Dawn trickled gray in the broken overpass, ash in the air as snow, which had forgotten how to be white. At the point where the concrete had ended, and nothing had begun, Malik Ren hung by the edge of the topknot of his head, in the wind which smelled of rust and of old burning. Three of them, medicine, water and twelve refugee children crowded together in the first, second, and third trucks, each truck huddling like injured animals medicine like their eyes too old to have young faces.
Toward the distance was smearing smoke. Not cooking fires. Engines.
Scouts of Jaro had discovered them.
Malik didn't run. In his scripture running was no longer in. He was moving towards the sound, the chains unwinding off his forearms in soft metal sighs, the scars on his collarbones, starting to bleed Ruin into the old wounds, as a rosary of pain.
The first scout dashed about a scraped girder, screaming, scrap bike rattling, chain swinging in a broad circle that was calculated to take off Malik's head at the neck. The body of Malik was eloquent and it needed not to be bothered by the mind. Loose Bolt Step a micro-twitch, with movements of the weight that the finger is a width away and the chain kissed his ear. He was within the guard of the scout, already dashing on his palm.
Span Breaker Palm.
He hit his heel in the solar plexus and his sound was like the snapping of dry kindling. Ribs cracked inward. The mouth of the scout opened and no sound came out save the blood and a wet gurgle possibly resembling the prayer. He collapsed like a cheap scaffold, and struck his face to the asphalt, already soaked in himself.
The second scout had no mind to learn. They never learned. and he entered with a rusted pipe, and was screaming something about the glory of Jaro. Malik grabbed the pipe on his forearm chains banging on the shoulder up to the bone, old bone grinding at scar tissue and being pulled. One idiotic heartbeat, and the scout jumped off his bike, then the elbow of Malik dropped.
Dead Drop Elbow.
Like wet pottery the collarbone broke. The scout hit the ground and didn't get up. Didn't breathe right neither. Malik didn't check.
The third scout had started to carry on. Brainy of the three, that was all it was, as he would go to the grave with his face against his party. The chain of Malik was thrown off, and he caught an ankle and dragged. The rest were done by the asphalt. When Malik pulled the chain back in the screaming was over, and the road bore a new red line.
Silence returned. The ash continued to fall.
Jun, in the van that was in the lead, rubbed a rag over his nose. Dark, hot blood saturated the tatty cloth. He had known the ambush, three minutes earlier, by the ambush-sound vibrating in the first engine, singing in his own bones, through the empty spaces. He didn't smile. Didn't cry either. He had only time to look into the eyes of Malik who looked back and gave them a nod. I heard them. You killed them. We keep moving.
At eleven years old and the language of survival, she speaks it.
Doctor Nari Vale did not raise her Krizaneyey, lying in her truck bed, over the injured guard. The fingers were as steady as the work of sewing men up again in the middle of a bullet-shower and a runaway flame. The arm of this guard, happened to be lying open on the night before to the blade of a bone-raider, and the infection was already making its headway. Rub rub rub, she worked Ruin with her fingertips, Triage Hand prodding to stay the bleeding, hours not fitting him, but forced upon him, as she did not--could not--have the wasteland make decision who should die to-day.
Malik eventually got on top of the truck bed and chains were already snaked around his forearms in a serpent-like manner that took them back into their nest. The new blood on his jacket caught the eye of Nari. Not his. Mostly.
You are bleeding, said she.
"Not mine."
"It will be yours one day.
It was her manner, she said everything, big, dry, a scalpel clothed in weariness. Malik didn't argue. That was too much to him to respect her. With him, as she saw through infected wounds, she saw.
Spat out the window of the second truck, Old Jina, using his tongue as a wad of rust colored phlegm. It fell upon a scout who was dead and smoldered a little. As usual her Rust Lung was being stubborn before a fight, as its body was being informed that in a few moments it would be working on entropy.
Prety boy carryin on with his demonstrations? she called, in a gravelly voice. Have no road wait corpses.
She turned on the engine. The procession pawed the ground forwards and the ground was littered with debris and a finger now and then. Nobody looked back. Viewing backward was how you came to a landscape.
They were across a broken span of some of the old highways which had dissolved to be but a half-corruption of an overpass, rebar sticking out as though they were the ribs of a long dead thing. They had been swallowed by the shadow awhile and in the darkness Jun stiffened.
His eyes were turned back. White. Empty. Both nostrils, like a turn of the hot blood, spurted out blood and stained his lips crimson.
Shrinking off were the rest of the children. They had witnessed this previously. It could not have been anything good.
Jun's mouth opened. The voice, which emerged was thin, remote, as a radio-signal of a long-lost station.
He is smiling, he is already on the bridge.
The head of Malik whipped up.
Forty feet high, on a support beam as a throne, sat a figure, cross legged. One leg dangled lazily over the edge. A respirator slipped loosely on his neck which was broken. There was an opening in his open coat upon which fasciculated rib girder scars. His amber eyes caught the sickly dawn and kept it as a secret.
Toma, Broken Span.
He waved. Slow. Friendly. As though they were old friends who had lost each other by the side of the road.
his voice whimpered, borne away by the poisonous wind, sweet and pleasant and so very wrong.
"Miss me, brother?"