Iron Heart

The wire holding my hair back snapped somewhere around the third rib of the dead harvester. I felt it go, a small ping against my scalp, and then the whole mess of it came loose and swung into my face. I didn't stop. You don't stop when you're wrist-deep in a machine's chest cavity and the sun is dropping behind the eastern ridge and you've got maybe forty minutes of light left to pull anything worth carrying home.

"Rva." Kest's voice came up through the access hatch, tinny and thin. "Rva, I'm hearing something."

"You're hearing the wind."

"I'm hearing engines."

That made me pause. My fingers, slick with old lubricant and something darker that I didn't want to think about, curled around a copper coil the size of my fist. Worth more than everything else in this corpse combined. I tugged it free and slid it into my satchel before I answered him.

"Direction?"

"South. Maybe two klicks out."

I pulled myself up through the hatch and into the open air. The harvester's carcass stretched around me, a whale of rusted metal half-buried in the red dirt, its ribs open to the sky. Kest stood on the ridge of its spine, one hand shading his eyes. He was fourteen and too skinny and he'd followed me out here against my explicit instruction, which meant either he was braver than I gave him credit for or dumber. Probably both.

I climbed up beside him and listened.

He was right. Engines. Deep and rhythmic, the kind that ran on fuel, not the scavenged solar cells my people used. That meant outsiders. That meant trouble, or profit, or both, depending on who was driving.

"Pack it up," I said. "We're leaving."

"But we just got here. You said the harvester had at least three more hours of salvage."

"I said it had three more hours of salvage if nobody else was sniffing around. Somebody's sniffing."

Kest looked at the horizon, then back at me. His face did that thing where he tried to look older than he was, jaw set, eyes narrowed. It didn't work. He still looked like a kid playing at being a man, which is exactly what he was.

"Could be traders," he said.

"Could be raiders."

"Could be traders who want to trade."

I slid down the harvester's side, boots hitting the dirt with a thud that sent up a puff of red dust. "Traders don't come this far east. There's nothing to trade for except scrap, and scrap doesn't move fast enough for them. You know who moves fast? Raiders. You know what raiders want? Everything. Including skinny boys who don't know when to run."

He followed me down, scrambling and sliding, his pack bouncing against his spine. "I'm not a boy."

"You're fourteen."

"That's old enough to make my own decisions."

"Then make the decision to shut up and keep pace."

We moved east, away from the sound, toward the low hills that marked the boundary of our territory. The ground was cracked and dry, the kind of earth that hadn't seen rain in months. It crunched under our boots. In the distance, the ruined skyline of the old city poked up like broken teeth, all twisted metal and shattered glass. I'd been born there. So had my mother, and her mother before her. Three generations of scavengers picking through the bones of a world that died before we were born.

The engines grew louder.

I stopped. Kest almost ran into me. I held up my hand and he went quiet, which was a small miracle.

They came over the ridge to the south, three vehicles, all of them armored, all of them flying the same flag, a red circle with a black slash through it. I knew that flag. Everyone in the eastern territories knew that flag. It belonged to Dorn's crew, and Dorn's crew didn't trade. They took. They burned. They left nothing behind but ash and bodies.

"Down," I hissed, and dragged Kest behind a cluster of rocks.

We lay flat against the dirt, our faces inches from the ground. I could smell the dust, the dry rot of old stone, the faint chemical tang of the approaching engines. My heart was a hammer in my chest. Not from fear. From something else. Something hotter.

Because I knew Dorn. Not personally. But I knew what he'd done to my settlement three winters ago. I knew about the fires, the screams, the way my mother had pushed me into the cellar and told me not to come out no matter what I heard. I knew about the silence that followed. The kind of silence that fills your ears and never leaves.

The vehicles passed within a hundred meters of us. I counted six men in the lead truck, all armed, all wearing that same red and black. One of them was laughing. I could hear it, faint and ugly, carried on the wind. I imagined putting a bullet in his throat. I imagined watching him choke on his own blood.

"Rva." Kest's voice was barely a whisper. "Rva, your hands."

I looked down. My fingers had dug into the dirt so hard they'd drawn blood. I hadn't noticed.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You're not fine."

"I'm fine." I pulled my hands back, wiped them on my pants, left dark smears on the leather. "We wait until they're gone. Then we move."

We waited. The engines faded. The dust settled. The sun dropped below the ridge and the world went gray and cold. Only then did I let myself breathe.

Kest sat up, his face pale under the grime. "What do they want?"

"Same thing they always want."

"Which is?"

I stood, brushed myself off, and started walking. "Everything."

He hurried to catch up. "What are we going to do?"

I didn't answer right away. I was thinking about my mother. I was thinking about the cellar. I was thinking about the way hate sits in your chest like a coal that never stops burning, no matter how much time passes, no matter how many winters bury it under snow and silence.

"We're going to find out where they're going," I said. "And then we're going to make sure they don't get there."

Kest was quiet for a long moment. Then: "That sounds like revenge."

"Does it?"

"Rva."

I stopped. Turned. Looked at him, this skinny boy with his too-big pack and his too-brave eyes. He didn't know what I knew. He hadn't seen what I'd seen. But he was here, and he was mine to protect, and that meant something.

"It's not revenge," I said. "It's maintenance."

He didn't believe me. I could see it in his face. But he followed me anyway, into the dark, toward the hills, toward whatever was waiting. And I let him. Because sometimes the only thing you can do is keep moving, and hope the hate doesn't eat you alive before you find something worth living for.