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and oh, i lost it all when I got high
and i can feel you even now
breaking horses in the sky
i can taste you in my rage
and in the sweat upon my brow
Shin wakes to the drums.
It's new, the most interesting thing that's happened in the last two days, in the time since she clawed her way free from six sets of hands and a menacing superheated branding iron--
"Oh, we got a live one!" It's gleeful and devolves into a cackle when she thrashes against the grips on her arms, her shoulders, her legs; yanks hard enough that someone yelps and topples forward; she's rewarded with what feels like an elbow crashing into the back of her head. Even behind the blindfold her vision bursts into a riot of color and nausea swoops in her stomach from the impact, and then something crashes into her stomach and shoves the air out of her lungs.
"Hey!" The same voice is irritated, snappish; Shin gasps air back into her lungs under the sound of someone getting slapped in the head. "That's a universal donor. Careful with the goods."
The tattoo guns buzzes to life again and she sucks in as much air as she can and yanks both arms back hard enough on the exhale that the hands gripping her all fall away. She's on her feet and sprinting off even before her manacled hands manage to throw the loose blindfold away.
She gets further than she expects, sprinting half-blind through tunnels and waterways, bursting out into the blistering sunlight she certainly hadn't missed and nearly toppling straight off the side of a cliff. There's nowhere to go, a lethal drop in one direction and a horde of howling painted soldiers spilling out of the tunnel behind her. She manages to send half a dozen of them screaming over the side before their numbers win out and she's hauled back to where she started, chained down while a humming psychopath tattoos her back and cheerfully explains to her how valuable she's going to be.
--and found herself crammed into a cage dangling from the ceiling to wait. One of the soldiers, the ones painted in white and black, his back bowing under exhaustion as he was half-hauled in and hooked up, sits tiredly nearby, her blood draining into his arm. There’d been a flash of a moment, when he first appeared, where something unidentifiable and strained had flickered in his eyes, where she’d thought maybe she could use him to find a way out; it had been barely a flicker, though, disappearing back into the same ruthless excitement the rest of them carried.
The drums pick up, and the soldier-- war boy, the tattooing asshole had called him and all of the other white-painted bastards-- sits up straighter, the movement yanking at the needle jammed under her collarbone. She grunts and jerks with the sting, bares her teeth behind the fucking grill of metal they'd clamped onto her face after hauling her back in from her escape attempt; he doesn't even notice her, focus on the stream of war boys making their way inside.
"What's going on?" There's a fatigue to his voice that she wants to sneer at. He sounds more pathetic than her, and she's the one caged up like an animal. More of them rush by and then back, steering wheels clenched reverently in their hands. The one draining Shin's blood jerks forward-- it pulls at her again and she growls and is ignored for her trouble--and latches onto a steering wheel from one of the war boys on his way out, babbles something about lancers and drivers and Valhalla.
She considers tuning it all out, because the melodrama of this place is exhausting, but instead she listens because there's nothing else to do, more offended by the boredom than the way her bad knee hurts abysmally from how she's folded up into the cage or the ache in her back from whatever the hell they tattooed there. Yelps of betrayal and imperator and stole are at most mildly interesting, until suddenly the focus of their conversation is Shin herself.
"We'll hook up my bloodbag," the war boy draining her says, yanking at the steering wheel.
"That?" The other one glances up at her with a sneer and tugs at the steering wheel, sending the other one stumbling and jarring the needle again. She growls and slams an elbow into the cage hard enough to shake the whole thing. "You're insane. It's feral."
Her vampire headbutts the other war boy, easily breaking his nose and snatching the steering wheel. "Exactly," he says, eyes glinting and shoulders tight. Shin almost admires the efficacy of his violence. "Full blood crazy, racing through my veins."
And so it is that Shin finds herself scooped out of the cage she's been trying to formulate an escape from, an easy dozen war boys and guards hauling her along-- one of them has one eye swollen shut, another with a broken cheekbone that she remembers shattering under her elbow; she's clearly made an impression and there isn't much in this wasteland of a life that she can find joy in, but she'll settle for the way that both of them flinch back when she bares her teeth behind the muzzle and jerks her shoulders towards them-- until she winds up mounted on the front of a car like a fucking hood ornament, the IV draining her blood wound through the chain tethering her to her vampire.
The desert wind is hot and cruel as the army of cars and trucks set off, the drums audible still over the wind noise. Her own car, the one they had needed six of their own to catch and cripple, roars past her, a war boy howling behind the wheel.
The indignities never cease.
The heat has surely blistered her eyeballs and her shoulders are screaming at the way her arms are pinned back, every bump and divot under the wheels jarring so hard she's sure her shoulders will dislocate, by the time their party catches up to the war rig. It's a behemoth, sprinting along at a pace that shouldn't be possible for something its size, designed to survive attacks at speed from anything the wasteland might throw its way. The stalking party of smaller vehicles comes in at an angle, the one Shin's pinned to faster than the others and one of the first to draw level with the war rig.
A war boy atop the rig swings down to the driver's side door and Shin squints against the hot wind when a metal claw jolts out of the window and catches him by the throat; she forgets for a split second where she is and her eyes go wide when the man is sent flying off the side of the rig with a pained shriek. Her teeth rattle in her skull when the car she's in speeds right over him and she shakes her head and squints back towards the rig.
The driver is staring at her. Black paint around eyes that burn bright and gold in the sunlight, face set stony and unwavering; her jaw clenches when Shin stares right back at her, until a war boy is flung up onto the rig from another car and the imperator-- surely that must be her-- has to fling her left arm up to deflect the way he grabs for her throat. The arm is metal, the claw that had sent the other war boy flying, and this one follows suit with a shriek.
Shin’s vampire slips the clutch and the car nudges forward, nosing ahead of the rig. If she wasn’t sure to die the minute he got too cocky and blew up the engine, she’d find a smidgen of respect for the way he’s handling this cobbled-together monstrosity of a pursuit vehicle; as it is, she can only growl into the wind and glance over at the war rig and the imperator, black grease and furious eyes as she flings her door open and swings out long enough to fire off six shots from a revolver. Shin can’t see behind her, but there are a handful of yelps and the sound of at least three pursuit vehicles crashing into each other, the ground almost shaking with the impact as the imperator ducks back into the cab.
Ahead, a wall of storm grows closer.
There’s a moment, as the storm lifts the entire car and she’s ripped away from her scarecrow post, wind howling and metal shrieking and everything messy and disastrous and loud, where Shin’s mind goes quiet for one of the first time since Baylan died. The cacophony of loss that’s been shrieking in her head for three thousand days alone quiets as the world around her screams in its place, and as she’s flung through the dust and the fury and the cartwheeling debris of pursuit vehicles that never stood a chance against the storm, she closes her eyes and stops fighting.
Shin wakes to the drums.
It's not drums, though. Not this time, not after the storm had sent cars and bodies and screams hurtling blindly through the dust and the car Shin had been mounted to was picked up by the wind and flung end over end in a crunching shattering mess. The pounding echoing through her skull is her own pulse, and she rolls onto her back with a gasp, spitting sand out of her mouth and shaking it out of her hair and stumbling back to her knees with a pained inhale when she tries to stand and the needle still anchored in her collarbone stops her.
She yanks the needle out with a grunt; it hurts, but no more than the crash did, more than her raw and tattooed back and less than her knee. The brace on her leg is twisted, and she straightens it habitually until it can bear her weight the way its meant to. The sound of her own pumping blood, a thundering percussive thrum, quiets as her breath steadies in the sunlight and her spine straightens under its own power for the first time in days.
She's still bolted to the fucking war boy, who's useless and either unconscious or dead-- she can't bring herself to care, even as she carefully detaches the IV and tubing connecting them, unwinds it from within the chain, tidily bundles it up and packs it away into a pocket, hands moving with the habitual inability to waste further in the wasteland-- and she considers digging the closest piece of car-remnant shrapnel out of the sand and trying to use it to saw through his wrist to free herself.
Instead, the sound of running water creeps into her ears, and she freezes, breathes, turns. The unmistakable bulk of the war rig waits in front of her, distant enough that the sound of water and voices nearly disappears into a heat that's so overwhelming it practically has a sound of its own.
Water.
Shin glances back at the dead weight she's bolted to, then to the war rig, and licks at her dry lips behind the muzzle on her face. Her throat aches after being hauled around and starved and hurtled through the desert sun as a hood ornament, and she's hauling the stupid war boy and his stupid chain up over her shoulders with a grunt before she even realizes it. He's heavier than he looks and she staggers under the weight before finding her feet again and setting off.
The gun in the war boy's waistband is clogged with dust, unfireable, but menacing enough; the grip is hot against her palm and she's busy trying to formulate a plan on how to commandeer a war rig full of water from an imperator who outsmarted the citadel's best and doesn't realize how quickly she's moving until a yelp sounds and she realizes she's staring at a collection of women.
Teenagers, really. Girls. Immaculate white clothes, unmarred skin, a delicacy and apprehension to their faces as they stare at her that can only come from people who've never lived in the wasteland. One of them wavers, trembles; another lifts her chin defiantly and glares at Shin furiously.
The imperator is with them, sun-dark and ground-in dirt, the short shave of her hair almost as dark as the paint around her eyes. The cruel prosthetic is missing, arm ending in a messy stump of scar tissue halfway between shoulder and elbow. She stares levelly at Shin, one hand out to keep the others where they are.
"Water." Shin lifts the gun and points it at them. She shakes the dead weight from her shoulders, swallows the urge to sigh with relief when the war boy topples to the ground next to her. There's time to deal with him after she's had a drink; her mouth is gummy with dehydration and she can barely think past it.
The imperator takes a step closer, hand still out behind her to keep the others back. Shin glares, points the gun more deliberately at her. "Water," she says again, short and angry.
The imperator opens her hand blindly behind her, waits for one of the others to hand her the hose they'd been drinking out of. It's heavy, weighting the girl's hands down as she moves, but the imperator doesn't blink when the weight settles in her hand; she takes another step, and then another. Shin watches impatiently, fights the urge to close the distance herself; she's outnumbered and tied to dead weight. Distance is her best defense.
The imperator's close enough that Shin can see the clench of muscles in her jaw, the mess of scar tissue on her arm, the way her shirt used to be white and strips of it still hold stubbornly to the color, lighter where the heavy leather harness for the prosthetic wrapped around her ribs.
She pauses, just out of arm's reach, mouth flattening into an angry line when her eyes dart down to the body at Shin's feet. "Ezra," she mutters, almost absently, as if she's forgotten somehow that Shin is standing here pointing a gun at her.
"Water," Shin says again, impatient, furious, and moves to lunge forward; she's rewarded with the imperator twisting and shifting and smashing the heavy metal nozzle from the hose into her ribs. Air bursts out of her lungs and she pivots with a breathless grunt, drives a shoulder into the solid wall of the imperator's ribcage and weathers the elbow crashing into the back of her skull as they slam into the sand.
It's a short fight, ugly, brutal. Shin has never savored violence, but has always excelled at it: the only language worth knowing in this life, the only way she's survived as long as she has on her own. Her ribs are bruised, possibly broken, from being slammed up against the tanker at one point; her vision swims and blurs, her head cracking hard against the ground when the imperator hauled at the chain on her wrist and used the short moment of Shin's dazed confusion to yank a gun out from somewhere on the rig, but Shin's on her feet before her vision clears and she returns the favor, slams into her from behind, takes an elbow to the face as she wrestles the gun away with one hand and uses the other to twist the imperator's arm out behind her.
She fires a handful of shots, bullets burying into the ground around the imperator's boots, freezing her in place. A snarl rips out of her and Shin grips tighter at her arm until she bends with the effort of keeping her shoulder in its socket.
"Water," Shin says again, more a growl than a word. She shoves the imperator away, keeps the gun pointed at her glare, and hauls the hose up until she can drink awkwardly from it. The water hisses when it hits the hot metal of the muzzle, but she ignores it, drinking her fill and then some before throwing the hose back towards the others. She points the gun at a pair of bolt cutters, enormous and awkward in the hands of one of the other women, rattles the chain at her wrist.
There's a half a moment, after the chain is gone and Shin's backing her way towards the cab of the rig, both guns out and keeping the imperator at bay, when something that feels suspiciously like guilt tickling at the back of her head. Too many eyes looking at her, some furious and some terrified; too many people looking at her like a person instead of an obstacle after three thousand days alone in the wastes and however many it had been since she was captured.
She spares one glance back after hauling herself into the rig, just for the moment it takes for the engine to churn and bellow to life. The imperator is helping the war boy up, gesturing calmingly at the others as they back away skittishly.
Shin looks away, shifting her focus back to the road ahead of her and the rig into second gear. It's not her problem.
She refuses to look into the rearview, refuses to look back because looking back is how everything falls apart. Looking back is the best way to get killed, so keeps her focus trained forward, right up until the engine sputters and dies and the rig goes quiet around her.
It won’t start. She tries every trick she knows short of getting out and pushing in search of momentum for a bump start, but the rig stays quiet around her. Thousands of pounds of horsepower at her fingertips, and she can’t turn it on.
“Ignition sequences.” The imperator’s voice comes from outside, and Shin refuses to look her way because of course there are security protocols in place and she’s lived her entire life in a feral wasteland, fighting and scraping and surviving, but she’s never quite felt like this before. Humiliation is a foreign enemy, one she has no defense against, and she freezes in place of anything else, glaring dead ahead while the imperator and her charges appear in her periphery.
“I programmed them myself. This baby goes nowhere without me.”
Shin spares a short glances over to where the imperator is squinting up at her in the bright sunlight, blindly strapping her prosthetic back on.
“Look,” the imperator says, hauling herself up to stand on the runner, nearly eye level with Shin now. This close, even while doing her best not to look, Shin can see the flecks of blood still on one cheek from their fight, can see the way her eyes are brighter than should be humanly possible in the fading mask of black warpaint. “Enemy of my enemy, right? They had you hooked up as a bloodbag, so I assume you’ve got no love for them. We’re no friends of them, either. We can all get out of this together, and then you can go your way and we’ll go ours.”
Shin grinds her teeth behind her muzzle, the urge to hit, to shoot, to rage burning in her veins. She’s survived as long as she has by standing alone, relying on no one and waiting for no one. The imperator can hold her own, clearly, but the others— Shin spares them a glance, these delicate children in their virginal whites and skin untouched by the sun, crowding together with one another like there’s any safety in numbers— are nothing but a weight at her back.
“You can get in,” she says lowly.
“I don’t go anywhere without them,” the imperator says, a snarl and an unwavering set to her jaw. Her metal hand clenches on the door, the metal groaning under her grip. “You need them to get me and you need me to get the rig going.”
Shin bites down hard enough she nearly cracks a tooth, jaw spasming against the metal so cruelly welded over her face.
“You want that thing off your face?” the imperator sounds almost amused, almost exasperated, like Shin is an unruly child in a safe home, someone to indulge and patronize, someone who—
She wants it off her face.
The rig rumbles back to life under the imperator’s touch while Shin glares at her profile. She accepts the metal file the imperator offers her carefully, snatching it up and setting immediately to getting rid of the muzzle.
“Sabine,” one of the others says, low and unsteady as they all crowd into the backseat. “Are you—”
“It’s fine,” the imperator— Sabine— says shortly. The rig groans into movement, the others staring warily at Shin while she pointedly ignores them and glares at Sabine’s profile, file working rapidly at the latch behind her head. “It’s fine.”
They don’t believe her. It’s painfully obvious in the way the five of them are crushed as far as possible into one side of the rig, as if the extra half a meter would protect them if Shin wanted to kill them. They see nothing but what the others had when they look at her: feral, wild, untrustworthy. A danger to everyone around her.
For the first time in days, Shin nearly smiles. Across the cab, Sabine spares her a sidelong glance while upshifting, mouth a firm line but eyebrows raised in unabashed interest, and Shin fights the sudden urge to squirm, Sabine’s singular focus more unsettling than the whole combined weight of the others’ glares.
The pursuit continues.
There’s nowhere to hide in the sands, and distant plumes of dust from three sides push them towards the canyons. Shin’s avoided them for most of her days, unwilling to deal with the irritation of the buzzards that linger there, but Sabine sets her jaw and leads them in.
The war boy— Ezra, Sabine had called him— had joined them from the back of the rig at some point. The others distrust him as much as they dislike Shin, but Sabine reaches back to grip his hand as he slumps into the back of the cab. He’s looking worse than when Shin had first seen him, draining her blood to keep himself upright.
The others— the wives, Sabine called them, unwilling concubines locked into sexual servitude; it’s enough to rattle even Shin’s unwavering stoicism momentarily— are even more distrustful of him than they are her. He tries to offer her a companionable smile from deep in his visible fatigue, but she does nothing but glare at him and continue filing at the muzzle.
The rig slows as they wind their way into the canyon. Sabine’s grip on the wheel, casual and comfortable so far, goes rigid; she almost flinches when the lock on the back of the muzzle finally breaks free and clatters down onto the metal floor.
“Free at last,” Sabine says wryly, sparing a glance her way as Shin works her jaw and scrubs her hands over her uncovered face. “What’s your name?”
Shin freezes, hands halfway dragged down her face, blinking stupidly across the cab at her.
“Your name,” Sabine says, impatient, tense. “You have one?”
“Does it matter?” Shin says before she can stop herself. She’s had a name ever since Baylan found her in the wastes, malnourished even by wasteland standards, dying of dehydration, alone like she always had been. She has a name, but she hasn’t spoken it aloud in three thousand days.
“Fine,” Sabine says with a disgruntled huff. “I made a deal for passage, but it might not be good anymore. So when I yell jackass, you need to get the rig started and get them all out of here, okay? Ezra knows the way.”
Shin stares at her, lowering her hands slowly. She’d thought they were the same, her and Sabine, untrusting veterans of an untrustworthy world, using each other with mutual understanding, but here Sabine is, asking things of her. Trusting her.
Sabine ignores the conflict that Shin’s sure must be wholly visible on her face, rapidly explaining the ignition sequence, as if Shin couldn’t just stab her through the jugular with the file still in her hand and take the rig for herself now.
“You got it?” Sabine slows the rig, turning to set an expectant look at Shin, and Shin reacts without meaning to: nods, twice, and rattles off the memorized details of the ignition sequence without hesitation. “Good. Stay out of sight. I’m supposed to be alone.”
Shin glares, because it makes sense, because the imperator is being imminently logical in her planning and absurdly illogical in trusting Shin as her backup— not that there’s anyone else; the wives have soft hands and scared eyes, and Ezra looks so close to death’s door that it almost uproots a long-dormant sense of sympathy in her— and it’s infuriating and confusing and there are many things Shin hates in the wasteland but surprises are at the top of the list.
She glares, and Sabine glares back, and Shin slides down into the compartment between the seats in the cab, gun in one hand and jaw still working in its new freedom, silent as she hides herself away and watches Sabine reset her warpaint with grease from the steering column. Black on gold, the short crop of her hair melding into the paint. She doesn’t look back down to where they’re all hiding, but her profile is slanted in Shin’s eyeline, stubborn and confident and unwavering.
The sound of Sabine yelling her terms is muffled and sharp in turns, bouncing off of the canyon walls and fading through the thick armoring of the rig. The silence that follows is deafening, and Shin moves without waiting.
“Wait—” Ezra grabs at her arm, fingers weak with fatigue and whatever radioactive disease is eating as his bones like it eventually eats at everyone’s. She shakes him off and is already in the driver’s seat and flipping through the ignition sequence when Sabine’s jackass bellows through the canyon, gunshots on its heels.
The rig is slow to get started but by the time Sabine hauls herself into the cab they’re racing at pace. Shin thrusts the rifle in her hand out for Sabine to take, blindly accepting the handgun Sabine trades her for it. The engines are loud but not as loud as the wind as they pick up speed, not as loud as the cracking gunshots as she fires and Sabine fires, trading targets and firearms easily.
They’re at a disadvantage even before the citadel’s pursuit catches up to them, and then suddenly they aren’t just scrambling to fight off the buzzards but the citadel as well. They pick up speed, the power of the rig seemingly limitless, and Shin drives and shoots and trades emptied guns for usable ones, easy as breathing, picking off the few who slip past Sabine’s methodical aim.
Something twists in Shin’s chest as she loads a shotgun across her lap and cocks it, shoves it up over her head for Sabine, boots braced on the dashboard and the seats to haul her head and shoulders up above the open roof, to take and fire. For one wild and stupid moment she wonders if she’s been shot— again, as if the damage to her leg isn’t enough for one lifetime— before she realizes it’s something entirely different. She’s having fun.
A yelp sounds from one of the wives, and Shin’s head snaps to one side to see one of the war boys clambering up onto the runnerboard on the other side of the cabin. The gun in her hand clicks uselessly, the clip empty, and she flings it away and snatches up the first one she can find. Sabine collapses herself back into the cabin, a controlled fall that Shin would admire if she had the time, and they both fire at the war boy. One bullet hits him in the shoulder, the other the throat, and he goes slack and drops away immediately.
“Nice shot,” Shin says in spite of herself, half a mutter and half a grunt, because Sabine has taken the time in the middle of this firefight to glance back at her and grin, and wink, and if they weren’t probably about to die Shin might even find it somewhat charming.
“You too.” One side of Sabine’s mouth hitches up higher, eyes bright in the mask of greasepaint. “Mine was better, though.”
She twists and fires another shot into the front tire of the last of the citadel’s vehicles that had made it through the canyon, sending it crashing into the desert sands, and suddenly the world goes quiet. Sabine glances back over her shoulder, towards Shin, towards Ezra, towards the wives, and then cautiously peers out the open window.
No shots sound, no harpoons or bullets or flames come hurtling towards them, and Sabine lets out a heavy exhale and slumps back into her seat. Shin’s violent grip on the steering wheel relaxes without her permission, Sabine’s calm spreading through the cabin. Ezra’s head slumps back against the back wall of the cabin, and the wives all seem to let out a collective, exhausted breath.
The adrenaline fades, and when Shin slants her gaze away from the open sands ahead of them, the brief blip of bright and joy from the firefight— some people, Shin knows, excel in anxiety, in stress, in the flashpoint fear of violence and too-high stakes; as little as she savors violence, Shin has always known that she excels at it, and it’s as obvious as the warpaint smudged along her cheekbones that Sabine does, too— gone. There’s no snap of excitement in the tired set to her jaw, her eyes duller inside the paint, her shoulders less proud and spine less strong without the immediacy of violence to keep her going.
Shin’s knuckles tighten on the wheel again, and she sets her focus back on the empty world ahead of them.
The sun sets, and Sabine takes over the drive again. Ezra makes a halfhearted protest when Shin takes Sabine’s old seat, but Sabine shrugs him off and Shin glares him the rest of the way away, and he shoos himself back to the rear guard. The wives are asleep, somehow, apparently lulled off by the hum of the engines and the lack of murderous intent surrounding them.
“This place,” Shin says into the quiet. She keeps her focus on the bandage she’s torn from the sleeve of her shirt, wrapping it tidily around one hand. It’s a better focal point than the sharp focus of Sabine’s eyes, or the way her own voice rasps painfully out of her throat. “Where is it?”
A rolling dune rises ahead of them, and Sabine downshifts as they hit the incline, barely a hitch in the rumble of the rig, and she doesn’t say anything as they gain a minute amount of altitude. Shin refuses to look at her, bandage tied off, and busies herself instead with ensuring that all of her scavenged gear— brace and gun, needle and tubing, a paltry attempt at a map inked into a scrap of cloth too dirty to ever use as a bandage safely— is sorted and in its proper place. She won’t ask anything of Sabine, won’t look to her for anything, because Shin has lived three thousand days alone and Sabine may have forbidden knowledge of a mystical green place safe from the citadel and the wasteland itself, but Shin hasn’t leaned on anyone since Baylan and she won’t start now.
“It’ll be a full burn through the night,” Sabine says eventually, upshifting smoothly as they crest the dune and start back downhill. The engines settle, and Shin looks without meaning to, finding Sabine’s profile sharp, her warpaint mostly gone, her prosthetic as dirty as the rest of her and her eyes glinting in the moonlight when she glances over towards Shin. “You should get some sleep.”
“I’m fine,” Shin says. It’s automatic, because she is, because she always has been, because there’s no other option. You’re fine, or you’re dead, gobbled up by the wasteland or the buzzards or the citadel, the radiation or the sun or the thirst. She’ll be fine until she’s not, and when she’s not she’ll die, just like they all do.
Unexpectedly, she thinks of Ezra, dying like the rest of them but slowing it down, with Shin’s blood and Sabine’s support, the wives and all of them helping him as they help each other.
“How do you know about it?” she asks without meaning to. “This— green place.”
Sabine drags in a slow breath, focus carefully on the sand ahead of them instead of on Shin. Her fingers flex on the wheel, her prosthetic creaking minutely in time with them.
“I was born there,” she says, even and unwavering even as her knuckles go white under the dirt ground into them. “I’ve been trying to get home since—”
She cuts herself off, glances sharply back over her shoulder to the rear of the cab. Ezra is still back on rear guard, the wives all asleep in a pile of limbs and white linen. Sabine’s lips press into a hard line, and Shin hasn’t touched another person in three thousand days for anything but violence but watches her own hands clench in her lap to stop from reaching to— something, something she doesn’t know, but something, anything, anything at all to address the way that the imperator, strong and unwavering, holding them all together, suddenly looks so tired.
“I was born there,” she says again. “Now that I drive a war rig, I knew I’d never have another chance.”
Shin nods, even though Sabine isn’t looking at her. Curiosity hums under her skin, unfamiliar and unexpected. The citadel’s imperators are legend even in the cacophony of the wasteland, the best of the best, survivors and leaders, the envy of every revhead and buzzard and limp dick the whole desert over. The legend is almost impossible to reconcile with the person sitting next to her, eyes tired but sharp, violent enough to defy the rulers of the wasteland but kind enough to bring a handful of untrained and unhelpful concubines and a dying warboy with her.
Shin wants to ask. How long has it been, how did you survive, how did you keep your heart? She wants to know how Sabine has lived a life steeped in so much intentional violence and still come out the other side willing to fight for someone else while Shin lost the only person she ever cared about and lost her ability to care for anyone else in the process.
“I can drive,” is all Shin manages to say, a gravelly offer that Sabine waves off, and just like that, the longest conversation Shin has had with anyone since Baylan died ends in silence.
She doesn’t sleep.
Even when she’d been caged and protected— a valuable resource, a universal donor, fed and watered and kept separate— she had only slept when her body eventually demanded it. She doesn’t sleep when people are around, and she doesn’t sleep now, in the gentle quiet of a war rig running away from a war.
She doesn’t sleep, but her mind drifts, thoughts aimless and soft, lulled into a trance by the rhythm of the sand under the tires and the rumble of the engines, the occasional creak of leather and metal when Sabine periodically shifts in her own seat.
The rig suddenly skids sideways, smooth and disconcerting, and Shin snaps to attention as Sabine grinds out a curse and struggles to straighten them out.
“What the—” It’s more growl than voice, imperator through and through. The rig straightens but their momentum is fading, whatever bog they’re sliding through sucking at the tires audibly. “Fuck.”
Ezra clambers up from the rear guard, the wives waking abruptly, and the quiet that hadn’t quite shattered in Shin’s head with the slide is broken the rest of the way when suddenly everyone is awake and present and talking.
They make it maybe two clicks on momentum and clever downshifting alone before the rig squelches to a stop. Sacrificing a handful of armoring plates under the tires gets them another, and then they’re fully stuck, not even the dismantled doors enough to grind them out.
“Fuck,” Shin mutters at the same time Sabine snaps it out, substantially louder and substantially more agitated. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?” one of the wives half-sobs, understandable but no less infuriating at this precise moment, and Shin considers just walking into the dark and leaving them all to their own problems.
“Winch,” Sabine says, irritation bleeding into the single syllable as she points to the front of the rig, and then up ahead. “Tree.”
The wives are all frozen in place, a fear and uncertainty that Shin vaguely remembers having lived through before holding them still, and she rights the urge to roll her eyes and yanks at Ezra’s arm. He glances at Sabine before running, awkward and slipping in the muck, to set the winch. Sabine makes for the rig, Shin roughly shoving the wives back towards the cab behind her and practically loading them in bodily.
Gunfire sounds just as Ezra locks the winch in, and Shin, about to haul the last of the others into the cab, drops her and yanks the door from the ground up as a shield. She grits her teeth as the metal shudders behind her, bullets rattling and shaking the entire door as the winch squeals and Sabine revs the engine. Shin glances at the woman— the girl, really, they’re all so young— crouched down in front of her, hands over her ears, and then up at Sabine’s gritted jawline, out to where Ezra’s barely hidden behind the tree, and her jaw clenches just as tight as Sabine’s.
A pause in the gunfire, and Shin moves without thinking, shoving the girl up into the cab and trading her for the bag of guns stowed behind Sabine’s seat.
“Get to high ground and take it a click up the road before you cool the engines,” Shin mutters.
Sabine glances back at her, eyes wide in the moonlight, blindly working the clutch as she hauls them out behind the winch. “What if you’re not back before—”
Shin blinks, the moment stretching out, as if they’re not in the middle of being almost-murdered in the mud. “You go,” she says, because of course they would go. She’s lived three thousand days alone, and the last two hardly change the world they live in. She nods, short and sharp, as much for herself as for Sabine, and then leaps back off the cab and hauls the door up as a shield again.
It’s difficult in an obnoxious way, trying to shuffle along in the oil-slick muck with a bag of guns over her shoulder and a metal door in front of her, but she makes do, skirting out wide until the bullets no longer rattle against her shield and the spotlights from their hunters are too narrow to catch her. She dumps the door and hauls a gun out, resets the bag against her back, and starts to run.
It’s harder than she expects. Even taking them by surprise, a flicker appearing out of the dark and picking off their flanks before finding a grenade in the bag and launching it into the middle of their party, it still takes longer than she expected. It must be exhaustion, the recent days— fighting and running and being caged— catching up to her; or maybe her understanding of the violence she’s lived her life by has already been irrevocably skewed by how easy it was to fight next to Sabine just the one time.
One of the war boys comes at her with a chainsaw, mouth already painted chrome and eyes maniacal, and she scrambles back, boots slipping and the blade coming down and glancing off of her brace. Sparks spray upwards, illuminating the war boy’s fanaticism as his balance tilts and he slides as well; she reaches back into the bag behind her and comes up with the same file that she’d used to cut through her muzzle, shoves it blindly forward. It buries itself just over his collarbone and he shrieks, the sound cutting off into a gruesome gurgle when she yanks the file up and rips through his throat.
It’s harder than she expects, but soon enough she stands alone in a pile of gore and filth, covered in blood and things she’d rather not think of. The silence is abrupt, nothing but the percussion of her own pulse and the jagged edges of her own breaths.
She breathes in, holds it until her lungs ache, and lets it out slowly. Dead bodies surround her. The citadel’s people wait behind her. Sabine and the war rig wait ahead.
She’s lived three thousand days alone. She could fill the bag up with supplies from the pursuit vehicles and walk into the dark and return to her quiet wandering of the wasteland. No responsibilities, no furious army chasing her, no teenage girls in need of protection. No imperator with bright eyes and a dark smile, steady at her side.
Shin drags a hand over her face, doing nothing for the blood sprayed across it, and hikes the bag higher up on her shoulder and starts to walk.
The rig is still there, cooling in the dark. Shin marches past the wives and the way they gape at her and the blood on her shirt, her face, her hands. Her steps don't falter until she's made it to Sabine and Ezra, Ezra's eyes going wide at the sight of her and Sabine's mouth firming into a solid line.
Shin offers the bag, bloody and filthy just like the rest of her, but refilled with guns and ammo; she waits impassively until Ezra clears his throat and takes it from her and clambers up into the cab.
"You good?" Sabine sets to hauling her prosthetic back on, handling the buckles and harnesses blindly while keeping her gaze level on Shin, and a heat spreads under the cooling drying blood on her face as she nods jerkily.
"Come on," Sabine says, prosthetic squared away. "No point in tracking that much blood into the rig.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?” Ezra says cheekily from the cab. Sabine ignores him and grips at Shin’s elbow, hauls her further down the rig.
“What is—”
“Mother’s milk,” Sabine says, her lips pressed tight together. “No point in wasting water.”
Shin eyes the bucket of white liquid dispensed from the tanker skeptically, but the blood drying on her skin is starting to itch, so she dunks her hands into it and splashes it over her face.
“You good?” Sabine says again. It’s quieter this time, nearly lost in the splash of liquid and the aggressive friction as Shin scrubs at her face.
Shin pauses, glancing sideways to where Sabine is standing stiffly at her side. Sabine rolls her eyes, gestures pointedly to the blood all over Shin.
“It’s not mine,” Shin says after a long moment, long enough that surely the whole of the citadel’s army will be right behind them by the time she finishes speaking. She scrubs at her face again, and Sabine scoffs.
“Stop, stop, just—” Sabine elbows her a step to the side, wedging into the space in front of the bucket, and grips at the ragged sleeve of her shirt, tears a strip off, dunks it in the milk. “You’re making it worse.”
Shin, having survived her entire life in this hellscape of a world by not hesitating, by keeping moving, by never slowing down enough for anyone to catch her, freezes in place as Sabine’s prosthetic comes up to steady her head and her other hand follows, cleaning the evidence of the fight away from Shin’s face.
By the time the engines have cooled enough for Ezra to set them gingerly on their way, the blood is gone from Shin’s face, her hair, her neck. Her knuckles are bruised and split but dry, her right hand wrapped in a makeshift bandage from the same strip of cloth that Sabine her torn from her own shirt. The wives are asleep in the back, and Ezra disappears down the rig to watch their six, and Shin sits alone with Sabine in the moonlight.
Shin blinks away from where she’d been staring out the window into the dark, over to where Sabine is stubbornly looking straight ahead. Her profile is sharp, her jaw set, but the rings of exhaustion under her eyes shine in the moonlight.
Three thousand days, one after the other, without a shift or a slip or a break in the quiet, and now she’s crammed into a rig with a runaway war boy and escaping slaves and Sabine, an imperator, a warrior, unflappable and stalwart and keeping everyone moving forward. Sabine, who could have left her behind; Sabine, who silently, brusquely, unexpectedly tenderly, cleaned the blood off of Shin’s face, prosthetic hand gentle as it held her chin in place.
Three thousand days of taking care of herself because no one looks out for you in the wasteland, and Sabine with her scars and shadows risked everything to help the wives, to help Shin. There are words to put to how it feels to have someone do something for her, to show appreciation, gratitude; to explain what it means to realize someone might care just the smallest bit for Shin’s wellbeing, but she can’t remember what they are.
“I can drive,” she says instead, eventually. Too late, the words thank you flash into her mind, dusty and rusty and distant; she clamps her mouth shut and holds them inside, flexes her damaged fists until the ache settles her.
Sabine is quiet for a long time, long enough that Shin figures her offer, miniscule as it may have been, was ignored, before speaking.
“It’s a straight shot east.” Her hand flexes on the wheel, fingers drumming absently. “We should be there by sunrise.”
Shin stays quiet. focusing on the lingering feeling of Sabine’s prosthetic at her chin, the way the skin of her hands and face feel nearly raw with cleaning. She could have walked away. She could have come back and taken the rig for herself, the ignition sequences burned into her brain; left them all to fend for themselves and made her way alone like she always has. She still could, if she wanted: Sabine is more relaxed beside her now and the gearshift masks a gruesomely sharp blade that Shin could bury in her throat before anyone could blink.
“I can drive,” she offers again, gazing out into the dark.
They find the paradise where Sabine grew up, sandwiched between the sand and the salt on the edge of the world. The world had caught up to it, leaving it as dry and barren as everywhere else, leaving nothing but a handful of survivors who recognize Sabine more than she recognizes them, a home held onto for seven thousand days ripped away for a second time.
Sabine wanders into the desert, and Shin watches her go. Ezra starts to set off after her, and Shin hauls him back by the arm bodily. Sabine’s grief is loud, and ragged, and violent, and still disappears into the winds of the wasteland.
The wives turn away, hold each other, curl into the protective holds of the women who remain of Sabine’s home. Ezra turns away, averting his eyes and rubbing a hand over his shorn hair.
Shin watches, an unintentional and unwavering witness.
By the time night falls, they’ve set up a small camp, motorcycles in a ring against the rig for protection. There’s a soft murmur of conversation as Sabine and the others— her people, her home, these women who survived for so long— work to pull together a plan forward.
Shin sits beside the rig, shoulders leaning back against the enormous tires and head tilted back to the sky. The stars are duller than usual, as if the moonlight reflecting off the salt is offsetting their brightness.
Footsteps sound in the sand, and Shin fights the urge to sigh.
“We’re going to head east,” Sabine says. Her prosthetic is off, a blanket draped haphazardly across her shoulders against the desert chill. “It’s three hundred days to cross the salt. We can load the bikes up with as much fuel as we can carry and make it across.”
Shin pulls her gaze down from the stars, but can’t manage to look straight at Sabine. She stares out at the salt instead, and Sabine settles down to sit beside her. It’s that, Sabine sitting at her side, giving up the high ground while unarmed and without her prosthetic, that draws Shin’s gaze over finally.
"One of those bikes is yours." Sabine doesn't look at her, staring instead out across the salt. Shin stares at her profile, a map of lines she hadn't seen two days ago but now couldn't forget. “You could come with us.”
Shin has spent three thousand days alone, traipsing through the wasteland alone. Three hundred days of empty salt stretches out ahead of her, Sabine and her people offering her a place at their side. She shifts her eyes back out towards the salt, but Sabine's profile swims in front of her gaze anyways.
"I'll make my own way," she says after too long. It's what she's always done, since the day Baylan died. It's what she'll keep doing, until the day the wastes catch up to her like they do everyone.
Sabine turns towards her, eyebrows furrowed. The black is gone from her face and her eyes are bright in the moonlight, and Shin busies herself with silently inventorying everything she has on her person-- an icepick in her knee brace, a knife in her boot, a gun in her waistband; needle and tubing salvaged from Ezra in one jacket pocket, a rag she'd used as a face mask when the desert winds were too much in the other, the muzzle that'd been forced on her refashioned and bent into a spotty vambrace on her left forearm-- to stop herself from admitting that the idea of three hundred days across the salt at Sabine's side doesn't sound so bad.
"You don't have to decide now," Sabine says finally. She shrugs and the blanket slips loose from her shoulder, her amputated arm helpless to catch it, and and Shin reaches without meaning to, settles it back over her shoulder automatically. Sabine freezes in place when Shin's hand brushes against the stump of her arm, and nausea swoops in Shin's stomach-- she wants, wants to say yes, wants to follow Sabine and her bright eyes and strong jaw and stubborn mouth into the empty saltwaste for as long as it takes to understand what it is to wake up with something to look forward to-- and she jolts back, turns to go.
"Wait--"
Sabine's hand lands on her back, careful as it brushes over the leather of her jacket, and Shin flinches without meaning to at the aching skin and still-healing brand, the itching of tattoo ink leaking out and drying on her skin.
"You're hurt." It's not a question, but Shin shakes her head anyways, frowns, refuses to turn around.
"I'm fine."
"Let me take a look, at least," Sabine says with a huff. She climbs to her feet and hauls Shin up with her, a frown of her own not unlike the first split second Shin had seen her-- fury and steel, barreling through the desert in five tons of nitro-boosted war rig, taking on the full army of the bastard who had ruled the wastes for so long-- and Shin doesn't realizing she's being led over to the rig until Sabine has filled a bucket and glared expectantly.
"I'm fine--"
"If you're going to go off on your own," Sabine says sharply. "You can at least let me make sure you're not going to die of an infection or something."
Shin glares back, ready to argue because she's spent three thousand days beholden to no one and the last time someone made her do something she didn't want to do she sent half a dozen war boys falling to their death and had to be beaten into submission, but Sabine lifts her chin stubbornly and waits.
Sighing, Shin tugs her jacket off, pauses to dig the rag out of her pocket and offer it to Sabine before she sit down on the step of the rig and pulls her shirt up and over her head. She leans her elbows on her knees and her head into her hands and tells herself that she doesn't care that there's a lifetime of scars across her body, that there's a mystery tattooed into her skin that's left her back raw and aching.
Sabine's hand lands against her skin, ghosting gently along her spine, and Shin bites down on the inside of her cheek until she can taste blood to suppress the shudder that wants to roll through her.
"What does it say?" The question slips out without meaning to, but the desert is quiet and empty and after tomorrow they'll never see each other again, and Sabine's fingertips are gentle on the raw skin of her back.
Sabine is quiet, steadying Shin unnecessarily with a careful hand before working softly at Shin's back, the liquid cool and refreshing against her skin as Sabine methodically cleans the damaged skin. She offers the rag back to Shin when she's done, and there's ink and blood on it now-- less than she expected, but more than she'd hoped. Shin folds it silently, moving to sit up and pull her shirt back on, but Sabine's hand lands silently on her skin again.
"Day 12,045, no name," she says softly, and Shin freezes. "O-negative, high octane. Universal donor. No lumps, no bumps, no bruises. Full life clear." Her hands follow the words as she speaks, fingertips rough but touch careful; she hesitates when her touch reaches Shin's shoulderblades. "Isolate psychotic. Keep muzzled."
It isn't surprising, necessarily. She'd been nothing but a bloodbag there, a wild animal caught and caged for resource allocation. Feral. Psychotic. Knowing she'd been branded in some way had bothered her less than not knowing what it said, but the confirmation aches in a way she hadn't expected.
Isolate psychotic. Keep muzzled.
Her jaw aches from where the muzzle had chafed at her skin.
“Everything hurts out here,” Sabine says, unbidden. Her fingers follow the line of Shin’s spine again, incongruously tender. “But that doesn’t mean you have to face it alone.”
Fingertips press between Shin’s vertebra, brief and firm, before disappearing, and Shin sits up and drags her shirt back over her head automatically. Sabine stands over her still, mouth in the same firm line it had been in when Shin returned to the rig in the bog, eyes bright in the dark.
“One of those bikes is yours,” Sabine says again, and then sets off, leaving Shin sitting alone and staring after her.
The sun rises, and Shin hasn’t slept. She’s standing between two of the bikes, staring out across the sand, the salt at her back, when the quiet shuffle of people waking and moving sounds.
“So what’s the plan?” Sabine appears at her side, squinting in the sunlight as she straps her prosthetic back on. “You coming?”
“Not to the salt,” Shin says, breaking her vigil to turn and face Sabine. She points out across the sand. “That’s your way home.”
Sabine pauses, buckles have fixed. “Say what now?”
“Three hundred days of salt,” Shin says in lieu of an answer. “There won’t be anything on the other side. But that—” she points again across the sand. “—there’s a home there.”
Sabine stares at her, dumbfounded, speechless, and if Shin were less worried about someone shooting her, she would be proud of it. Instead, she turns to where Ezra and the others have followed and are listening in.
“You want to go back?” one of the wives says.
“Back where everyone who’s trying to kill you is?”
“No, wait.” It’s Ezra who says it. “There’s green at the citadel. Water. Food.”
Shin, unexpectedly grateful, nods and points at him.
“It’s undefended,” Sabine says slowly.
“We take the rig and charge back through the canyon,” Shin says, definitive, certain, like she has any confidence this could work. Nothing ever works in the wasteland, but dying on the hunt for a real home is infinitely more appealing than three hundred days of salt. “Decouple the tanker and blow the pass behind us.”
Sabine finishes with her prosthetic, sets her hands on her hips, tilts her head as she stares hard at Shin. Shin fights the urge to squirm under her bright eyes, her unconvinced frown.
“It won’t be easy,” Shin says, pleading her case in a way she’s never done before. She wants this to work, wants to stop running, wants to sit in the quiet for once. “But three hundred days on the salt is worse.”
Sabine’s frown fades, her forehead smoothing out and eyes crinkling as a slow smile spreads across her lips, brighter than her eyes, brighter than the morning sun.
“Let’s fucking do it,” she says, and three thousand days alone calm and quiet and fade away in the face of her grin.
It’s a long day.
It takes hours to retrace their steps, to make it through the bog, to make their way towards the canyon. Anxious silence fills the rig as they limp at high speed towards an army ready to kill them, and then they crash through the center of that army at full speed.
It’s a long day, and Shin remembers almost none of it. She’s in the rig, loading all the weapons and organizing them in the most effective spots to grab from, Sabine behind the wheel, and then the war finds them. They lose people— one of the wives, two of Sabine’s people— but deal more damage than they take, right up until Shin finds herself on the roof of the rig, fighting off some particularly psychotic iteration of a war boy with a machete and she manages to block the strike that would’ve beheaded her with the shotgun in her hands but the weight of it sends her crashing over the side of the rig.
It’s a long day, but here’s what Shin remembers: she falls, and in the split second as it happens and she knows she’s about to die, she sees the canyon ahead, and is okay with it. She closes her eyes and waits for the ground to greet her, and instead her whole body jerks with a screeching noise because Sabine’s prosthetic is flung out the door and caught onto Shin’s knee brace.
She stares up at Sabine, the grit of her teeth and the strain of muscles in her neck and jaw as she holds on tight, and Shin decides she’s not going to die today.
Then an awful, cruel scream rips out of Sabine’s throat, and blood leaks out of her mouth, and her grip starts to fail.
It’s a long day, but here’s what Shin remembers: the flash of regret in Sabine’s eyes, winning out over glassy pain, when her hold on Shin starts to give out. Hauling herself up enough to find a handhold of her own, and getting yanked back into the fighting by another war boy. Making it through the canyon and the explosion behind them nearly upending the rig itself. The last war boy who made it onto the rig and the snap of his neck in her hands as she shoved him away and hauled herself back into the cab to the horribly wheezing sound of Sabine, dying on the floor.
“Sabine—” Ezra’s at the wheel, frantic and already slowing down.
“Don’t stop,” Shin barks out, shoving him back into the seat as she scrambles to Sabine’s side. She’s gone pale and cold under the dirt and sweat, blood pouring out of her side and bubbling in her mouth.
Three thousand days alone, but Shin still remembers every old book Baylan had found and made her read. Anatomy and physiology, emergency medicine. There was no amount of first aid to keep her leg fully functional, but Sabine has survived too much for Shin to let her die now.
“Hey,” Shin says softly, hands working at Sabine’s side. Slick arterial blood is pumping into her chest, crushing her lungs, and Shin glances wildly around the cabin and spots what may have once been the bottom half of a funnel.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, and then shoves it into Sabine’s side. A creaking wheeze is the only sign that she felt it at all, but the air makes its way into her lung.
“Will she be okay?” Ezra keeps looking back, barely focusing on the road, eyes wide in his head and body shaking visibly with worry.
“She’s bleeding out,” Shin snaps. “She needs—”
Isolate psychotic. Keep muzzled.
Her fingers tremble as she rips at the tubing she’d so neatly bundled up after ripping it out of her own body. Universal donor, full life clear. They’d taken from her without a second thought, stealing her blood for their own, but she shoves the needle into her arm without hesitation, gives of what she has left to Sabine without a second thought.
The transfusion starts, and Sabine stares at her with lidded eyes, half unconscious on the floor of the war rig as Shin’s blood pumps into her veins.
Isolate psychotic. Keep muzzled.
Shin shifts so she can hand the tubing to one of the wives to hold up and keep the blood flowing, shifts back, presses her hands to Sabine’s clammy cheeks.
“Shin,” she says softly. “My name is Shin.”
Shin wakes to the drums.
The rhythm is persistent and overwhelming and for a split second before she opens her eyes she's in a cage, muzzled and chained and branded, blood pumping out of her into a faceless nameless war boy; she jerks awake with a ragged breath and nearly falls out of the bed.
"You okay?”
Sabine's voice sounds from the doorway, and Shin relaxes without meaning to.
"I'm fine," Shin says quietly. She drags a hand over her face and watches as Sabine leans against the doorway. It'd look casual-- surely what she's going for-- if it weren't for the shallow labored way she's breathing, the bandages wrapped around her torso and bruises wrapped around her face, the missing prosthetic. "You?"
"I'll live," Sabine says, one side of her mouth twitching up into a smile. She straightens up from the door and takes careful steps across the room. Shin moves without thinking, setting her feet onto the cool stone floor and making room for Sabine at her side, reaches to take some of her weight as she sits down heavily. Sabine exhales heavily, pained and whistling, and Shin jerks her hands back, clenches at the rumpled blankets under her.
"Sorry," Sabine says hoarsely. "Think this one is gonna take a while to walk off, probably."
"Your lung was punctured," Shin says. "What did you expect?"
Sabine waves her hand dismissively. "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
The drums carry on. Shin tilts her head towards the sound. "What's with the drums?"
"Celebrations," Sabine says after a long moment. "New days, no warlords, all that. People are happy."
Shin stares down at her feet. She vaguely remembers bathing, the first proper wash she's had in probably two hundred days, before crashing into an empty bed in exhaustion yesterday. Her feet are clean against a similarly clean floor, and she stares at them in wonder. She's paler than she remembered.
"Are you staying?" Sabine says suddenly. Shin blinks up from staring at her own feet without meaning to, head whipping to the side and expecting Sabine's profile but instead finding Sabine looking square at her. The bruises on one side of her face are vivid, the laceration along one cheekbone haphazardly stitched, her eyes sparking impossibly bright in the sunlight.
"What?"
Sabine reaches and Shin freezes in place, watching without breathing as Sabine's hand stretches towards her face. There's been a lifetime between the first glimpse of Sabine that Shin had and now, thousands of days crammed into the few short ones they lived through together, and even longer since anyone reached for her with anything approaching tenderness, and Shin's pulse ricochets in her throat at the possibility.
Sabine reaches, and then her hand falls back when a pained wheeze squeezes out of her, the extension of her arm pulling at her damaged torso. "Shit," she mutters. "Sorry, I--"
Shin turns without thinking, reaches for her without hesitation. She's survived as long as she has by managing her impulses and making calculated choices, but since the minute Sabine had trusted her to get the wives out of the canyon she's been moving without calculating nonstop. Her fingertips brush against the undamaged side of Sabine's face, and it's Sabine's turn to freeze. Shin's chest aches-- with fatigue, with the number of hits she took in recent days, with anxiety and nerves and the fact of Sabine tilting minutely into her touch-- and she ghosts her thumb across Sabine's mouth, watches as Sabine's eyes slide shut, revels in the exhale that rushes out around her touch.
"Shin," Sabine says softly, and the world spins because Shin doesn’t know the last time someone else said her name out loud. The last person would have been Baylan, and she hasn’t missed the sound of her name once before hearing it on Sabine’s lips. “Shin.”
“Sabine,” Shin says, for lack of anything else to say. I’ll stay as long as you want me to burns in her throat, is this what a future feels like ricocheting off the back of her teeth.
“Are you staying?” Sabine says again. Her hand presses against Shin’s bruised knuckles, drags down to her wrist, brushes over the pulse there until Shin’s whole body trembles.
Shin leans forward and brushes her lips over Sabine’s cheek, the bruising and lacerations there, gentle as she knows how to be after a lifetime of violence. Sabine shudders under her touch, fingers tightening at her wrist for a split second before she turns and presses her lips to Shin’s, swallows Shin’s surprise with her kiss.
It’s neither heated nor extensive, Sabine’s damaged lungs and Shin’s aching body holding them both back, but Shin stays slanted forward anyways, presses her lips to Sabine’s hair— clean, now, but still dark and cropped short—and lets Sabine lean into her, drop her head on her shoulder.
“That better be a yes,” Sabine mutters into Shin’s shoulder, and Shin, unexpectedly, for the first time that she can really remember, laughs.
Shin wakes to the drums.
It's cool and dark, the bed soft and moonlight silvering the room. The aches are fading, distancing; her body resting, recovering. Healing.
Sabine whines in her sleep when Shin shifts, the knotty scar tissue of her left arm pressing fitfully at the back of Shin’s head.
“Go to sleep,” she grumbles, eyes still closed. Shin bites down on the urge to argue, to run, to take her three thousand days of silence and drown in them alone forever, to sit up and kiss Sabine until neither of them can breathe.
Instead, she resettles in the half curve of Sabine’s arm, lays her head back down onto Sabine's sternum, careful with her damaged torso but unwilling to give up the proximity to her heartbeat. The steady percussion of her pulse surrounds Shin as she closes her eyes, safe in the moonlight at Sabine's side.
Shin sleeps to the quiet drum of Sabine's heartbeat, and leaves the wasteland and three thousands days of silence behind.
and i went home
chasing twisters in the canyon
my cathedral is the badlands
dust and devils on my conscience
come back to me, darling