“Well, that went well,” Kross said as she swaggered through the open gate of the Sweeper’s fortress.

I looked her small frame up and down for injuries. Her long rifle rested over her shoulder with casual ease, but there were ripples in the usually still surface of her mind.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “That was a lot of bullets they fired at you.”

A heavy exhalation wheezed through her mask’s filters. “Yep. Nearly pissed myself. Felt like the entire building might’ve fallen down.”

“We’re glad you’re okay,” Bobby said. “We were really worried.”

Within the bush-suit and behind the visor, one of Kross’s eyebrows raised. “Were you now?”

I realized it was true. I hadn’t expected it. Kross was by all accounts a very Bad person who was only helping us for selfish reasons, but I suppose the part of the brain that decides whether we care about people or not isn’t in perfect synchronization with the part that makes moral judgments.

“We do still need a sniper,” I said.

“Ha, all right. How about you all?” She looked around. “Girl okay?”

Mari emerged from one of the machine gun nests up on the wall. An assortment of freshly acquired guns hung from her by straps and holsters.

Unleashing violence had done nothing to free her mind from its shell.

“Girl okay,” she announced and then descended the ladder to join us. The new weapons clattering against each other like morbid jewelry.

She had insisted on looting the Sweepers whilst Bobby and I opened the gate. I had left her to it. The sight and smell of the bodies turned my stomach, which was unusual, but perhaps it was because they were bodies I had made. That first one we’d shot, the one with the voice that had cracked as high as a child’s… perhaps he had been a child. In my mind's eye he was short and slight, I could believe he might have been only a year or two older than Mari. I hoped that was my imagination doing its worst.

Something sparked in Kross at the sight of the girl, but her posture didn’t change. “Excellent. We’re all fine then.” She turned to stare out over the Port Smith Industrial District. “Ahhh home sweet home. Been too long.”

We decided to press on and search the place systematically, as a group. Some of our gear was still stashed on the other side of the river, but that could wait. We did close the gate though and recover the climbing robe. It would have been very unfortunate if some other group of opportunists stumbled upon the fortress while we were searching it.

Bobby and I also had to talk Kross out of hanging a corpse above the gate as a warning, though Mari seemed disturbingly on-board with the idea.

The Sweepers’ island was big, with dozens of half-disintegrated warehouses and factories and other big blocky buildings. They were a large Tribe, but even they couldn’t have used all the space. It would have taken us weeks to properly search every building.

Kross simplified the task for us. She led us off down the rail track, saying, “we’ll want to check the gun shop first. That way. I’ll bet it’s the only building with lights on.”

“Do you think there’ll be anyone there?” I asked.

“Probably,” she said. “No one dangerous though.”

There was something swirling in her consciousness. Just a hint of guilt or embarrassment or something along those lines. Not much, but enough to make me stop and question her. “I thought you said everyone would be at the wall?”

She noticed I’d stopped and turned to face me. “Yeah, the fighters, sure, but not the… helpers.”

Bobby and I shared a concerned glance.

“Helpers?” they asked.

I was a bit more direct. “You mean slaves, don’t you?”

Kross shrugged. “Can you imagine those lot sweeping floors and cooking anything that doesn’t taste of garbage? Let alone having the attention span to assemble a firearm? Course they have slaves. Every big Tribe got slaves.”

“That isn’t true,” I said.

“Okay, most then. Anyway, gun shop is where we need to go.”

Something stirred with Mari. The barrier around her mind thinned slightly, letting more of the inner light through.

{Alan. If they take slaves…}

I didn’t have the heart to tell her to keep her hopes low. {I know, Mari. I hope we find someone.}

The walk through the district was eerie. It wasn’t the same as creeping through any other dead part of the city. Everywhere there were signs that this was a permanently occupied piece of turf. Vegetation had been cut back, crude art splattered on bare walls, tables and chairs left outside some of the less dilapidated structures.

Here and there we saw signs of recent activity cut short by hasty flight: meat burned to ash on a cook fire, a filter tent’s flap lap blowing open in the breeze, a tame dog staring at us from the shadows of a doorway, its mind pining for its masters.

Kross kept her rifle ready. Every few minutes she would ask if Mari and I had sensed anything. And our answer was always the same: “No. Not yet. Just rats and bugs mostly.”

That all changed when the gun shop came within sight.

‘Shop,’ was an underwhelming title for the structure. It was a huge cube. The surface bright steel where it wasn’t dark glass— as impenetrable as Mari’s visor. Other than the library I’d grown up in, it was the most intact building I’d ever seen. Like someone had cut it out of a photograph from the Good Times and glued it over the image of our decaying world.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate, the Sweepers had covered the thing in graffiti and rigged up huge speakers at each corner. But you could still make out the structurally pristine building underneath.

But our sight wasn’t the only sense that was suddenly awestruck.

{Alan!} Mari shouted in my mind.

{I feel it. I feel them.}

Just before the gun shop was a squat little warehouse. An unassuming building a normal person might have just walked right past.

There were minds inside. At a distance, we had just thought them more rats, but as we’d drawn closer, it became clear they were something else.

Mari broke into a sprint, charging toward the warehouse.

“Wait,” I shouted, chasing after her. Confusion and alarm bloomed in Kross and Bobby as we left them behind.

With my longer strides I managed to catch up with her just before she reached the warehouse, but I didn’t try to stop her. {Just slow down. Let’s be careful.}

A chunk of the warehouse’s outer wall had been removed. The insides were clearly the garage where the Sweepers had maintained their truck and other vehicles. But behind the machine tools and oil drums was a hastily constructed wooden fence, and behind that fence, were horses.

Ten of them. All full bodied and strong, their masks still in place.

Whether they recognized Mari by sight or by scent or by mind, they noticed her.

{Girl? Girl? Girl! Girl here!}

The searing heat inside the shell of grief cooled, and the barrier vaporized into mist. Love poured out of Mari as she ran toward the last remnant of her people. A shout erupted from her, a noise of pure joy.

After a quick scan for any human minds lurking nearby, I let her go. {We’ll be outside when you’re ready.}

She sent back something grateful, already clambering over the fence.

“Oh how wonderful,” Bobby said, running up beside me.

“Well there’s something,” Kross said.

We watched Mari for a time. We could have gotten closer, but this felt like a moment that belonged to her alone.

The horses surrounded her, pushing their heads forward to receive affection. Mari laughed in a way I’d never heard before, light and free, the way a child should laugh. She checked them over for injuries, softly whispering their names to them in a cooing voice.

“We got stuff to be getting on with,” Kross said. Her words were quiet, lacking the usual casual abrasiveness, almost apologetic.

“Give her a moment longer,” I said. I had a feeling Mari’s elation would be short lived, but I wasn’t going to rip it from her earlier than necessary.

Kross replied with a grunt of consent and said nothing further.

Sure enough, Mari’s mind began to draw back in on itself as the initial euphoria began to seep away. By the time she walked over, the hard shell was already forming around her mind, the warmth of joy turning hot with rediscovered anger.

{Are the horses all right?} I asked, carefully.

{They are well,} she replied. {I asked them what happened to their people.}

{Oh….}

There was no need for her to elaborate.

{Mari,} I sent, {they could be wrong. They’re just horses after all. They get confused sometimes.}

What was I doing, trying to give her hope?

{Let’s just finish this,} she sent back, her mind fully sealed away now. She took up one of her new weapons, a machine gun of the same model as mine, and wracked the side-lever back. An unspent bullet pinged out, bouncing across the floor.

Kross sighed. “I really need to teach you people to use those things properly at some point.”

We approached the gun shop, observing it from a hiding spot across the street. Wide double doors of dark glass marked the entrance, steel handles gleaming. Through the tinted portal lay an open room with what appeared to be a desk, piled high with the sort of detritus you would expect of the Sweepers: several guns, a pair of boots, a half-eaten bird carcass. The side of the desk facing us had been reinforced with bags of soil.

Cold fear wafted out of the building a thickly as smoke from a fire. There were minds inside, lurking just beyond the lobby, human minds, a lot of them.

“There’s at least twenty people hiding inside,” I announced to the group. “They’re terrified.”

“Maybe best we don’t just go walking in the front door then,” Kross said. “Scared people are stupid people, and there’s a lot of guns in there.”

I frowned. “Surely the Sweepers wouldn’t just leave those lying around where their slaves could take them?”

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

Something flinched in her mind, slight enough that I would have missed it if I wasn’t focusing on her. “Well, they wouldn’t in my day… best be careful though.”

No one disagreed with that.

“So is there a back way in?” I asked.

“Course. A few in fact. I’m thinking me and the girl take the rear, you two hold down the front here, make sure no one leaves. You and Mari can”—she tapped her temple—“you know, to keep in touch.”

{Something’s not right here,} Mari announced, to me alone.

“Hold on,” Bobby said. “Why does this sound like a battle plan? Aren’t we essentially freeing these people? Why not just shout to them and explain the situation?”

“Just being careful.” Kross insisted. She fidgeted a little, her blue eyes shifting to the side. I think it was the first time I’d seen her on the back foot, socially speaking.

“Kross,” I said. “You’re hiding something.”

“All right. Fine. Fine. Chances are the people in there aren’t all… helpers.”

“Slaves,” Bobby corrected.

“Whatever.”

“More Sweepers?” I asked.

“Sort-of,” Kross said. “The ones too old to fight. Or too young. In my day that was procedure: if something bad happens while the rest of the tribe is away, hole up in the gun shop.”

Nausea rose in me. That boy really had been a boy.

In hindsight, of course the Sweepers had children. It’s something people just do. Strange that I hadn’t even considered the possibility, but perhaps when someone behaves like a monster it is easy to forget they have the same fundamental wants and needs as the rest of us: eat, drink, sleep, reproduce, protect their Tribe.

I swallowed my disgust, hot rage boiling up from within me. “And you kept this from us why?”

“Because of that.” She thrust a finger at my face. “That stupid sorry look I knew you’d get.”

“And what? You were just going to slaughter them all before we could stop you?”

She blinked, scowled, her mind radiating indignity. “Give me some credit, kid. I just know how to talk to these people. They have to buy that there will consequences if they don’t surrender. If they hear your limp maybes and perhapses then they’ll know they can just squat in there until help arrives.”

I opened my mouth to retort, but reality struck true before I got the first word out. If the Sweeper’s young and old thought we wouldn’t be willing to kill them, then they had no reason to let us destroy their Tribe’s source of power. They could stay in there for days, until their parents and children returned in force.

My thoughts must have been clear to Mari, because hers intruded in my mind, {we should probably just kill them, anyway.}

{No,} I replied, batting her consciousness away, and then said to Kross, “you’re right. They do have to believe we’d be willing to go that far.”

“Alan,” Bobby started, shocked. “We can’t—”

“I said believe,” I snapped, cutting them off. “We’re not going to murder defenseless children.”

{Sweeper Children,} Mari interjected. {We should just throw Bobby’s last grenade in there.}

I didn’t try to repress my disgust at that suggestion. {No, Mari. No.}

“Children are hardly defenseless.” Kross gestured at Mari. “You should know that by now.”

{These people killed my family. My entire Tribe!}

Bobby had started to say something, but I didn’t hear it. I whirled on Mari with a violence that stunned the others, their eyes going wide.

“Killing these people won’t bring your family back! You understand? It won’t fix anything.” I loomed over her, and she cringed back a step before she caught herself.

The dark visor stared up at me. Much of the once bright floral patterns around the edges had worn away, where they weren’t stained by blood or dirt.

Her mind practically hissed at me. {You just tell yourself that because you never got revenge for your Tribe. You just ran away.}

The words hit me as hard as one her mental sledgehammers, but she didn’t let up. The cracks in that dark shell around her mind glowed white hot.

{You run and you hide. That’s what you do. You’re a coward. You could have tried to save my family and you just hid and watched.}

“Um,” Bobby tried to interject on our silent conversation. It must have looked very strange, the two of us staring daggers at each other, our breathing intensifying for no visible reason. “Maybe this isn’t the best place to do… whatever this is?”

{Mari…}

{Don’t deny it!} Mari screamed some incomprehensible words at the same time as her thought struck me. {I could feel the guilt pouring off you from the moment we met. You know there was something you could have done, but you were too scared.}

“Cut this shit—” Kross tried to say.

“Of course I was scared!” I screamed into her face, so loudly that my throat almost tore. She leaned back from me, the heat of her mind pulsing, her hand going toward her weapon.

Whether it was just a reflex out of fear or if she actually intended to use it, I never found out. Mari yelped, her gun-arm wrenched behind her back, hey body half-subsumed into the faux foliage of a camouflage suit.

“Enough of that,” Kross grunted, marching the stunned Mari away from the street.

Bobby shoved me hard in the chest, pushing me in the same direction. “What the hell is wrong with you?” they snapped.

I let myself be pushed, shame crumpling any resistance.

Mari could have smashed Kross unconscious and broken free, but she did not. The furnace inside her mind cooled just a little.

When we around the corner of a building and out of sight of the gun shop, Kross said, “are you going to behave now?”

Mari grunted, but it was the defeated sort of grunt.

Kross released her. “Whatever the fuck this is, why don’t you two sit here and sort it out while I go hand out the ultimatum? Any objections to me doing that now?”

“Go ahead,” I said, bitterly. “As long as a threat is all it is.”

Mari said nothing. Her shoulders shook with every breath.

“All right then,” Kross said slowly. “Bobby, you with me?”

“I’m going to stay here,” Bobby said. “To keep the peace.”

Kross’s eyes slid between me and Mari and back again. “Good idea. If anyone asks, there’s twenty of you, and we have the place surrounded.”

And then she left. Mari and I stared at each other. Bobby stood uneasily between us, as if they had become the reluctant referee of a duel.

“Now let’s just take a moment to calm down,” they said, as if talking to two children instead of one.

I felt a fool now, for having lost my temper so badly, but I couldn’t bring myself to be the one to apologize first. Mari had been pushing for us to commit horrible, disgusting, crimes against humanity. She’d been the one to dredge up my private past. She’d been the one to reach for a gun.

Mari was a monster and growing more monstrous each day. I’d been pretending not to notice, letting my prejudices guide me. She’s just a child, I’d told myself. Just a girl. But our cruel world was a way of twisting everything and everyone into something Bad. As far as I was concerned, Kross could look after her once we’d dealt with the Sweepers. I could leave, go back to the way things were before. Perhaps that was cowardly, but so be it. Perhaps I was a coward. Perhaps I liked being a coward.

{You’re not a coward, Alan.} Mari’s thought was gentle. In own self-absorbed my rage, I’d failed to notice the shift in her. {I’m sorry I said that.}

I blinked in surprise. Her wall was still up, but the dense black smoke of deep sorrow leaked from between the cracks.

{I wouldn’t have hurt you,} she sent. {I was just angry. And I thought perhaps— I don’t know what I thought. I’m always angry now. So angry. It’s like… I want to burn the entire world. You’re right. I am a monster. But I don’t think I want to be anything else.}

Back in the real world, her chest heaved, and she sucked in sharply through her filter mask. A sob.

Bobby noticed and took a step towards her but stopped themselves, their hand half-raised to reach out and comfort.

I hesitated too. Faced with Mari’s grief, my wrath had dissipated as quickly as it had appeared, but it was hard to know what to say to that.

{How much of my thoughts did you understand just now?} I asked.

{Enough.} Her next sob was longer, more pained.

I winced. It was time to turn some of my disgust inward. {Sorry. I should have tried harder to keep that in.}

{I’m glad you didn’t.} There was defeat in the thought.

{I’m not. You’re not a monster, Mari. Not yet. In the last week and a half, you’ve lost everyone you loved, and there’s been no time to sit still and mourn. I was just as angry as you once, but I didn’t have guns and mind powers and friends to help me actually do anything with that anger. I bottled it up and locked it away and just… tried not to think about it. It’s still back there somewhere, I think, waiting to come out.}

The sobs were coming faster now, her shoulders shaking. Mari was crying.

I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, but I crossed the space between us then, and reached out.

She fell into me, bumping her mask clumsily into my ribs. I stuck my arms out to the side, as if touching her would burn me, and cast a pleading look at Bobby.

They made a frustrated face at me and mimed an embrace.

I brought my arms around Mari slowly. Her heavy breathes shook my chest as if they were my own. Her sorrow pressed down all around me, until I couldn’t disentangle it from my own feelings.

{I’m sorry,} she sent again.

There was a wetness on my cheeks. Perhaps it was my sorrow after all. {It’s all right. Just… let’s hold back on the cold-blooded murder. Okay?}

There was a longer pause than I would have liked. {No cold-blooded murder.}

* * *

Meanwhile, Kross was ‘negotiating’ with the descendants and ancestors of her old tribe. I wasn’t there to witness this interaction, obviously, but she filled me in later that day, and her personality is… consistent enough that I feel I can fill in the blanks without portraying her unfairly.

Despite her warning about not just walking in the front door, Kross did exactly that.

She strode up to the glass doors as if she still owned the place, rifle slung lazily over her shoulder, and knocked on the door. There was no answer from inside, so she shrugged (probably) and opened it.

“Hello,” she called, her voice echoing off the hard glass and steel, “anyone home?”

She heard mumbling from beyond the lobby, arguing, someone knocking over something heavy, a curse, much shushing. She looked around for somewhere to put her rifle down and decided the reinforced desk-barricade was as good a place as any.

“Just want to talk,” she said to the air, dropping her weapon down with a purposeful clunk. “See? Put my gun down and everything.”

One of the doors at the back of the lobby flew open, and Kross found herself staring down the barrel of a gun.

“We can talk all right,” said a voice. Male, once strong, now raspy with age. “We have shooters at every entrance and these corridors are real narrow. You try to take this place, it’ll be the last thing you do, so you best fuck off before the rest of the Tribe gets back.”

Kross cocked her head. There was something familiar about the voice. It took a moment for a name to come to her.

“Skeet? That you?”

The old man, for he really was old, a few decades Kross’s senior, stepped out of the shadows. His bare tattooed arms were all sunburned sinew, and gray stubble peppered his sagging neck. Behind his mask, however, his eyes were still sharp.

“Kross?” He kept his gun—a compact submachine gun—trained on her.

“Yep.” Kross leaned forward onto the desk, making a show of inspecting the junk piled atop it. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

Skeet laughed, but there was no real humor in it. “Was sure you were dead.”

“Let you think that.”

“How’d you survive?”

“Made an unlikely friend. Patched me up.”

His eyes narrowed as he considered her story, but they didn’t stray. “And now you’re back to what? Take over again?”

She shrugged. “Ehhhh, we’ll see. First, I got some business in the shop. Going to need you and all the rest of the collateral to surrender and shuffle off somewhere we can lock you in. You lot still got the brig?”

Another humorless laugh. “We still got the brig. But why the fuck would I do any of that?”

“Because my crew has the place surrounded, and if you don’t give up without a fuss, we’ll grenade the shit out of you.”

“Try it you bitch!” A new voice shouted, hoarse and high, not quite broken yet. “We’ll riddle you full of holes.”

A boy of about Mari’s age emerged from behind Skeet, leveling a gun that looked almost comically over-sized in his grip. He did not have as many bullet casing adorning his clothes as the full-grown Sweepers, just a patch on each shoulder.

Kross grinned a predatory grin. All that would have shown of it would have been the way it twisted her eyes, but it was enough. “And who’s this young man then? Who’s kid?”

Skeet put a hand out to herd the boy back toward the door, hissing something under his breath. “Never you mind,” he said to Kross.

“Relative of yours? Grandson, maybe?”

“What are you doing?” whined the boy. “Let’s just shoot her.”

Skeet rolled his eyes, whirled on the boy, grabbed him by collar, and shoved him back into the recesses of the doorway. He raised a scolding finger and wagged it at the shadows. “If you let your brother walk through this door again, you’ll both be getting the worst kicking of your life, you hear?”

He slammed the door and turned back to Kross, keeping his gun pointed low but ready. “Where were we?”

“Kids, eh? Been having trouble with youths myself lately.”

“Fucking nightmare, aren’t they?”

“No respect these days.”

“No respect at all.”

“World truly has gone to shit.” They both shook their heads sadly, in aged camaraderie. “Anyway, you were surrendering I think?”

Skeet’s long fingers flexed around the grip of his machine gun. “If we surrender and come out, you’ll shoot us all dead.”

“What? After all we’ve been through?”

Skeet gave the same humorless laugh. “After all we’ve been through, I know exactly what sort of ruthless—” he used a word I won’t repeat “—you are.”

Kross put a hand on her chest in mock affront. “Me? Ruthless? Come on now, even I wouldn’t execute little kids and senile old men…”

“I have literally seen you do both of those things. More than once.”

“…unless I have to. You didn’t let me finish. Unless I have to.” She fixed those murder-blue eyes on his. “I won’t have to if you’re not in my way.”

Skeet held her gaze. He didn’t cringe away, but his wiry brows raised just a little as he decided she wasn’t bluffing. “All right,” he said very carefully, “what’d you want with the shop anyway? You going to trash it?”

“That’s my business.”

“You know the Tribe’s dead without the shop,” he said. “I can’t let you take it.”

A shrug from Kross, longer and more drawn out than the usual variety, and a heavy, frustrated, sigh. “Then I’ll kill you, and your grandkids, and everyone else in this building, and take the shop anyway. Then, if there’s some time, I’ll do heinous shit to those little corpses. Turn them into a real art piece for mum and dad to find when they get back. The sort of thing that would turn a parent’s mind to mush forever. You know the sort of thing. Like what the Pain Princes were doing during that mad spree of theirs? Remember? That shit.”

I tell myself she wouldn’t have gone that far but, if I’m honest, I’m not entirely sure

Skeet’s frown deepened, and his finger slid another few centimeters toward the trigger of his weapon.

“Sorry,” Kross said, chuckling. “Think I’ve gone a bit weird in my time out in the wild. You been past Sniper Town? Seen the skull piles? That’s all me. Killed and flayed every one of them myself.”

“Jesus Christ,” Skeet said. “You really have lost it. Half tempted to just blow your brains out right now and put you out of your misery.”

“You’ll die a second later,” Kross said. “Or did you think I’d be dumb enough to walk in here without at least two good shooters with good angles?”

Skeet’s eyes flicked to the buildings on the other side of the street.

“Yeah, good luck spotting them,” Kross said, she grabbed a handful of the strands of her bush-suit. “Useful things, these.”

They stared each other down. The way Kross presented this to me, it sounded like the stare might have gone on for minutes: two ruthless killers leering into each other’s souls, barely blinking, waiting for a flinch or a twitch from the other side.

Perhaps it was that grand of moment. I’ll let you decide if you believe her or not.

He could have tried to make her promise more binding, demanded she swear on the memory of a loved one or some god or another. But what would have been the point? This was Krosshair, the legendary sniper of Sniper Town, the most prolific killer the city had ever known, nothing and no one was sacred to her. Skeet knew that far better than the rest of us did.

Skeet let out a weary sigh and slowly placed his gun on the ground. “I’ll get the others,” he said. “We surrender.”