The carrion birds circled lower now, their shadows crossing Jiko's face as he knelt beside the corpse of a woman he didn't know. Her mouth was open, frozen mid-scream, and her hands still clutched a wooden charm painted with symbols from before the world broke. He pried her fingers loose with clinical efficiency. The charm was worthless. Pre-Severance religious iconography held no power here. But her pack might contain something useful.
Three days since he'd woken in the ruins of the caravan. Three days of sun and silence and the slow work of the dead.
Jiko didn't remember the attack. He remembered sleeping in the wagon, cramped between crates of salt and dried meat, and then he remembered waking to find everyone else had stopped breathing sometime in the night. No blood. No wounds. Just twenty-three people who'd decided, simultaneously, to surrender.
He'd checked their eyes. Glassy and distant, fixed on nothing. Classic signs of a Grief Walker's feeding. One of those Echoes that drifted through the Wastes draining hope until there was nothing left to keep hearts beating. He'd heard of caravans found this way: intact, untouched, everyone simply done.
He should've felt something about that. Survivors usually did. Terror that they'd been spared. Guilt that they hadn't woken in time. Relief that they hadn't joined the dead. But Jiko felt only mild curiosity about his own immunity and a practical concern about water.
The woman's pack yielded a canteen, half-full, a knife with a decent edge, and a memory-Shard wrapped in cloth. He held the Shard up to the light. Azure-blue, which meant it contained skill-memory. Something someone knew how to do, crystallized and transferable. Useful. He tucked it into his own pack without ceremony.
He should say something. Others would. A prayer, maybe, or an apology to the dead for looting them. But words felt performative, and there was no one to perform for. The dead didn't care. The birds didn't care. And Jiko didn't care either, and that was fine.
He stood, wiping dust from his knees, and surveyed the caravan one last time. He'd taken everything portable and valuable: water, food, Shards, the merchant's ledger that mapped nearby settlements. He'd left the bodies where they'd fallen. Eventually the carrion birds would finish them, or the sun would, or one of the Waste's stranger predators. The world recycled everything now.
A sound made him turn. Not the birds, something else. Footsteps, careful and deliberate, coming from behind the overturned wagon.
"Don't shoot," a voice called. Male, older, trying for calm authority and landing somewhere near exhaustion. "I'm unarmed. Just passing through."
Jiko didn't have a weapon drawn, but he didn't correct the assumption. Let the stranger stay cautious.
A man emerged from behind the wagon, hands raised. Sixty, maybe older. Hard to tell with Wastelanders. He wore the dust-colored robes common to travelers who wanted to avoid attention, but the fabric was too fine, the stitching too precise. Not a scavenger. Someone with resources.
His eyes went to the bodies, then to Jiko, then back to the bodies. Jiko watched his face perform the calculations: one survivor, methodical looting, no visible distress. The man's expression flickered through surprise, caution, and finally settled on something harder to read.
"Grief Walker?" the man asked.
"Probably," Jiko said. "I was asleep."
"Lucky."
"Maybe."
The man lowered his hands slowly, watching Jiko for permission. When Jiko didn't object, he moved closer to the nearest corpse. A young man, maybe twenty, with calloused hands that marked him as labor-class. The stranger knelt, studying the dead man's face with the intensity of someone reading a book.
"No Marks," the stranger murmured. "Clean. They went easy, at least."
Marks. Capital-M Marks. The stains that guilt and virtue left on skin since the Severance. Visible proof of moral weight. Everyone had them. Acts of cruelty left black Marks, acts of virtue left golden brands. You could trade them away, absorb others', build or destroy yourself with the economy of conscience made literal.
Jiko had seen Marks on everyone he'd ever met. Except himself.
The stranger rose, brushing his hands off. "You're heading to Ember's Rest?"
"I am now." Jiko nodded toward the merchant's ledger. "Closest settlement according to the route log."
"Three days' walk, if you keep to the old road. Might be caravans along the way, if you want company." The stranger paused. "Or don't. You seem the solitary type."
Jiko shrugged. Company or solitude. Neither appealed nor repelled. "You heading there too?"
"Near enough. I could walk with you, if you'd permit it. Safer in pairs, and I'm too old to fight off the Echoes alone anymore."
A reasonable offer. Jiko considered refusing. The man clearly wanted something, and people who wanted things were unpredictable. But companionship might be useful for gathering information. He knew how the world worked now, mostly, but there were gaps. Things people learned through conversation that you couldn't find in ledgers.
"Your choice," Jiko said. "I'm not staying for the birds."
The stranger smiled, and there was something relieved in it. "Fair enough. Name's Cartographer. Not my real name, but names are cheap these days, aren't they?"
"Jiko."
"Jiko," the Cartographer repeated, tasting the syllables. "Good name. Short. Memorable."
They walked.
The Wastes stretched in every direction. Grey dust and broken earth, the bones of old civilization poking through like ribs. Pre-Severance ruins dotted the landscape, skeletal towers and shattered roads that no one remembered building. The sun hung white and merciless overhead, and the horizon shimmered with heat that might've been real or might've been memory-bleed from the Shards buried in the ground.
The Cartographer kept pace easily despite his age, his breath steady. He'd done this before, clearly. Lots of times.
"You're not marked," he said after an hour of silence.
Jiko glanced at him. The old man was looking straight ahead, expression neutral. Not an accusation. An observation.
"No."
"Born that way? Or did something take them?"
"Don't know. Can't remember back far enough."
The Cartographer nodded as if this was expected. "Memory gaps are common. Half the population can't recall their childhoods anymore. Traded them for food or safety or enough Azure Shards to learn a profession. You lose yourself piece by piece out here."
"You remember yours?"
"Most of it." The Cartographer tapped his temple. "I'm careful about what I trade. Memories are power, if you know how to use them."
Jiko said nothing. The conversation felt like it was circling something, but he didn't know what yet. He waited.
"The lack of Marks," the Cartographer continued, "that's unusual. Marks appear the first time you make a moral choice. Usually around age three or four, when children start understanding consequences. Everyone has them. Saints carry so many golden brands they crystallize. Sinners wear so much black they look like walking shadows. But you..." He glanced at Jiko again. "You're blank. Like you've never chosen anything."
"Maybe I haven't," Jiko said.
"Or maybe you can't."
Silence. The Cartographer let the words hang there, waiting. This was the thing he'd wanted to say, the reason he'd offered to walk together. Jiko could deflect, lie, or ignore it. Instead he told the truth.
"I don't feel guilt," Jiko said. "Can't. I've tried."
The Cartographer stopped walking. Jiko took three more steps before stopping as well, turning back.
The old man's face had gone very still. "You're sure?"
"I've killed people. Stolen. Lied. Done things others call wrong. I know the words for what I should feel. Remorse, shame, regret. But I don't feel them. Just nothing."
"And virtue? Pride, compassion, mercy?"
"Same. I understand them conceptually. But they don't move me."
The Cartographer stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he began to smile. Not a warm smile. Something sharper, like a man finding a tool he'd thought lost.
"Do you know what you are?" the Cartographer asked.
"Empty," Jiko said.
"No." The Cartographer stepped closer, eyes bright with something that might've been fascination or greed or hunger. "You're free. In a world where morality is currency, you're the only one who can't be bought or sold. Do you understand what that means?"
Jiko considered. "That I'm worthless?"
"That you're invaluable." The Cartographer laughed, a sound with too many edges. "In Ember's Rest, there's a black market for guilt. People pay to have their Marks removed, absorbed by carriers who can bear them. But guilt corrupts. Take too much and it breaks you, turns you into something monstrous or catatonic. But you..."
"I can't be corrupted by something I can't feel," Jiko finished.
"Exactly." The Cartographer started walking again, faster now, energized. "You could carry a warlord's guilt, a murderer's sins, a tyrant's cruelty, and it wouldn't touch you. You'd be the perfect vessel. The perfect tool."
Tool. The word didn't bother Jiko. It was accurate. People were tools for each other. That was the economy. You traded what you had for what you needed. If his emptiness had value, then he'd use it.
"And what would you pay," Jiko asked, "for a tool like that?"
The Cartographer glanced at him, approval flickering across his face. "Smart. You learn fast. I'd pay in knowledge. Teach you how to survive in a world built on morality you can't feel. Show you who's hunting people like you and how to avoid them. And..." He paused. "I'd pay in truth. About what you are and why."
"You know?"
"I have theories. Good ones. But I'd need to study you to be certain." The Cartographer's smile widened. "Interested?"
Jiko thought about the three days he'd spent alone with the dead, the strange absence where others felt horror, the way guards at previous towns had looked at him with unease when they checked him for Marks and found nothing.
He thought about the Azure Shard in his pack. Skill-memory he couldn't use without someone to teach him how. The water that wouldn't last more than a week, and the Wastes that killed the unprepared.
He thought about having a purpose, even if that purpose was being a tool.
"Yes," Jiko said.
The Cartographer's smile became almost gentle. "Good. Then welcome to your education, Jiko. Let's see what you're really capable of."
They walked on toward Ember's Rest, and behind them the carrion birds descended to finish the caravan's story. Jiko didn't look back. There was nothing there worth remembering.
By the time they reached the settlement two days later, Jiko had learned three important things.
First, the world's economy ran on two currencies. Memories, extractable and tradeable and finite. And moral weight, gained through action, transferable through ritual or device, infinite in supply but scarce in distribution.
Second, the Severance had happened eighty years ago, though the Cartographer was vague about causes. Before it, memories and morality were abstract, internal, private. After, they became concrete. The change had destroyed civilization, but created new power structures built on controlling conscience itself.
Third, the Cartographer was far more dangerous than he appeared. He spoke about the world with the precision of someone who'd helped build it, and he watched Jiko with the intensity of someone who'd been searching for something specific for a very long time.
Jiko didn't know if he should be afraid. But then, he didn't know how to be afraid in the way others meant. So he filed the information away and followed the old man through the gates of Ember's Rest, into the heart of humanity's new strange world.
And somewhere deep in the Wastes behind them, something that wasn't quite human watched them go and smiled with too many teeth.
The revolution was still years away. But its seeds, hollow and feelingless and free, had just arrived.