Chapter 6 - The Escape

Author’s note - Not to get too on-the-nose regarding theme, but one theme I spent this entire book mulling over is the futility of ‘help’. It’s easy to offer help when it’s just words. Everyone wants to abstractly help. Where word becomes action is usually where it all goes wrong. It’s interesting to me all the many diverse ways that we can fail to rise to the occasion, fail to meet our intentions squarely, and it’s interesting to me how we continue on, after we fail. This chapter is several thousand words ruminating upon all of that, upon many diverse character’s failures, their reasons for failing, and how they managed to pick themselves up and address their failure afterwards. Of course, some just leave it for others to step around.

Asa’s baby girl was born a few days later, in the bedroom the fillies all shared, delivered by Eagan himself. Nestor was not permitted in the room nor the house, but everyone was aware when the delivery was completed, as every living creature on the property could hear the baby’s cries. But other than persistent crying, there was little clue that a baby existed there at all, for none mentioned her, no visitors came to call, and the baby herself remained sequestered in private rooms. Asa reappeared a couple of days after the birth and went back to her normal tasks with much apparent pain. Nestor tried to speak with her one day when she appeared outside to hang laundry upon the house’s clothesline, but she would neither meet his eyes nor respond.

Then the day came when Ester formally presented the baby in a miniature celebration hosted in the house’s large family room. Eagan made a point of going around to every person under his indenture and personally requesting each of their attendance, and they filed into the house in an orderly and quiet line, washed and preened to perfection to welcome the new family member. Asa was nowhere to be found, nor were the other fillies. The baby herself was adorable, a tiny old person compacted down to infant size, with red cheeks and bleary eyes, and all were given an opportunity to hold her, including Nestor. Nestor took the baby from Ester and he cradled her in his arms and he asked her name.

“She ain’t got one, not yet at least.”

“Why not?”

“Babies here ain’t named until their christening in the church.”

Nestor nodded, being familiar with a similar custom back home, “It’s too difficult…with the ones who don’t make it…if they have names.”

Ester met his eyes with a kind look and nodded.

The baby cooed and Nestor could feel her warmth in his arms, and was quite amazed at how small she felt, how her weight was practically nothing, and at how so little could grow into so much more. Looking into her beatific face, he wrestled with the thought that she looked like her mother, the real one, and how that likely meant she wouldn’t have much trouble finding a man to take her as one of his fillies when she was older. His gut wrenched at the thought. He shoved her back to Ester and excused himself from the room to ponder alone all the things in life that were not fair, and all those that should not be allowed to happen.

*****

Jack climbed up the ladder to the barn loft and crouched through that low space to the corner in which Nestor had sequestered himself. The wood-grained plasticine in this part of the barn had splintered, and over his time here, Nestor had peeled away splinters to make a hole that looked out over Eagan’s wheat field. He was peering through that hole to watch the wheat gracefully bowing in the artificial breeze, and glanced over his shoulder as Jack approached. Jack dropped heavily beside Nestor and craned slightly to see what Nestor was looking at through the hole.

He gave up and leaned propped upon his left hand and looked at Nestor somberly, “Interestin’, ain’t it?”

Nestor returned his gaze and squinted in confusion and then shrugged, “What’s that?”

“How it’s so much sadder happenin’ in the baby’s future than it is happenin’ to the momma right now.”

Nestor vaguely shook his head, “She’s an adult, she made her choice to live the way she wants to live, by now…” Nestor struggled to go on, his mouth opening and closing around unsaid words.

Jack squinted at Nestor a moment and cocked his head slightly towards the young man beside him, “You know what a filly was?”

“Horse, I think.”

“That’s right. Back in olden times. On Earth. A filly was a female horse, too young to breed yet.”

“Then why do they call them girls fillies? It don’t make no sense.”

“Because of when they take ‘em on. They’s still little girls when they fathers sell ‘em off. But they’re too young at that point. At least, too young for ‘em to get pregnant.” Jack stared at Nestor, allowing his expression to finish his thought for him.

Nestor felt his face burning, “It ain’t right, Jack. It ain’t right to…to do that to them girls. That little baby in there, she don’t have no chance, and she don’t have no choice. One of these Edenite perverts will get her as a child…child slave and then force her to carry his children once he can get her pregnant. Someone’s gotta help that baby.”

Jack leaned forward to Nestor, his eyes not breaking contact, “I agree.”

Nestor snarled, “But that’s the problem, ain’t it. Who can do anythin’ about this? I been sittin’ here thinkin’ how much I’d like to kill Eagan, but even that wouldn’t fix nothin’. I’m sure all his property would jes go to another one.”

Jack held his stare upon Nestor, watching him calmly. He whispered, “I can get the baby out of here.”

“You gonna steal that baby? How in the world you gonna do that?”

“I got a plan to get myself and a fair number of the other boys, even the ones on other farms, out of here. It wouldn’t be nothin’ to bring a baby, if her mother would come too.”

“You told Asa about this plan of yours?”

“Nah. Most them fillies ain’t allowed to talk to us boys out here. I’m surprised Eagan ain’t said anything to you about all the cavortin’ you been up to with her.”

“Cavortin’.”

Jack shrugged and smiled a wry smile, “Jes sayin’ it the way the Edenites would, is all.”

Nestor peered back out the barn wall hole and watched the evaporation shimmer in the midday sun. Today was warmer than most, and he knew if he could see the dome right now it would be fogged with the collected condensation and running in rivulets down the curved walls to collect in the outer moat to be recycled for tomorrow’s irrigation. Not looking back at Jack, and trying his best to keep the quiver out of his voice, he asked, “What if I was to ask to be part of your plan?”

“You actually askin’, or is this a hypothetical?”

“Dunno.”

“What would you do once you left?”

“Dunno that either.”

“Why you want to leave?”

“Same reason as you, I imagine.”

“Why ain’t you askin’, then?”

“Maybe I am.”

Jack stared at him silently and said nothing for several moments. He sighed and said flatly, “I wouldn’t be talkin’ to you about my plan if you wasn’t welcome to be part of it, Nestor. But if you don’t want to come, I cain’t have you goin’ to Eagan and tellin’ him I’m out here workin’ up somethin’. Understand?”

“’Course. But what exactly is your plan?”

“It don’t work like that. You need to be with me if you want details.”

“Ok, say I’m with you.”

Jack shook his head, “No sayin’ nothin’. You want out of here or not?”

“I do.”

Jack squinted at him again, and after several moments nodded, “Plan is simple. I got a truck’ll be waitin’ on us in a little gully north of here. Full tractor-trailer, with a motorized trailer. Can haul us out of here, even go overland if need-be. And it’ll fit all of us in that trailer. ‘Course, momma and baby could ride up front. Wouldn’t want them back in the dusty ol’ trailer.”

“How you gonna stop these people from findin’ it and ‘salvagin’’ it?”

“Truck is bein’ dropped off the night-of.”

“By who?”

“By a comrade of mine. I’m part of a group of folks who do this. Come out to these domes, and help folks get free of ‘em.”

“You done this before?”

“First time inside. We cain’t do a lot of repeats in these domes. But I been the guy droppin’ off the truck a couple times before.”

“You jes gonna sneak everone out once it’s dark?”

“Yup.”

Nestor nodded and stared at the loft’s floorboards for several moments. He could feel Jack’s gaze upon his cheek.

Jack spoke again, “You gonna try to talk Asa into comin’?”

“Gonna try.”

“Twelve days until the truck is dropped off,” Jack said as he lifted himself up to stoop away to the ladder.

*****

It was a full week before Nestor could have any sort of conversation with Asa, as she always seemed busy attending to matters about the house, and shooed away every rhetorical foray he made. He found it ironic that none of her house duties seemed to involve the child; even nursing was consigned to Ester and the other fillies, using Asa’s bottled milk. Nestor decided to force the conversation with her one lunchtime, during which Eagan and his family had gone off to visit at a neighbor’s farm, having abandoned the indentured with the baby back at home.

Nestor entered the Maries’ home and tried to creep through to the kitchen, where he imagined Asa might be. He found no one there, but through the windows could see the other two fillies out behind the house loitering and pretending to be hanging up sheets on the clothesline to dry. Nestor watched them chatting silently through the windowpane and wondered where else Asa might be. Where the baby was. He listened to the house and at a great remove heard someone moving about upstairs.

He went up the stairs towards the bedrooms on the second floor, and after opening doors to several empty rooms, found the door to Eagan and Ester’s room already cracked open. He peered through the door as he approached, seeing at first only their enormous bed and a small cradle off to one side.

Asa stood before the cradle, her back to the door, nursing the baby. She must have felt the air in the room change as he entered, for she turned halfway and cocked her head curiously at him standing there on the threshold.

What are you doing? She mouthed at him. Nestor took a step forward with his hand out and could not make an explanation come to his lips and instead stared dumbly at the baby, who detached from her mother’s nipple and cuddled to her bosom, eyes closed serenely. Asa shrugged up her dress, laid the baby in the crib, and padded over to Nestor.

“You need to leave before someone sees you in here,” she whispered urgently to him.

Nestor shook his head, “I need to talk to you. You ain’t let me say a word to you since…that night.”

Asa looked at him coldly, “I said all that needed to be said to you, Nestor. Eagan ain’t comfortable with us talkin’, and so I ain’t comfortable with it, either.”

“He don’t get to decide these things, Asa. It’s yer choice how you live yer life, not some…not Eagan.”

Asa opened her mouth to argue and Nestor could already foretell what that argument would be and he did not wish to rehash its finer points and by way of abridging her he blurted, “Jack’s got a plan to escape. We could leave. Get away from Eagan. We would bring her.” He nodded to the baby asleep behind Asa.

Asa shook her head, “Where would we even go, Nestor?”

“Does it matter? Away from here. Anywheres else. You could go anywheres in the world, at least there you could be with her.”

“I’m with her here.”

“No, you ain’t. You ain’t even allowed to interact with her here. Why you think that is? You had to sneak in here jes to nurse her…”

Asa stared at him and her eyes brimmed with tears and she blinked them back and they ran down her cheeks all the same. She shook her head and looked down and away.

Nestor persisted, “And what you gonna do when Eagan sells her off? You ever gonna see her again after that? And how you gonna look her in the eye, if you do? Knowin’ you coulda saved her.”

Asa glared furious fire at him, and he forestalled his argument and looked imploringly back. She wiped away her tears. She stared out the window at nothing for a long moment. Finally, she sniffed loudly, and with that same fire in her eyes said, “OK, then what’s Jack’s plan?”

*****

The dark barn brooded before them as they crept through the adjoining bean field. It was a similar design to Eagan’s barn, and along with the house next to it, had been abandoned following a tragic familial collapse, the cause of which Nestor did not know. This farm was the only empty one in the entire dome, as far as Nestor was aware, and so it was a reasonable choice for a meeting place. There was no indication anyone was inside as Nestor and Asa approached it that midnight, no light nor sound emanated from within, and Nestor questioned if Jack had put him on by requesting they rally here for the night’s escape.

Nestor adjusted the bag on his shoulder, which held every bottle of Asa’s pumped breastmilk, as she’d been adamant that no part of her be left behind at Eagan’s, and he opened the door to the barn to see a group already gathered there, including Jack himself. All eyes turned to him and Asa as they entered. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but several seemed to frown upon seeing these newest additions to their party. Jack must have been waiting on only them, for as soon as Nestor closed the door, Jack leaned forward to turn on a small, hooded lantern positioned before him, and cleared his throat.

He spoke at a volume just barely above a hoarse whisper, “You all ready to get out of here?” He smiled and the shadows on his face changed that smile into a ghastly, threatening expression. Heads around the room nodded. Nestor saw more than a few necks crane to look at him and the girl. The baby cooed in Asa’s arms.

Jack continued, “Those of you who don’t got a suit, I have emergency suits over here.” He lifted the lamp and pointed the unshaded portion at a line of silvery single-use emergency envirosuits draped over a crate. “For those of you that brought yer own, I got extra batteries on that table next to the emergency suits.”

Nestor shifted uneasily inside his old envirosuit and fidgeted with the battery. He was so preoccupied with memories of dune crests and decaying battery terminals that he jumped when Asa nudged him, trying to hand him her child so she could go don a suit. He took the child from her and watched her walk over to join the crowd who had gathered before the emergency suits. No one had yet put anything on. Jack seemed to notice their reluctance and spoke up, louder than before, “We do got a schedule to keep, folks. Let’s try and move with purpose, here.”

One man by the emergency suits cleared his throat and said, at regular speaking volume, “Uh, Jack…,” he cleared his throat again and continued, “Uh…look, I’m jes gonna come right out with it. I didn’t agree to be part of…takin’ away some man’s wife and…and baby.”

Heads around the room were nodding agreement, and an indistinct murmur rose as men mumbled their assent. Jack raised both hands, “Asa here ain’t no man’s wife. She’s a filly, and this child of hers is a girl. Doomed to be a filly as well. Who among you wants to be part of bringin’ that to pass?”

The murmur became a din, and several voices from the crowd spoke out:

“How you gonna take that baby outside?”

“Can she even run?”

“Ain’t nothin’ gon’ stop ‘em from comin’ after that baby and her momma.”

Jack raised his voice over the din, “Everone, please. We gotta keep it down in here. Now, I got a baby bubble stashed out by the airlock. Baby’ll be jes fine inside there. Her momma there can handle herself without any of you needin’ to worry about her, and in any instance it ain’t no man in this room’s responsibility to worry ‘bout whether or not she can make it. Or what happens after.”

Old Nate’s voice spoke from the door, whose threshold he’d covertly come to occupy, “Now that ain’t true Jack, and you know it.”

The attention of the room swiveled to the door, and Old Nate took two steps into the building, leaning heavily upon his cane as he entered and allowing the door to swing partially shut behind him.

“You’ll find they ain’t no trespass greater’n what yer up to in here, men. Takin’ a man’s filly. Takin’ his child.” He shook his head. “The Edenites’ll put to death anyone who is part of that.”

Jack argued back from his position at the opposite pole of the crowd, “They cain’t put to death who they cain’t catch, Nate. And it ain’t like these people ever leave this Valley anyways. We jes need to get clear of the Valley, and then everone’s safe.” He looked around at the faces before him, “Hear me? Everone.”

“Boy, you know well as I do, there’s thousands of kilometers of Valley ‘tween us and anyplace that might be safe for that filly. Thousands of kilometers that the Edenites been spendin’ generations learnin’ like the backs of they hand. You ain’t gonna make it to nowheres safe,” Old Nate persisted, both hands upon his cane while he argued, giving him a wizened demeanor that helped to place a full stop to his words as he spoke.

The men began backing away from the emergency suits, and several turned fully about and walked towards the door. Jack’s head swiveled back and forth between them all as the crowd seemed to disintegrate before him, and with a panicked look upon his face he yelled at full volume, “Any man who don’t come this time likely ain’t gonna get another chance. Ain’t no way to get someone else back in here to try again. You all understand? This here’s yer only shot at freedom.”

A few men paused at his words and looked around, but by this point the crowd had convinced itself of the futility of their escape and was steadily filing past Old Nate through the door. Jack put forth no further arguments and merely watched them leave with an exasperated look upon his face. After the last of the indentured men had left, Old Nate turned to look at Asa and Nestor, the only two remaining in Jack’s escape party, and said, “You two still ain’t seen reason?”

Asa looked terrified and Nestor walked to her and placed his hand upon her shoulder and she gazed at him and then at her child in his arms and then at Jack. Jack shook his head at her, “Don’t believe him, Asa. That old man don’t know nothin’ about what yer goin’ through. And he don’t have yer interests at heart, neither.”

Nate shook his head and looked down at the ground and then looked up and opened his mouth to speak, but Jack suddenly seemed through with humoring the old man and he walked quickly to loom over the codger.

“Get out of here, Nate. You already convinced the rest of them to stay. Couldn’t stand to see no one else get what you were never brave enough to try, that it?”

Old Nate looked up and met Jack’s gaze calmly and this seemed to infuriate Jack further, but then Nestor stepped between the two men, still holding the infant girl, “Old Nate, jes get on out of here. Asa and I are leavin’ with Jack. We takin’ the baby. It ain’t right what these people do to women, and it ain’t right fer you to stand here and try to convince us to stay. Jes go. Before Jack here hurts you.”

Nate looked between the three remaining escapees with a sad look upon his face and sighed and then turned with much effort and paced slowly from the barn. Jack moved to follow, but Nestor put out a hand to stop him and Jack glared at Nestor momentarily and then looked at the baby and back to her mother, whose terror seemed unabated. He shook his head and turned from the proceedings. Nestor watched the old man disappear into the dark down the gravel road before closing the door to the barn.

“What now, Jack?”

*****

Nestor pounded through the field. Asa’s baby girl held tightly to his heaving chest, his hand locked behind her little neck to support her lolling head. The baby was wailing, her cries drowning out everything, the sound of his breath, the wheat slapping against his envirosuit, every doubt and fear he’d had about this plan, all subsumed within the high keening being screamed mere centimeters from his left ear. He stopped for a moment and knelt to readjust the blanket swaddling the baby, laying her there in the ochre stained dirt and slightly unwrapping it and then pulling the sides taught again. Asa came from behind and dropped next to him and fussed about the blanket as he pulled it tight. She picked up the little girl and held her close and hummed in her ear and the baby seemed to deflate and nuzzled against her mother. He looked all around and could see only wheat, but he was sure there were pursuers somewhere.

The entire dome was looking for them, after Old Nate had gone and betrayed them. Or perhaps one of the others had let Eagan know they were escaping. Or maybe no one had told, and they were merely unlucky. Unlucky the baby and Asa’s absence had been noticed, or perhaps unlucky that the baby had cried the moment they’d left that dark abandoned barn and had not stopped and the cries could be heard throughout the confines of this cramped and yet still massive dome. Nestor considered all these options while he let Asa catch her breath and calm her child. It seemed most likely to him, in this moment, that they’d been betrayed, and he wished for revenge while he crouched and listened to hear if there were pursuers running through the field or voices calling out to them.

The weird, doped stars bent and shifted above him and his lungs burned and he wondered how much further it was to the airlock. Jack had taken a different route, had assured them both that he would lead off any pursuers and meet them there, and though Nestor had deep misgivings about this assurance, he had few other options and so he believed Jack. The baby was now merely whimpering. At a look from him, Asa handed her across to Nestor, and he lifted a bit to confirm there were no heads of pursuers out anywhere in the field and, seeing nothing, he rose fully.

He hugged the baby back to his shoulder, and he took off running through the field, his helmet swinging on its strap and slapping his hip as he ran. He crossed a dirt road and distantly down the road he saw approaching lights and he ran through the next field, this one farrow, hoping that he’d get across it before those lights got close enough to illuminate them. He kept turning to see where they were as he ran, and in doing so, he failed to notice the irrigation pipe, but his foot made no such error, and he tumbled over it at full speed. He twisted as he fell, his body curling around the newborn in his arms to protect her, and came down in the dirt hard enough to knock the wind from him. The fall scared the baby, and she somehow screamed even louder than she had before, her scream vying for primacy with the ringing it introduced in Nestor’s ears.

Asa came up from behind and knelt to ask him if he had been injured and he told her he was not. The lights on the road came to a stop out there and Nestor knew they’d seen him cross the road and could hear their voices indistinct but still quite identifiable as Eagan and his boys. Others he didn’t recognize. He knew they could hear the baby, but they didn’t seem to run at him. He suspected they hadn’t seen exactly where he’d gone, at least not yet. He pressed her mouth to his neck, and she fought him futilely and thrashed in anger, and her mother looked at him with an expression most of the way to a snarl and with the baby as muffled as he could manage, Nestor rolled and crouch-ran the final few meters to the next field over, a green bean field, hoping to fade into the beanpoles there.

He ran through this field and was afraid to look behind him again, the fear equal parts caution at tripping again and not wanting to see how much they’d gained. The voices had once again disappeared, obscured by the blood pumping through his ears and the partially muffled howls of the naif in his arms. He ran and felt like he ran forever in a universe where time was no thing, running in a featureless expanse where there was naught but his burning lungs and the baby’s laments, and it was in this state that he came upon the airlock.

He hit the button for the door and it whooshed open and inside stood Jack, fully suited and holding the strange baby bubble contraption before him in both arms. It was vaguely egg-shaped, with top doors that slid open to either side to expose a white, bare plastic interior. Nestor carefully lowered the baby girl into the bubble, no easy feat with her thrashing like she was, and he paused while her mother bent to kiss her forehead and then slid the doors closed and heard the contraption hiss as it pressurized with atmosphere. The baby’s cries faded and relief crowded in and then was ruthlessly shattered when Eagan’s shouts took their place. He turned and saw Eagan upon them, and he hit the interior button for the door and the doors jerked to close, but before they could move much at all, Eagan had reached out and arrested their motion with both hands. His sons were behind him, and they took up stations on the sides and wrapped their hands about the closing doors like claws. Eagan reached through to grab Asa by the wrist and pulled her hard towards him. As exhausted as she was, it was nothing for the much larger man to jerk her wholly out of the airlock and off her feet, and she tumbled to the ground as she exited. Eagan was not done pulling, however, and dragged her through the dirt while she used her free hand to pound about his wrists. He did not let her go.

Eagan yelled instructions to his sons to recover the baby, and they both let go the door to come into the airlock after her. Jack lunged forward and shoved one boy hard enough to lift the adolescent off his feet and throw him briefly through the air, which stunned his partner. Nestor took advantage of his opponent’s confusion and firmly guided the second boy backwards by the shoulders, out of the airlock and off to the side. The airlock door resumed closing behind him and Eagan was still dragging Asa and Jack was crouched upon and thrashing the other son, and Nestor saw no option but to pull his combatant down to his rising knee and then dash back into the airlock to set the baby bubble upon its threshold to prevent the closing of the doors. He turned and saw the boy had already recovered his breath and was moving towards him again when Eagan let out a yelp and all turned to see blood rivuleting down his wrist from a semicircle of Asa’s bite marks.

Asa scrambled away from Eagan on her backside, and the boy turned from Nestor and intercepted her and lifted her off the ground, kicking the air. Nestor moved laterally, trying to get an angle on Asa’s assailant when his eyes met hers. Asa’s expression had a strange cast to it, and Nestor felt he could tell what she was going to say before she yelled to him and Jack to save the baby and leave her and then she worked her hand over to grab the boy holding her by his crotch and twist enough for him to yelp and let her go. Nestor remained crouched for a moment looking for an opportunity to help, but Asa remonstrated him loudly once again to leave her behind and then she sprung upon Eagan himself with a rage that caused all in attendance to recoil.

Nestor was still staring when he felt a hand enwrap his shoulder, and he turned ready to fight whoever it was, only to see Jack pulling him back into the airlock. He allowed himself to be so guided and he watched as Asa beat her lifelong captor about the face with clawed hands and he watched in amazement as she drew long ragged red lines through that man’s face with her nails and then she was working her thumbs behind his eyes and his boys were moving around to grab her and the airlock doors slid closed with a hiss and then it was just him and the baby and Jack.

*****

They arrived at the pueblos cut into the stone of the north face of the Valley only a few hours later. Jack told Nestor that he knew a place where they could hole up, where no one would find them. Certain that the Edenites could track him across both the Central Valley Highway and the sands to the south, he had cut a zigzag course for the north canyon wall the second the dome had faded from sight.

The airlock closing upon it had damaged the baby bubble, and nothing Nestor could do would open the sliding doors on top. The bubble must have operated at a higher air pressure than Jack’s truck cab, as Nestor could hear the hiss of air escaping it. He could not locate the leak itself, even by moving his cheek all along the surface. He could hear the baby wailing inside the bubble by holding his ear to it, and this plus the fact that there was air inside to escape convinced Nestor that the baby was still fine. This did not change the fact that they needed to find some place where he could take a pry bar to the bubble, and sooner rather than later.

The portion of wall they headed for was in actuality a twenty-kilometer-long-incline composed entirely of loose scree, piled in a steep ascent that terminated into a tear drop made of kilometer-tall rock walls. All around the teardrop was an entire city built into that vertiginous rock face, thousands upon thousands of dead-eyed windows looking out into a crowded forest of industrial decay in the center. From a distance, as they’d climbed the scree slope, the pueblos had looked occupied, and Nestor had said as much, asking who lived there. Jack shook his head in that distinctive noncommittal way he had, and said, “No one lives there, nor has lived there for decades. Maybe centuries. But it was originally an Edenite city.”

“The Edenites had cities?”

“Before they was farmers. You’ll see. I’ll take ya on a tour when we get there and get this truck hidden.”

Once parked, Nestor discovered the truck had no pry bar, nor anything that could be substituted to that purpose. They left the baby in the truck and explored the pueblos, under the reasoning that there had to be some length of metal inside they could purloin to their purpose. But once inside, the state of the pueblos surprised Nestor. The rooms were still there, cut from the porous rock, but had not been tiled over with metal or plastic or concrete or ceramic, like back home. These rooms were just bare rock, and the few remaining doors were composed of loose plastic, not designed to fit with air seals.

He glanced at Jack as they passed a threshold and asked, “How you think they kept all the dust out with these doors?”

Jack only shrugged.

The windows facing out were immense picture windows, and the thin glass that had occupied them was mostly broken out, scattered in shards all about the floor. Nestor picked up a piece and was examining it in the light of his torch, when Jack noticed and walked over. He looked all around the gaping window hole, running his fingers along the rough rock of the sill, and said to Nestor, “Can you imagine growin’ up in a place with a window like this?”

He looked back over his shoulder at Nestor, who shrugged and went back to his glass shard.

Jack turned around, looking at the rest of the room, “I think this here was the main livin’ space, too. Growin’ up with all that sunlight pourin’ in to yer main room…” He paused and shook his head, looking around the room.

Nestor tossed his piece of glass down and looked at Jack. Jack looked back at him and smiled inside his suit helmet, “’Course, that little glass there don’t protect you from radiation. They didn’t dope glass back then. They were cookin’ themselves in these rooms and didn’t even realize. Or maybe they jes didn’t care.”

The rooms sat empty but for the little piles of rock fallen in from the ceilings and walls. Some of the bigger spaces were totally collapsed-in, seeming to foretell the destiny of the rest. As they walked through the abandoned caves and imagined the city that must once have bustled there, Jack pointed out that these cities were never truly finished, for the people who had started the construction works had given up midway through, and that some of the decay they were seeing may very well be half-finished work.

What astounded Nestor the most was simply the scale of the thing. They walked through wide hallways that seemed to stretch back into the rock endlessly, apartment door following apartment door into the gloom. Most of the doors’ hinges had given out, leaving the plastic husks of the doors fallen in an orderly line. Nestor imagined some beast must have come through this place and torn all the doors from their frames looking for victims before crawling back into the deep recesses to slumber, and he wondered what it might take to wake such a creature and dreaded that he might inadvertently do so.

By way of clearing this thought from his mind, Nestor remarked, “There had to’ve been millions of people livin’ here.”

Jack nodded, “I believe you’re right. This here city’d match Calahorra or Simud or Maja or jes about any of the cities in Chryse.”

“Where did all those people go? They ain’t any other big cities in this Valley is there?”

“Oh, they’s Mensa, that has maybe a hunerd thousand livin’ there. And Capri, Eos…they’s some bigger cities in the Valley, but none of ‘em are Edenite cities. They give up livin’ in cities at some point, and moved to the domes. Someone once told me they left the cities because their religion was losin’ too many folk. Too many excommunicates in a setup like this; it’s easier to keep people in line in more…confined environments.”

“Do you think that? They left the cities and made those domes jes to keep folk under control better?”

“Nah, I don’t think that’s why they left these cities. I think they left ‘em because livin’ aboveground in ‘em was too hard. Too full of meaningless death. You surely know what it’s like. How many of the kids you grew up with are still alive?”

Nestor shook his head, “I dunno. I ain’t been around any of ‘em for a long time. But I’d venture not many. Somethin’ always gets ‘em. Radiation poisonin’. Perchlorate Flu. Lotta cancers. Rashes that bled. We didn’t even have names for those. Jes knew that once they started happenin’, gangrene wasn’t far behind. My daddy always said that’s why we gotta complete the terraformation. Once it’s done, all the diseases’ll jes go away.”

Jack looked around him, raising his arms to shoulder level and spinning slowly, “That’s it. Aboveground, we are surrounded by death, all the time, everwhere we go. The radiation, the dust…everthing on this planet is hostile to life, and these folks, this first generation of people come over from Earth, they knew less than even we do now about how to live here. Ain’t none of this crap in this place sufficient to keep you safe from the hazards we live with. Someone tol me once that the first generation that come over, they had a one in ten replacement rate. For ever ten folk you had here making kids, only one of them kids survived to adulthood. I think that must have meant their whole damn society collapsed in a single generation, collapsed from dust poisonin’ and radiation and bad water and cave-ins. And the folks that survived jes…left…gave up. Tried livin’ somewheres else, where they might have a better chance.”

Nestor’s head swam with questions, “Why would they do that? Wouldn’t they keep tryin’ to survive here? Try and make it better, make it more safe? Why go somewheres else on this same planet and start all over again?”

Jack shrugged, “I ‘spose there weren’t enough left to stay here. It ain’t like you can keep a place like this runnin’ if there’s only a few of you. Or maybe the folk who’d survived the apocalypse back on Earth, and found themselves smack dab in the middle of a new one, jes made decisions based on different things than you or I do. No one knows. I asked someone that same question once, and she tol me ‘don’t concern yourself with the actions of those proven inferior to you.’ I think about that a lot. I wonder if they really were inferior.”

*****

They eventually gave up looking for a usable pry bar in the pueblos for there was none to be found, and once the morning sun had crested the wall of the box canyon, Nestor convinced Jack to pull the truck back down the scree slope to the teardrop’s center. They descended into a nest of huge rectangular buildings, ten-meter-high tanks, and interconnecting pipes, all rotted and slumping in on each other as if being drawn inexorably towards some black hole at their center. Nestor poked around this heap of decay for a short time and found a metal strip that was only partially rusted and carried it back to the truck to free the baby. He couldn’t find a place to wedge it anywhere on the bubble to prise the doors open, and so he resorted to pounding on them with the bar until one bent in enough that he could jam the bar in and lean on it to break it open. By this time, the baby was simply howling at an intensity that drove Jack to exit the truck through the rear, and he paced out there amongst the corroded industrial brambles, looking frequently back at the truck in consternation. Nestor wondered if he could hear the baby all the way out there.

Having extricated her from the bubble, Nestor cradled the baby and clumsily jammed a bottle of formula into her yowling maw, which at first merely muffled her cries. She eventually gave in to the indignity of being fed food she most desperately wanted, but had been too angry at the world to receive, and fell to sucking. Before long, the rhythm of the baby’s suckles coaxed both Nestor and the little girl to sleep.

They left a few hours later, as soon as the final bit of blue in the sunset had gone to indigo, the last wedge of the sun’s feeble light projecting up over the edge of the western wall. The baby had eaten two of the four bottles of formula that Asa had pumped and had messed herself three times. Asa had been carrying the diapers, and so they scavenged the bedsheets from Jack’s sleeper bed to serve this new duty. Apart from eating and shitting, the baby mostly preoccupied herself with bawling, a noise which Nestor, and eventually even Jack, felt simply numb to.

Jack pulled the big truck out of the box canyon expertly in the dark, and the slight rocking motion of the truck’s traction breaking as they slid down the kilometers of scree lulled their charge to sleep. Once free of the scree, and in blessed silence, they hugged the north wall of the valley, winding in and around dozens of gravel bluffs and landslides, their path obscured by a maze of ten-meter-tall loose hillocks that could not be driven over. Eventually, they cut across a high, wide rock fall, and after a long climb up, they crested upon a makeshift and kinetic hilltop overlooking the Valley.

Nestor dazzled at the sea of lights pouring throughout the Valley below. The domes of the Edenites. He’d never before seen clusters of surface lights with such density. Back home, the solitary homestead lights were tiny stars winking out of the vast black of the Tharsian high plains. The lights of the Edenite domes ran in a nearly unbroken line along the Valley Road, spaced evenly every twenty kilometers, with a web of other domes arranged further back, extending across the entire valley floor. He pointed to them and mentioned how dazzling they were.

Jack looked over at the lights and slowed the truck as he looked and said, “They shore are. It’s nice, at night, when you can only see the ones’re still occupied. There’s a whole lotta abandoned ones you cain’t see right now.”

Around midnight, the ground in front of them abruptly dropped away into a steep, loose slope that fell a thousand meters down to a broad basin floor. Out in the basin, and almost at the limit of what could be seen, the surface lights of Mensa glimmered. Nestor traced the line of lights marking dome settlements along the Valley Road out of Mensa, cutting through the basin and climbing up towards them.

Jack brought the truck to a stop and reached over to turn it off.

“There’s the road to Mensa. Why ain’t we pickin’ it up and followin’ it on in? That still the plan?” Nestor whispered, desperate to not wake the baby.

Jack shook his head silently in the dark. After a few moments, barely loud enough to be heard, he whispered, “Cain’t go to Mensa. We need a new plan.”

“Why? What’s wrong with it?” Nestor’s eyes flicked back and forth between Jack and the distant lights.

“We’ll stick out in Mensa. Lots of Edenites trade there, too. And by now, every Edenite in this valley knows about us stealing one of they babies.”

“So where then? Don’t you have no one waitin’ for you in Mensa to pick us up? We only got two bottles left for her. We got to get more right away.”

“We got to go north.”

“What the fuck is north of us?” Nestor said, temporarily forgetting the baby and speaking too loudly.

The baby answered in Jack’s stead by awakening and immediately resuming her wailing.

*****

“A long time ago, before humans come to this world and brought their new gods, before this world looked much at all like it does today, many of the gods of old strode about her surface. The largest and most powerful of these gods was Olympus, and he knew he was the most powerful, and he abused all the other features of Mars at will.”

Nestor had begun talking into the face of the screaming baby, and something about his tone while telling the story temporarily short-circuited the child’s brain. They’d been slowly climbing through the gargantuan rift valleys north of the Mariner Valley, and going overland in these wild places had been slow. She stared at Nestor cross-eyed, her weak blue eyes trying their hardest to focus on his, only a few centimeters away. He continued:

“There were only four others on all of Mars that could stand up to Olympus. There were the three lazy Tharsis brothers, and there was lonely old Alba. The Tharsis brothers had long taken up residence on the eastern shore of Utopia’s seas, and they were much displeased when Olympus drove Utopia from her regular basin, for while the seas do all they can to ignore the happenin’s upon land, the opposite is not true, and the land is often very much concerned with all the things goin’ on at sea.”

It was a common story from his own youth, and he told it in the memorized words and tones of his mother. The childhood storybook characters emerged from the deep recesses of his memory fully formed, and they danced for him as they always had, and in their dancing attempted to pull the strings of apocryphal rituals that might telepathize themselves into the nascent mind of his audience, who was at that moment trying her damndest to focus upon the tip of his nose, dipping and waving hugely before her face as Nestor spoke.

“The Tharsis brothers decided amongst themselves that it would be best if someone else were to deal with Olympus, and that person should be Old Alba. He was known to be quite partial to Utopia, and the brothers told him they’d support him in any fight against Olympus, and these matters combined to stir Alba’s sense of justice to go and attempt to put Olympus in his place.”

“Old Alba came across Olympus tormentin’ a village of the small people, by droppin’ lumps of molten rock on their houses, and each time he did so, he’d laugh boisterously while watching the little people’s homes burn to ash. Alba told Olympus to leave the villagers alone, and Olympus told Alba if he felt such great sympathy for those small bein’s, he should use more than words.”

Jack interrupted to point out that as the story was told back in Aram, Old Alba confronted Olympus with the Tharsis brothers in tow, but the brothers abandoned him at a look from Olympus. Nestor looked at Jack and shrugged, not seeing the difference. The baby did not take well their mutual silence, and yowled briefly to assert that she would still like her story. Nestor continued on:

“Olympus attempted settin’ several more houses on fire, but Alba swatted away each attempt. Olympus could not seem to figure a way around his wise opponent, and grew angry with the proceedin’s and turned away from the village, claimin’ that doin’ so had always been his intention anyways, and left Alba there to guard the village.”

“Olympus was beside himself with anger at Alba for confoundin’ him, and so as he retreated, he moved uphill from the village. Once he was high above them both, Olympus produced a great many gasses from his caldera, and they gathered into huge rainstorms, the like of which have not been seen since. The storms flooded everthing in that country, and wore many drainages and rivulets through those lands.”

The baby burbled at Nestor’s expressive face, her eyes shining with delight. Relief crowded into Nestor’s voice as his mind flashed through the preceding day. The truck tipping and scrabbling upon thin rock ledges in the chaos north of the Valley. The baby screeching as the walls of the Candor Chasm brooded over them. The vertiginous ridge of Baetis Mensa, an unbroken wall of rock that stretched for hundreds of kilometers to the north, which they followed while discussing in detail every feature they saw. For at least while they talked, she did not howl.

“Alba responded by releasin’ his lava to make levies to hold back Olympus’s floods. The grand volcano did not pause in the least, however, and continued roilin’ up more storms to fling at the wise old mountain. Old Alba released even more lava, and the more he released, the more Olympus drove in rains to wash it away, in a cycle that seemed like it may never end. Eventually, Alba released so much lava and spread it so far and so wide that it glued him to the ground, and he was prevented from ever movin’ again. Seein’ Old Alba stuck in his own lava, Olympus laughed and ceased his torrents and taunted Alba while the poor old mountain struggled. To this very day, Olympus may occasionally send a storm Alba’s way, to remind him of the folly of stickin’ your nose in where it don’t belong.”

The baby wrinkled her nose at this, her whole face reforming into a scream. Nestor sighed and looked over at Jack, who was no longer paying attention. He looked back out the window at the broad drainage spread beside them as they climbed and imagined her cries echoing over the vast distances there, and what rockfalls it might inspire in those distant horizons. He laid his head back against the seat’s headrest and closed his eyes and let her cry.

*****

Nestor shook the empty baby bottle and stared at it and questioned if the tiny amount still coating the bottom was safe to feed to her. The infant girl was shrieking with what he guessed to be hunger and had been doing so since they’d awoken that morning. He’d done his best to ration out the final two bottles on the prior day, which they’d spent climbing out of the rift valley, winding up and down mountain slopes and through the meter-deep dust that accumulated on the lee sides of those ranges, a featureless canted expanse that so dampened any optimism as to leave even their emotions coated with and entombed beneath that self-same dust.

They had made the surface, and spent the night there, giving the baby her very last bottle so she would go down. Nestor passed out with exhaustion when she fell asleep in his arms, while Jack moved about the cab, sucking on a tube of nutrient paste for his supper and throwing out the fully messed scraps of his former bed. When Nestor awoke with the baby in the middle of the night, Jack was still up and was staring off into the darkness, and both of them had stayed awake telling the baby stories and jokes to distract her from the fact that she very much wanted a bottle, of which there was none.

They had left at first light, and Jack’s eyes were so red and bleary from lack of sleep that he seemed blind, and using this as evidence, Nestor convinced Jack to allow him to drive instead. At first, the movement of the truck coaxed the baby to sleep in Jack’s arms, and for a while, Jack appeared to be dozing as well. Nestor followed the northern rim of Candor Chasma, a huge irregularly shaped rift valley that glowed bluely off their shoulder, a deep pit in which any manner of monster may lay waiting, and they avoided all such beasts by sticking inland just enough to find the good hard ground, and Nestor kept them moving quickly along. Transit was difficult to mark against the pit, as its size minimized all notion of movement, no matter how substantial said movement may be, and Nestor despaired at the absence of tangible progress. Shortly after noon, both baby and Jack had awoken, and Jack had advised, barely audible over the baby’s screams, to strike out across the vast and featureless plains to the northeast.

That had been a couple of hours ago, and both men had been taking the baby’s verbal barrage in silence since. Nestor held the mostly-finished bottle out to Jack.

“Want to give her this?”

Jack looked skeptically at the bottle, “Looks old.”

Nestor nodded, “I believe this here bottle was the one I give her yesterday noon. But if there’s germs in it, they’ll only be her germs.”

Jack didn’t look like he agreed with this assertion, but after a few moments of loudly attended consideration, he took the bottle from Nestor and offered it to the howling child. She readily sucked away, but soon finished the splash of milk remaining and loudly demanded more from a world that was ill-equipped to have given her even the small amount she had just received. Jack looked earnestly at the scrunched red face thrashing about in his arms. He began speaking, in an eager and booming voice, made for concert-hall recitations:

“There were many strange creatures on Mars during her early days, a consequence of having so much of Jupiter’s fire placed inside her. One such creature was a great Wyrm, a creature that needed neither food nor slumber to survive. Instead, the Wyrm fed on fear. The more afraid it could make the small creatures of the surface, the fatter and stronger it grew. The Wyrm was quite frightful, miss. It possessed a long tubular body of massive size, with hundreds of spindly legs growin’ from each side which ended with great gaspin’ claws. Its face was covered in long, prehensile tentacles, and the Wyrm was otherwise blind, but had excellent hearin’. It preferred to live underground, where its hearin’ and its tentacles could be most useful.”

Nestor looked skeptically at Jack, who shrugged in his own defense. The baby seemed to agree that he should continue, scrunching her face in displeasure at his brief silence. Jack short-cut her screams by continuing in his oratory tones:

“The Wyrm’s favorite thing to do was to dig under villages, occasionally creatin’ earthquakes or comin’ to the surface at night to snatch young children who stayed out after sunset. Eventually, however, the Wyrm would grow bored with the village and dig all around it, creatin’ a sinkhole into which everthing, village and villagers alike, would tumble. Once captured in his underground lair, the Wyrm would then terrorize the survivors until they died of fright.”

“The Wyrm did this for centuries, destroyin’ thousands of villages and developin’ a frightful legend that preceded him and caused him much pleasure. Over all of those years, he became quite fat, and quite lazy, and quite slow in his diggin’ and in his thinkin’, but he remained terrifyin’ to all. He decided that what he really wanted was to find a village big enough and easy enough to terrorize that he would never have to move again, and could just stay and get fatter and fatter forever. He found his ideal village on the plains northeast of the Valley, in a bustlin’ hamlet by the name of Juventae.”

Jack paused and peered at the baby dramatically, “We’re headed right to where that ole town once stood. Do you want to see it, miss?” The baby gurgled and rolled her eyes, lolling her head about.

“Juventae was a peaceful and prosperous town, and was no stranger to mystical happenin’s, bein’ so close to Olympus’ favored stompin’ grounds. But what made Juventae famous was the natural spring that rose from the ground south of their town and flowed thousands of kilometers north to the Chrysean basin. The spring’s waters were healin’ waters, and people came from far and wide to experience its benefits, and the residents, who grew up drinkin’ from those waters, found themselves particularly strong and healthy and long-lived.”

The ground before them fell away into a gargantuan box canyon, easily over a hundred kilometers across and thrice that distance in length. In the center ran a spine of mountains, themselves dwarfed in height by the walls of the canyon in which they resided. They wound along in a fetal bend near the southern canyon wall, descending in height until they faded into hills and then into a beach beside a large, shallow sea of liquid water. Jack seemed to not notice.

“One particular resident, a boy named Young Nico, loved the spring waters so much that he would scarcely part from them. The waters made him incredibly strong and wise, even for his young age. He was known throughout the village for minor feats of beatin’ up thieves, helpin’ matronly ladies with their small chores, and speedin’ along construction efforts by doin’ the work of many men. So Young Nico found himself compelled by duty when the town was plagued by many minor earthquakes, and young children out after dark went missin’.”

“The legend of the Wyrm was, of course, known to Young Nico, and so he knew what these happenin’s foretold. His only problem was that there was no way for him to locate the Wyrm until it surfaced to spread its terror. Young Nico could not bring himself to use a child as bait, nor the entire town itself, and so he needed another plan. The only thing Young Nico could think to do was to find a place near the center of the town and begin diggin’, straight down, until he found some sign of the Wyrm.”

The sea glimmered majestically down below them, and even at this distance, Nestor could make out waves moving along the surface, with white foam on crests stretching wide and pearlescent through the canyon’s southern tip. He looked over at Jack and then looked back down at the miniature sea below him. Jack’s attention was still on the baby.

“So Young Nico dug. He dug for many nights and days, diggin’ a deep hole in the center of the town, but never once findin’ the Wyrm. Young Nico eventually gave up, and was sittin’ on the edge of his hole, lookin’ quite beside himself with his failure, when a wise old man stopped by to encourage him. The wise old man told Young Nico that the Wyrm feasted on fear, and that even though Young Nico was very brave to try to take on that Wyrm, his bravery was itself founded on fear, and it fed the Wyrm just as effectively as screams of fright, and the only solution to the Wyrm was to banish all fear of it.”

“Young Nico took the old man’s words to heart, and he tried many things to diminish his fear of the Wyrm, but none worked. He went through the hamlet and explained to ever person he met how important it was to become less fearful of the monster beneath their feet, and asked for suggestions on how to give up their fear. No person could tell him how to become less fearful, however, until he met Lucius. Lucius was a comic, a funny man who most of the other villagers avoided, even though he frequently made them laugh, for it was his tendency to bring joy at times of seriousness that people disliked most of all.”

Nestor felt tears welling up in his eyes. He tried blinking them back, the blue pearl in the box canyon below smudging and smearing out as he blinked. He squeezed his eyelids together to clear his vision. A tear trickled down his cheek. He wiped it away and tore his eyes from the sea, the real sea filled with real water below him, tracing instead a thin black line of a road that snaked its way through the canyon from the north, extending as far as the eye could see in that direction. The road was packed with a long and evenly spaced line of tiny vehicles moving in both directions.

“When Young Nico explained his predicament to Lucius, Lucius knew exactly what the answer was. Lucius began craftin’ different jokes about the Wyrm, and began drawin’ crude graffiti on walls, featurin’ the Wyrm, and did everthing in his power to make the Wyrm a laughin’stock in Juventae. Over time, his plan worked, for people spoke about the Wyrm in diminishin’, condescendin’ tones, rather than fearful ones.”

“The Wyrm was infuriated that his source of sustenance was bein’ cut off, but he had grown so slothful and fat that he couldn’t quite convince himself to find another town where he wasn’t a laughin’stock. Instead, he did the one thing he knew would most terrorize these villagers. He would kill their favored son, Young Nico. The Wyrm located Young Nico’s deep hole, and he rose through it, and at the surface he called his challenge to Young Nico, who responded immediately.”

The baby’s eyes were growing heavy, and Jack’s oration decreased in volume as each blink grew longer. He had been holding her up to address as a bundle between his hands, and now he lowered her down to cradle in his arms. She snuggled back, trying to get comfortable in the scrap of blanket within which she was swaddled.

“The Wyrm tried throwin’ his mighty girth at Young Nico, but Nico deftly leapt away, and slapped the Wyrm lackadaisically as he did so, and the watchin’ villagers all laughed at Nico tormentin’ that ridiculous fat Wyrm. The Wyrm tried usin’ his many arms and graspin’ claws to snap at Young Nico, but Nico leapt about, always just outside the Wyrm’s grasp, usin’ what small metal items he found lyin’ about to wrap around the Wyrm’s claws, renderin’ him crippled. The villagers laughed even more at the stupid Wyrm in his diminished state, and feelin’ weakened and humiliated, the Wyrm fled back down into his hole.”

“Young Nico would not allow his quarry to escape, however, and grabbed the Wyrm by his tail as he fled, holdin’ tight. The Wyrm’s many feet worked rapidly against the walls of the hole, and scrabbled out dirt until it became super-fine dust that was ejected high into the air beyond. Young Nico still refused to let loose. The Wyrm thrashed about in the hole and expanded it until the entire town square had been atomized and launched great distances across the plains. But still, Young Nico held fast. The Wyrm thrashed further and dug up the entire town while Young Nico laughed away at it, and still the Wyrm whipped about until it had burrowed all the way down to the water table whence the healin’ springs flowed.”

The baby’s eyes were almost fully closed now, only opening briefly during Jack’s dramatic pauses. She snuggled her little head back into the crook of his arm, sighing deeply.

“Upon diggin’ into the springs, their water was let loose in a great flood, which drowned the weakened Wyrm where Nico held him. And that Wyrm’s great spine still occupies the hole he dug, and you can see it all the way down there in Juventae Canyon.”

Nestor stared at the chain of mountains, the Spine of the Wyrm, and could picture the creature there now, laying defeated upon the floor of the canyon.

Jack, still looking at the sleeping babe in his arms, whispered, “It really is pretty, ain’t it?”

Nestor sniffled, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands quickly and nodding, “I cain’t…how do they have water here?”

Jack looked over to him and smiled sanguinely for a moment and replied, “Summer daytime temperatures down in that canyon sometimes top out at twenty degrees, and they pumped enough atmosphere down there that it stays above freezin’ at night. Still cain’t breathe the air yet, and it gets cold enough that it freezes over in the winter, and they still have to use melters to convert ice to water, but it’s liquid water some of the year, and it’s on the surface. Which is somethin’. They haul the atmosphere and water ice down that road, a couple thousand kilometers from the ports in Chryse. Eventually, the whole damn canyon will fill with water, and the Highway will become the Juventae river, which’ll flow down to make a new sea in Chryse. At least, that’s what they say.”

“Why do they haul everthing so far? Why not jes build a spaceport down there? Or at least somewheres closer.”

“Well, they once had a port up at Stege, is my understandin’. Problem is, they’s not much to do out here in the winter. When it stays so cold, the water don’t never melt. Cooler temperatures hold in the atmosphere better, too, so even pumpin’ air slows down a lot over those twelve winter months. Without jobs that pay, folks don’t stay out here. This whole place runs seasonally. Lotta the huts’re automated. Robots and such. Only humans ever even see Juventae are the ones drivin’ the ice trucks. Ain’t a whole lotta civilization between here and Chryse, neither. We gonna stop at Stege tomorrow and you’ll see what livin’ out here in Maja is like.”

*****

They’d picked up a thin, single-lane blacktop that serviced the atmosphere pumps spaced every few kilometers along the canyon rim, and took this road north toward Stege. The only other vehicles they saw were automated road graters coming along to push the dust drifts off to the side and the occasional road train laden with ammonia or carbon ice. Drawing upon some unenumerated experience, Jack confirmed this was the expected amount of traffic for the road. The drive passed quickly, with the baby quiet for once and Jack dozing and a good smooth road beneath them, and they arrived at the intersection of the Rim Road and the Maja Highway before noon. They came upon Stege an hour later.

Stege was set in an ancient impact crater, the entire western wall of which had been eroded away by the river that had once flown out of Juventae Canyon, or perhaps by the flood caused by the death of the Wyrm, either seemed likely. The road into the crater followed this primeval channel, and massive rounded rocks bounded there along the smooth surface blacktop, forming a new channel funneling a different kind of water opposite-wise from the original course. Other than the road, which seemed to disappear near the middle of the crater, there was no sign of human habitation here at all. As they approached the place where the road disappeared, Nestor realized that before him stood a huge, open mine in the crater center, and that the road ran into the mine, spiraling along the edges all the way to the bottom. Jack opened his eyes as they came upon the crater and requested Nestor to pull over so he could drive. Nestor complied, with much effort because of the steady flow of vehicles all around him and the deep dust comprising the road shoulder.

“Is Stege…inside a mine, Jack?” Nestor asked, craning up to see the bottom of the mine as they switched places.

“Stege is the mine,” Jack replied while he pulled out onto the road, without looking for oncoming traffic, “or, I should say, Stege was once a mine. All this infrastructure you see here? This road, the stuff back at Juventae, the huts and all that machinery? It was all mined from here. Hell, most of it was manufactured here, too. There used to be quite a factory on the floor of this pit, is my understandin’.”

“So they mined everthing and then built a city in the mine?” Nestor asked as they descended into the pit, seeing little corridors branching off into the rock, dozens of them, all leading back to parts unknown.

“They mined what they needed, but this whole place held hunerds of thousands of folks, at one time. All them folks needed somewheres to live. What better place than in the mine itself? You’d have to dig out any other place to use as a city, they’d already dug out this one…,” he shrugged, clearly sold on the practicality of this idea, “so the city jes kind of built up with the mine.”

They pulled off into a corridor of Jack’s choosing and left the steady flow of traffic behind. The truck’s lights illuminated an otherwise dark corridor, and there was no sign of habitation or of any human settlement until they came upon a massive indentation carved in the tunnel wall to the right, large enough to hold many vehicles, the hollow itself lighted lackadaisically and mottled throughout with gloom. It was full of parked trucks of differing designs but similar industrial purpose scattered loosely about in no apparent order, and set into the far wall of the hollow was a twin airlock with a glowing sign above in a language that Nestor could not read.

Jack parked the truck into an opening capable of accepting its bulk, and Nestor couldn’t help but notice how many denizens of this cavernous parking lot appeared from the ether or perhaps from unseen hovels built into the very walls, all watching the parking job with much interest.

“What are all them people looking at?” He questioned Jack, as the truck came to a stop.

Jack’s head didn’t move, but Nestor could just make out his eyes moving about in the gloom, taking in the scene before them.

“Those are the locals. Or some of ‘em, at least. They’re sellin’ things, mostly. A lotta drivers come through here lookin’ to trade for this or that.”

“You’re expectin’ for us to buy baby formula and diapers from one of these people?” Nestor goggled all around him, as the veritable crowd of people wearing mismatched scraps of different worn-out envirosuits gathered about the truck.

Jack shook his head. “That ain’t what they sellin’. But I’m bettin’ someone inside can help us get what we need.”

Nestor looked over at the distant airlock and had opened his mouth to point out that this didn’t look like the kind of place that any sort of baby item ever came within ten kilometers of, when Jack spoke again, “Put on yer helmet, we’re goin’ in. Lay the baby down in the sleeper, we’ll pressurize it and leave her in there while we get what we need. Inside ain’t no place for her anyways.”

Nestor grabbed his helmet and pushed it down into the seals and the suit filled with air. He lifted the baby and took her back to the sleeper and made a sort of nest of the remaining blankets and laid her down in this. He backed out of the sleeper and slid down the partition. Jack, satisfied that everything was in order, reached down and hit a button, depressurizing the interior of the cab, then opened his door and deftly dropped out of sight. Nestor did the same, dropping easily down the steps on his side, and reached up to close his door behind him. By the time he turned back around, a small group of different mismatched exosuits had crowded in on him, each holding up a unique item, most of them in small plastic baggies. Their mouths worked in their helmets, but Nestor apparently wasn’t on the same channel as they were calling their wares over, as his coms were completely silent. He guessed that he probably wouldn’t understand their language, anyway.

He shoved his way through the crowd, holding up his hands in a gesture that felt very much like surrender. The proffered baggies slapped against his helmet as he pushed his way through and dispossessed hands reached out to tug on his wrists, and one even groped his crotch through the suit. He cleared the crowd, which once cleared decided that there was no convincing this mark and faded away like a desperate black-market smoke. He looked about for Jack and saw him already almost to the door and rushed after, noticing as he ran how the parking lot now seemed abandoned of people, returned to some virgin state.

They passed through the airlock seamlessly, simply closing the exterior door behind themselves, walking to the other side of the room, and opening the interior door. The room they walked into was large, with low ceilings, and so felt oddly confined. It was filled with haphazardly arranged tables encircling a central pod that looked part bar, part book-making business, as patrons seemed to place both orders for drinks and for bets to the men behind the bar. There was a constant din of people talking, a hum of indistinguishable gruff voices only broken by the occasional screamed protestation or guffaw.

They took off their helmets and made their way over to a long wall filled with others hung on hooks. Nestor placed his helmet amongst this coterie and had not taken more than two steps away when he noticed a man nearby glaring at him over a glass. The man was enormous, easily a head taller than anyone in the place, with broad shoulders and tattoos tracing their way up his neck and onto the back of his shaven head. Nestor froze in place and looked at the man and tried for a neutral expression on his face, not wanting to appear either weak or threatening. The man stood and walked over, placing his face mere centimeters from Nestor’s, and said something in a language Nestor had not heard before. Nestor took a step back, raising his hands, “I don’t know what yer sayin’, mister.”

The man seemed angry about this response and took back the distance Nestor tried to put between them, edging up even closer now, his pock-marked nose nearly touching the boy’s. He growled something else in his strange tongue and bathed Nestor in the smell of his liquor breath. Nestor looked around, trying to locate some absolution or escape from what this man portended.

Jack, seeing what was happening, pushed himself between them and said something in that alien language, using a not-exactly-conciliatory tone with the big man as he intervened. The giant growled a low, guttural sound that made the hairs on the back of Nestor’s neck stand up. Jack reached over and grabbed Nestor’s helmet from the hook and shoved it into Nestor’s arms and made a sort of sarcastic-looking bow and stared impudently at the giant. He glared back at Jack for a moment, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them, and then out of nowhere, his friends were behind him, guiding him back to the table, whispering things to him in their language. Jack turned around and gestured with his chin toward the bar. “Let’s get ourselves a drink. What say?”

Nestor’s eyes followed the man and his friends back to their table. “I don’t drink,” he said absently, still not looking away.

Jack’s response was silence, and Nestor could tell out of the corner of his eye that Jack was still looking at him. He glanced over and Jack pointed with his chin once again at the bar. “C’mon with me anyway,” Jack finally said. Nestor nodded and followed him, still stealing glances at the man at the table, who had not once stopped glaring fiercely at them.

At the bar, Jack ordered a shot of some liquor that Nestor didn’t recognize. Nestor merely shook his head when the barman looked skeptically to him.

Nestor held his helmet up to Jack, “Why cain’t I hang my helmet up with everone else’s?”

Jack leaned close, to avoid yelling over the din in this room, “Look, I reckon you ain’t been in a lotta rooms like this, but them hooks is for people have earned one. Which you ain’t. And you cain’t jes stare at people like yer doin’, neither. Ever one of these men is armed and won’t think twice about killin’ ya jes fer lookin at ‘em.”

Nestor looked at Jack and squinted, “But I ain’t tryin’ to provoke ‘em. How would that stand up with the law? Them shootin’ an unarmed man fer lookin’.”

Jack nodded to a pair of men walking by, sharing a meaningful look with them as they passed.

“They ain’t no law to speak of out here, Nestor. Chryse technically owns the water and pays by the ton delivered for both ice and air, but this whole Maja Valley area is free range. No government out here, not yet, not until the water starts flowin’ down the river and folk start livin’ here permanent. Then, I imagine there will be a whole lotta government come in here, likely some fightin’, too, seein’ as Tharsis, Chryse, and the Mariner Valley all could make a valid claim for this here land,” he chuckled, looking around, “But fer now, this land is wild. There ain’t some lawman keepin’ you safe out here, it’s jes yer wits.”

“But I didn’t do nothin’ to that man back there. We jes walked in the place.“

Jack downed his shot and puffed out his cheeks in a sigh and then looked patronizingly at Nestor. “Lotta folks, it don’t matter all that much what you do. It matters what you are, and what you are to these people is an outsider, a kid, not anyone who should be casually walkin’ into a place like this and jes hangin’ up his helmet. Like you was gonna sit and shoot the shit with the other blokes about drivin’ the trail. It’s insultin’ to them, is what it is.”

“Well, look Jack, I didn’t ask to come here with you. Why are we here, anyway? Jes so you could get a drink? Ain’t we got any other priorities than that?”

Jack turned and leaned back with his elbows on the bar, looking casually around the room.

“We got two thousand kilometers to go till we get to Calahorra, and the highway is dangerous, all the way from the Xanthe Mountains down to here. Stege is all there is for supplies, and those supplies come down the highway in armored caravans. Anything less might as well have a target painted on it. We got to find us some passage on one of the caravans that’s on its way back out of here. And the folks on those carvans’ll be the ones to have baby supplies they’ll be willin’ to trade for.”

Nestor looked around theatrically, “Jack, half the people in this bar look like they’d be the ones tryin’ to rob any armored caravan, and the other half look like they’d be more’n happy to help the first group. Who we gonna find to help us here?”

“Look, maybe you should have a bit more faith in me than that. I happen to know some folk out here, and soon as I see ‘em, we’ll be set.”

“So we’re meetin’ someone from the group you’re with here? Is that it?”

“I used to drive this trail, before I got…involved with the group I’m involved with now. Alot of those I knew back then, I still know now, and they’ll be the ones to help us out of here.”

“We just sit here and wait then? You don’t have no way to contact them?”

Jack shrugged and didn’t otherwise respond, but to call the bartender back over for another shot.

*****

They’d departed the bar having met exactly zero of Jack’s alleged acquaintances, and after several hours of loitering inside, Nestor had grown eager to check on the baby, afraid that she’d wake up alone in the truck cab. Jack agreed to leave with him, and as the truck resolved out of the parking lot’s shadows, they noticed both doors hanging wide open, and broke into a mutual run to cover the final few meters.

Nestor came to the passenger door and vaulted up into the cab and noticed immediately the partition between cab and sleeper had been slid back. Leaning into the sleeper, he saw only Jack coming in through the rear access door.

“Where’s the baby, Jack? Where’s the baby at?” Nestor kept repeating over his coms, pulling up the final few scraps of sheet, finding nothing there, and lifting the entire bed up to peer under it. Nestor’s breakdown culminated in his standing in front of the truck, hands on his helmet, a scrap of blanket still in one hand, draped down and behind the back of his helmet like the veil of a bride left at the alter, spinning in a circle and staring into the gloom, looking for an obvious villain lurking there with the bawling baby cradled in his arms. Some foe to defeat. Only darkness crept in those shadows, however, and no matter how many times Nestor spun, the murk never presented him with any tangible foe whatsoever. A most dramatic display, that Jack sat back and calmly watched.

Nestor slumped back to the truck, which Jack had already closed up and repressurized, coming in through the back and collapsing into the passenger seat in a defeated heap.

“What you think happened to her?” Nestor looked imploringly at Jack. Jack didn’t seem to hear and stared out of the front windows into the dark.

“They steal anything else?” Nestor looked all around the inside of the cab.

“They took some other small stuff. Anything that’d be worth anything. They left us the nutrient paste, thankfully. Guess they got enough of that stuff already. You cain’t trust these people. Any of ‘em. They could be inside right now sellin’ any of our things,’’ he grimaced at the callousness of the term, “they stole from us.”

“You think they inside? Well, let’s go back in, then,” Nestor leaned forward in his seat to stand.

Jack shook his head. “That ain’t what I mean. I mean they could be anywheres, and we cain’t trust no one to help us get…anything…back.”

“None of the people you know would tell you if someone had a baby they hadn’t had before?”

“Nope. Most of the people I know wouldn’t be against sellin’ babies they own selves.”

“So what we gonna do, then? We cain’t jes abandon her here.”

Jack shook his head again and laid it back against the seat, closing his eyes. “We all out of options. We still need to get on up this road. We cain’t stay here, that’s for sure. I think you oughta face facts, Nestor. We’ve lost that baby, and we won’t get her back.”

“We gotta keep tryin’. I’m gonna go inside and ask around. A baby has to stick out to these people.”

Nestor left, brooking no further argument on that matter, and Jack did not acknowledge his departure. He went inside and he asked every bar patron who would look vaguely in his direction if they’d seen a baby. None seemed to speak his language, or perhaps they did, but would not let him catch on to that fact, and all shook their heads and glared in the universal language of dismissal. He ignored this and pantomimed cradling a baby and made baby crying noises and they responded to his attempts at further clarification with outright derision, spitting responses in their language that clearly showed, even to one as dumb in that tongue as he, just what they thought of a man-child outsider making noises at them, no matter the purpose.

Eventually he wandered back out to the truck and found Jack asleep leant back in the driver’s seat as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Nestor lay on the bare mattress in the sleeper and stared at the ceiling, trying in vain to come up with some sort of plan to locate the little girl that was based on anything other than blind fantasy.

After a while, possibly minutes or possibly hours, Jack rose and pulled closed the partition and left the front cab, all without comment. He was gone for some time, and upon returning, pulled back open the partition and bent into the sleeper and looked at Nestor, his eyes glowing in the dim light cast by the sparse lot lamps.

“I asked around, and no one knows nothin’. And no one is willin’ to take us on for a trip up north, neither.”

He waited for no response and turned and sat heavily down in the driver’s seat, once again closing his eyes.

Nestor dozed fitfully and dreamt of robbers creeping into the truck, opening the front door and grabbing up the screaming baby and absconding with her from the rapidly depressurizing interior and running with her hiked over their shoulders into a gaping maw hidden just beyond the shadows, intent upon using her as fodder for some greater evil than even his imagination could reproduce, but which waited for him all the same. He came awake in fright and he stared at the ceiling for a while and then he headed back in to try some more.

Days passed in this way, neither man acknowledging any broader purpose or plan, both robotically repeating the same actions, the same inquiries. Little changed in the quality of response, except for one individual, an arachnidan man with lanky hair and steady, if slightly clouded over, eyes who had offered in a language that Nestor did not understand and even Jack seemed to struggle with to sell them a baby girl, of any age they wished. Jack responded seeking clarification, and the man recoiled with his long arms in a way that very much looked like pedipalps drawn back from some disgusting thing, and he looked skeptically at Jack and inquired something back in his skittering alien tongue. Jack apparently responded appropriately, as the man brought his long hands and arthropod’s fingers together in a gesture of imperiousness. He turned and left, and Nestor asked Jack what that was all about.

“Apparently baby girls that age are hard to come by. He didn’t think we could pay. Least not as much as he wants.”

“So what’d you tell him? That we could pay?”

Jack nodded, not taking his eyes from the man’s retreating back.

“We cain’t pay, though.”

Jack glanced over at Nestor with a distinct lack of patience showing through, “It don’t matter. He ain’t got her. Tol me it’d take two weeks at least for him to find such a baby. I tol him I’d wait, and he could keep me in mind if anythin’ else shows up in the meantime.”

They received no other word beyond this, not until the day they left.

*****

They met the man in the bar, and it seemed very much to be the case that he was who Jack had been expecting. He was a wiry man of below average height, more than a head shorter than Nestor, with a semicircle of thinning hair backing away from his gleaming bald pate. He seemed to have too much head for his face, and that he had no identifiable hairline intensified this effect, almost as though his face had been drawn on but then smudged down to make room for something, which the artist had then forgotten to draw. He wore glasses that changed color with the light level around him, but always lagged present conditions, turning dark in the dark, light in the light, and as such he was constantly fussing with them. Jack introduced the man to Nestor as Nils.

Nils spoke the same language as everyone else in this place, which Jack had advised was a regional dialect of Chrysean, and he apparently had no knowledge or desire to speak Tharsian, and so Nestor was excluded from their exchange. It must have had much to do with him, however, given the number of times both men looked and otherwise gestured in Nestor’s direction. Eventually, Nils walked away at some great purpose, leaving Jack and Nestor to stare at one another. Jack seemed much pleased, and Nestor asked him why.

“That was good news. Nils says he heard that a caravan carrying a baby in a cage headed out from Stege jes this mornin’. He’s gonna get some supplies and meet us up at the truck.”

“He’s gonna ride with us? What about a caravan? We gonna be safe on the road by ourselves?”

“Cain’t afford to wait around no longer. We leave now we might could catch ‘em up before they get to the Chrysean border. And trust me when I say Nils is worth at least as much as any caravan,” Jack smiled a wry smile at Nestor and cuffed him on the shoulder, “Now c’mon. Let’s get out to the truck.”

Less than an hour later they were on the road, the mine and Stege disappearing behind them. Apparently, the ‘supplies’ that Nils had needed were an enormous gun of a make not familiar to Nestor and twin bandoliers of ammunition worn crosswise upon the chest of his envirosuit. He presented a contradictory vision thus armed, simultaneously frail and dangerous, bookish and violent, sitting in the passenger seat of Jack’s truck.

They took the main road north and Jack opened the throttle on the truck all the way and they careened around the caravans of huge haulers, finding long stretches of empty road in between those nodes of relative safety. Nils’s head was swiveling about, checking the bluffs that rose on each side of the ancient river in which the road had been built. Nestor could understand the paranoia, as the bluffs seemed to crawl the moment you looked away and yet be abandoned the moment you looked back, a sense of impending attack prevailing. Despite the paranoia rampant inside the cab, no bandits rode over the crests of the bluffs, no traps were sprung upon the road, and the only genuine danger was from Jack’s insane driving. Nestor dozed as they drove, and a few minutes later, he was fast asleep.

The truck awakened him by slowing to a stop. As he sat forward to peer through the front windows, he could see a line of five trucks and rovers, parked sideways in two rows across the road to barricade it, several armed men standing in front.

Nestor moved up to crouch between the two men in the truck cab, who were conversing using confidential tones in Chrysean. Nils was the first to look at him and instantly looked away, seeming to dismiss him entirely. Jack saw him then and upon meeting his eyes, Nestor spoke first.

“We bein’ robbed?”

“Naw. This here’s the caravan we lookin’ for. They were kind enough to pull off once I ast ‘em nicely.”

Nils said something out of the side of his mouth that made Jack grin.

“What are we gonna do against that many men with guns, Jack? We got one gun between the three of us.”

Nils seemed to respond to this, too, though still in Chrysean and still not acknowledging Nestor. Nestor spun on him, “Look, if you understand what I’m sayin’ you could jes talk in my language. Or is there some big secret you’re keepin’?”

Nils looked Nestor up and down and bounced his shoulders in a small shrug, responding in clear Tharsian, “I keep no secrets.”

“Seem to be talkin’ my language jes fine now,” Nestor mumbled. Nils shook his head faintly and went back to studying the line of men pacing forward towards their truck.

Jack was staring ahead as well, “Look, Nestor, jes go on back to the sleeper for now, OK? Nils and me got this handled.”

Nestor looked at Jack for a moment, but Jack just stared at the men. Nestor looked back out the window, counting seven prospective combatants, who had now formed a rough semicircle encompassing the front of the truck. The truck’s coms system crackled with static for a moment, then a voice came over in Chrysean. It had the tone of a command. Jack and Nils looked at each other, seeming to psychically communicate for a moment prior to Jack keying the coms and responding. No one moved.

The voice came back over the coms, this time dripping with impatience. One man had detached from the semicircle and was walking with an air of importance towards Jack’s door. Jack and Nils reached down to grab their helmets, Nils placing his gun on the floor between the back of his seat and the sleeper. Nestor took this as a signal to put on his helmet as well. He went back to the sleeper to grab it, and by the time he had it seated, the man outside was pounding on Jack’s driver’s side door. Nestor considered leaning forward into the cab again, to see what was happening, but decided against it when Nils glared back at him in a clear signal to stay where he was.

Jack had turned to face the door, and Nils faced that direction as well, their hands in the air as the truck cab depressurized, and Jack reached tentatively forward to open his door once the air had cycled out. No instructions were broadcast over Nestor’s coms, but clearly Jack had been commanded to disembark, as he leaned forward out of the door and disappeared from view. Nils was still leaning forward as well, hands in the air and body a live wire, his focus on the man on the other side of the opening.

Several moments passed with Nestor staring at Nils, Nils staring out the door, while imperceptibly reaching his hand down towards the hidden gun. Abruptly Nils dove towards the sleeper, a line of holes drawing across the front windows where he’d just been standing, and for a moment Nestor puzzled at what they could be, and what the loud popping noise echoing into the cab from outside must be as well. Then Nils had his gun up, and braced himself against the driver’s seat, using it for support as he fired burst after burst out the open door. He ran out of ammunition and dropped into the passenger seat, kicking his feet to push the shattered window up and out of the cab, while feeding bullets one-by-one from his bandolier into the gun. Gunfire from outside was constant, a rain of windshield shards flying throughout the air all around them. Nestor lay flat on the bed, trying to crane up to see through the gaping hole where the window had just been, yet saw nothing.

Then Nils had his gun reloaded, and he came up over the dash, propping his elbows on the windowsill and leaning against it aggressively to steady himself, firing bursts down over the hood, pivoting for a new target, firing more bursts, and then he was out of ammo again and dropped back down to shield himself while he reloaded. Nestor watched him reloading and became aware that the only noise was the blood pumping in his ears. No more gunfire. He lifted himself up to look out the windshield, but could see only the blockading vehicles. Nils popped back up and swiveled, not firing. He swiveled back, then leaned over and slid like liquid out the open driver’s door. Nestor sat in the sleeper for a while, waiting for some resumption of violence, but only heard the occasional pop of single shots outside. Then nothing. He pushed open the sleeper cab access door and decanted himself, afraid to move too far from the truck lest he need to dive back in to safety.

A body lay on the ground by the open driver’s door, wearing the exosuit of the man who’d been giving commands. There were two more laid before the truck, but of the remaining four attackers, Nestor saw no sign. He crept forward, taking a moment to look down at the dead man by the driver’s door and upon seeing the shattered and bloody faceplate, he wished to examine the body no further. He paused at the front corner of the truck and he looked all around and he still saw no other person, living or dead or crossing the liminal space between.

Nestor detached from the truck and dashed the few meters of road to the first of the barricading vehicles, an off-road rover, avoiding looking at the two motionless bodies as he passed. The door to the rover stood open, and he peered inside and he saw nothing but baggage. He turned and walked to the next rover to his right, this one a larger four-door variety, which had the entire front windshield broken out. One of the missing barricaders lay in the front, his face obliterated, body draped over the steering wheel, spent rifle laying in his lap. Nestor avoided the body and opened the back door of the rover instead and found nothing there.

He stood up and was looking over the roof at the third, most distant of the first row of vehicles, weighing whether he wanted to bother walking over to it, given that all its doors stood open and there was nothing inside from his vantage, when Jack walked up to his side from the second row of larger trucks.

Jack’s voice came over the coms, “They all dealt with, Nestor. And there ain’t no baby here.”

“You checked everwhere?”

Jack stared granite at him, not deigning to respond.

“I thought Nils said this was the one.”

“Guess he was wrong.”

“So, what did you kill these people for?”

Jack looked at Nestor through his helmet faceplate. “Because they’d’ve kilt me first. Kilt all us. Besides, Nils did most the killin’. Yer welcome to try askin’ him what he did it for.”

“Cain’t you jest have told ‘em this was all a big mistake?”

Jack shook his head and looked down and resumed walking, passing by Nestor with no further comment. Nestor peered after him and then followed. He caught Jack up at the truck, and Jack was already up on the first step on the driver’s side and had reached in to pull out sundries and toss them on the dusty blacktop at Nestor’s feet.

“Go on, get back in the sleeper and get whatever you wanna take. We need to be out of here.”

“We leavin’ the truck?”

“Truck’s dead, Nestor. But that big truck over yonder’ll serve us jest fine to get goin’. Don’t look like it took no damage.”

Nestor looked over to the new truck and noted that Nils had materialized next to it and was already tossing a few purloined articles into the cab. His gun seemed to have been replaced with another, smaller weapon of which Nestor could only guess at the provenance. Nestor walked back to the sleeper of Jack’s truck and stepped up and looked in, wondering if there was truly anything left in this world that he’d wish to take with him. If there was anything that he felt was his.

Jack appeared by his leg, tapping it firmly and crackling over the coms, “What you doin’, Nestor? There anything you wanna take or not? We got to get goin’ before someone comes along.”

Almost as if he’d bidden it to happen, a road caravan came upon them from the south, a low bass whirr preceding the huge leading four-car road train as it engine-braked to a stop behind Jack’s former truck. At the noise, Nestor came out of his trance and then raced Jack, who was carrying his few meager possessions in a pair of canvas bags upon his right shoulder, to their new transportation.

By the time they arrived, Nils was already at the wheel, and had backed the truck around in a reversing turn, pointing the nose in their future direction of travel. He merely paused before he began crawling forward, leaving Nestor and Jack no choice but to run alongside before leaping up onto the steps on the passenger side. Nils floored it before both of Nestor’s feet had left the ground, and sped away north along the road, leaving the destruction in their wake for the innocent bystanders to reckon with.