In the time since her try for freedom Amber had healed, but she now worried for the health of her child even more. She shivered at night and the pangs of hunger were like red hot pokers in her chest.

Now the time had come, and Amber had a different plan.

It was a plan that caused her heart to quail with fear.

With her auburn hair brushed and glowing, lips ruby red, and brown eyes lowered, she walked towards the guard post and tried to ignore the tightness in her chest.

She was hardly showing her pregnancy, and while the rations of the prison camp meant her waist was the slimmest it had ever been, Amber still filled out the silk dress she'd pillaged from a dead woman's belongings. She had modified the dark blue dress so that the neckline was low, scandalously low, and the material was sheer, so that Amber felt near-naked.

As she picked her way through the groups of huddled prisoners, heading for the check point, Amber caught the disapproving stares of both the Halrana and her Alturan countrymen. The Alturans here were mostly soldiers who had been captured at the battle at the Bridge of Sutanesta, and they'd seen their friends killed by the Black Army, by the very men that Amber was evidently giving herself to. Amber lifted her chin and ignored them. In her position they would do the same thing.

She hadn't made the decision lightly. People were disappearing from the camp. They certainly weren't being released, for the ones disappearing were the old and the infirm, the weak and the dying, but if they weren't being released then where were they going? Then others started vanishing — those who argued with the guards, or even looked at them the wrong way.

Amber's trouble started in the food line when, two days before, Hugo, a vicious Tingaran, had tried to kiss her. When she'd turned her head, he'd angrily pulled her ragged dress from her shoulders, displaying her breasts for all to see. Without thinking, Amber had responded by slapping him across the face.

Hugo, a big man with the typical shaved head of a Tingaran, had looked surprised for a moment, and then glared at Amber as his fellow guards hooted and jeered. "You're going next." He had prodded Amber's bare chest with his finger. "I'll make sure of it," he said with venom. Amber had hung her head and pulled her dress back up, before realising what it was he meant. Wherever they were taking the vanishing prisoners, she was going, too.

Amber could see only one way out, a way she could save her life, and provide security for her unborn child. She had spent two days getting ready for this moment. She was beautiful, she reminded herself.