Or so it goes. All folk ever have are stories. Farms too near the Edge destroyed utterly by one bit of bad luck after another, brawls that somehow turned into massacres, folk who ran, maddened, into the desert and were never seen again. No proof. Just thin-air superstition – the Accord said – stoked by mercenary peacekeepers and vice wardens for the purpose of extracting money from the fearful.
Only people with choice but to ride the wastes alone told stories of meeting them and surviving. People like me.
With a sigh, I climb off the mule. I have no intention of lingering, not with an unconscious and murderous child bound and hidden on my vehicle. Another dose of the sedative sent her under when she began to kick and twitch at dusk. I didn’t like it, but neither did I want my throat cut.
The post is already ringed with vehicles; dirt mules in far better condition than my own, old delivery quads and charabancs, even a battered ex-army transport painted silver and black, the words VALDOSTA’S VIPERS emblazoned on the side. A travelling sideshow, no doubt. At least people will be distracted.
I whistle. The shadows move and a shape comes forwards: a teenager with a bald, patchy head, wearing huge, tattered gauntlets.
‘I will be an hour,’ I say, digging beneath my clothes for a bead. ‘I want the mule guarded well.’
The boy nods and drags a piece of gristle from a pouch to hold up in the air. A skeletal vulture sails down from the veiled sky to land on the front of the mule. I leave the boy securing the bird to the handlebars, while it stabs, oblivious, at its payment. Shouldering my pack, I hope that – for the sake of her eyes – the girl-child doesn’t wake.
Hat down, I duck between the sheet metal gates and into the trade post compound. It’s the dinner hour, and pungent century smoke mingles with the hot smack of planchas, and the odour of boiled onion powder and protein cooked in whatever sort of fat can be spared.
Folk sit in tight groups around the food station, smoking or chewing, picking crickets’ legs out of their teeth and gawking at each other’s plates to check they haven’t been cheated on their meal. The sight of the food, basic as it is, is enough to make my stomach yawn with hunger, after weeks of old field rations.
But business first. Glancing over my shoulder, I approach the door of Sorry Damovitch’s place.
Inside, it’s quiet, just those who can’t afford to eat and instead pummel their guts with mezcal. Sorry himself is at the edge of the room, shoving leaf fibres about the floor with his foot in an attempt to clean up some spill.
As I walk to the bar, one of the drinkers looks up: a large individual with a mottled pink face that speaks of hard drinking. Their straw-coloured hair is dark with grease, in a military cut short enough to show the three-dotted tattoo of a private of the Accord. As I pass, they push their stool back to stop me. Their expression turns sour as they take in my hat and the scarves that wrap the length of my throat.
‘Wasss your business?’ comes the slurred challenge. Before I can answer, Sorry himself shuffles forwards, his hangdog face drooping further at the prospect of violence.
‘Please,’ he implores, holding out a hand towards me, ‘for your own safety, go outside. I will serve you from the back door. What do you want?’
‘Just the usual,’ I say.
He lets out a breath.
‘Doc. You look—’ He shakes his head. ‘Next time, take the hat off, yes?’
I nod, though I’d do no such thing. A shorn head like mine gave nothing away, but the scars on my temples certainly did. People don’t like not knowing which side you were on. I follow him towards the bar, the drunk continuing to protest my presence with not-so-muttered threats.
‘It would be best to avoid Loto,’ Sorry murmurs. ‘The Accord revoked her pension. She’s been drinking snake wine since noon and is not to be reasoned with.’
‘How have you escaped her wrath?’ I ask, nodding at his neck, where two neat scars from a prison collar were all that remain of his former internment.
His thin lips lift in a smile. ‘Such is the luck of the landlord.’ He places a tumbler before me. ‘Friend to all, while there is a cup to be filled.’
I watch as he takes a bottle from beneath the bar and pours a few fingers of mezcal into the glass. Ordinarily, it’s a stupid idea to drink the stuff – who knows what bacterial horrors have been stuffed into bags and thrown into the vats to hurry fermentation – but I know Damovitch keeps a good batch for those who would not forgive being poisoned.
‘It is on me,’ he says softly. ‘For the last time.’
I drink. It’s appalling and makes my eyes sting, but it’s better than the jars of snake wine that line the bar; coiled creatures barely visible through the murky liquid.
As I peer at the drowned snakes, Damovitch places a little dish of worm salt and a lump of tinned orange in front of me, giving me time to find my tongue. For a while I just listen to the clang and hiss of the food station outside, to the roar of engines from the stable, the crying of the vultures and the distant desert wind rattling the sheet metal of the fence. I suck the smoky, biting salt from the orange, the combination making my mouth sing, and as always, wonder how much I can say.
He isn’t trustworthy, Sorry, but he is at least predictable in his cowardice. He was a Limiter too and in prison had been a Five, so the story went. He contrived to have his sentence cut by apologising so profusely for his actions during the war, that even the prison chaplain had become irritated and petitioned
