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door broken? Did the vans come?”
    “Kids,” a voice clicked.
    Sanford didn’t look around. He knew it was Sam—Samaritan. Yls’a’thq really, but the human names got in, didn’t they? Like sand under chitin, digging and eroding and bleeding you out. Sam was one of those he’d had a very vague recollection of back on the ship, and that connection made them closer than any of Sanford’s other neighbors in Cottonwood, even though Sam was an irritating handful of sand himself. Sanford didn’t like him or trust him, but they spent at least two nights a ten-span together anyway, sitting on Sam’s rusted-out vehicle and drinking, because without companions of any kind, why bother surviving at all?
    “They came in just after you left,” Sam continued now. He didn’t get up. He’d lit a fire in the empty place where the vehicle’s engines used to be and was cooking a thick strip of meat. Sam ate real meat almost every night, but that didn’t make him careless of it. Surely there were eyes all around them even now, waiting for Sam’s attention to wander just long enough for a leap and a grab. “Carried off about ten cans between them.”
    Sanford swore again and put his son down. Thirteen cans had been all the food he’d had stockpiled in what he thought of as ‘the open’, even though he’d hidden them. The chit exchange office would be closed by the time he reached it—they shut their windows an hour after the men at the Heaps shut the gate—so unless he felt like walking all the way back to the merchant-grounds and paying the exorbitant price for the meat sold there, there would be no dinner tonight. Until last ten-span, there had been extra cans of bug food hidden in the secret room, but, ha, he’d been robbed and so he’d brought them up.
    Sanford sent his furious stare both ways along the causeway, even knowing the culprits were long gone with their prize, and cursed every pair of watchful eyes he spied as the eyes of thieves and cowards. And bugs.
    Still. Kids. Starving children, no doubt. A herd of them, either at the direction of their parent or a psuedo-parent, or a fatherless pack surviving as best they could. Either way, only children, hungry children.
    “IBI was here,” Sam said, turning his bit of dinner. “IBI was everywhere, I understand.”
    “Contraband search?”
    “Never got out of the vans. It was eerie. They drove around all day, slow. Hundreds of them, I keep hearing, and not just here, but everywhere.”
    That was bad. Strange behavior for humans meant trouble for yang’ti. Sanford could see his son shifting restlessly beside him, wanting to hurry up and be home, but this news disturbed him. “They weren’t out as far as the Heaps,” he said.
    “I don’t explain it, I just report it.” Sam stabbed the meat on the end of a twisted length of metal and pulled it out of the fire, laying it across his thigh to cool. He looked at Sanford, antennae low and palps snapping. “They’ll be back and when they do come, they’ll get out and come on their little pink feet. I have stuff for you to hold.”
    Sanford buzzed curtly, looking around. The causeway was never empty, especially when good meat was roasting out in the tempting open. “Not now.”
    “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Sam said.
    “It’s too dangerous. I’ll be searched.”
    “Your boy’s shell is looking mottled.” Sam picked up the strip of meat and just held it, dripping juices onto the dirt. “Too late now to turn in your chits. You got anything to feed him?”
    Sanford buzzed again, less shrilly. He really did not like this man.
    “Fresh cow, right off the shoulder. Good enough for humans.” Sam dangled the meat out, inviting a snatch from a tiny hand. “You hungry?”
    T’aki hugged onto Sanford’s leg and said nothing. Of course he was hungry.
    Sam glanced up, gave the strip a toss, and Sanford caught it out of the air. “I’ll bring the stuff by tomorrow,” he said again, and kicked the lid down