Crash Evans got off the convoy with her red hair still mashed to the side of her head, drool staining her shirt. Not because she’d been sleeping, but because she had listened and re-listened to the same video so many hundreds of times that she forgot about her jaw muscles and her mouth fell open and she started to salivate on herself. Likewise, her hair was messed up because her head had slumped sideways against the back seat as she fixated on the tablet, both her arms and legs up in a fetal position in the seat as she concentrated for hours on end.

She’d been taking up the full back seat of the cushy black government sedan in the middle of the convoy for the last day or two, ever since the Commandant had sent a couple men to pound on her door at two a.m. to demand she get dressed.

She’d told them to get lost, of course. Her tour of duty ended six years ago. When they knocked again, she yanked open the door and squirted them both in the face with the spray bottle she’d been using to train her puppy not to pee on the rug. “No!” she snapped, squirting them again.

The two men had stared at her, mouths agape, dripping clove-scented water from their chins and noses, when one of them had gingerly held up a tablet with a man in a weird feathered headdress and showed the image to her. Crash had been about to slam the door on him when he’d numbly hit Play, and her attention had instantly come into complete focus and she dropped her spray bottle to grab for the tablet.

It had been a video of a group of men dressed like they were planning to re-enact some ancient Aztec ritual as they snuck between the buildings and out of sight, but their words…

She’d only heard a few of them, a quick whispered exchange between a couple of the men, but Crash had fallen in love. Ancient American root, she had recognized immediately. Some as-yet-undiscovered evolution. Massive geologic separation from Alliance Standard. Probably at least a few million speakers, judging by the disparate accent variances.

She’d listened to the clip seventy-six times, grabbing her recorder to take notes as the two men wiped their faces and nervously eased past her into her home and gathered up her stuff. Crash ignored them, still standing in her doorway, breathlessly listening to the treasure they had brought her. They had more clips, too, little whispers and arrogant chortles and barked orders captured from this camera or that, all from what looked like a small town or farm village. It was magic. She didn’t even notice as the two men wordlessly ushered her out of her house, bags thrown over their burly shoulders, puppy under one guy’s beefy arm, locked her door with a polite flick of her lights, then gently guided her into a sedan, totally transfixed by the glory that now broadcast from the pad in her hand. It was new. A new language, hallelujah thank the lord!! She was getting so bored having nothing to do but watch her fish swim in circles. If she’d had a gun, she would’ve shot herself.

Probably why the Commandant had written a law specifically for her saying she was not allowed to carry a gun. Because that was fair…

But this… This made waiting the three months with nothing fun to do totally worth it. Clearly, this fascinating new achievement of human ingenuity was a case of massive divergent linguistic evolution from a same Old American root, maybe Canadian or Californian. After she’d listened to them at least three hundred times, she had grabbed the startled soldier sitting in the sedan with her and had demanded to know where he’d gotten the videos. He’d said something about Nebraska and invaders and mass murder and she’d gotten even more excited.

“God, what time is it?” Crash asked, glancing at the sky out from under the awning. She couldn’t tell if it was day or night with the rain and cloud cover. Probably day, because it had been in the middle of the night when the Commandant’s thugs had accosted her, but she’d been spending so much time staring at the short videos they had captured of their visitors that she didn’t put it out of the question to be sometime the next day.

“Seven thirty-six, Ma’am,” a cowed-looking young man with an automatic rifle said. He had been glued to her side ever since they’d shuttled her out of Pittsburgh—where she’d told the commander to shove his ‘team’ of linguists totally up his ass and just took the one with a halfway decent understanding of Canadian vs. Southern Old English morphology and a pretty smile—and had let her out onto a base somewhere in Tennessee. At least, she thought it was probably Tennessee. She hadn’t looked up more than a couple times, but the scenery had changed from big trees to dust and cactus. “Been a long ride, eh?”

Crash hadn’t looked up long enough from the video—which she had replayed at least a hundred and thirty times, now—to look at his nametag. She glanced at it now.

“That seven thirty day or night, Marks?” she asked.

He reddened. “Night, Ma’am.”

“Really?” Crash squinted at the sky. She supposed the drive back to the base could have taken longer than a couple hours. “Where am I? Have I eaten anything?”

Lieutenant Marks’ eyes went wide and he cleared his throat. “Not that I’ve seen, Ma’am. And we’re in Old Dakota.”

She squinted at him, trying to figure out how they’d driven across the country. Her stomach, now that she thought about it, was complaining. “Did you eat anything?”

“Yes, Ma’am. I offered it to you, but you told me to leave you the fuck alone, you were working and by god if I interrupted you again you’d throat punch me. Ma’am.”

“Huh.” Crash sniffed, rubbing the side of her head and squinting at the squat military base around her. “Old Dakota? You sure?”

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“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Huh.” She processed that a moment, then shrugged. “You guys get anything else for me on the drive?”

“The Engineer grabbed one from a schoolyard roof cam. They’ve got it for you in your room.”

“They get the mouth movements on that one?”

“No, ma’am. Just some laughing right before they went in and slaughtered the kids.”

“Fuck.” Crash sighed. “I need lip movement, Marks. Tell that little shit to do something useful with his time dilation and go get me some goddamn visuals of their mouths as they’re killing those kids.”

“But…” Marks began, almost a babble, “…you’re the only one the Engineer will talk to…”

“Ugh. Still?! That stuttering little shit needs to grow a pair.” She rubbed an arm across her face, realizing she probably had a cold. “So where’s this guy I’m supposed to talk to? He got a name?”

“He’s…uh…chained to the leg of the Commandant’s spaceship, Ma’am. We don’t know his name.”

Crash blinked, thinking she’d misheard. When Lieutenant Marks didn’t correct himself, and instead swallowed hard and winced at her harsh look, she said, “Why’s he chained to the spaceship, Marks?”

Her liaison reddened. “Um. I was told it’s because he’s too dangerous to put him in a room with you.”

Crash turned and squinted out from under the awning at the heavy rain that had been pounding the wet asphalt for what had obviously been quite some time. “How long’s he been out there?”

“Um…I’m not sure…” Marks looked like he was going to get on his comm and check.

Crash held up a disgusted hand. “Never mind. Tell them I need them to get him a cup of coffee and sit him down in a chair across from me.”

“The Commandant doesn’t think that’s a good ide—”

At Crash’s sharp look, he choked off what he had been about to say.

“You tell that pointy-hat meathead he’s gonna get that man in a room with me because I’ve got a cold and I’m sure as fuck not interviewing him in the rain.”

“Uhhhh,” Lieutenant Marks cleared his throat. “I’ll see what I can do.” Without leaving her side, he grabbed his radio and said, “Matthews? Can we get the murder hobo into a room? Miss Crash doesn’t want to interview him in the rain. She’s got a cold.”

He hesitated as he listened to the set in his ear, then grimaced, his brown eyes falling on Crash. “Um. They said the Commandant threw the keys over the Edge and he’s stuck there until they can get a grinder.”

Crash frowned. “The Edge? That’s five hundred miles from here.”

“Uh…yeah. Higher ups wanted to teach the guy how to fly, from what I heard.”

Crash pursed her lips. “Remind me not to piss off the Commandant,” she said. She considered. “But I’m not going to interview him chained to the leg of a spaceship. Get him somewhere comfortable and dry.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Marks relayed the orders, then gestured towards a hallway leading deeper into the building. “They’ve got your security set up. Got a guy watching your puppy so he don’t pee on the bed. Are you ready to see your room?”

“Fuck the room. Show me the savage.”

Marks blinked. “But you haven’t slept in—” At her sharp look, he cleared his throat again and said, “Yes Ma’am. This way.”

Crash followed the man through the complex until he led her to a heavy concrete room looking like a prison cell without bars. It had a single metal table in the center and a two-way glass mirror taking up one side.

“So this guy is dangerous,” Marks said, as he showed her a place to set her backpack and gear in the attaching room. “Commandant wants to be sure you don’t get too close to him. He has some sort of matter manipulation abilities like from the old wars. They’ve got him suppressed, but they don’t want to rely on that too much, just in case it’s not completely foolproof.”

“Interesting,” Crash said, immediately calculating how that could have affected the evolution of his dialect. He probably had developed more words for ethereal substances, concepts, and matter-shifting actions, and it was probably a much greater percentage of his people’s overall vocabulary than, say, boring thirty-sixth-century East American survivors. She thought about the feathers and how she had isolated a few words with ancient Egyptian roots. Some small group of Egyptian nationals that had the majority or some power hold in a small enclave that survived the Fall, one that maybe dominated the language for the rest of the next fifteen hundred years? Ones that maybe borrowed a feather fetish from Mesoamerica?

“So, like I said, we could get you set up in your room first if you need some time to rest before—” Marks was saying.

“How long until he gets here?” Crash asked, dropping her stuff in the prep room and going into the interview room to sit down at the stark metal table. She pulled out her tablet and recorder and started taking notes.

“Uh, lemme check.” Crash said a few things to his comm, then, after a moment, said, “They’re bringing him in now.”

“Good. Tell one of the Commandant’s guys to get some food and drink. For both of us. Something hot for him, fizzy for me.”

“Sure thing, Miss Crash,” Lieutenant Marks said. He said a few more words into the comm, none of which Crash paid any attention to. She was reviewing the new files that had just come in from Quad—scavenged from an old CCT in some dead dude’s barn. Apparently, he’d been trying to figure out where his rat problem was coming from. Instead, he’d been killed, but the savages responsible had spent quite a bit of time camped in one corner of his hay loft, watching the goings-on of the farm as they gorged themselves on their spoils from prior conquests for an entire day and a half before climbing down to go slaughter everyone in that town, too.

Crash analyzed the sound captures, amplifying and cutting out the horse and goat noises until she could get a good bead on just the voices themselves. She was pretty sure she had several of the basic words down, like I, you, he, go, stay… The Egyptian had been a red herring, and the more time she spent listening, the less Egyptian it actually sounded, and the more run-of-the-mill North American with a few time-based evolutionary quirks.

These guys like their volcanoes, Crash noted, as she listened for the hundredth time. Most of the Egyptian root words were related to volcanoes, and she could extrapolate—based on the way one guy came back into the loft carrying a severed head and got on his knees, hands up, and started carrying on about blood sacrifices—that they probably had some sort of volcano cult worship going on.

“The, uh, prisoner is here,” Lieutenant Marks said from the door.

“Shhh!” Crash snapped, going back to the original video of the group of six sneaking through the village. She heard the ancient Egyptian word for ‘volcano’ a couple times there, too, and since there were no volcanos that she knew of in that area of the Edge, she had to assume it was their god.

A few minutes passed before Marks crushed her thoughts into a thousand sparkling bone-shards slicing through her brain when he said, “You said you wanted to talk to the prisoner…”

Spinning, Crash slammed her hand down on the metal table and snapped, “I swear to god, Marks, I’m trying to concentrate, and if you interrupt me again, I’m going to grab you by the—” She frowned at the big, dark-skinned man in chains and a big silver collar standing behind him, giving her a curious look over Marks’ shoulder. He was flanked by six beasts of men, all sporting full combat gear, automatic rifles, and grenades.

“Oh.” She put down her squirt bottle and gestured for the prisoner to join her.