“Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do,” Skipper said. She yanked her bone-handled steel knife from its sheath. “I’m gonna free your hands and feet and leave you some water.”

The Changer, who already looked half dead, every inch of exposed skin covered in bruises, scratches, and old blood, blinked at her. “You are?”

“Yeah.” She tossed her knife and caught it deftly. “You know who I am. You know I’ll just hunt you down if you run.”

He nodded slowly.

“So.” She fiddled with the blade. “Something about your story’s not quite adding up, so I’m gonna go find your trail and follow it back to camp. If you’re telling the truth and they’re all dead, I’ll come back here and we’ll figure out how to get that ankle splinted. If you’re lying to me—in any way—I’m going to come back here, hunt you down, torture you, and kill you.”

He flinched.

“Anything you wanna tell me?” she demanded.

His eyes flickered at the gun, then he just shook his head.

“No, I’m not leaving it with you,” she laughed. “Turn around. I’m about to leave.”

He complied meekly, pulling himself out from under his dead companion, then grunted in surprise when she grabbed him by the hair and shoved him to the ground, putting a knee in his back.

“Don’t move,” she ordered as she began searching his pockets for anything he could use as a weapon. She found a small, fold-out pocket knife—which she kept—and a key. “What’s the key for?” she demanded, as she patted down the rest of him.

“The hummer I drove out here,” he said. “It’s been recharging. Probably got tons of juice now.”

Finding nothing else but lint, Skipper hesitated in her search. Very slowly, she shoved him onto his side to face her. “Did you just say there’s a working hummer up there?”

He winced, and too late, she realized she was gripping his wounded shoulder. She released it.

“Probably two,” he muttered. “Pastet followed me. Doubt he did it on foot.”

Remembering the key that had hung around the other man’s bloody neck—now resting in her pocket—Skipper hesitated, the options hitting her in an excited wave. To have not one Hummer at her disposal, but two…

Of course, they left a trail that even a blind and addled child could follow, but the idea of being able to cover more than a dozen miles in a day left Skipper breathless.

“I’m gonna let you go,” she growled, jamming the knife against the back of his neck. “Don’t fight me. I swear to the stars themselves I’ll gut you.”

“I won’t,” he whispered.

She deftly cut through the bonds—cruelly-tightened twist-ties, she realized—and shoved his arms away from his body so he couldn’t reach for something hidden in his clothes. Then she did the same to his feet.

“We both know you ain’t going anywhere fast,” Skipper said, stepping back to let him rise. “If you’re anywhere but right here when I come back, I’m going to make good on my promise to end you, Changer.”

“Okay,” he said into the ground. He hadn’t moved a muscle since she freed him.

“Here’s some water,” she said, grabbing the canteen from the dead man’s pack and dropping it by his head.

The Changer flinched at the thunk of the bottle hitting the sand by his face. Very slowly, he started to move his left hand towards the water, his right arm remaining where she’d dropped it. Like someone who expected to be shot in the back of the head the moment he stopped paying attention, the man slowly sat up, his bloody, dusty hair nonetheless moving like lustrous strands of whispery glass over his back as he got to a seated position. His fingers were trembling, still swollen and discolored from the zip-ties, as he uncapped the water one-handed and, eyes on her, drank.

Then, because she felt a little bad, Skipper grabbed one of the sealed food bars from the dead man’s pack and dropped it beside his injured leg. “There’s enough food for three days, if you don’t waste it.”

He nodded up at her, still looking like a wild coyote that expected to get shot.

“Don’t run off,” Skipper said. “I’m checking out your story.”

He nodded.

She hesitated, still a bit surprised she’d let him go. “Anything you want to add before I go?” she demanded. “I can tell you’re lying about something.”

His shoulders tensed, but he shook his head.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged, took all the important gear out of the dead man’s pack and transferred it to hers, then, with one last look at the miserable-looking Changer, she snagged up her weapons and turned and jogged back up out of the canyon.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

#

Skipper found the camp exactly as he said it would be. Seven Changer corpses wearing the Blood Dragon badge rotted in the sun, already picked apart by birds and coyotes. There wasn’t enough of them left to determine the precise cause of death, a few of the bones were charred. One female corpse lay face-down by the fire. There were signs that others had been in the camp, smaller feet, wearing moccasins and not combat boots, but they were long gone. The fire was close to a week old.

The Hummers, too, were exactly where the Changer had told her they’d be. Two of them. Fully functional, if the way the lights came on when she stuck they key in the ignition was any indication. Skipper didn’t have the first idea how to operate them—she only knew the keys went in the little slots beside the steering wheel because she’d watched raiding parties come and go through her scope for the last two decades—but she took it as a good sign the Changer was telling the truth.

Still, it bothered her. How had he grabbed a rifle, wounded and with a concussion, and executed seven men before one of them could shoot back at him? And why had they allowed him to have the gun in the first place?

And why hadn’t the rifle glowed, even once, when she tried to activate it up on the canyon’s rim? She’d built a little fire and concentrated, as hard as she could, and couldn’t even get it to glow a little.

Then Skipper realized what was really bugging her. There was only one rifle. Between two men, one of whom had supposedly killed an entire camp of Changers, and the other having supposedly chased after him in the desert…without bringing a gun of his own?

It didn’t make sense. Where was the other gun?

Skipper went looking for the other gun in the camp—any gun—but started to get a weird little chill when she couldn’t find a single one. Everything useful had been taken. She squinted at the tracks that disappeared into the desert, about twenty of them, then at the two Hummer tracks heading back the way she’d come. If anyone had followed in that direction, they were too good at hiding their passage for it to show.

Frustrated, Skipper returned to where she’d hidden the vehicles with creosote and mesquite and old cholla. She tore apart the interior, then, coming up empty, followed the men’s tracks to the place where the Changer—Ptahmohtep—had camped. She looked, but she couldn’t find a second gun. She scoured the bushes all the way back to the cliff’s edge—pausing to look over the edge of the Changer dump-zone to ensure none of the corpses at the bottom of the ravine were fresh or sporting a rifle—then checked the stone ledge for some indication she’d missed it the first time.

Nothing.

Squinting, she peered over the edge. The Changer was no longer in sight, but that didn’t mean anything. He could’ve simply slipped into the shade under the ledge, waiting for her.

Sure enough, when she grew frustrated enough to return empty-handed that night, the Changer was sitting beside a small fire, a little packrat roasting on a mesquite twig. She saw that, narrowed her eyes, but threw her gear under the overhang anyway, startling him.

“Where’s the other gun?” she demanded.

“What gun?” the Changer asked, looking like he wanted to bolt.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Skipper said. “I just walked twenty miles to decide whether or not to kill you. Why was there only one gun? Why didn’t Pastet have his own gun, if he was going out there to kill you?”

“Oh.” He gave a nervous laugh, like he was a kid caught stealing pinon nuts, and she saw the slight points to his teeth.

“Let me guess,” Skipper said, her hands tense on her bow, but as of yet not raising it, “a scavver counter-raid hit your camp while you were arguing with your Lieutenant buddy and you and your Pastet grabbed the only two Hummers and got the fuck out of there while everyone else died.”

He frowned like she’d insulted him. “No. I killed them.”

“Okay.” She was willing to go with that for now. “How?”

He glanced at the weapon over her shoulder and licked his lips.

“What about your buddy over there?” she demanded. “Why wasn’t he carrying a gun of his own? Why’d you have one and not him?”

“It’s probably just out there in the desert somewhere,” he said.

“No,” Skipper said, frustrated, “it’s not. Believe me, I’d just love to get my hands on another working gun. But I looked. He went after you empty-handed.”

“Maybe that’s why he kicked the shit outta me,” the Changer said.

“You mean he just…left…his gun behind, knowing he was going after a guy carrying this kind of weapon?” Skipper demanded, patting the AI rifle. She shook her head. “Doesn’t make sense. What aren’t you telling me?”

He glanced down at the rodent. Surprisingly, he’d bound and splinted his ankle with strips from the dead man’s shirt, and he’d more or less cleaned himself up. He’d pulled the dead man out of sight under a pile of rocks. His unnatural, living crystalline hair was still dirty, though, as were his clothes.

He hadn’t, however, tried to run away. And, for that reason alone, Skipper was willing to keep talking when, at any other time, she would have simply offed the Changer for being a Changer.

After a moment, he glanced back up at her, seemingly steeling himself for something. “Would you like another lesson on how to use that AI? There’s a lot more that it can do than just melt stone.” The way he said it, melting stone was low on the list.

Skipper scanned his face. She would have given one of her knives to know what he was hiding from her. Just the fact that he had almost three feet of hair was…strange. Most of the Changers Skipper had seen liked to keep their heads cropped short for raids—or even shaved. She suspected it made them feel better at night, knowing they were less of targets by scavvers looking to sell their locks.

And he did have some expensive locks. It was the first time Skipper had been close enough to get a good look at the long stuff while a Changer had been alive. Usually, by the time she got to them, their precious hair was already stiff and dead, but his still flowed with ethereal life, almost like it was weightless, lifted by clouds.

“Okay,” she said, reluctantly. “Teach me.”

A little wash of relief crossed his face and he nodded. “So it’s not just a weapon. Same thing that can make stone melt can also make water.”

Skipper felt the implications of that hit her like a boot to the face. “That’s how they’re doing it,” she breathed. She’d never been able to figure out how the Changers were getting their water—they always picked the most defensible positions for their camps, with no regard to water or food supply, and she just couldn’t understand why they weren’t all dead.

“We’re making it,” he confirmed. “Desert living gets a lot easier if you don’t have to worry about running out of water.”

Skipper realized her mouth was hanging open. She looked down at the gun in her hand, suddenly realizing just how much more valuable it was than she had first imagined. Where she had assumed she carried a weapon, in actuality she carried life. The life of a whole village. A people.