The Worldshift Chronicles: Monday

Chapter 6

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Chapter 6

Maddy

Commander Rojo and his quartet of soldiers were good men. They really didn’t want Maddy to be there, among their contingent assigned to police the DMZ. They hated it when she tagged along, some out of loyalty to her well-being, some from the fear they might be held accountable should anything untoward happen to the First Chair of House Cheyenne. As always, she reassured her people she was a big girl and she could take care of herself. They grumbled, but ceded to her wishes.

Maddy was, after all, the last word and the bottom line.

She was cloaked in a hooded duster, standard garb of choice in the outlands and one of House Cheyenne’s most popular sellers. Impervious to most airborne toxins, sewn in lead-lined fabric that repelled ever-clinging isotopes, it effectively masked her well-known visage. The troops were clad in standard House Cheyenne rad gear civvies, khaki uniforms with the red raven’s head logo of House Cheyenne on their breast pockets, neural feed harnesses strapped about their chests. Her squad’s rebreathers were state-of-the-art. Maddy hated using them. They made her tongue stick to the roof of her mouth.

Inside Citadel walls, scrub purifiers and humidifiers processed and cleansed radioactive air around the clock. Outside the gates, however, House Cheyenne’s grid could only afford to post scrub mills every half-click, and their power cell batteries were routinely stolen by penny-poor thieves. Respirators were necessary for all but New Gen children. One of the Citadel treasury’s most extensive pro bono expenditures was supplying and replacing rebreathers and basic rad protective gear to the two hundred thousand plus souls camped about the Citadel who hadn’t the means to purchase necessary equipment. Most people who arrived at the high desert had exhausted their supplies, taking solace in the fact they’d survived the journey north at all…because most didn’t.

Years before, she used to take patrols in full view of the squats, but it became too cumbersome when she was constantly approached and appealed to, by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of folks, begging and bribing and threatening, their desperation rooted in their desire for access inside the Citadel gates. It was heartbreaking, every single time. She didn’t have to wonder how her predecessors fared before her appointment. One of them, in the earliest days of the Citadel after worldshift, was assassinated by an outland warlord looking to take power by force. The next was a suicide, a pulse pistol shot set to max power straight through the head while sitting in his armchair overlooking the ghettos from his apartment high in the Citadel.

It was no picnic, stewarding the balance of trade, production, and charity in the soup mix of House Cheyenne. Too many parents on their knees pleading for medicine for their sick child. Amputees on flatbed rollers asking for a few quarter-chits, that they might buy another day’s respite courtesy of a half-pint of irradiated corn bourbon. Thieves, exiled chieftains from Baja, disgraced paladins, escaped convicts from the Ditch, every kind of drifting outlander one could imagine, all of them making a last stand against their own extinction, hoping they might rally a second wind of survival at the only house still accepting candidacy for entry without prejudice nor a minimum chit count.

Many were opportunists, looking to capitalize on the squalor, low level merchants offering near useless goods, substandard foods and mutie varmint-kill, polluted water. Maddy’s people tried to circumvent the black market by running daily supply convoys through the vast maze of alleys and shantytowns and tent cities, dishing out meds and power cells and MREs and tankards of clean water, as much as the gated commune could spare.

But there was never enough to go around, there never had been, not since the world fell.

Much of House Cheyenne’s policing focused on the underground slaver circuit rampant in the outlying settlement, traffickers who weeded out the poorest, the fittest, the childless or the parent-less, kidnapped under the cover of night, taking their victims to labor camps at the borders of the Famine Lands, where outlanders were conscripted in tending poisoned crops until they succumbed to radiation. Maddy knew House Gammon had their own embeds within the ghetto as well, flesh coyotes shanghaiing unsuspecting folk and shipping them south into forced labor, tending to the hundreds of clicks of their penal colony’s electrified walls, or as maintenance workers for the solar fields east of the domed city in the Red Desert.

How Maddy wished she could impose an embargo on trade with House Gammon in response…but she could not. The Citadel was utterly reliant on New Angeles hydroponic crops. It was tit for tat in the outlands, having to cherry pick the lesser of evils, and she hated it. Maddy knew the truth of trade. Life was like that before worldshift, and it didn’t change much after the extinction level event, other than finding, collecting, and creating resources had become far more difficult and imminently more dangerous.

That was one of Bard’s most redundant counterpoints, why he was so invested in his long shot scheme of magical nonsense, one he thought would save humanity in spite of itself. He believed the species deserved more time to improve their standing in the cosmos. Maddy was yet to be convinced humans were little more than brief specks of stardust, given their ridiculous history of bloodshed, and an idiotic, millennia-long fealty to gender-based racism and tribalism. Bard believed the human race would, in time, overcome those biases. Maddy often doubted he’d truly gazed upon what ‘base’ humanity tended to roll down its long, slippery slope. In the barrios of House Cheyenne, it was all too easy to see why people were still head-deep in the muck of their primal roots.

It was strange, knowing Bard’s background, insomuch as what he revealed to her over the years, in his former vocation as a shepherd of survivors, a leader of the initial exodus out of the south lands to less volatile regions near the Sierra, how long he practiced his protectorate, his cursed fortune in being endowed with both arcana and longevity by the same spell which killed the world. The man ought to have known better.

He had seen the pending end of their line, same as she had, in the lost eyes of children born into the savage region of what was once paradise, the constant reminders of what the rest of the species had suffered in the prolific spread of the mutant scree population. He knew too well the hopelessness of outlanders on the precipice of starvation, the quiet rage of eking out a wretched living in the scurrilous likes of outposts like Half Moon, or Tiwan, even there about her poverty-ridden city, the last civilization left in the high desert. Most troublesome of all was the mass illusion perpetuated by several hundred thousand city-souls, trapped by the lure of security in the draconian districts of New Angeles or San Francisco.

Yet for better or worse, Bard’s stance on arcana being the sole avenue of some measure of salvation was probably incorrigible. Were it not for the fact all technological efforts between the four cities to cleanse and repurpose local environments were failing, and the evidence Maddy had seen with her own eyes in witnessing Bard’s abilities, she would have tossed him in the ‘Del’s medical psych unit well before she introduced him to Monday.

Commander Rojo ordered his troops to bear arms as they rounded a corner in an alley, just over a click from the gates of the Citadel. Maddy had visited that part of the slum several times before, three-square blocks of rat’s nests, tattered canvas tents, tin huts lit in torchlight, ramshackle kiosks and lean-to booths manned by hawkers selling non-threaded meats, used toiletries, and irradiated thorn-berry wine. It was atrocious, a hub of tuberculosis, rampant with skin cancers and all manner of madness.

Her people cleared out all children under the age of eighteen from that sector, but it remained a sordid borough, filled with exiled criminals from House Arroyo, low rent techno-merchants from Half Moon, and cagey anarchists with little interest in joining official channels of House Cheyenne nor any other factions, settling for the day-to-day of the eternal hustle in huckstering the poor and the despondent. Too many turned mercenary to spill blood for chits.

It was usually loud and boisterous, fights and haggling abound. Yet today, it was oddly quiet. Maddy wondered if that sector had been abandoned for some reason. It happened on occasion, usually because of an outbreak of a transmissible illness of some kind. Her guards’ artillery was plenty deterrent to discourage enterprising sorts, though once in a while they were challenged all the same, and now again, as the end of the alley darkened with a small group of armored men bearing rusted long swords, scattershot gunnery, a handful of pulse pistols.

Interestingly, their armor was inactive nanotech plate, ordinarily activated by neural feeds, harnessed by House Li paladins with proper access codes. The iron-polymer based microbots adjusted viscosity and stringency at the atomic level, rendering their users more or less immune to low and moderate caliber ballistic fire, as well as energy-based attacks like plasma streams or pulse beams. The nano-armor was effective against arcane measures as well, one of the sole reasons why the iron nun and her technocratic order had developed the defense system in the first place, so fervent was San Francisco about the blasphemy of magicks, mages, and arcana in general after worldshift.

It was rare to see that elite House Li technology in the hands of common outlanders. Maddy wondered if they were disgraced paladins fallen out of favor or whether they’d somehow overcome a regiment of House Li paladins to commandeer the suits. It seemed a superfluous endeavor, since without their previous owners’ specific biometric passkeys, they wouldn’t be able to utilize nanotech operations. But they’d patchworked the rigs and wore them as simple protective gear, a rather mundane solution, as the iron in the armor was much heavier than standard chain mails and alum-steel plate.

“Lower your weapons and hand them over,” growled a tall, burly man at the east end of the alley. His voice was dull and metallic, rasping through a filtration half-mask that had seen better days. “Then radio your HQ and tell ‘em to bring an econo-wagon full of all the arms and food and water they can fill it with, or their princess silver-pants won’t be comin’ home tonight,” the tall man went on.

“Hold,” Maddy said calmly to Commander Rojo, who’d signaled his men, their regiment having raised their rifles to bear. “Gentlemen. There is surely an accord we can reach, between traders of like-minded ways.”

“We ain’t like-minded, your highness. As you can plains-see, our tea party weren’t invited inside the raven’s nest proper, no robin’s blue eggs are we, shame as it is,” he replied. “Ya, we know well who ya are, the golden goose, queen o’ the ‘Del, the one who decides who eats and who dies. Fireside chitty chat says you sometimes takes your rosy garden walks ‘round the squat to dream another dream, and here ya are, in all yer purple mountain majesty. And you only gots four men today, and there’s eight of us. I was no good at math ever, but I know eight’s twice more than four, and I know our rusty bullets will kill your lackeys same as their plasma beams will us. The difference is, we got nothin’ to lose, and you all do. An’ besides…we got a bigger bear in the back room.”

“What’s your name, good sir?” Maddy asked.

“Why thank ya for askin’, queenie. T’ain’t no bidness of yours, but I’ll tell all the same, it’s Sumpter, and this here’s my crew. We lookin’ for upgrades, and guess what. You’re the mark, an’ a fair time comin’, we been waitin’ for your royalness for a near a whole moon now, heck, we even thought of knockin’ straight on the gates, we was getting’ impatient.”

“There’s no need for violence. Tell us what you require and we will send for it. Food. Water. New gear. There is no extended grace for those who bring pain and blood to an already stretched community,” Maddy said.

“Miss Cabot. There is no point. Give the order.” Commander Rojo muttered.

“Aye, there’s no point t’all. Mayhap the gunnery on yer persons won’t put stew over the fire, but it’ll give us more sleep at night, if you unnerstand. The guns. Now. And make your call to your peeps back at the lodge.”

The armored raider cocked and snapped the mecha on his twin-barreled shotgun, its shells likely filled with pebbles and rock salt and little else, Maddy thought, so scarce was ammunition about the camps.

“Don’t be a fool, man,” Commander Rojo barked. “Your rust-bucket arms are no match for plasma beams and you know it. And why you’re thinking that dead weight paladin armor is a good idea is a real mystery, I must say. That stuff’s worthless without power.”

“That be true for most sitcha-ations, aye. Less so for thissa one, methinks, as you ‘bout to find out.” He nodded at an unseen associate past Maddy’s alleyway line of sight. Then a small, rattletrap hovercraft floated forward, coming to a bumpy stop behind the gang of armored men. Its driver was suited in the same absconded paladin gear. The transport bobbed under the weight of its mounted cargo, and it was then Maddy drew in a sharp breath as her contingent stiffened, their rifle barrels shaking at the tips.

For at the aft end of the craft, another man in paladin’s armor stood, manning a tripod launcher with a smooth-bore barrel and a bayonet-style spigot mount. The cannon’s loaded projectile appeared to be a small, ancient warhead of some kind, an oblong-shaped bumbler rocket with rusty, corroded fins on each side.

“Ma’am,” Rojo whispered urgently. “That’s a tactical nuke, sure as screes at sunset.”

“I know what it is, commander,” Maddy replied.

And she did know, too well. Maddy had made it her business, in her long years of service to House Cheyenne, to study whatever books could be found on the subject of the sordid history of nuclear ordnance, from weapons to fuel to the fundamental processes of fission. It was only prudent, seeing as how the world had ended not from the macro-spell of arcana that had enveloped the planet, but more explicitly, its reaction and subsequent amalgamation with almost all nuclear energy sources, be it battleship engine rooms, submarine batteries, power plant rod pools, missile silos, or spent fuel storage sites.

Her memory was not fuzzy when it came to specific kinds of nuclear devices, same as, she knew, any of the other heads of state in the four cities, because if there was one thing each faction universally agreed upon, it was the expedient disposal of any nuclear technologies upon discovery. The Citadel had a deep pit underground on the eastern borders of the Famine Lands for just such needs. San Francisco operated a lead-lined, sub-T facility in the northern highlands above Black Gate. Tiwan had dug out a deep cave network in the southern wastes of Baja Sur for storing found ordnance.

It was thought nearly ninety-five percent of all sources of nuclear energy had been affected across the world at worldshift’s flashpoint, but there had been some few hot spots left in the western spheres of what used to be the United States. Most notable had been the delayed detonation, years after worldshift, of a found warhead by a foolish casino owner using it as an attraction that flattened what was once Las Vegas. As such, all four houses had specialized salvage teams that routinely scoured their surrounding territories for potential leftovers.

Maddy figured the ancient device floating atop the hovercraft was almost certainly what used to be called an M-28 Davy Crockett gun, a tactical nuke of low yield, its warhead a compact fission device no bigger than a sack of potatoes, a clumsy projectile designed to take out a limited spread of enemy forces while sparing the industrial or military hardware about them. In the literature, it was said soldiers often called it the ‘atomic watermelon.’ It was a sloppy weapon, never used in official combat of the latter second age, and was decommissioned by most nation-states due to its inaccuracy and poor form. She couldn’t fathom how the raiders had found such a weapon and its accompanying launch apparatus, much less how they’d figured out whether it was operational and how to successfully initiate its use. Odds were, it had long been inert, if it hadn’t gone off during worldshift.

Obviously, she couldn’t take a chance nonetheless.

“Commander, was that vehicle registered upon arrival?” Maddy asked.

“No, ma’am,” he replied, poring over the grid feed panel embedded in his forearm gauntlet. “I have no idea how they drove it inside the settlement without notice.”

“You really ain’t in the know-how about things workin’ out here the way they do, are ya?” Sumpter posed. “You send patrols out, ya, but you barely pay attention, any old outlander can bumble right in, no checkpoints on the fringe. No, you save the vetting for the gilded folk, the ones who make it inside the ‘Del’s guarded oasis, an’ what a dice roll that is for the rest of us lowlifes, ain’t it. An’ what you doin’ ‘bout it? Nothin’, that’s what, not for most of us barely findin’ dredge water to drink and moldy biscuits to eat.”

“Sumpter,” she said quietly, trying to control the edge in her voice. “Do you really understand what you have there? It’s just as likely it’ll blow you to smithereens right here and now, and it’ll take this side of the settlement with it, maybe the whole place. And that paladin iron armor isn’t lead, it won’t protect you from the fallout afterward. What kind of plan is that?”

“The only one we got, queenie.” He motioned to the man standing behind the tripod, who swung the long, bayoneted barrel and aimed the finned warhead straight toward the glassy Citadel tower in the distance a click or so away. “Yer camps here are precious short on plannies, somethin’ you already well aware. But we came prepared, yes we did. High grade rad gear, ammo, meds, guns, power cells, everything you can muster, and a fully fueled hover wagon transport too while yer at it. Or the boom boom goes boom boom, and we meets our makers one by one. Don’t think fer a second we ain’t eager to meet ‘em ourselves, what all the words we got for them dummies who’s let the eleven hells run amok. And before you think ‘bout doin’ something heroic, let’s us remember what’s at stake hereabouts, in your precious pen of losers.”

Then yet another of his squad stepped out of the unseen alleyway from whence they’d come, shoving a small, little girl in front of him. She had ratty brown hair and was dressed in grimy coveralls, frightened out of her wits, whimpering, her dirty face lined with streaks of tears. She fell to the alleyway, fumbling in a cloud of straw and dust. Her respirator tumbled from her mouth into the dirt. She bawled and wailed. 

Can’t be more than seven or eight. Same age as the sassy crack-shot I took in, not too long ago, that punky daughter of the moon, never follows a word of my advice, ignores any and all good sense, uses her New Gen immunity like a poker chip, won’t accept a rank in House Cheyenne, tours the outlands like she was born there…so damn stubborn. Never-gods, I do love her so, not that I’d ever tell her, she maybe has parents somewhere for all we know. And this little waif here, she probably has no family, or these guys killed them to use her as leverage. As if they needed more capital beyond the threat of a nuclear bomb. Idiots.

Maddy was about the girl’s age, when she and her parents made the long trek from an abandoned outpost outside House Li’s southernmost wall (her mother and father refused to adopt mandated religious mantras of San Francisco’s templar order, and were subsequently exiled to the outlands). They traveled eastward toward Sacramento, the old capitol of California, and managed to evade raider tribes and slavers rampant in the city’s utter ruin. With the help of a sympathetic nomadic caravan, they’d crested the summits of the Sierra, taking off-road trails, giving a wide berth around the borders of Washoe. At last, they’d reached a long-rumored sanctuary in the east willing to take in refugees, a massive tent city situated around a single hotel-casino structure which had somehow avoided burning to the ground during a fiery holocaust that razed the former city of Reno, Nevada.

It wasn’t long after they’d sunk stakes in a pitiable plot of desert when her father was slain, defending them from a slaver outfit. A year more passed until her mother died of radiation poisoning. Then Maddy was tendered to a raggedy orphanage run by the newly established House Cheyenne, a consortium of well-meaning merchantry and ex-military who’d consolidated remaining feudal warlords into a single force and cleared out scree infestations lingering in the burnt husks of the city.

Long she labored in laundries and commissaries about the camps, dodging rampant diseases dogging the tent cities, most of all the killing strokes of the heavy metals, uranium and radium and polonium, and the arcana-soaked gamma particles in the air itself. She garnered the attention of a high-ranking official stewarding the upper residences of the tower and was taken in as a maid. She was given access to advanced education tracks, where she learned the new world order post-worldshift, that of trade and remaining military strengths, outland hot spots, functioning communication and infrastructure grids, adjusted topography and geography across the western coastal region of what was once North America, and naturally the newfound (or rediscovered) spectrum of arcana, as much as could be determined by House Cheyenne scientists and aspiring archaeologists of the new landscape.

She studied in warfare, strategy, and tactics, and newly developed technologies like nano-ware, maglev transport, pulse and plasma power and weapons. She became known as the ‘steel trap,’ her contemporaries jibing her about her keen ability to absorb, process, and implement new information in a real-time manner, a woman of action, not prone to indecision nor committee meetings, one who put front foot forward and made necessary steps regardless of ripples across the delicate neutrality held between House Cheyenne and the three other remaining hubs of humanity.

She was forty years old by the time she was given a chair on the council.

She was fifty when she was reluctantly promoted to First Chair. The only reason she accepted was because she didn’t trust anyone else to do it.

Most of all, she knew her generation was a wash. Her efforts in keeping civilization as civil as she could, in a cannibalistic world on its last legs, were solely based in her desire to try and rally a semblance of a safe ecosphere for the children.

It was the kids.

It was always about the kids.

Worldshift had stolen all their futures.

But if she could ease some of those children’s suffering, even for a day, an hour, a moment…that was what she would do. She’d be damned if she’d sock away even one MRE or one round of ammunition at the expense of one more child’s life. Not one, not if she could help it. They didn’t ask to inherit the horror of the third age. As long as children were being born, she’d do as much as she could do.

She found the other First Chairs of the respective houses wanting. One of them seemed to pretend their post-worldshift existence was a game of chess, while he hoarded resources and overtaxed his water supply. Another upheld the illusion that gods still existed as she imposed a veritable gulag upon her own citizens. The last was a ghost, perhaps nonexistent entirely, for all her recon surveillance had gathered about the unseen leader of House Gammon.

For all its roughneck failings, House Cheyenne offered hope for anyone, anyone at all, no matter where they were born or where they’d come from, and while her guild didn’t promise everyone a rose garden ending, nor could it guarantee safety for all, it functioned as best it could, within its limits of dwindling resources, an ever-encroaching toxicity of the land, and the dawdling despair of a people who knew their time was coming to an end.

“Miss Cabot…what do we do?” Commander Rojo whispered.

“We do as he asks, commander,” Maddy said, strangely sublime, catching his eye, and then he knew. She peered close at the crying girl in the dirt. “Honey, stay down. Everything will be okay. Sumpter, you win. Please have your man take his hand off the launch pad hot-wired on that tripod. I’m not certain where you will be welcomed across the four cities and the greater outlands while transporting a nuclear device, but I will give you a fully stocked vehicle, replete with weaponry and goods of your choice, upon your word that you will leave the borders of the Citadel and leave that thing here for my people to disarm and disassemble. You and yours are never to return.”

“That sounds like a swell deal, queenie. We’ll take all those terms save one…we keepin’ the bird. Mayhap the dragon’s den or the domers might pay even better than the dyin’ crow’s nest,” he said. His crew mumbled in agreement.

Maddy sighed. “I’ll need to radio my people. Might I access my comms then?”

“Go right ahead. An’ have ‘em add some New Angie fruits while they at it. We’s near scurvy here, ain’t had any greens for many moons,” he replied.

Commander Rojo nodded as Maddy tilted her head at him. He spoke into a pip at his collar. At once, a thin, bright, green beam of light splayed from above the alley, straight into Sumpter’s chest plate. His crew parted about him as Sumpter stared at the sparkling green dot vibrating on the carapace of his armor’s cuirass. He smiled at Maddy as he followed line of sight all the way back up to the roof of the Citadel tower. From that distance, none could see who was issuing the laser-sighted targeting system, only that the beam came from the apex of the tower superstructure.

“Come on, now, queenie. Ain’t a soul on earth that could make that shot from that posh skyo-scraper of yours, not even with your best Frisco-made, long-range scope. We’re over a click aways, maybe’s much as two. I callin’ your bluff. Now bring us our goodies an’ we’ll be on our way. Otherwise, we’s startin’ your motivation by puttin’ one in this here little girl’s head, an’ then we’ll nuke your precious Citadel, an’ all that for skimpin’ on one stocked rig. Use your head. You c’n afford the loss. But you cain’t ‘ford this loss,” he groused, nodding toward the melon-shaped, finned warhead looming at the end of the launcher.

Well. I think there’s one soul on earth that might successfully take that shot from the upper deck of the Citadel.

As it stood, the eyes behind the laser-sighted shot in question were soulless, theretofore unseen by the masses in the camps surrounding the main fortress of House Cheyenne. Maddy didn’t see she had any choice in the matter, not when there was an actual nuclear weapon threatening the lives of over two hundred thousand people.

“Surrender your weapons and disarm the device. Last chance.” Maddy said.

“Screw it, let it fly,” Sumpter snarled. “We’re far ‘nuff way to avoid the blast.”

“Mark,” said Maddy.

A microsecond later, a concentrated beam of pulse energy coursed straight through his chest, followed in succession by seven more pulses, each of them taking out Sumpter’s band of mercenaries one by one, before they had time to realize what was happening. Six bodies armored in defunct paladin tech crumpled to the dirt alleyway. The seventh slumped over the hovercraft’s cockpit controls. The eighth tumbled headfirst to the street from the turret on the back of the transport.

The little girl wailed, scrambling away from the amassed bodies about her, and fled into the maze of causeways at the alley junction.

“Wait!” cried Maddy. But the girl was gone.

Commander Rojo seemed pleased. “The ground zero A.I. functioned perfectly, Miss Cabot. Long have we waited to field test it.”

“Yes,” Maddy murmured. “I’d hoped to keep its presence concealed for longer, but circumstances today forced our hand.”

“All due respect, Miss Cabot, but I must note, once they revealed the presence of a fission weapon, we should have issued the order long before dickering with the outlander.”

“Perhaps. I hoped I could talk him down. I’ll have words with the commanders of all patrols who scouted the outer perimeters within the last half-moon cycle, as well. That transport should’ve been picked up and registered.”

“Yes, Miss Cabot.”

“Contact the hazmat teams and have them send out the engineers. I want this thing underground and tucked away for decommissioning before moonrise tonight. Tell them to take great care in deactivating its primer and to take their time in moving it to the east bunker. That rotten raspberry of a bomb hails all the way back to the mid twentieth century. I can’t believe they found it intact.”

“Yes, Miss Cabot.”

“And have our recon patrols comb this area for that girl. I want to ensure she’s provided for, and if she’s not, have her brought into the sanctuary.”

Commander Rojo barked orders into his comms as his soldiers began salvaging weaponry from the fallen outlanders. His comm grid chirped, an incoming variant channel, and another of his men somewhere in the slums recanted a recon update of some kind. Rojo turned to Maddy. “Ma’am. One of our units scouting the lower Washoe slopes on the west side has come across a young man wearing New Angeles civvies. He’s got a wounded, unconscious girl with him fitting the description of courier eight-zero-five.”

That was Monday’s designation in House Cheyenne’s trade network.

“Have him bring them in, commander. At once.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Maddy wandered over to a nearby shanty hut and leaned against its sagging wall, struggling to keep her composure, forcing herself to breathe deep and slow, rather than succumbing to the anxious hyperventilation which threatened to overwhelm her. Dozens of curious outlanders began emerging from the cover they’d taken in nearby alleys, murmuring between themselves.

Yes. The First Chair in the raven’s nest is a rock-hard seat. You signed up for it. Suck it up. You just saved the lives of near a quarter of what’s left of the human race on this continent. Take the win.

But she couldn’t.

Not while a single child went hungry in her domain.

Maddy wondered where the little girl had fled.

Monday had put her big girl pants on long before most children had stopped sucking their thumbs. The girl learned to shoot at the age of ten. She started casting spells at age seven, maybe earlier. She started couriering at thirteen years of age. Monday never had a childhood at all.

It broke Maddy’s heart, again and again.

But heartbreak was better than oblivion.

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