Chapter 6 The Volunteer

POV: Phoenix Kade

I think about the old man.

Not strategically. Not in the way you think about something when you're making a decision. Just suddenly, completely, the way he arrived in my head sometimes without permission. His voice, dry and certain. The way he held those pictures up to the light. The way he looked at me after I told him I wanted to see the world, all of it, even if it killed me.

He never told me I was wrong.

I'm running before the thought finishes forming.

My legs are already half-dead and my chest is screaming and my bound fingers send a white bolt of pain up my arm when my arms pump, but none of that matters because I'm moving and my voice comes out loud and clear and steady in a way I didn't plan and couldn't have faked.

"I'll go!"

The sound of laughter hits me like a wall.

It starts with the riders, that hard, genuine laughter that comes when something is genuinely surprising, not mean yet, just shocked. One of them nearly tips off his bird, grabbing the neck to steady himself, shoulders shaking. Then it spreads to the edges of the crowd, nervous laughter, the kind that comes from relief at not being the one who just did the stupid thing.

I stop in front of Slyfox and I look up at him.

He's even bigger up close. The exoskeleton armor catches the morning light, the articulated segments shifting slightly as he breathes, and the two black pistols at his belt are right at my eye level. He looks down at me the way you look at something unexpected in your food, not angry, just trying to figure out what it is and whether it's going to be a problem.

My face is a mess. I know that. The swollen eye, the claw marks, the bruises from the scarred man's crew, all of it fresh enough to still be vivid. I probably look like I've already lost one fight today, which is accurate, and like I have absolutely no business volunteering for another, which is also accurate.

He stares at me for a long moment.

"Can you even lift our fucking weapons?" His voice is flat. Not cruel, just matter-of-fact. "Just fuck off."

"I want to go fight the sweepers."

I hold his eyes and I don't look away. The old man taught me that too. When someone bigger than you is deciding what to do with you, the worst thing you can show them is that you've already decided they get to make that choice.

"If I can survive the fight," I say, "you need to fulfill your promise and take me away from this place."

Something shifts in his expression. Small, almost invisible. He takes a slow drag of his cigar and the smoke curls between us.

"Do you really want to leave that much?" His voice has changed slightly, the dismissal not entirely gone but something else moving in underneath it. "Staying alive matters more than anything else."

"I want to be a digger," I tell him.

The words come out steadier than I feel. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in the claw wounds on my chest, each beat a fresh pull against the crusted-over cuts. My legs are shaking, but not visibly, I think, or at least I'm hoping not visibly.

"I don't want to be hungry anymore," I say. "And I don't want to be taken advantage of by anyone any longer."

For a moment nobody says anything.

Then the rider with the gear-grafted shoulder lets out a bark of laughter.

"Staying alive in a crazy era like this one ain't easy," he calls out, his bird shifting under him, responding to his amusement. "Living with honor and dignity is even harder. You think you'll never go hungry again once you become a digger? You think nobody will ever take advantage of you again? What a joke!"

More laughter from the other riders. The one with the blade-arm shakes his head like he can't believe what he's watching. From the crowd behind me I can hear it too, that nervous, relieved laughter of people watching someone else be humiliated so they don't have to be.

I don't turn around. I keep my eyes on Slyfox.

He's not laughing.

He's looking at me with those small dark eyes, the cigar held loosely between two fingers, smoke rising in a thin straight line in the still morning air. He looks at my face, at my bound fingers, at the dark stain spreading slowly through the rag pressed against my chest.

He looks at the way I'm standing.

The laughter from the riders dies down. The crowd settles. The silence stretches long enough to become uncomfortable, long enough that even the rider with the gear-arm stops grinning and starts watching Slyfox with the attention of someone waiting for a cue.

Slyfox takes one more drag of his cigar. Then he slaps himself on the forehead with his palm, a slow deliberate motion, and mutters something under his breath that I don't quite catch.

"Fuck me," he says finally, to nobody in particular.

He looks at me again.

"Fine. I'll give you one chance. If we wipe out the sweepers and you make it out alive, I'll give you a chance to join us. The Tartarus mercenaries."

The name lands differently than Slyfox's name did. Tartarus mercenaries. Something shifts in the camp behind me, a different quality of silence, older and more serious.

"You seriously letting him in?" The gear-arm rider's voice has lost its laughter completely now. "He's just a fucking scav."

Slyfox turns and looks at him.

"Shut your fucking mouth," he says, pleasantly. "You aren't exactly a fucking noble either. I'm the fucking boss here. What I say goes."

He fires another round into the air without looking up, the motion casual and practiced, and the crack of it silences everything.

He surveys the crowd over my head, and his voice drops back into that conversational, carrying tone he's been using all morning.

"Even a brat like him has the balls to fight. What are the rest of you afraid of? If you go fight the sweepers, I'll give you each two pieces of bread and a bottle of water."

He pauses.

"If you don't go, I'll let you have a taste of gunpowder."

That does it. Food wins out over fear, the way it always does out here. The calculation shifts the moment bread and water enter the equation, and suddenly hands are going up, voices rising again, the crowd surging forward with a new and different energy. The hollow-eyed man. The woman with the child, though she pushes the child back firmly and steps forward alone. Even the old stranger near the wall opens his eyes and gets slowly to his feet.

I watch them come forward and I feel something I don't entirely expect. Not contempt. I understand them completely. I am them, or I was this morning, standing outside the camp deciding whether to come in. Need makes animals of everyone eventually. The old man wasn't wrong about that. He just thought it could be held off longer than it usually can.

Slyfox watches his squad assemble with the practiced eye of someone counting inventory. He doesn't look at me again, but when he turns back to his vehicle and starts issuing instructions to the riders, he says over his shoulder:

"You there. Kid. Get in the car with me."