Greenblatt stared through a scope. He had been atop a dune nearly one hundred feet from Shi-Toh and the cart when the explosion when off. The detonator was in his hand, of course, but he still lamented the premature conclusion to his opening strategy. Shi-Toh was supposed to get to the rest of the clan, but their sabotage was discovered early.

  “I told him to hide it better,” he grumbled to Ulrich.

  The Pit Lord didn’t need a scope to see what happened. There was the explosive blast, bodies burst in every direction, and then Krav vaporized one of the raiders with Greenblatt’s invention. Watching the clansman disappear beneath the glowing red laser reminded him of Jerod’s death, and he smiled a bit. “He insisted on sticking it up his rear. You shouldn’t have let him help.”

  “First rule of leadership; it’s always your fault.” Greenblatt turned back and waved to rally their troops. Immediately, the desert began to creep forward as fifty warriors from the disciples crawled forward beneath juvenile carpet beast carapaces. They made their slow approach toward Footfall. Krav needed backup now, however. “I’m sending in 001 and 002 in. Follow them up with the Executioners. Their attention will be on Krav, so you’ll be able to get close.”

  “If we don’t survive this, Black Thumb, I’ve had fun journeying with you.”

  Greenblatt smiled beneath his mask. “It has been quite the adventure. I’ve had fun as well.”

  The two shook hands, then split up for the moment to command their troops. Ulrich directed the Pit Lords to rally behind Boris’ mighty shield and move forward. Greenblatt sent 001 and 002 sprinting into desert, and they moved like greyhounds with their long strides and thin frames. The army of Disciples crawled forward.

  Down in Footfall, Jackmaw’s attention was demanded by the explosion. He raised his own scope to his eye and smiled so wide his gimp mask threatened to tear open. It was the boy from Agua Fria. He had defied the odds and survived the challenges of the wasteland, even survived the weapons of the Gordo clan.

  When he saw Zed’s legs fall over, the warlord had to bite his tongue to keep from wailing with laughter. Six of his men had been killed in an instant, and all he could think about was the boy who destroyed them.

  “Krav…” he salivated. He turned to his lieutenants. “That’s why that boy is worth more than each of you scab heads combined. Whoever brings me him alive gets all the ass and drugs they could ever ask for.”

  “Warlord says keep him alive!” one of the lieutenants shouted to his detachment, and the rest followed suit, commanding the clan to switch to non-lethal weaponry. Guns were replaced by nets and bolas. The clan wasn’t as well trained in its methods of capture as it was murder, but they were able to use the tools to steal off slaves. They had never needed to use them on enemies that were walking straight towards them with a laser beam.

  One particularly eager lieutenant led his group up the dunes toward Krav. They jabbed themselves with zerker and charged with drug induced bravery. Screaming and sprinting, they sounded like a desperate group of soldiers charging a machine gun emplacement, and the result was mostly the same. Once they were in range, one of them swung their net high above their head.

  Krav flipped the laser on and twisted his arms left to right, then back left again. The laser beam left ruins of glass in the sand and bisected the raiders with a quick sweep. As they lay dying in the sand, grasping at their charred wounds, Krav continued his approach. The boy didn’t even look in their direction as he stepped over them.

  “Jackass Yapyap! Where the fuck is my little brother!?”

  There was a tingle in the warlord’s spine that wriggled from the small of his back and settled in the base of his brain like a pulse of electricity. So far in his week, he had found the Emerald Expanse, Shi-Toh had been blown to high heaven, and Krav had returned to him. All he needed now was to figure out how to shit gold and his whole bucket list would be scratched off in a matter of hours.

  It was a lovely day to be Jackmaw Yapyap. Even as the boy continued his approach and spat out gouts of laser into the town at random, the warlord felt his chest swell and his breathing quicken. Watching the boy was like watching his own son hit a home run for the first time. In another life, Jackmaw might have been taking pictures of Krav before sending him off to prom, or attending his graduation ceremony with a large congratulatory posterboard. In the wasteland, however, all he could do was laugh at his dying clan.

  “Lord!” one of his lieutenants called. The raider went by the name of Davey, and Jackmaw had a particular disdain for him. The lieutenant had been defined by his sobriety, and if it weren’t for the fact that he was an excellent leader, he would have been executed long ago. He sounded too much like Shi-Toh. “We can’t capture him while he has that weapon! What should we do?”

  “Keep running at him until he’s out of Ammo, stupid! I don’t know a lick of shit about lasers, but I know guns always run out of Ammo.”

  “That’s suicide! You should have a pipe rifleman fire at the tank to disable it.”

  Jackmaw turned his blood red gaze onto Davey. Beneath the glare, the lieutenant felt incredibly small. The warlord put one large hand on Davey’s shoulder and squeezed it hard enough to pop. “Davey… you will lead your men into that laser beam, or I will tear off your limbs and rearrange your corpse into the shape of a dick and balls. Do you understand?”

  That terrible sight. Those eyes. That smile. Davey swallowed hard and crept towards the edge of town. With his whole squad behind him and a bola in his hand, he knew he was doomed. There was only one strategy he could think of to capture Krav and spare his men. If he could just hit the boy’s arms with the bola, he might be able to disable him long enough for the others to get close and jump him.

  Davey wound up the bola, spinning it above his head until it was at launching speed. As soon as he stepped out from behind the building, he aimed the bola, launched it… and missed. Krav turned on him immediately and blew a bowling ball-sized hole in his chest. The lieutenant felt at the smoldering hole with his last firing neurons, then collapsed against the wall.

  Jackmaw couldn’t believe it. It was an absolute dream come true. The boy was unstoppable, wielding his weapon with deadly precision and without any morals. He was after the warlord’s heart, surely, but he had earned it a long time ago. The warlord turned to another lieutenant, this time Markl. Markl was a clueless woman, but she was loyal and quick with her cruelty.

  “Get your men into position and capture him as soon as he sets foot into Footfall.”

  “Aye, Lord. But what is that up there?”

  On another dune entirely, there was something barreling for the town of Footfall. Jackmaw turned and his smile faded slightly. It looked like the wall of a building had come to life and was now moving towards them. The warlord squinted and saw legs just beneath it.

  “Fire on that… wall!” he cried, and the closest raiders to him turned and switched back to their firearms. Pipe riflemen fired their powerful, single shot attacks into the wall, but their holy Ammo pinged off of it like gnats being swatted away. Raiders with blinkers were running to that side of town and readying themselves for its inevitable engagement.

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  It was a quick distraction, a cheap one for sure. No matter. There wasn’t enough of them to stand to Jackmaw Yapyap and the Gordo clan. He grabbed his brand-new gun and was torn. He wanted to be close when Krav came down into the town, but he also wanted to blow holes the size of his fist into the approaching wall. It was quite the dilemma.

  As he sat and thought about it, however, he watched Krav. Behind the boy, he could have sworn he saw the entirety of the desert crawling alongside him. Jackmaw had to rub his eyes and blink three times just to be sure. Indeed, something was there, moving with him. Megafauna from Paradise, perhaps? If that was the case, his men were in more danger than he originally thought.

  Jackmaw turned. There was one thing he could send out to stomp out the megafauna beneath the sands. Bantu was sitting on his knees. The elephant wasn’t often used in combat, and the sound of gunfire spooked him plenty, but he wouldn’t dare refuse an order from his master. The animal and the red devil made eye contact, and the glare held all the command it needed.

  Bantu rose on shaky legs. When Jackmaw jutted out one arm, it gave out a roaring trumpet, then began to move. Almost immediately, Krav fired a beam into it. The laser cut through its massive body at an angle, and the top half of the creature fell away to the floor with a mighty crash. Sand plumed from its body, and Jackmaw fumed.

  “Hey, scab head! You can kill as many men as you want, but my elephant was off limits!”

  “Fuck you, scab head! Where the hell is Lenny!?”

  Deeper in Footfall, in the blown out clinic where Mac was crafting her ultimate weapon, Lenny listened to the combat going on outside. When the shouting and strange sounds of undulating laser beams could be heard, he thought that Jackmaw might have started a war with their contact. It wouldn’t have been the dumbest thing the warlord had done, in his experience.

  But he heard his name. No one in the clan besides Mac called him by his own name. It was always war sage, or boy, or in Jackmaw’s case, scab head. He heard his name being called on the wind, and he thought he recognized it.

  When he looked at the girl, he knew she thought the same thing. The smile on her face had returned, and it wasn’t the one of sympathy she had only been able to form when she was with Lenny. There was a fierce, manic smile on Mac’s face that Lenny saw in the rest of the raiders.

  “You heard that too?” Lenny said.

  “Krav!” Mac cried. She was so excited she snatched Lenny by the arms and pulled him into a hug.

  Their work wasn’t finished yet, but it would be soon. Now though, Lenny reconsidered it. The chemical concoction they were cooking up in the clinic was meant to absolutely disrupt the battlefield. If Mac’s mixture was correct, it would make everyone absolutely lose their minds. The mixture of zerker and DMD was a dangerous combination, but Lenny was excited to see it. He just needed to figure out a way to protect Krav from it.

  Lenny pulled Mac away from the hug, careful not to bump where the zerker and DMD had been chopped into neat piles. “What if this gets Krav too?”

  “He’s survived a lethal dose of zerker and fought the champion of the Bone Eaters on DMD. This isn’t a poison to a guy like him, it’s a buff.”

  Lenny could remember the champion of the bone eaters. Garth and Jackmaw had come to blows back at the clan’s hive quarry. He fell quickly to Jackmaw, but to think of Krav squaring up with a guy like that, it didn’t seem possible. She left out the part where Ulrich was also in there, but that was a minor detail. It was Krav who gave him his grievous injury, and at that point in their journey, it was quite the feat. Mac knew that the boy was more than enough to take on Jackmaw now.

  Behind Lenny, however, a shape was forming in the doorway of the clinic. It wasn’t big enough to be considered a major threat immediately, but Mac recognized the woman at the threshold. Miss Minnie, the tattooed elder of the clan stepped into their makeshift lab on shaky, knotted knees. She wore a scowl on her face, twisted deeper by the embrace she witnessed.

  “There’s a goddam war going on out there, and you two are hiding back here trading hugs? Get your shit together! Macaw, I need you to craft some tranquilizers. War sage, put the tank on and get to the frontline. We need a diviner to find out what the hell is coming at us from beneath the sands.”

  The two stared for a moment, shocked by her sudden appearance. Mac stepped forward, putting herself between Miss Minnie and Lenny. “The mixtures are all prepped. You just have to load them into the flares.”

  “Did you not hear me, girlie?” Miss Minnie said. She continued her daunting approach with one hand on her pistol. “Make the tranquilizer or I’ll have you reassigned from grand apothecary to sex slave, you ungrateful bitch.”

  “No!” Mac shouted.

  Lenny looked between the two women, then dove for the desk. He quickly packed the mixture of DMD and zerker into the flares.

  “Karma help me.” Miss Minnie pulled her weapon and aimed it not at Mac, but at the war sage. She had never been fond of the boy ever since Shi-Toh picked him out at Agua Fria. Jackmaw taking the tank from her and putting it on him was like adding fuel to the fire. It wasn’t fair. She had divined for the clan for almost a decade. Now a boy calling himself a fortune teller was here to take her only job from her? No. She could divine this battle for the clan. She just had to stop their war sage.

  The pistol leveled at Lenny’s head, but Mac twisted and sent a kick high enough to smack the gun from Miss Minnie’s hand. The older woman winced and held her aching wrist. “What do you think you’re doing, Macaw! I’m the only thing standing between you and a gang of brutes that would rather fuck you to death that let you make our drugs!”

  “You never protected me! It was Shi-Toh that made me an apothecary! You would have groomed me into it when I was just a girl!”

  “You’re still just a girl!” Miss Minnie unsheathed a blade from her hip. In the past, it would have been a common barber’s razor, but now it was the perfect folding knife for an old woman. Mac drew an arm up to block just in time. The blade slashed her arm open rather than her face.

  “Just an ungrateful girl in a world that would have raped and killed you a long time ago! Where would you be if it wasn’t for us pulling you out of that well? If the witches didn’t get you, slavers would have!”

  The slashes continued, and Mac had learned her lesson about blocking too carelessly. Her arm was wet with blood and turned a dyed red. In the openings she did get, Mac jabbed and kicked with quick attacks that lacked power, but had enough speed to avoid the razor’s edge.

  Their fight was one of small attacks that ramped up over time. A quick hook to Miss Minnie’s kidneys might shock her the first time, but by the third, she was slowing down and going on the defense. Mac sent a combination of attacks, fluidly switching between sweeping kicks and flashing jabs. A death by a thousand small blows, Miss Minnie’s breath was turning ragged and her knees shook under her straining body.

  “I’ll make sure Jackmaw leaves you on a cross,” she huffed when the combat finally broke. The two women stood paces from each other, staring daggers. Miss Minnie sported a set of bruises that made her look like she had gotten into a violent encounter with an octopus. Mac was left with minor cuts covering both arms. “I’ll have him nail you to a plank and we’ll parade you around for a week before we leave you gasping for air in the desert.”

  The blade flashed again, and this time, Lenny rushed her. From behind Mac, he dashed like a shadow being cast from a suddenly ignited light. With Miss Minnie’s attack aimed at Mac, he was able to dive under the razor and snatch the old woman by the waist and drag her to the floor. Lenny sat on her stomach and put his full weight on her arms.

  “Get off of me!” She spat. “You scrawny no good war sage! I wish Jackmaw took your head off with your master back in Agua Fria!”

  “His name was Rufus!” Lenny’s hands flew away from Miss Minnie’s, and he snatched her by the neck. Tears flared in his eyes as he squeezed harder and harder. The old woman’s paper-thin skin made her neck feel like a crumpled paper bag. With a grip like this, Lenny easily crushed her windpipe with the first squeeze. “His name was Rufus, you stupid bitch! I’ve had enough of you and your clan tormenting me! There’s no more war sage! No more divinations! No more Gordo Clan!”

  As he screamed at her, Lenny wrenched her neck and slammed her into the concrete floor of the clinic. Miss Minnie’s head cracked and spurted out a small amount of blood. It grew into a puddle with the repeated slams. The old woman’s eyes rolled into the back of her head, but the boy kept going. Lenny was sobbing as he killed her, and by the time Mac finally pulled him away, the back of Miss Minnie’s head was a crater that leaked the remains of her brain.

  Mac dragged him away. The boy was nothing like Krav, and it was hard to believe they were brothers at all. Her inclinations as a raider made her first instinct to hate him for being so weak, but she didn’t think she was a raider anymore. Instead, Mac held him like he was her own little brother. She smoothed his hair and told him everything would be alright.

  “Did you mean that? No more Gordo clan?”

  Lenny was staring at the tattooed corpse. He felt like there was no turning back now, he had blood on his hands. Shaking hands still pulsed with his own heartbeat, and he could still feel her thin neck in his fingers. He did mean it, no more Gordo clan. But he wasn’t a fighter. Not when he had an emotional episode after every kill.

  But he didn’t have to kill anyone else. He just had to release the concoction that would make them kill themselves.

  “I do mean it. The flares are all done. Let’s make sure they can never hurt anyone ever again.”