressively as the technology will allow—which isn't very, but she caps it off with a scowl into the camera. When I open the door an inch she pushes it open three feet, and my calm, Ruralite sister stomps into my home like Nik Nik's meanest runner. "Oh? You're not dead. Interesting. I was s...
I burst into the prep room with more momentum than I intend, startling Dell into dropping the veil she's holding. "Any chance I'm scheduled for a pull on 175 today?" Narrowing her eyes, she picks up the delicate bit of plastic and wires. "You are not." "Do you know when I will be?" "You assume they'd send you back?" I ...
When I land in the dirt banks of the dry river, the smell of hot sand and ash hits me like other people must be hit by the smell of their mother's cooking. After a second I lick my lips and the salt and acid taste of the air settled there isn't the shock it was last time. I hit my earpiece. "I landed. There's no nuclea...
As we wait for the emperor, Mr. Cheeks seems even more nervous than I am. He said he could get me a meeting with Nik Nik quickly, and he wasn't lying. It was only Thursday that I got the gun, now it's Sunday and I'm waiting in an empty warehouse for His Royal Pain-in-the-Assness. I haven't been granted an invite to the...
"What happened to you?" The naked concern in Dell's voice gets at me. "Nothing. It wasn't even really a fracture. It's just the bruise left." She doesn't listen. She circles me, prodding along the discolored skin. "I told you, I've already been podded." "These cuts are newly healed. How did you...?" But then, standing ...
When Nik Nik arrives, he has brought a posse, and if I hadn't received the text from Mr. Cheeks I would have fainted at the sight. I haven't seen this many idle runners gathered together in years. And there is nothing more terrifying than an idle runner. I step aside, motioning them in quickly. It does no good; none of...
What surprises me the most when I'm moving with the runners is that Nik Nik doesn't demand deference during the run. All of the pomp and circumstance he'll usually kill over—lowering your eyes when you speak to him, never questioning him—all of that goes away as we navigate the scaffolding of Wiley City. They use a con...
Mr. Cheeks's head snaps back with the violence of a whip, and for a moment I think it's over that quickly. But then he ducks and turns, spinning away. My mind stutters at the sight. "Dell?" I ask, but she ignores me, slamming a hand into Mr. Cheeks's throat that leaves him sputtering. Dell is taller than either of us, ...
The news projections catch fire after the runners' display. They used flamethrowers, chainsaws, and motorized skates to terrorize the garden with one clear message: We didn't kill Jean Sanogo. I scan the coverage obsessively, making sure none of the images contain my eyes or utterly unique facial striping. I'm in the c...
The day before we strike, I find myself looking at everything like it's for the last time. When I pack, I expect a mountain of possessions, heavy as an anchor, to prove I did belong here. But it's just a backpack's worth of clothes and a box filled with my collection of items from other Earths. Soon my name will be off...
I wait for my interview in the lobby. Without looking, I see six black jumpsuits, Maintenance workers on a day they don't usually work, waiting with me. I'm dressed in Dell's suit, and it makes me feel confident. I guess it's easy to be confident when you're helpless, easy to be fearless when you have nothing left to l...
The acidic air only burned for the first week. After a few days I can't even taste the salt on my lips. Early on, I spend most of my days feeling my own pulse, waiting for it to slow. Adam Bosch made it seem like the long-term effects of the serum would kill me, but after the second week I have to admit that I'm feelin...
The eviction notice was hanging on the door when they got back from the hospital. The time stamp said 1:27 am, six minutes after Mary Shelley Bierce's official time of death, an hour and twenty-eight minutes before her two daughters sitting in the waiting room had even been informed. Amber sent Nicci in to bed while sh...
There could have been a lot more than two children at the funeral if it hadn't been for Measure 34. Mary Bierce (known to her clients as Bo Peep for her curly blonde hair, big blue eyes and child-sweet face, a name she was quick to capitalize on with frilly panties and ribbons and the intermittent plush sheep) had neve...
She didn't say anything until they got back to the apartment. Then Amber sat her baby sister at the kitchen table and put two short stacks of papers in front of her. One was the eviction notice, the new lease, and a copy of their mother's insurance policy. The other was an information packet with the words Manifest Des...
"How are you going to fuck men—" That flinch again. "—for money—" Nicci broke, tried to get up. Amber caught her by the wrist again and held on in spite of her sister's squirming efforts to tug free. She hated this, hated herself, but she kept on talking and her voice never shook. Sometimes you had to say the bad stuff...
They called the ship the Pioneer, of course. The launch had originally been scheduled for August 3rd, but it had been pushed back three times and now was set for January 22nd, and, barring another sanction from the United Nations, set in stone. That gave the Bierces a little more than twelve weeks to prepare for the fl...
Amber knew where he lived, but she went to 61st Street anyway because when Bo Peep moonlighted, which was almost every night these past few years, she did it on 61st and the Six-Ones might be feeling territorial. Sure enough, after standing out in the grey rain for a good half-hour, a kid sidled up and asked who she wa...
She took her lunchbag home and put it in Mama's room without looking at it. Then she cleaned house. Ice cream, frozen pizzas, peanut butter, all the nuke-and-eat dinners in the freezer and the just-add-hamburger boxes from the cupboard—opened or unopened, it all went into a garbage bag and straight out to the dump-bin ...
Time came back. She had eight weeks to kill with nothing to do. She went to all the seminars the Manifestors offered. She took a class in agrarian infrastructure, and another in canning, figuring they'd be useful skills to have on the new planet. She went to the gym every day, but gained back five pounds. She would hav...
That day, Amber learned early that standing around in an skyport was pretty much exactly like standing around in an airport. This was probably because, regardless of the Director's many efforts to make it look futurific and exciting, it was an airport, only with a space shuttle behind it instead of a bunch of planes. T...
Amber woke up on her side, which she knew only because she could sort of feel the hard mat under her cheek and the cold, curved glass panel of the Sleeper's lid pressing on her nose and forehead. She tried to roll over, but couldn't. Her limbs were dead; she was beginning to register the discomfort of her arms crossed ...
She stood there for an undeterminable stretch of truly awful minutes, locked in a kind of mindless, paralyzed panic, aware that time was passing but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. It was bad, and she often thought back on that moment later with the idea that that had to be at least some of what Hell was ...
Crewman Scott put himself in command. This initially made for some tense moments when he was trying to recruit for what he was calling 'reconnaissance and establishment of a forward operations base,' particularly from the Fleetmen, who certainly seemed open to doing something but were visibly hostile to the idea of tak...
Much later, in the waning light of the alien, cloud-covered sunset, Amber finally took that head count. She couldn't do anything else at the moment, not after that hike, except sit on the ground with her aching, rubbery legs splayed out before her, trying to gasp her lungs into working again. She'd been the last to com...
They made their way down to the water in the dark. And it was dark, much darker than it had been up on the apex of the ridge, where the sullen red glow of the smoldering ship had been their nightlight. It was a lot steeper on this side as well, so they went slow. It seemed like hours before they actually reached the wa...
In the city of Xheoth, in the state of Yroq, in the world and the hour of Gann, a pillar of fire rose up in the east, reaching like a desperate hand to heaven. It was a cool night, but not a cold one, and rainless although the wind was strong over the city, and so there were many who saw this miraculous sight. Uyane Me...
Meoraq descended the stair and beckoned indiscriminately to the crowd of youths and low-born priests still clustered in the upper halls hoping for a glimpse of the miraculous fires. Several came forward at once. He took the first to reach him for his usher, made his few demands to the others, and allowed himself to be ...
His usher was waiting in the hall to lead him to the temple's gate, trying—and failing—to disguise his curiosity at the sexual mysteries he knew to be unfolding behind the door once the woman entered. He seemed very surprised to see Meoraq so soon emerged and it took him some little time to remember the proper genuflec...
It stopped raining a quarter-span outside of Tothax, with the city walls looming black and tall before him and his clothing as heavy as another damned man riding about on his back. Meoraq cast a surly word of gratitude upwards, accepted the final mutter of far-away thunder for the rebuke it surely was, and walked the l...
One city was very much like another, each one being made after Oracle Mykrm's design at the Prophet's direction. It had been half a year since Meoraq had last been in Tothax, but he did not need the boy to guide him. He knew the way to the temple district in every city of his circuit and took himself easily down to the...
There was a man posted outside the quorum doors, swordless, with a brutal-looking hammer at his side. Not one of the warrior's caste. A bailiff, then, and not one Meoraq knew or at least not one he remembered. He gave his name and went into the arena hold to wait. It was his right to hear any dispute where he might be ...
In retrospect, the trouble with Scott started immediately, but it took a few days before Amber caught on to just how bad it was. She knew she was as guilty as everyone else of letting him take over. She also knew that she didn't want to be the one in charge when the whole human race was just forty-eight people on an al...
It rained for days. Amber lost track of how many. They had no computers anymore, no digireaders, no handhelds, not even wristwatches. They talked about hours or minutes, but in truth there was no time on this world—just one endless day cycling between grey and black, filled with wind and rain. The lake started rising, ...
They hiked for days in the rain, moving the camp piece by heavy piece, following a storm-swelled fall of water up the eastern slope and away from the Pioneer. It shouldn't have taken as long as it did, but Scott refused to leave anything behind. The purifier, the generator, even the stupid bags of concrete—everything w...
Although the right to move freely between the cities of Gann had been a favorite dream as a boy, Meoraq the man did not enjoy travel. He didn't hate it; travel was an inevitability of being Sheulek, which was so great a sign of his divine Father's favor that he could hate nothing that came of it. But the distance betwe...
At the center of camp, unaware of the new eyes watching them from the shadows, the survivors of the crash of the Pioneer prepared for their first Stone Age hunt. Amber was right in the thick of them, heating up the tips of the spears she'd helped cut earlier that morning. Scott had deigned to give her his approval, and...
Amber was never able to put into words just why she brought the lizard back to camp. When asked (and they asked, many times, for days afterwards), she was always able to come up with something plausible-sounding about how useful he might be, but that first impulse remained indefinable. She only knew that she wanted him...
The longer he listened, the more certain Meoraq became that the strange chatter of the creatures who called themselves humans was indeed a true language, entirely separate from his own. This troubled him. The Prophet's Word is the only Word. This was the first law of Sheul, repeated no less than twenty-three times thro...
He dreamt. Dreams, by their very nature, frequently touched at strangeness and he was not a man who attached much importance to them, even when he recalled them upon waking, which was not often. But this... When he became aware of it (he could not say 'at its beginning' for, like so many dreams, it seemed to have much ...

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