Skipper Stax watched the first Changer shove his captive out on the rock outcropping through the scope of her rifle, wondering if she should waste the bullet.

It was her only bullet, and unless they lined up just right, she could only get one of them. She supposed she could shoot the tall, square-jawed man holding the gun to the other’s head, but that would leave the shorter one free to grab the gun and go scurry off to some crack somewhere while she traversed the canyon to search his buddy’s corpse and hopefully find some more bullets.

And, while he had his hands tied behind his back and his feet hobbled, the whole side of his face an angry black bruise, the captive was still a Changer. Regardless of whatever he had done to earn his companion’s wrath, he deserved a bullet just as much as the rest of them.

But she needed that bullet to count. She hadn’t eaten more than dried cactus fruit in six days, ever since a stray dog had stolen the last of her jerky from her camp. She had been following the animal for almost a week, hoping for a lucky shot. It was a plump one, probably twenty or thirty pounds of meat on it from the couple glimpses she’d gotten as she chased it up the rim of the canyon. More likely than not a survivor of that village that got sacked to the east by a group of Changers with Hummers and automatic weapons a couple weeks prior—she couldn’t imagine how else the miserable beast could have been so fat.

He got fat on your jerky, her stomach complained, having become a voice of its own after surviving this long without food. He’d been so efficient at stealing it, too—just snuck in while her back was turned, unzipped her bag, took the whole pouch of dried meat, and bolted off at a sprint. Clearly the beast had had practice elsewhere.

Hence, Skipper really wanted to save that bullet for the dog.

She eased herself a few more inches along the dusty red rock on her belly, setting her rifle against a rock to get a better view of the two Changers on the ridge.

It was pretty clear the taller guy was going to shove the shorter guy over the edge. Skipper, who still needed to make camp for the night, wished he’d get it over with. The shorter guy seemed to sense that, too, because he had stopped a dozen feet from the edge and, arms bound behind his back, his spine ramrod-straight, had started arguing with his captor.

“Come on,” Skipper groaned, watching them shout at each other through her rifle. As soon as the captive went over the edge, she’d brain the other dude and then go to collect whatever they’d stolen from hardworking scavvers from the raid earlier that week—and that night, she’d sleep soundly, the ending of a couple Changers giving her no more pause than putting down a couple of fire ants.

After all, both of the Changers on the ridge wore the big red patches of the Blood Dragons that had leveled One Hop earlier that month, though the shorter, bound man had a smaller, purple patch beneath that.

Like the pit boss that killed my brother, Skipper thought, eyes narrowing on the symbol. It was a rarer patch, one she’d only seen a handful of times before, but one she would never forget. It was the same image she’d seen twenty years ago, one of a sun radiating between two prongs, like a fishing spear that had snagged a star.

The taller one was carrying two rifles and fully decked out in clean black combat gear, while the shorter one was without boots or belt. Even from across the canyon, Skipper could see the shorter Changer’s unnatural, translucent hair lay down his back in perfect cascades like wet rice noodles, shining almost pearlescent in the sun. Cleaner than any hair had right to be.

They probably shower every night, Skipper thought bitterly, thinking of how even now she lay on her belly in the dirty sand, her sweat-stained clothes a reddish-brown where they had once been white, the same clothes she had worn for six months straight. More than once, she had considered sneaking into a Changer camp while they were off raiding villages just so she could use their showers.

She’d always thought better of it, though. Changer camps were filled with scavver women or village girls they had stolen from their homes, most of whom were left in cages or leashed on chains like animals, and they would turn on her in an instant if they thought it would get them an extra scrap of food that night.

That, and she’d seen her picture—taken from the side with a game camera as she crept through the desert—posted on the entrance to the Changer town all the scavvers called High Loft. The Changers called it something else, something ridiculous like Hope, but Skipper just thought of it as a pock mark on the ass of the Earth, one that, if she ever figured out a way, she would eradicate.

Skipper hated them. The feeling was so intense, so raw, that she often found it hard to breathe. Even then, looking at two of them through her rifle scope, it was all Skipper could do not to pull the trigger. Like most scavvers and crag-nannies, Skipper had spent the first sixteen years of her life avoiding Changers with the rest of her family. Then, after her brother had been captured for a work camp and her mom and dad had been fed to the Changers’ dogs, she’d spent the next two decades doing the best she could to exterminate them.

But she only had one bullet, it was getting dark, and she was pretty sure one of the Changers was about to push the other Changer off the edge of the cliff, saving her the trouble of killing him. She waited. Though the one with his hands bound wasn’t armed, the other didn’t get too close, instead shouting and gesturing with the gun, clearly telling him to walk off the edge.

Not surprisingly, the captive was refusing, shouting some brave last words, spitting at his captor’s feet, etc, etc…

“Oh just shoot him already,” she groaned, her gun aimed at the taller man’s tattooed head. The bald man had a black bird wrapped over his fat-wrinkled neck, the wings outstretched over either ear. His face was weathered, his body obviously long-used to the desert. His long-haired companion still had his back to Skipper, arguing more vehemently, now. She could almost hear their words echo across the canyon before the hot evening wind whipped them away.

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For some reason, the taller guy seemed leery of pulling the trigger.

He probably afraid he’ll be ringing the dinner bell for every scavver and crag-nanny in the area, Skipper thought. She had the same reservations. While she generally got along with her own kind, she’d had a few run-ins with scavvers, particularly, as a less-than-savory experience that several times had ended up with another corpse drying out in the desert.

But, since she personally knew most of the scavvers that had lived in the area were now feeding coyotes in the canyon bottom or—if they were unlucky—serving as slaves in the Changer camp, she wasn’t too worried about a hunting party forming to investigate a single stray shot.

Yet, in the two decades since learning that Changers died from a bullet to the brain just as quickly as a rabbit did, Skipper had come to appreciate what a single well-aimed shot could do. She had already started salivating in anticipation of the travel rations she’d find on their bodies.

Abruptly, the argument between the two men on the ridge intensified, and the taller one shouted something and fired a couple shots into his companion. Even before she heard the retort of the rifles, there was a sudden flash of light that, even lying in the shade of a creosote bush almost mile away, almost burned out Skipper’s retinas.

What the fuck? her startled mind babbled, remembering the last time an eye-searing radiance had forced her to look away. It had happened when a Changer pit boss had stormed up behind her brother, shouting, gun aimed at his head, and her brother had twisted suddenly, shoved the gun aside, and fought. The blast had gone off like an exploding sun, and Skipper had been hiding in the hills outside camp watching the exchange through her father’s hunting rifle, trying to work out how to rescue her sibling from the work camp, when she’d been forced to turn her head aside, blinking at the light. When she looked back, her brother was a smoldering husk of bones and bubbling flesh on the ground, the pit boss standing over him with the gun aimed at his back, spitting something angrily and panting, and another man had been walking up behind them with a smug look on his face—a man wrapped in elegant gold and gemmed clothing that billowed white silk, his skull all but encased in a massive green-feathered headdress that showed off not a human face…but something like a cross between a lizard and a coyote.

Skipper’s finger had tightened out of sheer shock, and her father’s rifle hand discharged. She’d had only a moment to register surprise that the strange, lizard-faced man’s head had actually exploded before the camp alarm sounded and Skipper spent the next six weeks on the run, trying to evade the Changer death party that went looking for her.

That day—the day she lost her last surviving blood relative to the flash of that pit boss’s weapon—had been pivotal for her. As she’d spent the next month and a half of hiding in the rocky canyons and eating insects to survive, the image of that Changer’s death—that look of smugness exploding in a wash of gore—had kept her rage simmering, a strength Skipper used to feed her through the days of ice storms and hunger. Her brother had lost his life, but, in the two decades that followed, the Changers had lost a hundred and eighty-three of theirs.

Skipper still didn’t think it was a fair trade.

Yet here she was, once again having to blink the afterimage of the blast from her retinas enough to see, wondering what she had just witnessed. The two Changers on the cliff were on the ground, struggling at the edge of the rock face, rolling back and forth, kicking and punching as the stone around them melted into a slurry that started to drip off the edge in awkward, clumpy glops.

That gun melted the whole cliff, she realized, horrified. It was only the second time in her life she’d managed to see the Changers’ fabled celestial weapon in action—and the only time she’d actually been able to stay and watch—and it was just as terrifying in person as all the fables and legends said it would be. Sweat started to spring up on her brow, slickening her palms as she tightened her hands on her gun, finger resting against the trigger guard, waiting to see who would win, already planning what she’d use that weapon for.

Carnage. She’d use it for carnage. Already, the hatred in her gut was like a fire, a surging roar of anger and hope.

If she could get hold of that weapon, she could finally bring the fight to them. Not just take potshots at guys taking a piss on the outskirts of the outer camps or even High Loft, but all the way to the Silver itself. The source of all the well-fed, inhuman monsters who came out here to casually slaughter whole villages, the survivors never to be heard from again.

Skipper found herself holding her breath. She would get that weapon, and she would use it on silverlings.

It didn’t take long for the bigger, bald man to get the better of the scuffle. Hands free, the taller, bulkier man got his hands behind him and used both legs to kick his shorter, long-haired companion over the edge. The bound man cried out, bounced once on a ledge three feet down, rolled down a slant of orange rock, fell another twenty feet, flopped over the edge, and disappeared feet first in a crevasse shrouded by a small outcropping between Skipper and the two Changers. Skipper had just enough time to see the surprised panic in the man’s yellow eyes as he went over the edge, still alive and screaming.

Took long enough, Skipper thought. She glanced back through her scope at the tattooed man, who was sitting on the edge of the rock cliff, panting. He was clutching one hand to his chest, obviously wounded somehow, but generally looking smug. She pulled the trigger.

It took a couple heartbeats before the man’s head exploded into a spray of glowing red, but she got the same thrill she always got, seeing a Changer’s body collapse with lifelessness. One down, six hundred to go.

She wasn’t sure it was exactly six hundred, but that was her best estimate. She knew, however, that after only having killed a hundred and eighty four in the last twenty years, she wasn’t going to be able to get them all.

She could, however, try. Especially with that new weapon.

Once she’d waited a couple minutes and nothing had moved on the ledge, she got to her knees and went to find a way to the other side of the canyon. She didn’t need the long-haired corpse—Skipper already had all the standard gear the Changers carried on their bodies in triplicate, and what she didn’t carry on her person she stashed in caches up and down the canyon for forty miles in any direction. Besides, he had clearly been relieved of anything important before being shoved over the ledge.

That left the weapon on the cliff. She glanced at the distance between her and where the corpse had fallen out of sight, then up at the ridge, trying to decide if she could make it to the gun before nightfall.

That less than a mile, she thought, squinting at the distance to where the body had disappeared in the crevasse. She’d have to backtrack to get down to it, but there was a good path up onto the other side near where the corpse had fallen, and then it was just a quick jog along the rim to retrieve the weapon. I can make that before nightfall.

But only if she hurried. Skipper packed her rifle over her shoulder, brushing the creosote bush she’d been hiding under in her haste to get off cliff, making its pungent branches release their piney-rosemary smell as she grabbed her bow and ducked between the cacti and mesquite, headed to the wash, hoping she could get to the opposite ridge before dark.