Chapter 7 Out of the Ruins

POV: Phoenix Kade

Someone grabs my arm before I can move toward the vehicle myself.

A rider, not the gear-arm one, a younger one with quick hands and eyes that have already moved on to the next task before they finish the current one. He steers me toward the passenger side with the impersonal efficiency of someone handling equipment rather than a person, pulls the door open, and shoves me inside before I've fully processed what's happening.

The inside of the vehicle is like nothing I've ever experienced.

The smell hits first: machine oil and metal and old smoke and something chemical underneath that I have no name for, sharp and synthetic. It coats the back of my throat. The seat I've been shoved into is cracked leather over something that might have been padding once and is now mostly just the memory of padding, hard and uneven, but I grip the edges of it with both hands and stare through the cracked windscreen at the camp outside.

The dashboard in front of me is a chaos of salvaged parts, gauges and switches and wires running in every direction, some of them clearly functional and some of them clearly decorative and no way to tell which is which. There are scratches carved into the metal beside the steering column, tallies of something, dozens of them, and I decide not to think too hard about what they're counting.

Slyfox hauls himself into the driver's seat and the whole vehicle sinks several centimeters under his weight. He pulls the door shut with a crash that shakes the frame, jams the cigar between his teeth, and does something with his hands on the controls that I can't follow.

The engine roars to life.

The sound at this range is physical. It hits me in the chest, in the stomach, in the bones, a deep mechanical bellow that vibrates the seat beneath me and the door panel beside me and seems to vibrate the air itself. My heart lurches sideways. Every instinct I have screams that something this loud is dangerous and I should be running away from it.

I grip the door handle and I don't run.

Behind us, through the cracked glass, I can see the riders loading scavengers onto the backs of their birds, three or four to a bird, the volunteers clinging to each other and to whatever they can reach. More scavengers pile into the back of the vehicle, the suspension groaning with the added weight, their voices rising in frightened murmurs that I can barely hear over the engine.

Slyfox looks over at me. Takes in the white-knuckled grip on the door handle.

He doesn't say anything. He faces forward.

Then he pushes something and we move.

The acceleration is like being hit. The vehicle surges forward and I slam back into the seat, all the breath leaving my body at once, my wounds screaming as the impact jars them. The ruins start moving past the windows faster than anything I've ever seen, stone and shadow and sand blurring into streaks.

I've never gone this fast.

I've never gone any speed other than walking or running. The fastest I've ever moved under my own power is flat-out sprinting away from mutabeasts, which is fast enough when your life depends on it but nothing, nothing like this. The vehicle hits a ridge of broken stone and goes airborne for a moment, all four wheels off the ground, and my stomach drops straight through the floor, and then we land with a crash that rattles every component of my body simultaneously.

No seatbelts. I find this out when the landing nearly throws me into the dashboard. I get both hands braced against it and stay in the seat through what I later understand to be sheer luck and the cramped dimensions of the cab.

Slyfox doesn't react. He drives like the vehicle is an extension of his body, making small adjustments with hands and feet that I can't predict or follow, steering around obstacles I don't see until we're already past them. The cigar stays clamped between his teeth through the landing and everything after. Black smoke belches from somewhere behind us in thick clouds that I can see rolling past the windows when we crest a rise.

We climb a dune, the engine screaming with the effort, and reach the top, and the Shatterlands open up in front of us in every direction, vast and broken and endless under the morning sky.

I've never seen it from this height before. From down in the ruins you only ever see the next wall, the next pile of rubble, the next twenty meters of your immediate survival. From up here, from this speed, you can see the shape of things. How vast it is. How completely it goes on beyond every horizon.

How many horizons there are to cross.

My whole body is shaking. I don't know if it's from fear or the vibration of the engine or the speed or something that doesn't have a name yet, something that lives in the place between terror and the thing the old man called freedom.

We plunge down the other side of the dune and the camp disappears behind us, swallowed by sand and distance.

I don't look back. There's nothing back there for me anymore. The burrow, the pictures safe under their stone, the mound of dirt with the old man underneath it, all of it already behind me and getting further away with every second.

The horizon stretches out ahead, red-gold in the morning light, huge and indifferent and full of everything I've never seen.

Old man, I think, I made it out.

Are you seeing this?

I made it out.