We all felt odd about just leaving the dead to rot. Not that they'd know if we buried them, but in a place as heartless as this one, any little human act felt more meaningful, while every act of callousness chipped away at our souls a little more. And every time you lost a piece, it was some part of you that you weren’t ever getting back.

We didn’t have time to bury them, but it didn’t take me long to pick everyone up and take them to one of the few remaining stone buildings. We crammed it with wood and pitch and sealed it up like a charcoal heap, with enough ventilation so the fire inside would keep on burning. Angel left some flowers at the edge of the pyre, and then we walked: pulling Doc along while behind us, a smooth pillar of smoke rose from the corpse of Eden.

The trip back to our base was a lot longer than the journey from Oil Town to Eden. It wasn’t just the sled, which seemed to want to catch and jostle over every bump and hill on the trail. It was the army. The Pigs were on the march, and every other mile, I picked up the oily fetid scent of unwashed barbarian bodies, heard the shriek of dinosaurs and the crack of whips. It took three days to cover a hundred miles. And by the time we reached the Primordial Forest...

"Fuck." I crouched low in a stand of thick cattails while Angel peered through her binoculars in the direction of Oil Town and the Fossil Springs. The horizon was glowing with the lights of hundreds of fires. Centurions. " We can't stay here. Our hijinks and the eruption forced the warfront to shift."

Angel signed for 'yes' with one hand, the other still holding her binoculars. She sighed, shifting restlessly on my back. "Damn it. We're not ready for Rachini yet. We need to max our levels."

"I don't know about that. We can probably make turrets and other goodies now. And we still have a whole bunch of patron and fan loot we haven't opened." I stuck my nose out between the reeds, sniffing. There were no foreign odors in the marsh itself, no strange spoor that indicated the Centurions or the Pigs had come through here, but that didn't mean it was safe. I knew as well as anyone that water muddied scents. "I think we've got a day before we need to pick up, maybe two. Let's take care of Doc and make a plan."

"Yeah..." Angel's expression was glum. "But I like that cave. And that house."

"Me too, but it is what it is." With that piece of cliche stoic wisdom, I slithered out into the marsh. Doc groaned as warm water slopped over the sides of his stretcher, but the bamboo floated enough to keep him from drowning. Once we reached the tree, Lulu formed a kind of space helmet around him to give him some extra air so that we could dive into the underwater cave and get him to safety. Relative safety.

“Ooond… huup!” Lulu helped to lift the stretcher up over the waterlock, then down into the cavern. I dragged it up to our front porch, and waited while Angel unequipped the harness and traces. To my surprise, Lulu shooed me away, then went over to Doc. “Angoo… antoobootooc!”

“She wants the antibiotics you were talking about,” I said to Angel.

“Oh! Sure. Hang on.” Angel went inside, armed and wary. About ten minutes later she returned, looking a lot more relaxed. “No one’s found our base yet. Also, here. Be careful with this stuff, it’s expensive.”

I tilted my head, watching as Lulu cooed and went to administer the potion to her new patient. “What’s in that shit, anyway?”

“Mold from rotten bread, alum, black garlic, and honey,” Angel signed back. “Fortunately I keep all our rotten food in a special chest.”

The girls took charge of Doc, and took him for a brisk drag into the house to set him up in a bed. While they did that I settled down on the porch and re-read Cold Fox's message, pacing back and forth outside the house. 'Contact Clive'. Everything about that suggestion - or was it an attempt at an order? - caused my hackles to lift and the venomous needles under my skin to expectantly slicken with poison. Working with Clive was about as appealing as a vat of cockroach larvae. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Like me and Angel and Lulu, Clive was a skilled outsider. He wasn’t part of the Russian-speaking mafiosi club, and probably didn’t know that there was fishy stuff going on at the top levels. He was also probably not especially loyal to King Pig, whoever he was. King Pig and the Hell Pigs generally were a means to an end for him, and his ambitions were on the back foot right now: the volcanic eruption had hit the Pigs territory harder than it had the Centurions. Clive had to prove he was a good war-boss if he was to keep the Pigs unified, and that meant an offensive.

‘Something real fucky is going on,’ I mused. ‘And I’ll bet all my money that King Pig is working for Kaban and the whole thing’s a shell game.’

By the time I wandered into the house, Doc was set up in a bed in the living room and looking better. 'Better' being a relative term, compared to his breathless, grey near-dead state from before. Propped up in bed, asleep, he looked almost peaceful.

"Angel, once he’s awake and talking I need you to ask him what he knows about the Centurions slaving process," I said to her. She'd pulled up a seat beside the bed, where she was assembling new ammunition: rounds for the rifle, buckshot for her new shotgun. "I've got an idea about how we can get into Fortuna. But you're not going to like it."

Angel glanced up at me. "Why?" she signed.

"Because..." I hesitated. What if I told her what I planned to do, and she said 'no way'? I hadn't known Angel all that long, and while I knew she was practical, she wasn't going to be willing to work with the enemy. Not after being captured by them.

She arched a brow, and waited.

"We need to liberate the Maroons out of the mines first," I said, not too quickly. "And arm them. We need to take a shit-ton of weapons into the mines and arm the slaves. Lead a revolt. And while that's happening and the Centurions are forced to try and put them down, we go fight Rachini."

"You want to use the Maroons?" Angel's brows furrowed.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"I want to give them the best chance they have to survive this." I wrapped my tail around my back legs, sitting neatly, so it didn't flick around. "Key word in my proposal is 'lead'. We don't just throw them a stack of guns, shake Merc's hand and leave. We help them fight their way out, build a stockade or something, then force the Centurions to split their forces. I can carry a ton of gear - we can make bows and arrows, bolt cutters and spears, and give them out like candy to every slave we see. Because I don't know about you, but I'm fucking sick of this place. I'm sick of the system that takes liberty away from people who already didn't want to be here. So, let's fuck 'em up. Let’s help the people stuck in this shitty fucking stalemate and tip the balance. If we want to get out, we have to take down Kaban and expose the ruse he's created."

I sound and felt more passionate by the end of that than I'd expected, up on my feet and pacing restlessly. when I finished, Lulu cooed and cheered, clapping her little 'hands' together. Angel looked pensively at the pile of ammo in her lap, pressing her lips together.

“The only part of that I don’t get is why you think I wouldn’t like it,” she signed.

I flattened my spines down. “Just uh… you know. Because we’re kind of sticking our necks out. And you want to win.”

"I do, but I was pretty much going to suggest the same basic plan to you." She signed. "The Maroons might not have been the… most effective faction on the island, but they were the only people trying to build something good here. We can't let this Paragon Society take that from us. Now that we… you… have two of the mandalas, everyone is going to be gunning for us anyway. We fight or we die. We might as well fight for something, and try to free as many people as we can."

Something in my chest lifted as Lulu bobbed enthusiastically in agreement. I wasn't sure what I was feeling, but it made me remember, briefly, what it had felt like to be human.

And I was about to go fuck it all up by seeing if I could cut a deal with Clive fucking Magazine.

“You know, I…” The offer to take my collar off and let Angel put hers on was on the tip of my tongue. But something stopped me from saying it. Chorus’s warning? Cold_Fox’s practical encouragement to use Clive for my own ends? It was just as well that Reapers couldn’t sweat. “Actually, don’t worry about it. I’m going hunting, okay? I’ll be back later.”

***

"It's better to leave them out of it, man. It just is."

My only audience was the corpse of a river dolphin I'd hunted out of the water. Like a leopard guarding its kill, I’d dragged it up to the top of one of the gigantic flat-topped trees that reared out of the marshes. Partly eaten, it stared at me accusingly.

"Don't look at me like that." I had my message center up, where I'd been composing a short, carefully worded message to Clive. I'd been through three other drafts before finally settling on a two-line masterpiece. "If you want to meet the Reaper and have him take down Targent AND Kaban, meet me at the Bone Tree landmark. Come alone. No backup, no legions."

It was just cheesy-edgy and mysterious enough to work - especially given that the message was coming from one 'M.T Noodles the 4th, PhD.'

"Don't worry. He'll be completely bamboozled and intimidated when I loom out of the shadows," I assured the dolphin as I scissored another bite out of it. "Also, I have to say: GOD DAMN you're delicious. One of the best things I've eaten since I got here. Your ass would sell for like ten thousand yen per pound in a Japanese fish market, did you know that?"

The dolphin stared back at me with one glassy eye. It was extremely dead.

"Yeah, I know." I sighed. "This is dumb as hell."

It was dumb as hell, but staging our entry during a Pigs invasion of Fortuna also the only way I could see us having an actual chance at overthrowing Kaban. Without another army besieging the city, the slave revolt was destined to be just that - a revolt, a failed attempt at overthrowing the despotic settlement that had been purpose-built to contain them. To stage a revolution, we needed more than just weapons. We needed chaos... and if there was one thing that could be said for the Hell Pigs, they were chaotic.

"I mean, I COULD tell Angel what I’m doing." I stared at the unsent message, my tail flicking back and forth across the bough I rested on. "But I know she's going to get pissed at me either way. The Pigs killed her girlfriend. Even if I explain that the whole point of this is to kill as many of them all as possible by setting them on each other, I can't expect her to approve of me dealing with Clive."

Mr. Dolphin - or Mrs. Dolphin, I wasn't sure - oozed supportively.

"Yeah. Fuck it." And with that positive affirmation, I hit Send.

I was almost done with my tender, delicious dinner when Clive's reply hit my inbox. There was no message in the body, just in the title, which read: "Enroute. ETA 2 hours."

"That was fast. He must be keen to deal." I left the dolphin to dangle over the branch by its spine, rising and stretching. It felt so instinctively GOOD to be up high like this... one of the reasons I'd picked the Bone Tree landmark. It was a single dead, white tree of the same kind as those found in the Primordial Forest, but located some thirty miles north-west of our base in a patch of high desert, a hint of where the biome had once extended before this area had turned arid. From the map, it looked like an open, exposed area with difficult, jaggedly steep terrain. Even if Clive brought a posse, I was pretty sure I would have the advantage.

I shot Angel a message: "Out late looking for specific animal to hunt, will be back by morning", then kicked the dolphin head and attached spine out of the tree and bounded off, leaping for the next tree over on my way toward the north-west.

When I reached the Bone Tree, it was pretty much what I expected. The tree within a natural cul-de-sac amphitheater of rock, surrounded by heaps of loose shale and tumbleweeds. A ton of small caves and nooks sheltered behind a 'balcony' ring of stone about thirty feet off the ground. The skeletal tree reared up from the hard soil, its bare branches casting an intricate lattice of shadow across the ground. There was a resident pack of hyenas, which I made a point of killing and leaving at the base of the tree. They despawned after a few minutes, but the loot sacks remained as testimony to my presence while I scaled the sheer rocky walls and vaulted up behind the balcony area to wait.

An hour or so of drowsy napping later, my skin ruffled. I sat bolt upright on instinct, head swiveling toward the south-east.

"Ah ha." I crouched and slunk over to a gap in the low wall ahead of me, peering through. For several minutes, it was just the smell of churned dust and the scuffle of feet on dry earth. But then Clive rode in, reining in his dinosaur. He had a rifle over one shoulder, but he had obeyed instructions. No legions, no riders following him up. As expected, he looked over to the pile of untouched lootbags and frowned.

"Alright! Come out, whoever you are!" he called out. "Ain't got all fuckin' day!"

While he was distracted by the sacks, I was on the move: prowling along behind the concealing lip of stone, only to bound down the wall behind him and to his left. He jumped at the slip and crack of claws on stone and whirled just as I hit the ground, all four tentacles out and ready for action. His raptor mount screeched and backpedaled, tossing its head.

"I figured it was time to finally drop the bullshit and just have a talk," I projected out to him, flicking the puds down along by back into a sleek line.

Clive's eyes widened. "Wait. Hold up jist a second. You..."

"Can talk? Understood everything you and everyone else has been saying all this time?" I rattled a soft laugh. "You got it."

Clive pushed his helmet up part way to scratch at his thinning hair. "Well knock me down and steal my teeth. You're a sentient. The fuck did you do to end up as a fuckin' monster in this shithole?"

"We're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you and the future of the Hell Pigs," I replied. "And maybe to negotiate a business partnership."