I’ve lived at the Market long enough to know all the rumors about Alastair the First, but I’ve never seen him bleed with my own eyes before. It’s strange.
“I told you to stay in the truck,” he says, frowning. His skin ripples with color around his cheekbones. He’s annoyed.
“You needed help,” I retort.
“No. I didn’t.”
I glare at him. “Very well. Next time you can die alone for all care.” I walk back to the truck.
I shouldn’t be talking to my King like this. He’s not known to accept disrespect. But I hear him laugh behind my back.
The two mercenaries have found the Highwaymen’s cars a little farther down the road and are looting everything that could be of use. Then they will announce on the merchants’ radio channel that the vehicles are available to scavenge.
Alastair grabs the falling tree with one hand and pulls it out of the road like a giant twig. Fucking mutants have no business being so strong.
I get back in the truck, annoyed. Alastair pulls his shirt off, and I can’t tear my eyes away as he removes the bullets from the wounds on his muscular chest one by one, using his damn fingers and a small knife. He’s not even cringing from the pain. He then wipes the blood with his shirt before dropping it in thedust. By the time he walks back to the truck to grab another shirt from the back, I swear his wounds have already healed.
I watch him rummage through a bag to find a new shirt. He’s a monster of a man, to say the least. Oliver is tall—most mutants are, from what I’ve heard—but not as muscular. I guess it makes sense. He shares his genes with one of the biggest old gods on Earth.
I feel his eyes on me and look up.
“What?” I ask sharply.
Alastair just smiles again. He’s known to be a ruthless leader and an unrelenting killer. I never knew he could smile. And yet, he’s been doing it a lot.
Not that we’ve ever spent much time together.
He puts a new shirt on and sits behind the wheel once again. But right as we’re about to drive away, Leonard runs to our truck.
“We’ve intercepted a radio signal from a merchant,” he says. “Perri sent a message with the coordinates of his position. Apparently there is a good amount of stuff to scavenge in Silicon Valley. He has blown up the entrance to a secret lab. He’s fine, and he’s found what he’d been looking for.”
Relief hits me like a brick. Perri’s fine. Another day of travel, and we’ll meet halfway. And the AI…
“He has found his AI,” Alastair says, echoing my own thoughts.
Not only an AI, but a robot, too. If what she said was true, she has an artificial body and can move.
Let’s hope she’s as gentle and safe to be around as she pretended to be.
5
A vast, decaying world.
“You can learn everything there is to know about the old gods, their habits and the territories where they live, but humans are the ones you should be wary of. They’re the true enemies. They hide in the shadows and covet what you have. They’ll smile and then bury a blade in your back. I prefer the old gods, thank you very much.”
Extract ofThe Journal of a Survivalistby Jake Parker, 2043.
PERRI
“We should spend the night here,” I say after exiting the dark lab. “I don’t like it, but I’d rather not cross the entire city at night. We won’t be able to see what awaits us around the corner.And with some luck, considering the ruckus I made with the explosives, most nomads and scavengers will stay away. They won’t want trouble. I hope…”Wishful thinking.
“Very well,” says Vex in her robotic—yet ethereal—voice.
She’s looking at my truck in awe. She’s never seen one. Hell, she hasn’t seen the light in more than twenty years. Had she been human, her retinas would have been scorched by my flashlight.
She’s more than what I expected to find. There is no mistaking her for a human. She has no skin over the white plate that covers most of her artificial body. You can see the wires, joints, and screws around her articulations. She has no hair, either. Her face is sculpted in the same white material, with movable parts under a layer of skin-like silicon to make her facial expressions seem real. The back of her skull is transparent, showing the intricate computer underneath. Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined such an incredible machine. She’s tall and lean, like a ballerina. And she moves like water. I understand why they locked her up deep in the secret labs. She must have been a creation to be protected at all costs. Not that any of it mattered at the end of the day. I bet the scientists all died in the first year after the Rise, like seventy percent of the world’s population.
“So, what’s your first impression of the outside world?” I ask her.
