fancy swears here …,” Lemon whispered.
From the sounds she heard in the ruins, she guessed the rest of the scavver crew were suffering the same fate as their boss. Lemon heard strangled cries, a few choking prayers. And then?
Nothing but the hymn of tiny wings.
She twisted to look at the woman sitting behind her, her belly cold with fear. Her captor’s face was impassive, dark skin filmed with dust. This close, Lemon could see her dreadlocks weren’t hair at all, but the same kind of segmented spines as the horsething’s mane and tail. Her eyes glittered gold in the scorching light.
“It’s a good thing I already puked this morning,” Lemon said.
That golden stare flickered to her own.
“Lemonfresh has nothing to fear from us.”
“Ooookay?” Lemon said. “Having trouble believing that one, but let’s just run with it for now. Since we’re being all chummy and whatnot, you got a name? You BioMaas folks are usually called what you do, right? I mean, I could just call you Terrorlady or the Doominator, both of those seem to fit pretty good. Am I talking too much? I tend to talk too much when I’m nervous, it’s kind of a reflex thing, I’m trying to get better at it but honestly you have a chest full of killer bees and I think I just felt one land on my neck, so if—”
“We are Hunter,” the woman said. “She can call us Hunter.”
“Right,” Lemon nodded. “Of course you are. Pleased to meet you, Hunter.”
“No, Lemonfresh. Pleasure is ours.”
“… Oh yeah? How you figure that?”
“Look around.”
Fearing some kind of grift, Lemon kept her stare fixed on her captor.
“Look,” Hunter insisted. “Look hard. Then tell us what she sees.”
The girl risked a glance at the wreckage of the old town. The empty shells and dead cars. The sun was burning white, bleaching everything beneath it whiter still. The men who’d wanted to make them corpses had been made corpses themselves. Everyone scrapping and killing over trash that people would’ve just thrown away back in the day. The wind was a whisper, the only thing growing was a thin desert weed, spindly roots digging into the shattered concrete and slowly prying it apart.
In a decade or two, all that would be left of this place was rubble.
“I dunno,” Lemon finally shrugged. “The world?”
“Yes,” Hunter nodded. “And Lemonfresh is the flood that will drown it. The storm that will wash all of it away.”
Hunter smiled, all the way to her eyeteeth.
“Lemonfresh is going to change everything.”
“I don’t feel so fizzy.”
They’d been riding for the best part of the day, and the sun was hot enough to give an aspirin a headache. Hunter had reached into her saddlebags, given Lem a spare cloak, the same rusty desert red as her own. Lemon pulled up the hood to shield her from the scorch, but that only made her sweat buckets and feel sicker.
She’d been tasting off-color since that morning, talking true, but she figured it was just the leftovers from the bad meat, the sad from seeing Grandpa die, leaving Eve behind. Her heart still hurt when she thought on it all, and she didn’t have much else to do. Feeling miserable and all the way helpless. But as the day ground on, the sickness in her belly had roiled, and finally, as they neared sundown, come bubbling up out of her mouth again.
There wasn’t much to puke—just the water she’d been sipping from an odd, leathery flask in Hunter’s saddlebags. But she kept heaving long after her insides were outside, holding on to her belly and wincing in pain.
“I gotta sit …,” she begged. “I gotta sit still for a minute …”
Hunter slowed the horsething’s pace, brought it to a gentle stop. Sliding off the strange beast’s back, she lifted Lemon down onto dry, cracked earth. They’d cleared the maze of gullies a few hours back, and now they were deep into a stretch of blinding salt flats. The ground was like rock beneath her feet. The glare was blinding. If Lemon squinted to the east, past the broken foothills, she could make out the irradiated edge of the Glass.
Thinking of Evie in that tower.
Thinking of the cardboard box she’d been found in as a kid.
Thinking she’d been abandoned all over again.
She thumped down on her hind parts in the dust, toying with the silver five-leafed clover around her neck and feeling sick all the way to her bones. Watching as Hunter unclasped her strange organic armor, peeled it back to expose her honeycombed throat beneath. The woman hummed an off-key song that reminded Lemon of the wind when it stormed in Zona Bay. A dozen bumblebees crawled out from Hunter’s skin, took to the wing, up to the sky and back off to the north.
“That …,” Lemon whispered, “is the freshest strange I’ve ever seen.”
“They will watch,” the woman said.
“For what?”
“Pursuit.”
“You mean my friends.”
“And those not.”
The woman massaged the translucent resin that bound Lemon’s wrists, and the bonds came away like soft, warm putty. Stashing the resin in her cloak, she handed Lemon the leathery water flask, nodded gently.
“Drink,” she urged. “Long road to CityHive.”
Hunter turned to the salt flats behind, slung her strange long-barreled rifle off her back. The weapon was pale, oddly organic, looking like it was made out of a collection of old fish bones. Hunter held it to her shoulder, peered down the long telescopic scope at the horizon. Her back was turned, and Lemon was keenly aware of the cutter in her belt, drawing out the blade with a slow, steady hand.
Fortunately, Lem was also mindful of the dozen ultra-poisonous-if-sorta-cute-and-fuzzy killer bees flying in lazy circles around her captor’s head. And deciding that getting ghosted by bugs was a less than fizzy way to cash her chips, the girl kept the blade hidden in her palm.
Lemon had grown up hard in Dregs. She prided herself on knowing bad news when she saw it. And though Hunter was all the wrong sort of trouble for the wrong sort of people, Lemon didn’t sense any hostility from the woman directed at her. If anything, she seemed … protective? The way she spoke, the way she wrapped an arm around Lemon’s waist as they rode. Standing close and guarding her like a keepsake.
Whatever BioMaas wanted Lemon for, they obviously wanted her alive. But the girl sure as hells wasn’t happy about getting snaffled from her friends.
