They headed back to camp and shoved the central part into the purifier, and water began running again. The camp cheered—whispered, tired cheers, but genuine.
Spark's face lightened as she tinkered with the device, fiddling with it, coaxing more efficiency out of salvaged components. But Patch's eyes were lifeless, distant. Cowboy's death was a festering wound that wouldn't heal, at least for tonight.
Maul glared across the fire at Bullet, his bleeding shoulder from some scuffle on the run. "Drifter's luck, eh?" he snarled loudly. He spat into the fire. "Cowboy's dead, ripped apart, and this guy struts back like nothing's happened. Like he didn't just witness a man being killed."
Bullet's scar pulsed. Shard's words echoed in his mind: Choose who you are.
That evening, a sandstorm swept in, wailing across the dunes, driving everyone to their tents. The pull screamed in Bullet's chest, louder than the wind. And beneath it all, guilt sat heavy as a stone—Cowboy's scream ringing forever in his brain.
The morning dawned in with grit lodged on all—skin, clothes, the back of Bullet's tongue. He was just thinking about leaving when a scream shattered the stillness of morning.
Spark charged into camp, blood leaking from a gash on her arm, her eyes drawn wide with terror.
"Raiders!" she gasped, gripping her shard like a lifeline. "Raiders are coming! They're after the Cache, and they're close behind me!"
Bullet followed Shard to the edge of the gully, his scar aflame, the pull infused with life. In the distance, figures moved under the auroras—six, maybe more, their armor cobbled together from drone parts and shaped metal. Paint adorned their faces with designs he had never seen, and they carried machetes, spears, slingshots.
The Cache. Bullet didn't know what it was, only that it mattered—shards, circuits, gear. The camp's lifeline, hidden in the gully.
"We have no choice but to fight," Shard said, drawing her sword. The metal shimmered as it came out of the sheath. "They get that Cache, we're finished. All we've built goes with us."
Maul grinned, cracking his knuckles. There was already blood oozing through the bandage on his shoulder from yesterday's wound, but he didn't care. "About time we had something to hit. Let's make these bastards bleed."
Patch clutched her wrench, jaw set in determination. Rivet, a lean woman with scarred gashes on her arms, held a crowbar, her eyes burning. Spark struggled with a slingshot, her hurt arm shaking. Others seized what they could: pipes, knives, clumps of metal.
Shard stood opposite Bullet, his hand extended, holding a machete and the other hand grasping a pipe. "Pick one, Bullet. You're in this now, whether you like it or not."
The pull yanked at him, tugging him forward, away from here. But he looked at these people—Shard with her guilt and determination, Spark with hope, Patch with her steady kindness—and he knew he couldn't go. Not now.
He took the pipe. The weight was familiar in his hand.
Shard nodded, a look of approval in her eyes. "Good decision. Now be careful out there."
The raiders struck at sundown, their silhouettes sharp against the green glow of the aurora. Spears sliced the air. Stones into stones where the warriors of the camp had retreated.
Sweat and steel perfumed the air. Blood seeped almost at once—Maul's shoulder was ripped open again by a spear passing close by, red flooding the earth.
Shard charged like a hurricane in human form, her sword cutting through the arm of one of the raiders. Blood flew as the man yelled. She sprang over him without breaking stride.
"Keep those sonuvbitches off the Cache!" she shouted. "We lose that, we lose everything!"
Maul threw a rock with bestial strength, smashing one raider's skull. Bone shattered in a sickening crunch. "That's one down!" he shouted, blood dripping from his shoulder, completely unflinching.
Rivet's crowbar crumpled a raider's ribs, but a spear slammed into her side before she had time to even rub it in. Blood burst into the wound. She fell to her knees, choking, the crowbar slipping from her fingers.
Patch's wrench snapped a raider's kneecap. Spark's slingshot rock split another man's lip, red running off his chin.
Then the sandstorm hit.
Grit clouded the air, heavy as concrete. The auroras burst above, illuminating the storm in a mad green light and wailing wind.
Bullet fought through it.
His pipe shattered a raider's throat, blood spraying hot upon his hands. Another charged him, machete flashing, and Bullet's pipe hammered against it in a spray of sparks. He cracked the man's jaw, savored bone splinter on impact.
A thought occurred to him—Why am I so good at this?—but he did not have time to look at it. Rivet's body lay still in the soil, blood pooling around her. Instinct drove him forward.
A seventh raider approached their line, heading straight for the Cache. He was scraping at the grit, trying to dig it out.
Bullet struck him, armor scraping, the machete of the man catching at Bullet's arm as they went down. Warm blood flowed down his arm. He swung the pipe around, the raider's head crunching in with a wet sound. Blood pooled in the sand beneath them.
His scar ached like a brand, survival instinct leveling everything to rubble.
The remaining raiders dashed into the tempest, their flight loose and frantic. The warriors in the camp let out spent whoops of victory, raw-voiced from bellowing and panting in dust.
Shard limped over to Bullet, her knife dripping with blood, a fierce grin splitting her bruised face despite the obvious pain in her leg. "Not bad, Bullet. You're tougher than you seem." She slapped his entire shoulder. "Stick with us. We can use someone like you—someone who fights as if they mean it."
Bullet shook his head, the horizon calling even in the midst of coming storm. His scar burned. "I can't stay, Shard. Something is calling me out there, and I must find out what it is."
Her smile melted away, eyes heavy with knowledge and regret. "That pull will kill you, you know? And those blackouts." She paused, glancing over at Spark, who awkwardly wrapped her own arm with one hand. "Stay here tonight. Eat something. One night. You owe us that much for fighting with us."
The tug snarled through his chest, yelling at him to move, to get going *now*. But his legs felt leaden, blood was seeping from the wound on his arm, and exhaustion came crashing down upon him like a weight.
"One night," he vowed quietly.
"I can do that."
---
That evening in the tent, Spark pushed her radiant shard into Bullet's hand. It was warm, full of stable light that almost throbbed like life.
"This is for saving us out here," she said, her bright eyes glinting with something between thankfulness and idolization. The weight of the debt was there in her voice. "Don't forget us, Bullet. Wherever that tug takes you, don't forget we were here."
Beside her, Patch lay on a bedroll, bound and shallowly breathing. She looked at Bullet, and something passed between them—trust, or maybe just understanding. Two people who'd seen death and kept going.
Maul growled in the corner, grumbling loudly enough to be heard: "Drifters always bring trouble." His shoulder was bound with new cloth, already starting to seep through.
Bullet's scar throbbed. The gilled shard rested heavy in his pocket—the one he'd awakened with. Now Spark's shard joined it, another weight. The pipe lay beside him, grounding him to the instant, to the place. Beyond the tent walls, the sandstorm lashed on, dust whipping against the fabric.
The pull gnawed in his heart, never at rest. And at its base, shame pressed heavy as stones—Cowboy's cry echoing in his head, Rivet's blood on the beach.
He shut his eyes, but sleep refused to come down on him.
---
Dawn crept slowly, the camp stirring as people emerged from tents, grit still on their clothes and their skin. The storm had passed, and all was covered in a thin red dust.
Shard intercepted Bullet by the lip of the gully, staring out over the horizon where the pull stretched like a hidden arrow.
"You're leaving now, aren't you?" she said. It wasn't exactly a question.
He nodded, his pull throbbing in his chest, the scar searing like a coal against his heart. "I have to. Whatever is out there, it's calling me. I can't ignore it any longer."
Shard reached into a bag and pulled out a breathing apparatus—a mask set to a small tank, all of which she had rummaged up and improvised with obvious care. "Province 472's water," she told him, holding it out. "But it's not like we have here. Different. Poisonous. You'll be needing this to survive on the journey there."
She halted, face bruised and somber in dawn's light. "You've earned it, Bullet. You fought with us. You saved lives. That's something."
He settled the gear onto his shoulder, grimacing as battered ribs protested. "Thanks, Shard. For everything. For adopting me when you didn't have to."
"Watch out for yourself out there," she said to him, already walking back towards the camp, towards the people who depended on her. "You can't believe anything in this world. And you're stepping into the absolute unknown."
---
The storm had passed completely now, and the desert lay still and desolate under the fading auroras. Bullet walked, the fragments weighing in his pockets—his etched one still a secret, Spark's a debt he'd never be able to repay.
A shadow danced across a nearby dune, and he froze.
Metal glinted in the strange light. Wings blazed, too pointed to be natural. Red eyes glowed like hot coals for a moment before the beast vanished with that same bone-shuddering hum he'd heard moments before.
But Bullet continued, the tug drawing him in the direction of Province 472, where and what that was. The dunes began to bury his footprints behind him, red sand changing and reforming as if he had never stood there in the first place.
His scar burned across his chest—a man with no history, with no name, driven by a fire he did not understand and could not shake.
The desert stretched before him endlessly, full of uncertainties and horrors that he could barely even start to understand yet. But the temptation stretched out before him, always forward, and he could do nothing but move.
He left the camp of Province 618 behind, the inhabitants there living their lives. Ahead of him lay Province 472, with its impossible water and new horrors.
Bullet embarked alone into the crimson wasteland, taking with him only blood and uncertainties.
---