“Between the way the Autarch constructed our outer defenses and the lookouts we have patrolling, we know roughly when and where the enemy will be arriving,” said Sally as we walked. The door wasn’t far. One of the guards pushed it open, revealing the half-dead land I’d seen when I first arrived. One by one, we stepped out, the last guard closed the door behind us, and we were alone in a hostile landscape.

  That was nothing new. I’ve been alone in a hostile landscape one way or another for most of my life. We started forward, into the dead land.

  I paused after about twenty yards, looking back at the compound Thomas and his people had claimed for their own. I still couldn’t figure out where I’d seen it before, or why it all looked so damn familiar.

  Sally wasn’t wrong about the cold outside the walls. I pressed two fingers to the skin below my jaw as I started walking again, focusing on the match tattooed there, and a wave of warmth washed over me, chasing the cold away.

  Every step kicked up a small cloud of dust, and while some of the bushes were very obviously dead once I got close to them, others shied away from me, reacting almost like sea anemones in the presence of a predator. A world of reactive vegetation was nothing unique, but I’ve always found plants that move to be more fun than the other kind. Sadly, I didn’t know if they’d have defenses—toxins or stinging sap—and we were in a hurry; I couldn’t allow myself the brief luxury of prodding them unless I wanted to risk losing an hour to an allergic reaction. Sometimes being responsible is the boring way to do things.

  Two more detachments of guards came to join us as we walked, none of them giving me much more than a second glance. I was with Sally, they trusted Sally, I must belong here. I wondered what she’d done to earn such faith from these people, many of whom were visibly scarred, none of whom were obviously human. By the time Sally called for a halt, we were a force easily fifty strong, bristling with polearms, swords, and bows.

  There was nothing in front of us. No people, no visible threats. I glanced at Sally, trying to assess the situation. She shook her head and gestured to the air, a little bit above head height. I looked again, squinting when it still looked like nothing in particular. Finally, I saw it: there was a faint soap bubble shimmer in the air, like a film of rainbows overlain across the rotting sky.

  “That’s the edge of the Autarch’s protection spells,” she said, voice tight. “Not much beyond that point. Including air. Air is important. Most people need it if we want to live.”

  “So this is where we fight?”

  “No, this is where we take a really damn deep breath, and where you trigger those bubbles the boss said he saw on your arm.”

  “Shoulder, actually,” I said, as coolly as I could, and pressed my hand against a line of bubbles tattooed at my shoulder. My head spun even as the dust and dryness seemed to vanish from the air. I hadn’t realized how thin it was even on this side of the barrier. “A little blood sugar’s a fair trade for a lack of hypoxia, I guess. How are you going to be okay?”

  “Practice,” she said. “We’re like those Olympians from Colorado at this point. The ones who’ve trained for so long in crappy conditions that we’re superheroes when we get down to sea level. Only what we’re training for is fighting people where there isn’t enough oxygen in the air.”

  “What fun hobbies you people have,” I said.

  She smirked at me, then gestured for the group to resume walking.

  The barrier offered no resistance. Even with the charm, I could tell the air was thinner there, making it harder for me to draw a full breath. At least it was still breathable. The charm would last about three hours as long as I didn’t run into any burning buildings; it would run out faster if I made it deal with actual smoke.

  Outside the barrier, the sky was even uglier, the rotting yellow color of a bruise that had barely healed past the purple-black stage, the shade that meant something was dying. If there was a sun somewhere up there, I couldn’t see it, lost as it was behind the layers of dust, ash, and cloud. The world looked sick because the world was sick. More, because the world was dead.

  The world had been dead for a long, long time. It had just remained tethered to the crossroads somehow, tied to their poison in a terrible way I didn’t quite understand, and they had been feeding it by throwing their exiles here. Every time the crossroads threw someone away, they’d been feeding magic back into the biosphere. Not enough to heal it—not enough to grow into a new membrane or to bring the dead, decaying thing it was back to life—but enough to let it limp along in a state of suspended animation, never fully collapsing.

  And then they’d thrown Thomas through, clever, clever Thomas, who was so much more adaptable than most of his kind, who had already learned the techniques for tucking magic into his flesh for later use, ink and sigils and potential, who had found a way to tap into that shallow well and use that magic as if it were his own. He’d been protecting the other exiles, making this world a better place for them to live, and hastening its death at the same time.

  He might have known that. He might have considered it a good thing. Better a hundred good years than five hundred years of endless suffering as the biome rotted to the point where it could no longer support anything resembling life. Or he might have been acting as a sorcerer, not a conservationist. He’d never been a part of my family’s obsession, had married in as an adult and been imprisoned at the same time, making it impossible for him to do more than help with research. Field work and seeing the impact of little changes to the ecosystem had never been an option for him. He might never have realized what he was potentially doing.

  Or he’d realized it and confirmed he wasn’t doing it, and I was completely off-base, woolgathering as I walked. But it made sense, based on everything I’d managed to learn about the way this system worked, and the way he and Sally both agreed this reality was falling apart faster now that new arrivals from the crossroads weren’t falling out of the sky. There was no new magic coming into the world. What little did arrive, Thomas took and hoarded, and however good his reasons were, however necessary his actions, the fact remained that he was like the man with the only well for miles around, taking all the water for his own lands.

  It felt weird to be thinking critically about the man I’d come here to find while on my way to parlay with his enemies, but it was also necessary. A clouded head never does anyone any good, that’s what my grandmother used to say, and Grandma was almost always right about almost everything. Enid Healy was the culmination of a hundred generations of careful Covenant breeding plans, and they were lucky she hadn’t burned the damn place to the ground on her way out the door.

  A line of dust had appeared in the distance. Sally signaled us to stop again, then gestured for the guards to fan out and form a line.

  The land wasn’t entirely flat; near the dusty plumes, I could see the kind of rocky outcroppings that I associated with Arizona and with certain episodes of Star Trek. The thought made me want to laugh. I swallowed the sound, only snorting a little in muffled mirth. Why did I keep getting into fights in places where Kirk and Spock would have fit right in, with their polyester and their bright Technicolor future? Desert landscapes are cheap to film in, sure and they seem to occur on any planet with a biome capable of supporting humanoid life, but it was still funny.

  “Boss says you know what we’re up against,” said Sally, apparently taking my snort for dismay.

  “Yup. I’ve been to the place where they live. Didn’t like them then, don’t like them now.”

  “They’re not easy to kill.”

  “Nope.” A thought was starting to form. A bad one, which probably meant it was the best idea I was going to have today. “Sally, you should let me go out ahead. I can shoot their front line, thin their ranks before they engage with you directly.” It was the sort of technique that had been keeping me fighting for fifty years. I just needed her to go for it.

  She looked at me doubtfully for a long moment, as the guards looked anxious and the plumes of dust got closer. Finally, she sighed.

  “Fine, whatever,” she said. “Just don’t get yourself killed. I don’t want to drag your corpse back to the boss. Not when we’re this close to total disaster.”

  “You got it,” I said brightly. Then I took off at a run, heading into the dusty distance.

  Here we go again.

  Sixteen

  “I looked at that girl and I knew two things: that she was going to drive her daddy out of his mind, and that I was never going to love anything else the way I was going to love her. And God help me, both those things were true.”

  —Frances Brown

  Running across a desolate wasteland toward a potentially unwinnable battle because that’s always a great idea

  Sally probably thought I was being foolish, and she wasn’t entirely wrong, but I knew these people. I knew where their weak spots were, and I knew that their idea of tactical cooperation was even lousier than mine. It made sense that if they’d been able to access the crossroads—whether ours or a local equivalent—a lot of them would have thought making bargains was a great idea, and it made even more sense that they’d have been able to thrive in the killing jar of an evil cosmic entity. Their home world was already basically a cross between Mad Max and Lord of the Flies. This just gave them a slightly shittier stage to perform on.

  I stopped when the dust got close enough that I could see individual shapes moving through it, crouching down and hiding myself as well as I could behind one of the rocky outcroppings while I took stock of the situation. There were about fifty shadows all told, and while that might have made the force Sally was leading seem excessive, each of them was large enough to make two-to-one odds roughly fair for us. The shadows had a remarkably degree of morphological consistency, which made me think people from their world were extremely fond of making bargains—that, or they had aggressively dominant genes, which made no sense. There was no way these people were mammalian, much less cross-fertile with anything that wasn’t essentially a reptile.

  Sometimes biology gives me a headache. Everything I learned in school, that I thought was the calculus of life, was basic math at best, and it’s all so much more complicated than we ever knew it was. Every new world just adds another layer of “no, seriously, what the fuck?” And a lot of the time, you can’t really stop to make sense of it, because when something is trying to chew your face off, you don’t generally get the opportunity to ask it how its reproduction process works.

  How these people could be here didn’t matter, not really. What mattered was that they were here, tall and angry and armed with cudgels and clubs. And running straight toward me. Couldn’t forget about that part.

  Once they were inside shooting range, I straightened up. Yes, that made me a bigger target, but as none of them had anything I recognized as a distance weapon, I wasn’t terribly worried about that. I shoot better standing up. Trying to look utterly unconcerned, I sauntered forward.

  “Hey, boys,” I called, once I was close enough to get their attention. “Long way from Helos, don’t you think?”

  There had to be a larger group somewhere that wasn’t part of this assault force, because they were all male as far as I could see, lacking the distinctive red-scaled mask of females of their species. For there to be this many of them, they must have had a breeding population, even if it was small; I didn’t know enough about them to know whether they were egg-layers or what. And in this moment, it didn’t matter, as they stopped running in order to snarl and glare at me, clearly posturing to seem bigger and more terrifying than they were.

  They didn’t have to try all that hard. At seven feet tall, heavily muscled and heavily scaled, they were big and terrifying enough.

  “Now forgive me if I get this wrong, but I’m assuming you weren’t invited to come for a visit, right?” I directed my smile at the largest of them. “I think maybe you ought to move along.”

  The one I was smiling at traded his snarl for a roar that would have been a lot more terrifying if he hadn’t sounded like a squeaky toy being stepped on by a horse. He charged for me, mouth still open. That was his first mistake.

  As established much earlier, the scales on the people from Helos made them slightly harder to shoot, but not enough so that it was any kind of real problem. Even if it had been, things with open mouths might as well be wearing a sign that says, “Hit the bullseye, win a prize.”

  I’m not the best sharpshooter in our family, but this guy was charging for me and closing fast, and he had a big mouth. I fed him a bullet and he fell, still running, in a heap on the cracked earth. His companions stared for a moment before they roared, almost in unison, and rushed for me.

  Nothing like a good shooting gallery to make the afternoon more exciting. My first eight shots were clean, and eight bodies hit the ground. My next two missed their mark and only wounded, maybe because they were getting too close. With only two bullets remaining, I started producing knives from inside my clothing and hurling them at the soft parts of my attackers, embedding them in throats, eyes, and other vulnerabilities. Six more fell.

  I was beginning to give serious thought to falling back when a volley of arrows flew over my head and cut down four more of the big lizards, followed by the sound of Sally shouting. With a roar I could feel down to the soles of my feet, the remaining Haspers charged forward, and the battle line surged forward to meet them. One of the lizards swatted me to the side as they ran, not taking the time to finish me off, which I appreciated. I don’t like being finished off.

  I hit the ground hard enough to bruise and rolled to the side, blinking dust out of my eyes as I turned to watch the two groups collide. The guards, moving with Sally, were far more controlled than the Haspers had been, and clearly had some sense of troop discipline and tactics. Good to know that they hadn’t let being stranded in a death world make them sloppy.

  The reason for such a focus on polearms was more obvious once I saw them going up against the giant lizard-people. Putting their knives on the end of long sticks, when they didn’t have ready access to firearms, meant they could counter at least a little of the improved reach and height of their opponents. More of the Haspers went down. So did a few of the guards.

  Sally was a spinning tornado of knives, moving fast and low, slashing at joints and exposed weak points, gutting and moving on. I admired her technique, even as I picked myself up off the ground. I shook my head, trying to clear the ringing out of my ears. Then I shot another pair of lizards and backed away, getting a decent distance between me and the fight before holstering my guns and whistling shrilly. “Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, over here!” I waved my arms over my head. “Exposed and alone and unarmored! Come and get it!”

  The Haspers not currently engaged began to run in my direction, forming a nicely unified pack. I like a unified pack. I like the way it splashes when you lob a grenade into the middle of it, and I like it even better when none of its component parts knows what a grenade is, so they react like you’ve just thrown a rock or something. To be nonspecific.

  The sound was immense, the echoes rolling through the badlands and into the rocky Star Trek bluffs ahead of us. The silence that followed was even louder. A few fights were still going, but they were smaller now, multiple guards against single Haspers, and they were done in short order.

  Sally strolled toward me, pausing only to kick a few of the corpses before giving me a sharp look. “Do you always showboat like that?”

  “Only when it seems appropriate.” I rubbed my elbow, hand coming away sticky with blood. “Ow. I thought Thomas said a show of force would be enough to make these people back down. What happened?”

  “Things have gotten a lot more desperate since the last time we clashed with them quite this openly,” said Sally. “We have more resources than they do. They were probably hoping they could overwhelm us fast enough to finish our entire front line.”

  She had taken a hit to her shoulder at some point during the fight, and it was already beginning to darken, turning lividly purple and black and spreading tendrils of angered veins down her shoulder and upper arm like some kind of odd growth. Looking at it made me feel like I could sketch a map of her capillaries.

  Sally glanced at it, then shrugged. “I bruise easy,” she said, like that was all the explanation I needed. “We won, they didn’t knock us down, now we go home for a clambake and a beer. Or we would if we had either of those things here.”

  “Right.” I looked at the field of fallen bodies, past the Haspers to where the guards were gathering up the remains of their own. “And we have to offer to help these people escape when we leave this place?”

  “Messengers have already gone out,” said Sally. “Remember? Anyone who’s willing to come peacefully will already know that the offer’s on the table. Anyone who isn’t, we leave behind.”

  She grabbed the arm of the nearest Hasper, grunting a little with the effort of dragging it back toward the others. I blinked. “What are you doing?”

  “We aren’t the O’Vera; we don’t eat the fallen. But we still have to take what we can from the bodies. It’s time for looting.”

  “Oh, goodie,” I said dryly. “My favorite.”

  * * *

  * * *

  It didn’t take us as long as I would have feared to strip the bodies of everything usable, including the arrows that the guards had pincushioned them with, and my own knives, which I retrieved and wiped meticulously clean before tucking them back into their sheaths and scabbards. Sure, I was covered with blood and ichor, but I don’t rust. Knives do. There was still plenty of time left on both the charm keeping me warm and the one keeping me oxygenated when Sally whistled, waving for the rest of us to follow her back toward the barrier line.