Progress through the city north of Sniper Town was quick. The sniper tore up the streets ahead of us, Mari and I riding Thunder after the growl of her engine. Occasionally, she’d stop to let us catch up, only to zoom off again before we reached her. We rested Thunder as needed, but the ever-present distant roar of the Sweeper’s convoy kept us from tarrying too long.

I wasn’t sure if they were following our tracks or just tracking the bike’s engine, but in either case we didn’t gain much ground on them.

Soon, only half an hour since we’d passed over the north bridge out of sniper town, we emerged from the gray streets onto the narrow wilderness of the riverbank.

You’ve probably seen the river yourself, but in case you haven’t: its dark, fast flowing, and broad enough across that the cars and buildings on the other side look like they belonged to an ant-sized civilization.

Where we’d emerged was just downstream of the weir, close enough that the white spray from the falling water condensed on our visors and eyepieces.

The sniper sat in the grass, staring across the water, her bike flat beside her. If it weren’t for her gun and her mind—which was cool and even—I’d have probably mistaken her for another bush amongst the overgrown bank.

I dismounted and walked over, leaving Mari to feed Thunder. My leg twinged as I put weight on it, the dog bites still raw.

“We made good time,” the sniper said, without turning. “That big deer thing is fast.”

“Horse. And it is,” I said, still very wary around this strange little killer. I unshoulder my pack and set about finally cleaning and dressing my wounds. I’d left them unattended far too long.

The sun had begun its descent, transforming the highest buildings of the opposite bank into black obelisks, but it was still a good few hours from reaching the horizon. We could be with the witch well before then.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice you two snatched your guns back up.”

“It seemed like we’d need them,” I said, wincing as I dabbed my leg wound with a spirit-soaked rag. “Is that a problem?”

She turned to look up at me then, her blue eyes narrowing to slits. For a while she just stared into me in silence. I shifted uncomfortably, getting the distinct impression that this was some sort of test.

“Nah,” she said eventually. “Keep your guns. You don’t seem like you have the stomach to shoot someone in the back.”

“Um, thank you,” I said slowly, unsure if I had just been praised or insulted.

She grunted and looked back out across the bank, and I went back to tending to my injuries.

She was right. I wouldn’t murder someone for any reason, but I might not be the one she needed to worry about.

I glanced back at Mari. The girl’s mind had finally calmed, perhaps finding something comforting in feeding her horse. She had unscrewed a cap on the front of Thunder’s horse-sized mask, and was placing a fistful of long grass inside. I watched in curious fascination as she replaced the gap, then did something the side of the mask that produced a hissing noise. Presumably there was some sort of airlock system in there that let him get at his food without letting the magic inside.

“She yours?” the sniper asked.

“What?” I turned to find she too had started watching Mari and Thunder.

“Your kid? Your sister?”

I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it might be safer for both of us to pretend that was the case. I hesitated too long for the lie to be convincing. “No, we’re not related.”

“Who is she then?”

I hesitated. Combing the truth for anything that might be dangerous. I couldn’t find much that would put us in more danger. “She’s… not from around here. She doesn’t quite speak the same English as us.”

“Thought she sounded a bit off.”

“I found her yesterday. Her and the horse. The rest of her Tribe…” I glanced over my shoulder, but Mari was still busy with Thunder. I cleared my throat. “The rest of her Tribe ran into the Sweepers. She was the only survivor.”

“Why’d they do it?”

“Not sure. Sweepers got aggressive. Horse People got aggressive. It turned nasty. But obviously the Horse People only had bows and arrows and spears, so…” I trailed off, feeling the resolution of the story was obvious.

“Bastards,” the sniper spat. “Would have never happened in my day.”

Behind her back I raised an eyebrow at ‘bastards.’ I didn’t disagree with her assessment, but it seemed somewhat hypocritical. The sniper had murdered dozens and dozens of people in cold blood if the stories were to be believed, and the skulls adorning the border of her domain made those stories very believable indeed.

So distracted was I by that first word, that it took me a moment to register what she’d just said. I blinked.

“Wait. In your day? You were a Sweeper?”

She turned to look at me then, leaning back into the grass.

“Kid, I was queen of the Sweepers, thought we were the Shooters back then.” She thrust a gloved thumb at her chest. “We were a more respectable Tribe, none of this riding around spraying lead into the air for no reason, no pointless massacres, better taste in music.”

“What happened?” I asked. The Sweepers had always been their current, chaotic form since I first encountered them.

She shrugged. “Got betrayed. Happens to every powerful person eventually if they get too complacent. The people following you get hungry for what’s yours, and if you don’t scare them back into line often enough one of them is bound to stick a knife in your back.”

That statement didn’t ring true to me. It was too absolute, too pessimistic. But I didn’t particularly see the point in starting an argument.

“That asshole in the power armor, you saw him? That little shit and a bunch of the other youngsters ambushed me and all my most loyal people, filled us full of holes before we even knew what was happening. Only survived because I jumped into the river.”

So the metal man wasn’t some sort of mechanical creature, but just a normal man in a special suit. The older librarians had told stories of powered armor, something our ancestors had invented towards the end of the Good Times and made a lot of use of in the Bad Times, but like anything invented after people stopped writing on paper the details were fuzzy and contradictory, passed down imperfectly from one generation to the next. One thing was certain though, the metal man was very dangerous.

“That’s… quite the story,” I said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

I was perhaps a little insincere, for all I knew the sniper was just as bad as the people that had ousted her, but it seemed like the sort of thing one said.

She grunted an acknowledgment. “So why are you dragging this girl along with you then, if she’s not yours?”

Again I hesitated a while before replying. My answer would sound alien to someone that regularly shot people in the head before they got close enough to say hello. But my honesty got the better of me in the end.

“It seemed like the right thing to do. She’s alone and doesn’t know the area. I couldn’t just leave her to the mercy of the city.”

“You could. Most would.”

“I’m not like most people.”

“No. You’re fucking weird.” She narrowed those sharp blue eyes at me. “You talk weird and you act weird and there’s just something… off about you that I can’t place. Where’d you come from?”

“I, erm…” My throat swelled unexpectedly, and hot tears stung my eyes. “North. Nowhere in particular.”

I looked away so that she couldn’t see my face, but I felt her consciousness swirl with curiosity as she no-doubt stared at my back.

“None of my business I guess,” she said, then groaned and rustled as she dragged herself to her feet. “You and your beast rested enough now? Can we get moving?”

I sent a silent query to Mari. She was ready to move.

“We’re ready,” I said. “Are you coming all the way to the island with us?”

“Aye,” the sniper said. “Can’t spend the night out here, can I? Haven’t got a tent.”

“I could lend you mine?”

“Nah.” Her shoulders jerked a little at that. A laugh. “Even with a tent, real problem is that this thing”—she patted the bike—“is noisy, and every throat slitter and back stabber for miles around is creeping towards us as we speak. Besides, been a while since I seen the witch.”

“Right,” I said. The thought had occurred to me whilst we were riding in her deafening wake. As fast as they were, motor vehicles announced their presence to half the city. A problem horses did not have.

I was for that reason that we finished the journey on foot, the sniper pushing her bike along beside her, Mari leading Thunder by the reins. Just past the weir, splitting the river down the middle, was the witch’s island. There was a rope-operated ferry resting in its usual spot, at a small pier on the near side of the bank.

The sniper examined the pier through her scope before we approached. It was an infamous spot for robberies and ambushes. I’d been mugged there the first time I’d gone to visit the witch.

“See anything?” I asked after a while, my palms itchy.

The sniper answered by firing her rifle. She worked the bolt with elegant efficiency, aimed again, and fired a second shot.

“Couple of lurkers,” she said with a shrug, feeding more bullets into her rifle.

Sure enough when we got down to the pier we found two bloody, prone, unmoving, men hidden in a bush. They had a rusty knife and an axe between them, and their equipment had almost completely disintegrated from neglect. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been breathing magic for months through their long-clogged filters. One of their minds still fluttered weakly.

“You could have just scared them off,” I said. “They weren’t any threat to us.”

“Wrong,” the sniper said. “They weren’t much of a threat to us. A crazy with a knife can still put you in the ground if you let your guard down. You know that just as well as I do if you’ve been walking these streets.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Of course I know that, but still—”

“Iz arne still alieve.” Mari pointed at the man whose chest was still rising and falling almost imperceptibly.

“She speaks!” the sniper crowed. “What’s that dear?”

The girl thrust her finger at the man and repeated herself.

“Oh, I see now. Well spotted.” The sniper finished the unconscious man off with her knife.

The whole scene didn’t sit well with me— the girl deliberately drawing attention to the man so that his death became a certainty. It sent a shiver down my spine. Hopefully I wouldn’t be responsible for Mari much longer, and then someone else, someone more qualified, could handle the delicate task of steering her young, angry, mind away from a short life of brutality.

Mari fixed her visor on me, and I knew some of my thoughts must have spilled out.

{Sorry,} I sent to her.

{What for?} she asked, and turned away again, but the sting of betrayal was hard to miss.

We climbed onto the ferry, dragging the bike and the horse with us, and the sniper and I pulled the rope to send us bobbing across to the ominous river to the island. There were bells rigged up to the rope system that began jangling erratically as we crossed, giving the witch all the warning they’d need to come out and meet or fend off their guests.

“What’s your name, kid?” the sniper asked as we strained against the ropes.

“People call me Red, because of the mask.”

“Makes sense,” she said, “I go by Kross. With a K.”

“As in, crosshair?”

“That’s it!”

I stared at her for a moment to assess whether she might be joking. Her eyes and her mind showed no signs. “Pleased to meet you, erm, Kross.”

It wasn’t her real name any more than mine was Red. For us city dwellers, nicknames were usually enough. My theory is that it was because we so rarely saw each other’s true faces, real names implied far more intimacy than we were accustomed to sharing. Though perhaps I am projecting. Perhaps it was just easier to remember the sniper lady was named after part of a gun and the guy with a red mask was called Red and the man who fished was called Fisher. Why use an arbitrary noise like ‘Alan’ to refer to someone?

Kross grunted. “And Flowers? What do you call her?”

I looked over to where Mari was calming the big horse that we’d only managed to squeeze onto the ferry. It felt wrong sharing a name on someone else’s behalf. “I’m sure Flowers is fine for now.”

Soon we were within a stone’s throw of the island’s shore. A faded sign floated on a buoy. ‘Wait here for permission to dock,’ it said, in my own writing. The sign had been part of my payment last time I’d been to visit the witch, there weren’t many city dwellers who could write. Unfortunately, readers were just as rare, so a second buoy with a crude comic strip depicted the process of docking for the less literate. It also depicted what would happen if the procedure wasn’t obeyed: liquid green fire falling from the sky to consume the would-be intruders.

I’d never seen any such fire myself, but I’d met Loners who swore that the witch did in fact melt those who tried to force entry onto their island.

We pulled the ferry to a stop just before the buoys and waited obediently.

It was only a few minutes before a voice called out across the water. It was elegant and powerful at the same time, with an unearthly quality to it, as if it had reverberated up from the underworld. Which one could be forgiven for believing, because the speaker was nowhere to be seen on the barren shoreline.

“Who seeks the hospitality of the Witch of the Weir?”

Kross and I both called our nicknames at the same time, mangling each other’s speech. We shared a silent look. It seemed foolish, but I got the sense this was a contest of some sort for her, that if she spoke first, she would be confirming herself as the leader of our newly formed trio.

And, foolish as it was, I didn’t want to let her think that.

“Red,” I shouted, far too loudly. “Red seeks your hospitality, oh wise Witch of the Weir.”

There was no reply for several seconds.

“Ah, the one who wrote your sign?” I tried.

“Kross is here too,” called Kross. “And a little girl. And a… a whatsit? A horse!”

More silence, and then, quite suddenly: “A horse?” The ethereal voice sounded confused. “I didn’t think those existed anymore?”

“That makes two of us,” Kross called back.

I spoke up. “An entire Tribe emerged from the eastern wasteland yesterday, they had dozens of horses. The girl is one of their number.”

“Oh, wow. Horses… that’s super interesting. Sure, head on over.” The other-worldly and mysterious quality of the witch’s voice had disappeared.

I shared another look with Kross. She shrugged, and then we set about pulling ourselves to shore.

“Oh! Wait!” the witch’s voice called across the water again, halting us. They paused a moment, and the next time they spoke the ghostly echo was back. “State your purpose. What would you beg of me?”

Kross beat me to it this time. “There’s news. Bad news, that you need to be aware of.”

“And we have someone we’d like you to assess with your witch’s eye,” I added. “Someone with gifts.”

The witch paused again. Perhaps they were processing what had been said, perhaps they were just being theatrical.

“You may alight upon my island, good petitioners.”

I caught Kross rolling her eyes. We pulled the ferry in and had soon moored at the pier on the island’s side of the river.

The witch’s island was sparsely forested, but the underbrush was thickly overgrown to the point of being impenetrable in some places. It was completely cleared in others, replaced with rows of neatly cultivated herbs. Amongst the branches of the trees, camouflaged as part of the canopy itself, was the witch’s home.

The witch kicked the rope ladder down as we approached, but instead of waiting for us to ascend like they had on my previous visits, they began eagerly climbing down to greet us.

“Sorry, we’ll go inside in a moment,” they said. “But I have to see the horse.”

The witch’s voice had none of the ghostly quality it had from the water. It was clear and confident whilst maintaining a certain lightness of tone, and, like many things about the witch, hard to easily categorize as male or female.

They dropped to the ground, skipping the last four rungs on the ladder, and dusted off their gloved palms. The witch wore a bulky one-piece suit of faded yellow plastic, adorned with dozens of home-stitched pouches and innumerable necklaces and charms composed of shells, bones, and shiny rocks. The suit had a glass ‘bubble’ helmet and filters about the neck instead of over the mouth, leaving their full face unobscured.

They had brown skin with a smoothness that only a life spent mostly out the elements could grant, and large, dark, eyes, that seemed to shine with inquisitive energy. The sight of a naked human face, without any warning, stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps this will sound strange to you, but it wasn’t something I saw often in those days.

Something in Mari’s mind spiked at the sight of it too, and it dawned on me that she was probably even less accustomed to seeing bare flesh as I was, with her Tribe all covered up in furs and black visors.

The witch approached us, arms out in greeting. “Red, Kross— it has been too long! What are you two doing together? And who’s this little one? And who’s this magnificent creature?”

Each new question came before there was a chance to even begin answering the previous.

“Red! What happened to you?” their eyes went wide as they stared at the reddened bandages about my arm and leg. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. They aren’t serious.”

They frowned as if they didn’t quite believe me, and then said, “all right, slowly. They next moment the frown was gone, and they strode between the two adults and stopped before the girl and her horse.

“Hello there,” they said, bending their knees to bring their eyes level with Mari’s visor. “What’s your name?”

Mari leaned back a little, her mind bristling with wariness and unease. The witch’s thoughts rhymed with their words: all energetic curiosity and inquisitive joy.

{Should I answer them?} Mari asked me.

{I don’t see the harm.}

Mari took a breath, then said her name out loud.

“Oh, like Marigold? As in the flower.” The witch pointed at the floral decoration around the border of the girl’s visor.

Mari hesitated for a long while, her thoughts churning something dark and painful.

“Yes,” she said eventually.

“That’s a lovely name. And who is this?” The witch held out a hand as if to touch Thunder but stopped half-way. “May I?” they asked Mari.

The girl nodded subtly. “Thunder.”

“Thunder.” The witch said the word with an almost reverent awe and patted the horse on the neck.

{Friend?} Thunder thought and sniffed at them.

The witch asked dozens of questions. What does he eat? Where did you get him? Are there many more horses? How fast can he run? That sort of thing.

Mari answered reluctantly where she could, and I filled in where she could not.

It was several minutes before Kross managed to end the interrogation with a well-timed and very loud clearing of her throat.

“Oh of course, sorry,” the witch said, “we have more important matters to discuss, don’t we?”

They frowned at the ladder up to their home, their mouth twisting, before turning back to Mari. “I’m afraid Thunder might have to wait down here. Would that be all right?”

Mari nodded.

“We should probably hide him deeper into the trees,” I said.

The witch fixed those dark eyes on me. “Hide him?”

I found it hard to keep their gaze. “Erm, there are people looking for us, they will recognize the horse even from the shore.”

“I did here some shots. Was that what that was?”

“Nah,” Kross said. “That was just some low lives. Real problem is the Sweepers.”

“Ahhh,” the witch sighed, “we really do have important matters to discuss.”

Thunder seemed happy enough to rest in a more obscure hiding spot. We tied his reins to a tree though, not trusting his simple mind to retain why it was so important that he didn’t go wandering along the shore.

The witch’s home was a strange building, and not just because it was built several stories off the ground. The exterior was clad with wooden boards, woven branches, even living patches of greener foliage, and it had a wooden balcony running around the outside. Beneath all that natural material though, was plastic. Or something like plastic, anyway. It might have once been pure white, but time had aged it to a gray eggshell color.

The entrance had two doors in sequence, forming an airlock. Once we were past the first door, the witch pressed a button on the wall, and there was a heavy mechanical clunk followed by a rushing hiss of air.

While the airlock was doing… whatever it was doing the witch took up a spray bottle from a bench and started spritzing us with it.

“Just stops you dragging magic in here with you, nothing to worry about,” they said apologetically, when Mari shied back. “There used to be some automatic hose thingies in the ceiling but those haven’t worked since I was your age.”

After a minute, there was a clicking noise, and the second door swung open.

The interior was far less harsh and sterile by comparison. The not-quite-white plastic was still there, but it had been buried under curtains, carpets, piles of cushions, and tinkling decorations of every imaginable variety. Shells, bones, shiny bits of scrap, old jewelry, all hung from bits of string or electrical cable that crisscrossed across the walls and ceiling. Electric lights in an eccentric mixture of red, purple, blue and magenta bathed the space in a technicolor glow.

Even through my filter mask, a heady, spicy, scent wafted over me. It was pleasant, but my nose couldn’t place it.

The witch reached up and unclasped their helmet, which let out a spit of compressed air.

“Ah that’s better, hate wearing this thing.” They removed the glass bubble, shaking loose a river of dark hair, and began unzipping the outer suit.

I hesitated at the threshold, sharing an awkward glance with Kross. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. Showing your face to one stranger was one thing, revealing it to three at once was exponentially more unnerving.

“You can keep those on if you want,” the witch called over, smiling at our trepidation. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

After a moment, Kross gave a heavy shrug and reached up to pull her mask off. She had a bony face with sharp features, and messy inch-long blond hair shot through with a generous amount of gray. All in all, not far from what’d I imagined. As normal as face as any, with the same red marks and callouses from persistent mask wearing that everyone had.

She had a crosshair tattoo at her temple that I hadn’t been able to see before: simple, faded, black ink. The woman certainly liked sticking to her theme.

She frowned when she caught me staring at it. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Makes me cringe too. We were all young once.”

“I erm… don’t think it’s so bad,” I offered.

“Yes, you do,” she said.

Perhaps she thought I thought the design itself was garish or immature, but what really gave me pause was the mind that had chosen such a thing. It wasn’t enough for Kross, or her younger self, to deal sudden death on a regular basis, she had to mark her face so that you couldn’t avoiding being reminded of that fact. It wasn’t a choice I could relate to.

I cleared my throat and reached up to remove my own mask. After I’d pushed the strap free, I paused for a moment, keeping the thing in place with my hand, and took one last deep breath.

I didn’t have a particularly interesting face, I thought. Mother insisted I was handsome, but on the rare occasion that someone else gazed upon my visage they had little reaction one way or the other.

Kross regarded me with casual indifference. “You’re older than I thought you’d be.”

“I’m twenty-five, I think.”

“Yeah, but you act pretty soft for someone that age. How many people have you killed?”

“Is that a normal question to ask where you come from?”

“Sure. It’s just part of life, isn’t it? Everyone does it now and again. See, even Flowers has dropped a few people, good for her.” Kross nodded at Mari.

I turned to find the girl holding up three fingers. One for Peter, but I couldn’t account for the others.

“That’s not something to be proud of,” I snapped, whirling on Kross. This close the height difference between us was even more pronounced, and I towered over her. “Stop encouraging this… this Badness. She’s a child.”

“You’re a child,” Kross said, “in a man’s body, maybe, but that girl apparently knows more about the way of the world than you.”

{Stop, Alan,} Mari called with her mind.

But I was furious now, my face felt like it was on fire. “Don’t you dare lecture me on the way of the world. I am very, very, aware of the way things work. I just won’t lower myself to partaking in the same savagery as degenerates like the Sweepers, or their predecessors.”

Kross’ ice blue eyes narrowed. “Where do you get off, talking down to me like I’m shit on your shoe? You think you’re better than me, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t think, I kn—”

“Hey! Hey!” The witch shouted, cutting me off. “Cut that out right now.”

Their face twisted into mask of disbelief, disgust and embarrassment. Rusty as I was at reading facial expressions, even I couldn’t misunderstand, and the heat radiating from their mind made it clear.

I blushed and had the sudden urge to hide my face behind my mask once more. Kross looked aside, grimacing, embarrassment radiating from her.

The witch locked us up in an intense glare and thrust a finger at each of us in turn. “You two will act civilized while you’re on my island, understand?”

We both mumbled some affirmative noises.

“Good,” the witch said. “Where the hell did all that come from, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. Several nerves had been struck at once, but I wasn’t in any place to reflect on which ones and why. “It’s been a difficult few days, I suppose. Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“Aye,” Kross said. “Will rein it in. Sorry Witchy.”

“All right then,” the witch said, their posture relaxing. “Let’s all have a seat, I’ll make some tea, and then you can tell me all about this bad news of yours.”