Chapter 9 : The Canyon Approach
Dawn broke over a landscape of rust and silence.
The sandstorm had deposited us in a stretch of desert I didn't recognize from the movie—flat, featureless, the kind of terrain that could hide an army or swallow a convoy without a trace. Furiosa had pushed through the night, driving until the Rig's fuel line cracked and forced a stop.
Now we sat in the morning shadow of a canyon entrance, waiting for repairs that would determine whether we lived or died.
I dropped from the platform and walked the Rig's perimeter, cataloguing damage. The Armor wanted to feed—it always wanted to feed—but I kept it controlled, restricted to absorbing loose rust and flaked metal rather than anything structural. The symbiote had grown denser since the storm, its reserves at their highest point since my arrival in this world. The feeding had been good. The headache from the failed Network connection was finally fading.
Toast was already under the chassis when I circled back to the fuel line.
She'd stripped to a tank top against the rising heat, her dark skin slick with sweat and grease, a wrench in one hand and a strip of salvaged rubber in the other. The cracked line was bad—a split that would have leaked the Rig dry within fifty kilometers if left untreated.
"Need help?"
She didn't look up. "You know engines?"
"Some." The understatement of several lifetimes. I'd designed engine components for three years before the factory accident that killed me. Transmigration hadn't erased the knowledge—if anything, it had made my hands steadier, my eye for mechanical problems sharper.
I slid under the chassis beside her.
The crack was worse than I'd thought. Not just the rubber line—the metal coupling beneath it had fractured, probably from the Buzzard impacts or the storm's punishment. The patch Toast was attempting would fail within hours.
"That won't hold." I pointed at the fractured coupling. "See the stress lines? The rubber's not the problem."
Toast paused. Her eyes tracked from my pointing finger to the fracture to my face. "You can see stress fractures in dim light from two feet away?"
"I've worked with metal." Not a lie. Just not the whole truth.
Her expression didn't change, but something shifted behind her eyes. She was adding this to her list—the list of things about me that didn't add up.
"What do you suggest?"
I pulled a belt from my waist—salvaged from the War Boy vehicle I'd ridden before the Buzzard attack—and began unfastening its buckle. The metal was low-grade but solid. With some reshaping...
"The coupling's shot, but we can bypass it. Use the buckle as a compression sleeve around the crack, seal the gap with rubber stripped from the old line, then reinforce with this." I pulled a length of wire from my pocket—scavenged during my walk around the Rig. "Three-point binding. Won't be pretty, but it'll hold until you can do proper repairs."
Toast watched me work.
I could feel her attention like a physical weight, tracking every movement of my hands. The speed with which I identified problems. The confidence of my improvised solutions. The way I handled tools like extensions of my own body.
An engineer. That's what she was seeing. Someone with training that didn't exist in the Wasteland.
Should have played it dumber, I thought. Should have let her struggle.
But the Rig needed repairs, and without repairs everyone died. My cover wasn't worth their lives.
The bypass took fifteen minutes. When I finished, I slid out from under the chassis and found Furiosa standing three meters away.
Her mechanical arm hung at her side—the same arm I'd noticed in the movie, a prosthetic marvel of Wasteland engineering. But something was wrong with it now. The fingers were twitching, clenching and unclenching in small spasms that didn't match any intention I could read on her face.
She noticed me noticing. Her jaw tightened.
"The fuel line?" Her voice was flat, controlled.
"Fixed. Should hold another five hundred kilometers, maybe more if you baby the throttle."
"And that?" She nodded at my forearms, where the Armor's gray-silver sheen was visible in the morning light. "Your 'salvaged armor'?"
I didn't answer.
Furiosa took a step closer. Her arm's spasms intensified—fingers curling, servos whining with mechanical stress. When she was two meters away, the twitching became violent enough to shake her whole limb.
She stopped. Stepped back. The spasms faded.
We stared at each other across the three meters of sand that her arm apparently needed to function properly.
"Your skin and her arm don't like each other," a voice said from the Rig's platform.
The Dag. She sat cross-legged on the tanker's edge, her pregnant belly resting against her knees, her pale eyes fixed on the space between Furiosa and me with an expression I couldn't read.
"I noticed that," Furiosa said. She didn't look away from me. "What are you?"
"A survivor."
"Everyone in the Wasteland is a survivor. That's not an answer."
Toast emerged from under the chassis, wiping grease from her hands. She still had the flattened bullet—I could see its outline in her pocket, the one that should have punched through my chest during yesterday's firefight.
"The spike that hit him during the Buzzard attack," Toast said. "It should have killed him. Flattened against his chest like it hit plate steel."
"Armor," I repeated. "Salvaged—"
"There's no armor that thin that stops a strike at that velocity." Toast pulled the flattened bullet from her pocket and held it up. "This is from one of the stragglers this morning. I watched it hit him. Watched the impact flatten against his skin. Skin, not armor."
Furiosa's eyes dropped to my forearms. To the gray-silver sheen that I'd stopped trying to hide.
"What. Are. You."
The question hung in the air. Behind Furiosa, I could see the Rig's other occupants gathering—Capable with Nux leaning on her shoulder, Cheedo peering from the compartment's shadows, Toast with her evidence clutched in one hand.
I could lie. Deflect. Give them half-truths and misdirections until they either accepted me or threw me off the Rig.
Or I could offer something real.
"I don't know." The truth, as far as it went. "Something happened to me. Before the Citadel. This—" I held up my arm, let the Armor shimmer in the morning light "—grew on me. Through me. I can't take it off. It eats metal. Protects me. I don't understand how it works."
Furiosa's arm twitched again, responding to my proximity.
"And that?" She gestured at her spasming limb.
"I don't know that either. Maybe it... senses something similar? Reacts to it?" I was guessing, but the guess felt right. The Armor was alive in some way I didn't fully understand. Furiosa's prosthetic was mechanical, but in a world where radiation twisted flesh and scrap became salvation, the line between living and machine was blurrier than I wanted to admit.
The sealed door in the Citadel's depths flashed through my memory. The Armor's terror. The hum of something old and hungry waiting behind welded metal.
Same, the Armor had said. Different. Older. Stronger.
Whatever had given me this power, I wasn't the first. And whatever else was out there, it scared my symbiote enough to override my own intentions.
Furiosa studied me for a long moment. Her arm had settled into a low tremor, manageable now that she'd increased the distance between us.
"Can you fight?"
"Yes."
"Can you fix things?"
"Yes."
"Will you betray us to Joe?"
I thought of the Citadel's shadows. The blood bag ward. Max on his rack. The dying man who'd asked me what happened when the Armor ran out of fuel.
"No."
Furiosa held my gaze for five seconds that felt like five hours. Then she turned and walked toward the cab.
"The canyon's two kilometers ahead. Rock Riders control it—they'll let us through for a price, or they'll try to take what we're carrying. Either way, we need to be ready."
She climbed into the driver's seat without looking back.
Toast stayed. The Dag stayed. Capable stayed, with Nux still leaning against her like she was the only solid thing in a world gone liquid.
"She didn't answer your question," Toast said to me. "Whether she trusts you."
"I noticed."
"She doesn't trust anyone. That's how she's survived this long." Toast's eyes dropped to the flattened bullet in her hand. "But she's curious. And in the Wasteland, curious means you get to keep breathing until she figures you out."
She pocketed the bullet and climbed onto the Rig's platform.
The Dag watched me from her perch, one hand resting on her pregnant belly.
"The metal on your skin," she said quietly. "It's alive."
"Yes."
"So was her arm, before Joe's doctors rebuilt it. Before they cut away the parts that didn't serve him." Her pale eyes held mine. "Be careful which parts of yourself you let them see. Not everyone who looks is looking to understand."
She retreated into the Rig's interior before I could respond.
The canyon walls rose ahead, narrow and treacherous, and on the rim I could see smoke rising. Signal fires. The Rock Riders knew we were coming.
I climbed onto the rear platform and found a position where I could watch both the road ahead and the Rig's occupants behind me.
Furiosa had the wheel. Toast had her questions. The Dag had her observations. And somewhere in the narrow canyon ahead, an ambush waited that I remembered from a movie I'd watched in another life.
The Rock Riders would demand a toll. Furiosa would negotiate. Things would go wrong—they always went wrong—and people would die unless I found a way to tip the scales.
Joe's pursuit would regroup eventually. His kill teams were still racing toward the Green Place. And on the horizon behind us, dust clouds marked the survivors of the sandstorm pulling themselves together for another chase.
The Armor pressed against my ribs, dense with storm-fed reserves, ready for whatever came next.
Toast sat in the passenger seat, turning the flattened bullet between her fingers like a puzzle she was determined to solve.
I watched the signal fires burn on the canyon rim and started planning how to survive the next hour.
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