Oleja took the board and looked it over, assessing Trayde’s plan in her mind. It sounded perfect.
“That will work,” said Oleja. “Uh, thank you.” She went to take the boards from Trayde, then realized she’d have no free hands to assemble them, nor a stationary surface to set them. “Wait, actually—”
“Yes, I’ll hold them.”
Oleja laughed. “Thanks.” She set to work cutting the holes in the side of the wagon—nothing major, and hardly noticeable to eyes that weren’t looking for them.
“What are you working on?” asked Trayde, falling in step alongside her with the boards in her arms.
“The tray design you suggested.”
Trayde glared at her. “Don’t make me hit you with these boards. I meant the hinges you’re making.” Oleja smirked.
“Oh, those? Well, I had some wings once, but I don’t anymore, so I’m building new ones.”
Trayde rolled her eyes. “Fine, don’t tell me.”
Oleja completed her minor modifications to the body of the wagon and then assembled the tray from the boards. When she finished, it held nicely, giving her the perfect place to put tools and other odds and ends: a wider surface, with sides three inches high all around to keep everything from tumbling off with every bump of the wagon. When Trayde’s job was done, she vanished just as quickly as she appeared.
With the sun just past the height of its arc, they caught their first glimpses of ruins ahead, and by mid-afternoon they arrived at the edges of the old town. Oleja tried to imagine it in its prime. Thousands of people bustling about, going about their lives. Kella was right—Oleja struggled to picture so many people and a town that could house them all.
Casmia brought them to a halt just outside the ruins. “We will divide up and sweep the ruins. Raseari, Dirin, you will each go with someone more experienced. Raseari, you’re with Trayde. Dirin, with Hylde and Kella. Onet and Gleathon, you’ll be together. Jeth, you’re with me.” She tossed empty backpacks to each person as she called their name. “We will meet back here when the sun touches the horizon.”
“Wagon modifier team, back together,” said Trayde, clapping a hand on Oleja’s shoulder. Oleja shrugged her off. She had no quarrels with Trayde, but she preferred to explore the ruins alone. It would give her time to gather pieces for a new glider and any other fun new contraptions she could build—preferably of the eclipser-killing variety. She picked a direction and hurried off, joining the rest of the raiders in dispersing.
“What gives?” asked Trayde, hurrying after her. “I held your stuff; what more can a girl do?”
Oleja looked back at her over her shoulder. “Sorry, I was just hoping I’d be able to work alone here.”
“No can do, Casmia keeps us in groups. Less dangerous that way.”
Oleja sighed. “Why? I’m perfectly capable of collecting scrap and hauling it back on my own. Been doing it all my life.”
“And what if you round a corner and walk straight into a pack of those Gila monster mutants? Or a camp of earthborn? None of us can take that stuff on alone.”
“Yeah, well, you haven’t seen me yet. That fight last night—I could have brought the mutants down in seconds if I hadn’t been trying not to put an arrow in any of you. I work best alone.”
Trayde shrugged and put her hands up in mock surrender. “Suit yourself, but I’m not going to get chewed out over it. So, until that sun is sitting pretty on the horizon, you’re stuck with me.”
Oleja trudged on through a lane between two lines of crumbling stone columns. Piled up at the base of one lay a mound of old rusted shards. Parts poked up from beneath the sand. Oleja moved to investigate, kicking up the sand to reveal the treasures hidden below.
The purpose of the contraption now faded to a mystery, but Oleja was more interested in the pieces anyhow. Rust ate away at the parts on top, but as Oleja dug deeper, pushing aside heavily corroded plates that may once have formed the exterior of the thing, she found scrap in better condition. At first, nothing caught her eye. Then, tucked deep below the pile and nestled in a protective layer of sand, she spotted a couple of springs—perfect for her glider.
“None of the stuff is useful anymore. Loads of junk, and not the good kind,” said Trayde, kicking a rock into the pile.
“Not to you, maybe,” said Oleja as she knelt and pulled up the springs. She brushed the surrounding sand aside as she checked for any more.
Trayde shrugged. “If you need those things, be my guest. I’m going to go check out that stuff over there.” She pointed a few dozen feet away to a clearing in a long rectangular pit where scrap metal and other items scattered the ground.
Oleja checked for anything else of use but ended her search with only the springs. She stowed them in her own bag. Trayde said herself that they were useless, so Casmia could not confront her and demand she hand them over, claiming they belonged to the group. They were her hard-earned scraps, and she could make better use of them.
When she joined Trayde in the clearing, she found the other girl lifting the rusted beams and large rectangular cases to search beneath them. Trayde piled the useless scrap in the far corner, the most heavily destroyed section of whatever building once stood on the foundation. Oleja went to the corner opposite, which remained in surprisingly good shape. A piece of the roof still clung to the walls, and below it, a slightly-less rusted case leaned against the wall. Oleja threw it aside. Below it, shards of floor tiles remained intact, scattered with broken bits of glass bottles and another, lighter material that crumbled to dust when she touched it. But her attention quickly turned to a heap of fabric—some sort of banner, fine material despite its tears and stains. It was an old, musty brown in color, with streaks of yellow and light grey. Oleja felt it with one hand, gingerly at first, but the fair condition surprised her. It retained its strength.
“Got anything good over there?” called Trayde over her shoulder. Oleja jumped an inch, startled. In her focus she had forgotten about the other girl.
“A few bottles, mostly broken,” Oleja called back, wadding up the fabric and stuffing it into her bag as quickly and inconspicuously as she could manage. Trayde came over to join her.
“Aw, nice,” she said, lifting a bottle to her eyes and peering through it. “These are still in great condition. Good find!”
In total there were three unbroken bottles. A bit of metal clamped onto the top stoppered each. Rust had eaten a hole straight through one, the contents now long gone, but the other two retained whatever liquid sloshed around inside—barely. When Trayde tested one of the two intact caps, it split easily, spilling the liquid down her arm.
“Save that one, and try to keep the cap from coming off,” she said, indicating the one Oleja held. “Some freak in the next town might want whatever’s in ‘em.” She took a whiff from the open bottle in her hand and choked back a gag. “Now that… that’s fermentation.” She swirled the liquid around in the bottle, then crouched down to pour a small puddle out onto the ground. It was a deep, rich brown color. She looked to Oleja with a strange gleam in her eye.
“If I die, it was in some glorious combat with a nasty mutant vulture. Stab me a few times so I look the part,” she said. And then she took a swig from the bottle.
The following fit of interminable coughing echoed through the ruins with a leveling force. After the initial moments of gagging and spluttering, Trayde burst into laughter. She held the bottle out to Oleja from where she lay sprawled out on the ground.
“Give it a try. This stuff’s… absolutely fantastic.” She punctuated the statement with another fit of coughing.
“Not a chance,” said Oleja as she dumped the remainder into the dirt and stowed the bottle in her looting backpack.
They made their way around for the next few hours, collecting a wide variety of scraps and relics. It was as the sun approached the horizon that Oleja found a pile of long metal beams tucked between the lone standing wall of a ruined building and the cliff face of the hill it borde
red.
Some of the beams were thick—supports for something immense that could withstand excessive pressure, no doubt. Others were slim, less than an inch thick but just as long as their larger counterparts at somewhere around twelve feet long. All of them were in fair condition, with minimal rust save for those on the very top of the pile.
“Anything good back there?” asked Trayde between coughs, which had faded considerably since she first drank from the bottle, but still forced their way up now and again. Her voice had gone hoarse at least an hour ago and showed no signs of getting better anytime soon.
Oleja hefted one of the thinner beams and slid it out past the wall—still incredibly heavy, but nowhere near the weight that she expected of the larger ones. Trayde ran her eyes along the length of it, coughed, and then spoke.
“Good condition, but too heavy for what they’re worth. Probably best to leave ‘em.”
Oleja flipped it around, looked it over, and then slid it back onto the pile. It glided back into place easily. A spark ignited in her mind, and she slid it back out again.
“I have an idea. We need two of these—help me carry them.”
“What? No, are you crazy or something? How do we carry them from the ruins? They won’t fit in the wagon, and you’d be lucky to find someone else who wants to bear them with you for the next, I don’t know, few weeks?”
Oleja shook her head. “We won’t be carrying them. We can use them to turn the wagon into a sled—”
She caught herself before she said “like Honn’s.”
“So it’ll go faster in the sand,” finished Trayde, looking over the beam with renewed interest. “I like it. But no one else is going to buy it. ‘Cause then we’ll all have to walk faster, and no one’ll be happy about that.”
“Could be nice to get where we are going sooner,” suggested Oleja. “We could get out of the desert heat.”
Trayde shrugged. “Sure, whatever. Hand me a beam. We can carry them together over our shoulders.”
They grabbed two of the thinner beams and each took an end. They were heavy for sure, but Oleja managed fine. They took a few breaks on their way back to the wagon so Trayde could rest and switch shoulders, as she wasn’t as strong as Oleja, but they made it back just after the sun reached the horizon. They dropped the beams alongside the wagon while the others stood clustered up off to the side discussing something.
“All right,” said Oleja to Trayde. “I’ll start unloading the wagon. We can pile stuff over there. You can unhitch the horses; I’ll need to flip the wagon up on its side, and that sounds like a very unfriendly position for horses. I’m also going to need your help getting the water drum out of the back, that thing probably weighs a ton.”
“Sounds good,” said Trayde, and went to the horses. Oleja moved around to the back of the wagon and climbed inside.
Dim light filtered in through the canvas covering, even less than usual under the dying light of day. She surveyed the cargo. Shelves lined with boxes, their tents and other supplies piled up down the middle—Oleja took to moving the supplies from the center first. She emerged with armful after armful, piling the wagon’s contents on a flat spot of ground off to the side. When she emerged with her third or fourth trip of stuff, Casmia stomped over.
“Raseari! What is this? Did I tell you to make camp?”
Trayde came around the side when she heard Casmia. Oleja paused at the back of the wagon, a tall stack of blankets in hand.
“I’m not setting up camp, I’m making some modifications to the wagon,” said Oleja.
“And when did I tell you to do that?”
“You didn’t, it was my idea.”
Casmia put her hands on her hips and tried to stare Oleja down, but any attempts at intimidation were lost to the fact that Oleja, standing in the wagon, loomed several feet taller than Casmia. When she saw the futility of her efforts, she tried a different approach.
“What sort of ‘modifications’ are we making here?”
Oleja pointed down to the metal beams. “I’m going to remove the wheels and use those to turn it into a sled. It will increase our speed in the sand and also keep the wagon sturdier so it bounces less.”
“There is no need to dismantle my wagon for the sake of a slight speed boost. We are ahead of schedule as it is.”
“But we could be going faster,” countered Oleja. “You could get out of the desert heat.”
“Everyone will have to walk faster to keep up. It will exhaust us all. My answer is no.”
“But it will ease the burden on the horses. You’re sacrificing the increase in speed for an easier day. You can walk faster, or you can walk longer. They cancel out.”
Casmia narrowed her eyes. “Don’t talk down to me like I don’t understand the specifics of our travel. You have an awful lot of nerve coming in here and speaking to me that way, you know that? What makes our speed so important?”
That was an answer Oleja did not wish to disclose.
“I have your best interest in mind,” said Oleja. It could be considered true in some regard—if Honn caught up with them, he could very well decide to kill them all.
“Get out of my wagon,” hissed Casmia, and grabbed Oleja by the wrist. Her tug contained nowhere near enough force to bring Oleja down to the ground. Oleja took her wrist back and hopped to the ground of her own volition.
“We need these modifications,” said Oleja, her voice lower now that she stood closer to Casmia. She was getting tired of arguing. Her goal was to save time, not waste it. Every minute lost brought Honn a minute closer.
“We do not, and you will not make them,” said Casmia, her voice lowering to match Oleja’s. A stern calmness resonated through her words.
“Listen to me,” started Oleja, regretting the words on her tongue before she said them. “An ecli—. An earthborn soldier hunts Pahlo and me. He is following our trail and will attack if he catches up. Speed is our best measure to counter his advance.”
Casmia retained her composure for a moment, but it slipped, slowly, until anger and fear mingled on her face. “And why are you giving me this information now?”
Oleja paused. What could she say? She wouldn’t admit that she had kept it to herself in order to hide what was undoubtedly a failure—so many failures, all wrapped up into one problem: Honn, pursuing her as far as she could go. She said nothing.
Casmia pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “All right. Do what you must. But we leave at dawn, and we will have words about this incident.” She stormed off. Oleja turned to where Trayde still stood, watching the conflict unfold.
“I don’t know what you said to convince her,” she said, “but just for the record, this is my wagon, just like they’re my horses. And I say go ahead with these changes—especially after that tantrum.”
Oleja rolled her eyes. “Unnecessary, truly. I’m only trying to help. But thanks.”
With Trayde’s help, Oleja unloaded the wagon and got it up on its side. The other raiders and Pahlo cycled over in waves, directing curious questions at the pair. After some quick explanation from Oleja, they all seemed to be on board, contrary to the expectations of Trayde and Casmia. Wulshe and Jeth offered some help holding the beams up while Oleja fastened them into place, and Kella and Pahlo sat for a while and kept her company while she worked.
Eventually, the raiders filed off to their tents. Oleja continued her work long into the night. She offered to take the first watch shift, seeing as she had no choice but to stay awake anyway, but even after the time came to wake Onet for his shift she continued working, letting him sleep while he could.
The time she wasted trying to convince Casmia that the sled modifications would be worthwhile replayed in her mind as she worked. As long as she completed the work by morning, the time it took didn’t matter—they made camp there for the night and had no intentions of going any further that evening regardless of Oleja’s plans. Still, she should not have had to waste the precious minutes. She knew what she
was doing; she was plenty capable of making things more efficient. If she had to convince Casmia of her plans every time she formed one, she would soon waste away her years on arguments. The bickering reminded her of precisely why she couldn’t bring the raiders—or anyone else—when she went to save her people. Other people got in the way.
She worked alone.
Chapter Eleven
As it turned out, Oleja knew exactly what she was doing; she was right, and Casmia was wrong.
The new wagon-sled glided over the sandy terrain with ease. On rockier parts it slowed a bit, but overall their speed increased by an impressive degree. The horses no longer seemed to struggle so terribly each time they hit a bump or rut in which the wagon wheels would have stuck. Their hooves easily found purchase on the ground and never hit a patch where they slipped in the sand, trying to pull their cargo along behind them. Using their conserved energy, Trayde guided the horses to a trot, and then it became a matter of matching the horses’ speed to the capabilities of those on foot, no longer the other way around. To Oleja, it felt well worth the exhaustion she faced after getting so little sleep the night before.
The raiders—minus Casmia—admired the new wagon and commended Oleja for her work, impressed at how much faster it moved. Oleja made sure to thank them loud enough that Casmia could hear.
They turned their course southwest again as they set out for the day’s walk. Casmia told the party that their next destination was something unlike anything any of them had ever seen, but gave no further details. Excited mutterings aplenty flowed through the group during their morning walk as they theorized what this could mean, but even more rousing news commanded the discussion. Beyond their mystery destination, further west amongst some “mountains,” there was a town—a living town—which, in time, they would visit. Casmia gave no estimate of when they’d reach it, just that it would be after they combed the desert and looted it dry. As far as Oleja was concerned, the other raiders should just make for the town if they wanted to. No need to follow Casmia’s orders if they had their own, preferred objective.
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