Chapter 4 The Camp

POV: Phoenix Kade

Dawn finds me before I'm ready for it.

The light creeps in through the gap in my burrow, pale and grey and indifferent, the way dawn always is out here. It doesn't care that I'm hurt. It doesn't care that I'm alone for the first time in years. It just arrives, the same as always, and expects me to do something with it.

I lie still for a moment, taking inventory.

My chest is the worst of it. The mutabeast's claws opened me up in four places, two shallow and two deep, all of them crusted over with dried blood that has glued my rags to my skin overnight. When I try to sit up, the crust cracks and something warm starts seeping again from the deepest one. I press my palm against it and hold it there until it stops.

My left eye is still half swollen shut from the scarred man's fist. The bruises across my ribs have settled in properly overnight, the way bad bruises do, darkening and spreading and making themselves at home. My two bent fingers on my right hand have stiffened up completely. I test them carefully, trying to straighten them, and the pain that shoots up my arm is sharp enough to make my vision white out for a second.

Broken, probably. Or close enough that it doesn't matter.

I use a strip torn from the cleaner part of my rags to bind the two fingers together, pulling the knot tight with my teeth. It's not good work but it's the best I can do. The old man would have done it better. He had a way with injuries, patient and precise, like he'd had a lot of practice at keeping broken things together.

I pick up the metal box and hold it for a moment before tucking it carefully into the deepest corner of the burrow, buried under loose stone where nobody who didn't know to look would find it. I'm not taking it with me. If I don't come back, I don't come back, and the pictures deserve better than to be lost in the Shatterlands with my body.

If I do come back, they'll be here waiting.

I crawl out into the morning.

The ruins look different in daylight. Not safer, nothing out here is ever safe, but more honest. At night the shadows fill in all the broken places and you can almost pretend the structures are whole. In the morning light you see everything clearly: the collapsed walls, the empty window frames, the slow inevitable surrender of everything the First World built to the sand and the wind and the weight of time.

I stand up straight despite the protest from my ribs and look out across the wasteland.

I need food. That's the first and only priority right now. I killed a mutabeast yesterday and lost every gram of it to the scarred man and his crew. My stomach is past the point of growling. It just sits there silent and hollow, past complaining, past demanding, just waiting to see what I'm going to do about it.

The honest answer is that I don't know.

I've been scraping by alone in this section of the ruins for three years, ever since the old man took me in and showed me the best hiding spots and the safest routes. Before that I drifted, moving constantly, never staying anywhere long enough to be found. I know these ruins. I know which sections have been picked clean and which ones still occasionally yield something worth finding. I know where the mutabeasts den and which routes avoid their territory most of the time.

And I know that right now, in the shape I'm in, going back out there alone is close to suicide.

I think about my options for a while, standing in the early morning wind with my bound fingers throbbing and my chest seeping slow and warm through the rag pressed against it. There aren't many options. There's scavenging alone, which might get me killed. There's staying put, which definitely gets me killed, just slower. And there's the camp.

The camp.

I've been avoiding it for two years, since the last time I got close enough to see what it was. Maybe forty scavengers clustered together in the ruins about two kilometers east, sharing warmth and misery in equal measure. Numbers mean some protection from the mutabeasts. Numbers also mean competition for food, and conflict, and the constant threat of someone deciding you're more useful as a resource than as a person.

The scarred man and his crew came from that camp. I'm almost certain of it.

But the scarred man and his crew took my kill and beat me half to death and left me in the ruins, and I'm still here. I survived them once. I survived the mutabeast. I survived fifteen years in the Shatterlands, more or less.

Maybe the camp is worth the risk.

Or maybe I'm just desperate enough that any option sounds better than dying alone in my burrow.

I start walking east.

The two kilometers takes me the better part of an hour in the shape I'm in. I have to stop twice to rest, which I hate, sitting on rubble with my head down and my good hand pressed to my side, waiting for the grey edges to clear from my vision. The sun climbs as I walk, burning off the morning chill and replacing it with the familiar dry heat that turns the ruins into an oven by midday.

I hear the camp before I see it. Voices, low and scattered. A child crying somewhere. The sound of something being dragged across stone. The small constant sounds of people trying to keep themselves alive.

I come around a crumbling wall and there it is.

It's worse than I expected and about what I imagined. Forty people, maybe a few more, crammed into the shell of what might have been a large building once. The roof is mostly gone, open to the sky in three places. People have built rough shelters inside using salvaged material, scraps of metal and canvas and bone, leaning them against the remaining walls to create cramped, lightless spaces to sleep in.

The smell hits me next. Unwashed bodies and old blood and something beneath that, the particular smell of people who have stopped expecting things to get better. I know that smell. I carry it myself.

They see me coming and the reaction is immediate. Eyes track me from a dozen directions. Hands move toward weapons. Bodies shift, calculating, assessing. Is this one a threat? Is this one an opportunity?

I keep my hands visible and my pace steady. Show no fear. The old man drilled that into me. Fear is an invitation out here.

A man steps into my path. He's not the scarred man from last night, but he has the same flat eyes, the same professional stillness. A gatekeeper of sorts. He looks me up and down, taking in the wounds, the bound fingers, the general state of me.

"You're a mess," he says.

"I know."

"You got anything to trade for entry?"

I look at him steadily. "I've got two working hands, more or less, and I know how to fight."

He stares at me for a long moment. Then he steps aside.

"Don't start trouble," he says. "Don't take what isn't yours. Those are the rules."

I almost say something about irony. I don't.

Inside, I find a patch of wall to put my back against and I sit down and watch. That's all I do for a while, just sit and watch and learn the shape of this place. Who defers to whom. Who moves freely and who stays in their corner. Where the food is kept and who guards it and how often the guards change.

The old man taught me that too. Before you act, observe. Before you speak, listen. The Shatterlands will kill you in a hundred ways, but most of them start with someone making a move before they understood the situation.

I'm still watching when the sound starts.

Distant at first, more felt than heard, a deep vibration moving through the ground. Then it grows, building into something mechanical and powerful and completely alien to everything I know about this place.

An engine.

I've heard the word. I've seen pictures of the machines. But I've never heard one in my life, and the sound of it does something strange to me, something that bypasses rational thought entirely. Every head in the camp comes up at once, turning toward the sound the way prey animals turn toward something large moving through tall grass.

I get to my feet.

Whatever is coming, it is coming fast.