He saw the camp in the distance—a cluster of tents and make-do metal huts grouped around what seemed to be a parched gully. Columns of smoke rose into the auroral sky, filling the air with cooking and survival odors.
The shelters sagged with age and rough usage, pieced together from drone plate, animal hide, and whatever else these people had managed to scavenge. A sentry sat atop a low knoll, holding a worn spear, his gaze never wavering from the dunes. Deep cuts marred his arms—old battle or accident scars.
Near the center of the camp, someone was preparing food, stirring a container of tubers or roots, steam rising with a bright metallic smell that did not mix well with more earthy smells. Others moved between the tents, exchanging—he caught glimpses of glowing shards and bits of circuit board being traded, voices low and guarded.
There was not only this camp, he understood. He could spot other villages on the horizon as he looked out. Human beings who had made it to Province 618, probably because it was relatively close to waterways, or whatever resources existed in this impossible place.
He stood at the camp's edge, the tug beckoning him on, to walk, to go on. But his throat was parched and he could barely swallow. His stomach was completely empty. His body was giving way from dehydration and sleeplessness.
He needed water. Food. Maybe answers.
He needed to rest, even for a moment.
So he walked into the camp.
Heads turned as he stumbled into view. Hands were clenched on blades—makeshift, for the most part. Pipes. Jagged pieces of salvaged metal. A machete that glinted in the light from the fires. Survivors, and survivors didn't take chances.
Their features were lined by hardship. Some were disfigured, ugly, poorly healed wounds left over from the past. Others had that empty-eyed look of men who'd witnessed too much and slept too little. All were wary, sizing him up, deciding if he was a danger or just some other unlucky son of a bitch barely managing.
There emerged a spindly woman from the crowd. Her hair had been shaved to stubble, and there was a thick scar on her face, temple to jaw. She walked forward with the attitude of one who had earned her place here in blood and will. Her knife—as if some scrap metal had been hammered into it—was as keen as her eyes.
They'd call her Shard. That was later. Right now, he only saw a potential threat, or a potential help. He wasn't yet sure which.
"Who are you?" she growled, her voice as rough as gravel. Her eyes flicked up to his chest, landing on the smooth round scar above his heart. Surprise flickered under the hostility. "Wandering into our camp like some half-dead ghost. Do you have a name?"
He tried to speak, but his throat was dry. The words were a rasp. "I don't know who I am." He swallowed in pain. "Woke up out there in the dunes. No memories. Nothing."
To his amazement, she snorted—a chuckle, perhaps. "That's not new around here, fresh meat. Most of us started out the same way—waking up confused with gaps in our heads where the past is meant to be." She cocked her head, regarding him like so much salvage that might or might not be worth the trouble. "You've got a nickname, or do we have to coin one for you?"
He shook his head. The movement made the world spin dizzily sick. Dizziness reached for him, and that scar over his heart throbbed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
Shard's gaze dropped to the mark on his chest again, and her lips twisted—that was about as close to a smile as she managed. "All right. We'll call you Bullet, due to this mark. You were shot in the chest and refused to die." She crossed her arms. "If you're thirsty, you'll have to earn it here. That's the policy."
"How do I do that?" His words ran over the words. The draw still burned in his chest, urging him on, urging him forward, but he was tired.
Shard's expression remained stubborn, but a glimmer of nearly approve grinned in her eyes. "You take what you can get. You fight when we need you to fight. You fix what's broken. That's the deal." She gestured out at the dunes that stretched on endlessly beyond the camp. "Or you can just keep heading out into that desert and see how long you make it. Your choice."
Near one of the fires, a woman knelt beside a boy who had been no more than twelve or thirteen. His arm was cut open and bleeding, and she closed it up with makeshift thread and careful fingers.
Burn scars marred the woman's face, harsh and puckered old wounds. Her eyes, however, were gentle, understanding. She worked with the practiced facility of a woman who'd done this drill a thousand times before.
They'd called her Patch. He'd discover that later, too. She sat there now, the firelight dancing off her upturned face, and something changed in him—guilt, he imagined, though he couldn't fathom why. Guilt at having lived when others hadn't? Guilt at something he couldn't remember?
"Stay quiet, kid," Patch told him, her voice calm but firm. There was steel behind the quietness. "You're tougher than this cut, and you know it. This'll be over in a minute, and then you'll be good as new."
The boy gritted his teeth but nodded, believing her completely.
Before he could even think of recording the scene, a broad man with red rage burns half his face pushed past him, a grin of teeth that were yellowed with years. The man was enormous, muscles bound with scars that charted a history of brutality. His eyes raged with barely contained hostility.
Maul. They called him that, and it fit.
"Another goddamn drifter coming out of the sand?" Maul growled, his voice dripping with contempt. "Half-killed already. What's the use of wasting our water on someone who won't last twenty-four hours out here?"
He stood tense, fatigue momentarily forgotten as survival habits took over. The scar above his heart flared. The pull required him to focus, to be ready.
But before he could respond—before he could even decide what to say—Shard's sword materialized, her form gliding between them.
"That's enough, Maul," she said, her tone as cold as glass. "He's here now, and he'll test himself, just as you did the first time you stumbled in. Let him catch his breath before you start picking fights."
Maul spat on the ground, his eyes flashing vicious. But he backed down, cursing under his breath as he turned away about drifters and bad luck and men who didn't keep their bargain.
Bullet came down at the edge of the gully, his legs finally giving out. He pulled the metal sliver from his pocket and held it up in the flickering light. The etching seemed to pulse ever so faintly—that circle bisected by a broken line.
Under the green, dancing light of the auroras, the shard heated in his palm, pulsating with the beat of the scar above his heart. It mattered, but he did not know why.
A girl sneaked up, moving slowly, as if she didn't want to scare him. She was no more than sixteen, her arms illuminated in the faint room with burns. She clutched her shard as well, its glow reflecting off a circuit board she had put across her lap.
She was Spark. She was constantly repairing, constantly making, constantly trying to make something work in this broken world.
"These shards," she said quietly, her voice soft but eager, like she was sharing a secret, "they're not just junk. They can power things—drones, purifiers, maybe even the old cities, if the stories are true." Her fingers traced the edges of her shard with obvious affection. "I found mine half-buried in a ruin, still humming after who knows how long. But yours." She leaned closer, studying the etched design. "Yours is different. That mark—it's as if it's for something. You feel it, don't you? That connection?"
Bullet nodded intentionally. The tug roared in his chest, and the scar throbbed in response. "Yeah," he confessed. "There's something out there. Something calling to me."
Spark's fingers trailed over her own shard, and for a moment, her youth-sprinkled face looked age-worn, heavy with the knowledge that preceded her years. "Mine tingles when I'm near technology, as if it comes to life, responding to something. Yours is. heavier, in some way. Older. As if it's been waiting for you." Her eyes came up to meet his. "Be careful, okay? Things that attract us are not always attracting us in the right direction."
Next, close to the middle fire, Shard pulled Bullet aside. Her voice dropped, and she spoke just for his ears.
"I used to take fighters out there," she said, waving her hand toward the retreating sand dunes. Her gaze was distant, seeing something he didn't. "Twenty, maybe thirty people who thought I'd be able to keep them alive. A storm swept them all away—sand, wind, some terrible thing. I don't know. I wasn't good enough, smart enough, fast enough to save them." Her jaw worked. "This camp's my second chance. A chance to keep people alive, get it right this time."
She eyed him, her scarred face unyielding but honest.
"That tug you're feeling, that thing drawing on you like it's the only reality? Don't let it get the best of you, Bullet. I've lost too many people who became entangled on things they could not let go. They go into the desert and they do not come back."
His heart scar pulsed, and her words settled into him like dust following a storm, heavy and unshakable.
Central to the camp was what they called the communal stone—a large, flat rock with carvings etched into it. Scars, Bullet thought. One for every person who'd been lost.
The survivors were attracted to it, this thing that glowed, as the sky darkened above them to a purple, their voices hushed, exchanging pieces of what they imagined they might have been. A ritual, he imagined. A way of holding on to something, even if it was just a chance.
Patch was the first to speak, her charred hands stroking the scarring in the rock with tender fingers. "I used to be a fighter, once upon a time," she said. "Patched up fight injuries, kept people going when times were tough." Her voice was gentle but firm. "Now I sew skin, mend tents. Not all that different, really. Still patching everything up, wound by wound."
Ash, a thin man with soot permanently staining his hands, shrugged. "Fed people, I think. Cooked, grew roots where the ground allowed. Still do, when we have something to cook."
Hawk—twitchy and lean, eyes always roving the horizon—spoke up, "Scanned the skies. Tracked storms, maybe drones, in whatever life before this one. Watch the dunes now, sense danger before it senses us."
Maul's voice cut through, harsh and bitter. "Likely betrayed someone. That's likely the way I got these scars, and why I'm still around when better people aren't." His eyes came to rest on Bullet with outright hostility. "You don't trust newcomers. You don't trust wanderers. They break too easily, and they leave you hemorrhaging when you need them most."
Shard's blade brushed against Maul's shoulder—not a threat exactly, but not soft. The giant man went quiet.
"I led fighters once," Shard said, her tone steady though weighted. "Lost them all to the desert and to my own poor choices. This camp is my second chance to do better. To keep us all alive." She gazed at Bullet. "Now it's your turn. Share with us what you have, or the stone gets you too."
His chest scar throbbed. The pull, for the first time, was quiet, waiting.
"I don't know what I am," Bullet replied, his throat rough from disuse and dehydration. "All I've got is this pull in my chest, pulling me somewhere I don't understand. That's it. That's all I've got."
Maul snorted—a harsh, bitter snort—but Shard's headshake held him back.
"That's for now," she told him. "We're all stuck here somehow or another. Bullet included."
Shard put together a crew for a scavenging raid the next morning—Bullet, Patch, Spark, and a thin kid with a scarred face who carried a knife at all times. They called him Cowboy, although Bullet didn't believe that was his name, no more than Bullet was his.
They needed to scavenge a ruin for anything to rig as a purifier core. The camp's water was at critically low levels, and without that purifier operational, they'd be dead within days.
Shard pointed toward the darkness under a dune, where a building glowed faintly in the distance. "Our water's low," she said, her eyes running over each member of the team. "We're not surviving without that purifier online. We need tech—circuits, a core, anything that still hums with energy. But ruins are hazardous. Be careful for traps. The old world doesn't give up its secrets easily, and it sure as shit doesn't care if we survive or not."
The ruin towered before them like a broken tooth—walls scarred and glinting, bones riveted with metal in the grit. Some of those bones had been human. A hum emanated from the air, stung Bullet's teeth, thick with the smell of desiccated blood and corroding metal.
His scar throbbed as they descended into the building. Patch gripped her wrench tightly, her eyes vigilant. Spark went first, her shard glowing more intensely, muttering to herself in terms of circuitry patterns and vectors of power. Cowboy trailed behind, his knife spinning nearly on autopilot in his hand, inspecting each shadow.
The drone coalesced out of nothing.
Metal limbs whirled, blue eyes flashing in the darkness, moving fast. Bullet's body moved faster than his brain—he swung the rusty rod they'd given him, and it came down with a meaty thud on the drone's body. Sparks flared, searing his cheek, but the drone's movement was stopped.
Shard's knife swooshed, cutting through the drone's middle. The thing crashed over, jerking and sparking on the floor.
"Stay sharp, all of you!" Shard spat, wiping her blade on her pants. "There's much more where that came from. These ruins aren't empty long."
They pushed deeper, the ruins growing darker, more ominous. And then they found the sand maw.
It seemed to be hard ground—just a little more of the grit and dust that covered everything. But when Cowboy put his foot on it, the ground opened into a mouth filled with bone-white teeth, impossibly wide.
The jaws closed on Cowboy before anyone could react.
Blood had splattered on walls. Bones had grated with a crunching sound that would be imprinted in Bullet's mind for days to come. Cowboy screamed—a scream of unadulterated horror and agony that was immediately silenced when the maw was done.
Then there was silence.
Bullet's vision faded to black, the room spinning. His vision tunnelled. The scar above his heart seared like fire. There was a second's blackout—a flash of blinding blackness, the drag sucking him down like a riptide.
Shard's hold jolted him out of it, her fingers around his arm clutched so tightly they bruised.
"Move on, Bullet!" Her voice cut through the blackness in his head like a scalpel. "We can't save him now—there's nothing to be saved. But we can still take that core. We can still make dying worth something. Now MOVE!"
They managed to recover the core—a bright thing that pulsed with gentle light—and they ran as the destruction started to collapse around them, dunes piling in to fill the holes they'd left.