“I’m going after those scab heads. You in?”

  Krav had cornered the girl who had come to the dreamer’s tent to report to Gaya. She was a young girl, about Lenny’s age. Curling red hair spun down her back and over her shoulders in tangles and knots. She stared at him with stunned, wide green eyes set in her tanned face.

  “I… I don’t know,” she said. She had just left one of the covered mangroves after giving her full report to the warriors who remained at the village. Their probing questions had left her mentally exhausted, but now she had stepped out into a situation even more taxing. “Maybe we should get the rest of the tribe together?”

  “No time. You want to get revenge for all your dead buddies or what?”

  She shook her head and tried to push past him. “It’s no use. We’re no match for them, no matter how many warriors we bring.”

  “Then at least tell me where I can find them.”

  The warrior girl looked up at him. He looked like a fool. In fact, he looked just like those Gordo clan freaks. Those hungry eyes that stung with withdrawal. His metal teeth. He even stank of the dry desert like they did. If he borrowed some of their feathered skirts and greasepaint, he’d look like one of them. That gave her an idea.

  “I can help you find them, but what will you do when you finally catch up? The group we found couldn’t have been them at full strength. If they’ve regrouped with their main force, then you won’t be able to do anything without getting torn to pieces first.”

  “So long as I kill Jackmaw Yapyap, they can rip me a new asshole for all I care.”

  He was being serious. She could tell by the way he set his jaw and stared at her like he wouldn’t back down if she had told him the entire world was in his way. Maybe there was no convincing him to wait for the rest of the clan to prepare for war. Maybe that was for the best.

  The meeting with the elder warriors had made her feel wholly inadequate. Those women who were executed in the jungle were women she looked up to since she was too small to fight. The elders thought that they had time to gather more information and launch an attack when a plan had fully formed. Only she knew that there was no planning. These enemies weren’t the megafauna that obeyed patterns and lived their lives on a feeding loop.

  The Gordo clan was a different enemy entirely. If they were decapitated, it might cost her and the boy’s life, but the scattered remains of the clan would get lost in the jungle and feasted on by its beasts. She could wipe them out with a single sacrifice, and that was what her sisters had done with their lives before her. The idea in her head hatched and grew.

  “If you’re serious about that, then I’m in. We can go now,” she started to lead on, but then stopped and turned. “I’m Nala. If I die and you don’t, bury me with that name.”

  “Krav. If you die and I don’t, I’ll try to remember that.”

  That was good enough for her. Nala led Krav to another covered mangrove and let herself in. As he followed, he stepped into a tent lit by many candles. They illuminated the leather walls and revealed the left-over black veins in the dead skin. This tent was almost like a depot, storing the tribe’s many belongings. Woven baskets were arranged with care and overflowed with dried food, materials for crafting garments, and intoxicants ready to be mixed.

  Krav picked through them, trying to find something good to chew on and get high. Nala was more deliberate with her search. She found pots of greasepaint and grabbed at a basket with various animal parts like teeth and feathers. Just as the boy found a basket full of mock root, Nala got his attention.

  “Take your shirt off.”

  “It’s a jumpsuit, it all comes off at once.”

  “Then just…” she unbuttoned the garment to the hips and tied the upper half around his waist. His thin, muscular frame was put on display. “There.”

  “Hey! Get a guy a little high first, at least.”

  Before he could continue complaining, Nala shocked him with a cold hand filled with greasepaint. The substance made his skin feel dry and cakey. After a few layers, she had given his sunburn complexion a full makeover. One half of his torso was a bright red, the other half a sickly yellow.

  “Not bad. Not bad… but…” she stood back and observed, then picked out the next bit. She was going almost completely off of memory of her encounter with the Gordo monsters, but she was doing a good job in his opinion. She combed his hair back and spiked it upwards with a comb made of bone. It took her a minute, but she wove a necklace of teeth and feathers and draped it around his neck so that it bounced around his two-tone chest. Then she realized they might recognize him if they’ve had run ins before.

  “Do you have a mask or anything? Like your companion does?”

  “No, they make me itchy.”

  There wasn’t much she could use without spending an hour weaving striped of leather or modifying one of the warrior masks. Nala dug through the baskets trying to find anything. After multiple baskets without anything, she stumbled upon a basket containing the tribe’s intimate garments. They were supposed to be saved for when a sage came and they could seduce him into continuing the tribe’s bloodline. This counted, right? She was using them to get a boy to ensure the future of the tribe. It was close enough.

  The garment she pulled out was a loin cloth. Hopefully, for his sake, it had gone unused. The piece was made to be the perfect face mask, since it was designed more like an apron than underwear. She tied it around Krav and marveled at her handy work. It wasn’t half bad.

  Standing in the candlelight of the depot, Krav looked just like one of them. The loin cloth hung off of his face like a thief’s mask, and the feathers and teeth lent themselves to the clan’s animalistic nature. Now that she thought about it, the greasepaint may have been a bit overkill, but they wouldn’t notice it. Not when the boy looked so much like them.

  “Perfect. Now I just need to match it.” Nala gave herself the same treatment, painting her arms a deep crimson and leaving her torso bare save for her leather bra. She decorated her chest piece with feathers and bone bits until it looked like it was made of the pelt of a beautifully multicolored bird. She exchanged her shorts for longer leather pants that they wore in the cold season.

  She looked the part, but Krav saw a glaring issue. “You need boots.”

  “What?” Nala looked down at her bare feet. Her ankles were cuffed with feather anklets, and she thought that was a good choice for the disguise she was going for. “You’re telling me those guys have a dress code on footwear?”

  Krav shook his head. “No one in the valley walks around barefoot. The sand would burn the soles of your feet off, dumbass.”

  Insult aside, maybe he was right. But she had no way to make boots. The most footwear the Disciples wore was finely crafted moccasins, and those were only worn by the elders as they retired into their sundown years. She looked at Krav’s boots and frowned. They didn’t look all that intricate, and she might be able to craft some with time, but they didn’t have any time. As it was they were prepping for combat into the late of the night.

  “Think they’ll notice?” she asked, suddenly feeling very self-conscious.

  Krav shrugged. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t. It didn’t matter to him. If the Gordo clan did notice, it just meant the fight started quicker. “Why do you care so much about looking like them, anyways?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You won’t be able to get close to their leader without some sort of disguise, right?”

  “So, you think we can sneak up on Jackmaw Yapyap and cut his head off?” Krav stared down at her for a long while with a look on his face like she had explained quantum physics to a brick wall. Then he cocked an eyebrow and rubbed his chin. “That might work.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “You’re really obsessed with the whole ‘cut his head off’ thing, aren’t you?”

  With their preparations made, they snuck out of Rootwalla village under the cover of night. They passed Ulrich, who was drinking some concoction with one of the warriors near the campfire. He had the same demeanor as when Krav first met him in the bar of Kiva Noon. Back then, the drink had made him a violent idiot, but now, he was jovial and leaking happy tears.

  Ulrich put an arm around a warrior, and the woman accepted it. She was also taken by the drink, and the two of them laughed so loud, Nala feared they might wake the whole village. Ulrich’s beat red face was streaked with tears, and his eyes matched the color of Jackmaw’s.

  “And then! And then…” he pulled the warrior close and whispered loudly in her ear. “The guy shoots a laser beam straight through the VIP room. Boom! No more power-hungry shit stain! Ha!”

  The warrior woman leaned closer and shared his laugh. She was trailing one hand up and down his gut like she was rubbing a pregnant woman’s belly. Krav stared at him and shook his head. As little as he cared for the attention of women, he would never understand how Ulrich garnered so much of it.

  “Come on!” Nala whispered. She took his hand and led him into the dense jungle.

  At night, Paradise became a living nightmare. Every motion in the dark could be a predator, every noise an early warning. Nala was nimble and able to scale the trees to move in safety. Once she had ascended the branches, however, she quickly realized Krav was not built the same way.

  “Have you never climber a tree!”

  “You know how many trees we get in a fucking desert!” Krav was halfway up the tree, using a vine like a rope and scaling it with all the leisure of a casual rock wall climber. “I’m getting the hang of it! just chill out!”

  “At this rate, it’ll be morning before we find them,” she groaned. As he ascended, she took the time to observe the land before her. It was easy to get lost in Paradise, which was exactly why she had studied the surrounding area from the village all of her life. It was easy to see the patterns of the trees now. She knew which ones to avoid and which ones were safe. The hardest part would be tracking the Gordo clan from where she had left them, but that would come in time.

  Krav finally got to the top of the tree and balanced himself on a branch. Nala wasn’t sure which was safer, walking amongst the megafauna below, or risking the boy falling to his death this high up. Either way, she was starting to have her doubts about the plan.

  The two of them moved slowly through the tree. Often, she would have to stop and help him as he leapt from one thick branch to another. There were a few times where he almost fell, and each time he shouted expletives that would grab the attention of everything in the jungle. She would drag him back up the tree kicked and flailing, only for him to calm down as soon as he was in the tree.

  It was a slow pace, but they would make it. Eventually they came upon the dead Disciples Nala had left behind. She climbed down the tree, gave her remarks to their corpses, and began looking for boot tracks in the muddy earth.

  Jackmaw Yapyap and the Gordo clan broke through the jungle and back into the desert. On this side of paradise, the twin suns blazed just beyond a nearby mountain range, and their infamous lights bore down with a radiating heat. Everything here was bathed in the green glow. The true sun would be up at any moment now, beating back the hellish light, but for now Jackmaw stared out at the Emerald Expanse.

  He stared out… and he scratched his head.

  “Where is it?” the warlord asked. “Where’s all the shale?”

  The Tallyman crawled along the back of Bantu, snorting and gibbering like an animal as he went. When he found the head of the elephant, he perched himself between its ears and shot a finger out into distance. “Here it is Lord! It’s hidden in plain sight! Right under our noses! Before our very eyes!”

  Jackmaw snarled and snatched the young boy by the neck. He let him choke and protest at the end of his wrist as he shook him. “You idiot! This is more fucking desert! You’re only job is to count shit and scout, and you can’t even do those two things right! I ought to kick your tiny ass into the twin suns!”

  Lenny watched the poor creature strangle and die. Outwardly, he felt nothing for the Tallyman. Inwardly, he was glad there would soon be one less Gordo clan psychopath. There was a cold glaze that froze over his eyes, and he dared not look away.

  Shi-Toh, on the other hand, took one step into the desert. His boot sank into the sand, and he quickly realized it was a different composition than the sand he was used to. A pang of excitement went through his heart like it had caught fire, and he turned his head up to Jackmaw.

  “Lord!” He shouted. Jackmaw wrung the kid’s neck for a moment longer before tossing him aside like a pathetic doll. The Tallyman fell from Bantu’s back and Mac caught him. She inspected his neck while he coughed and gasped for air.

  “It better be good news Shi-Toh. I’m about to rip you in half just to blow off some steam!”

  The feathered man bent and scooped sand from the ground. Even as his fingers dug into it, he knew they had found the right place. It was warm to the touch, and was a strange combination of oily and gritty. Shi-Toh held it up for his master to inspect. “It’s the shale! It’s all shale!”

  One of Jackmaw’s fingers snatched a dallop of the stuff from Shi-Toh’s grasp. He sniffed it and the gimp mask stretched with his smile. “The Emerald Expanse…”

  At the warlord’s acceptance of the place, the life kicked back into Lenny for a moment. He pushed past Jackmaw and stared out over Bantu. It didn’t make any sense. Was this really the place Jackmaw was ready to genocide the sages for? It was just more wasteland, only this time closer to the awful twin suns. Sure, it had that shale stuff, but was that really all he wanted?

  Lenny had envisioned a promised land. One filled with water, fruits, and all the drugs you could ask for. He envisioned the paradise they had just left, sans the monstrous creatures. Jackmaw Yapyap was more singularly minded than he had even originally thought. This place was all shale to him, and Lenny still didn’t understand why that was worth all of this trouble.

  “Isn’t it beautiful, war sage?”

  “Beautiful is… it might not be the word I’d use,” Lenny said. He was trying to grasp a word for it. Disappointing? A waste of time? That was four words. In truth, Lenny wasn’t looking for a word to describe it. He was looking for the answer as to why Rufus hid this place from them.

  Jackmaw laughed and fell from the elephant. There was much to do and not enough time to pull it off. They would have to split up again.

  The rest of the day was spent in deliberation. Jackmaw and the Gordo clan leadership were hidden behind the silken walls of the warlord’s tent. A hunk of mock root was burning in the center of the room to try and accelerate their thinking power. An idea Lenny thought was ridiculous, but one Shi-Toh swore by.

  Outside, the rest of the clan was putting the slaves from Kiva Noon to work. They toiled away, packing various containers full of the substance. Another group of slaves was cutting down wood and fashioning a wagon to be attached to Bantu. Each of them was beginning to sweat and burn beneath the glow of the twin suns.

  Jackmaw lounged as Miss Minnie gave her proposal. They were discussing something Lenny wasn’t privy to, and as such, he kept his mouth shut. “Why not bring the outsiders here? It’s not far from the meeting spot.”

  “It’s a day’s journey. Should we really ask our benefactors to add that much time? They’re already coming from far off to aid us,” Shi-Toh argued. He seemed to have a lot to say yet no plan to offer.

  “Trade with us,” Jackmaw iterated. “They’re not helping us. We’re helping each other. And Shi-Toh’s right. They won’t want to take a step deeper into the valley than they have to. We have to bring it to them, and to do that, we need to stick to the original plan. Two trips.”

  “Genius plan, Lord,” Dansk said. He was scratching something off of his tooth absent mindedly. “Always the right choice, Lord.”

  “Shut up Dansk. If I wanted my dick sucked I’d have the slaves in here, not you ugly fucks. What say you, war sage? Does the original idea work?”

  “Does it matter? Your mind is already made up. Work or not… fate will bend to you.” Lenny had detached completely. Even the talk of people outside the valley wasn’t enough to stir him from his grief. All he could think about was his dead brother, and how he was sharing a tent with his killer. What would Krav have done? Shi-Toh wouldn’t have left the tent if it were up to Krav.

  “King of the world…” Mac whispered to herself. She was drawing pictures in the sand between her legs. It was a smiley face Krav had taught her how to make back in Mallum Vid.

  Jackmaw seemed to like that answer. “You’re right. I made fate my bitch a long time ago. Who cares about tactics and strategy? I’m Jackmaw Yapyap! I’m king of the world! Everybody out! We pack this shit up and get the elephant loaded up with as much as he can carry. Shi-Toh, your dumb ass gets to stay behind and load up more. I’ll leave you with a detachment of shooters and the rest of the slaves to keep packing up the shale. When I get to the meeting point, I’ll talk them into waiting another day for your arrival… Get the fuck up people! I gave you a damn order!”

  Everyone besides Mac and Lenny flew into a frenzy. They were scrambling out of the tent and running to prepare Jackmaw’s wishes. Orders were shouted across the Emerald Expanse, commanding the serfs and clansmen to pack up and move.

  Shi-Toh watched Jackmaw and the Gordo clan disappear over the horizon for a second time that week. His soul was crushed by the newfound distrust Jackmaw had for him. If he had to prove himself again, he would.

  The warlord left him with twenty shooters. He had taken the lobotomites with him in case the people from outside the valley had any way to reprogram their controls to the clan’s liking. It was an immense amount of trust to leave the feathered man with after his transgressions, but it didn’t come without a catch. As an added layer of insurance, Dansk stayed with him.

  “Whatever you do, don’t get in my way,” Shi-Toh warned. “My word is final while the Lord is away. Understood?”

  “You’re the boss. Just remember the chain of command. You tell me what to do, not my boys. Yeah?”

  Shi-Toh offered a nod and the two went their separate ways. The feathered man went to their camp to see if he could find anything to craft more containers with and Dansk went to his men. The raiders were enjoying a small feast of the left-over lizard meat and hanging out around a fire pit. They made jokes at the slaves expense and smoked the wild mock root that grew in the area. Dansk didn’t know if it was the mock root or the lack of sleep, but he could have sworn he counted two extra heads at their camp.