I sit up, hand going for my blade, but it’s only Asher, caught up to me finally.
“What happened to Zuly’s?” I ask. His lips are parched and cracked, like the ground I sit on.
“Decided I didn’t want to be vulture food.”
I nod and pass him my waterskin. He drinks greedily.
“Slower,” I warn.
He wipes his mouth on his sleeve and sits beside me. A moment later he takes another small sip, then lies back. “Wake me when you want to move again?”
I nod.
The wild, wary side of me wants to sit watch. But Powder Town is easily twenty clicks behind us. The General’s mines are far to the east, maybe eighty clicks or so, given how much Asher and I traveled after leaving them. There’s nothing around these parts. No one to even keep watch against.
I lie down beside Asher and doze. When there’s still plenty of light left but the worst of the heat has passed, I nudge his shoulder. We walk the rest of the day in silence, passing the water between us and eating as we move.
* * *
It goes on like that through the evening and into the next morning—the summer solstice. We walk when we have the energy and rest when we don’t. Still, I think we might be pushing too hard. I keep seeing Indie and Ma in the heat. Sometimes they’re ahead, urging me to hurry. Other times they’re behind me, on a horse of all things, waving their arms and begging me not to leave.
By midday, these figures are a constant smudge on the horizon to the south, and I start to wonder if maybe they’re not a figment of my imagination. If there is truly someone following us.
“You see that?” I ask Asher.
He stares back the way we came. “Probably one of the Reaper’s soldiers. Confirming that we’re not going to circle around and sneak back in.”
“We’ve been walking long enough that they know we’re not coming back,” I say. “Think it’s a Loyalist?”
“Nah.” He jerks his head toward the sky, which is quiet and sprawling, no birds in sight. I don’t point out that it’s only the General’s Four who use the falcons and that this shadow of ours could still be working for him. “Maybe just another vagrant wandering the wastes,” Asher goes on, “hoping we drop dead so they can strip us of our gear. We keep on, we’ll outpace them. Honestly, they’ll turn back as soon as they realize they don’t have the supplies to keep dogging us.”
I pinch the waterskin, checking its fullness. Half left. “See that outcropping ahead?” I point to a disruption on the horizon, a small bluff surrounded by rocks and boulders that break up the otherwise flat plane. “We should set up an inverted well and rest there. Get more water before we head back out. Maybe even let our friends catch up so we can take them out if they’re trouble.”
“Yeah,” Asher agrees. “Sounds good.”
And with that, we plod on.
I don’t like the quiet between us. It’s awkward, uneasy. Neither of us has apologized since our fight, and I worry that if I try, it will only lead to more yelling.
As we close in on the rocky outcropping, two strange, foreign shapes appear just beyond it. They’re unnaturally straight, like wooden posts, but far too tall. Thin, shadowy wisps hang from them like spider’s threads.
“North Tower?” Asher asks.
I shake my head. “North Tower was closer to the Backbone on the map, and east of the Verdant. Sure looks man-made, though.”
A shiver travels the length of my spine. A man-made structure means people, and out here, in an uncharted section of the wastes, that means people we can’t trust. People who could be Loyalist spies or opportunist trappers like Bain and Cree.
Asher and I glance at each other. I draw my two blades, passing the Old World model to him, and we creep forward, cautious.
The structure gets larger with each step, until we’re rounding the rock outcropping and staring at the strangest construction I’ve ever seen.
The posts are as thick as tree trunks. Ropes and pulleys hang from them, attaching to a thinner, horizontal post that bisects each vertical one. Pale, bunched fabric is cinched here, against the wood. The vertical posts are secured to a wooden wagon that could easily hold a dozen people. The sideboards aren’t tall—maybe knee-high—and the bed has been modified so that it is narrower at the front than at the back. The entire thing sits atop two metal axles salvaged from a rover. One wheel is still the Old World variety, made of some strange foreign material. The other three are wooden.
We scan the area quickly, then move closer.
I walk around the vehicle—I assume it’s a vehicle of some sort, since it has wheels—and stare up at the towering posts. Why would anyone want massive treelike posts aboard their vessel? It makes the wagon needlessly top-heavy.
“Someone must have abandoned it,” Asher says.
I use one of the wheels as a foothold and pull myself up and over the siding. Aside from additional roping and a lever near the front, the wagon is virtually empty. Where is the yoke for hooking up mules? Where are the reins and harnesses? The thing certainly can’t be pulled like a rickshaw.
Asher climbs in and steps beside me, shielding his eyes as he gazes up the posts. Even cinched, the pale cloth flutters slightly, toyed by a breeze we can’t feel in the wagon’s bed.
“What is it?” he asks.
I shake my head. “It makes no sense. It’s like a wagon, but shaped all wrong. And these posts will only make it top-heavy. Whoever built it is an idiot.”
“That idiot is about to shoot you,” a voice announces.
We twist toward it. Nestled against the foot of the outcropping, standing in the crooked doorframe of a ramshackle hut we hadn’t noticed in our first sweep, is a wrinkled old woman. She has a rifle aimed at our heads.
“Now, if you don’t mind,” she says, motioning with the weapon, “get your tired asses off my wind wagon.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“We don’t mean trouble,” Asher says, raising his hands. “Just passing through.”
“That’s a lie,” the woman croaks, squinting at us. “There’s nothing around these parts, so there’s nowhere to be passing through to.”
“Wind wagon, you called it?” I say, thinking about the posts behind us, the giant swaths of fabric that could catch the breeze if uncinched. Like my flags back at Dead River, hung out to warn of incoming storms. “That’s genius.”
“Modeled it after a sailboat,” the woman says.
Zuly’s tanker surfaces in my mind. I can see the resemblance between her hull and this wagon’s bed. The tall posts are another matter.
“Not much use for boats anymore,” Asher says.
“There’s lots about the Old World people have chosen to forget. Doesn’t mean they can’t still serve a purpose,” the woman replies. “Now, what’re you doing here?”
“Like we said, just passing through,” Asher repeats.
“And like I said, there ain’t nowhere past here to pass along to.”
“You can’t believe that,” I say. “You built a wind wagon. Clearly you intend to cross the wastes. Which means you think there’s something out there.”