Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ronin watched as the skin on his right leg was cut and peeled away.
The machine’s larger arms lowered, and numerous attachments went to work.
Within a minute, everything from his knee down had been detached.
He didn’t shut down the sensors in the area.
The pain was intense, but fleeting, a brief flicker of life.
He knew such sensations were both more intense and longer lasting for humans.
After his leg was repaired and reattached, the machine moved upward, making minor repairs to his damaged internals and sealing the holes in his casing, buffing and polishing the once damaged areas.
Finally, it loomed over his head, its tiny arms extracting the shrapnel embedded in his left optic.
Before the final repairs began, Ronin obeyed the attendant’s directions and deactivated his optical input.
He occupied himself by sifting through his memory. He replayed Lara’s dance, reviewed their conversations and their arguments, lamented the amount of time he’d spent apart from her. Echoes of what he’d experienced during their couplings skittered across his electrodes.
More than anything else, he replayed her confession of love.
The attendant directed Ronin to the epidermal synthesizer once his optics were online. He continued his reveries inside the chamber.
He hadn’t told Lara he loved her. He hadn’t known how to, though the words were so simple; they would’ve taken less than one second to say. She’d given no indication that she had been bothered by it, but that didn’t make it all right.
When the dermal repairs were completed, Ronin dressed himself. The shirt Lara had made was more comfortable against his skin than anything had ever been, apart from Lara herself. He headed for the exit after thanking the attendant.
He’d been away from home for twelve hours and thirty-five minutes, and he wanted nothing more than to be back with Lara. To tell her that he loved her too.
An itch pulsed across his cheek. He ignored it.
“Good to see you fully repaired,” Mercy said pleasantly when he reached the front desk.
Ronin glanced at her and halted abruptly. Her smile was gone, belying her tone.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Her optics flicked to the entry doors. “It’s just that…he came looking for you while you were in there.”
“He want me to go see him?”
“No.” She dropped her gaze, and her brows twitched down briefly. “He’s been waiting outside for the last three hours and forty-two minutes.”
Ronin turned his head toward the doors. Between the contrasting lighting and the reflections on the glass, the details were blurry, but he counted five distinct figures standing outside about ten meters from the entrance.
There were undoubtedly other exits from the building, but Ronin had only been in the lobby and the repair room, so he dismissed the possibility of an alternate route. Such an escape would only lead Warlord to Ronin’s residence, and he didn’t want that scar-faced tyrant anywhere near Lara.
He walked toward the exit, ceasing his processors’ attempted speculations. Warlord’s whims seemed as difficult to predict as Lara’s. The doors whirred open, their sound indicating an inevitable motor failure in the near future.
If the group of bots had been conversing, they fell silent when Ronin stepped outside.
They all looked at him as he approached.
Warlord stood at the center of the group, unassumingly average in height, build, and features compared to his companions save for the sutured gash on his cheek.
Even though the gearheads displayed far more bare metal, Warlord’s damage was somehow more imposing.
Ronin stopped several feet away.
Should’ve brought the pistol.
A single round in Warlord’s optic could have been enough to short his system entirely.
“Dustwalker. Looking better than you did when you came in last night,” Warlord said, his expression neutral.
“Feeling it, too.” Ronin met the gazes of each of the gearheads before settling his focus on Warlord again. “Just here to make sure I’m adequately repaired?”
“You push boundaries, dustwalker. Maybe that’s good out there. Maybe that’s why you’re so productive. But we’ve been over this already.”
“I didn’t intend to come back in after dark, but I wasn’t exactly in any condition to race the sun yesterday.”
“I’ve dealt with your type. I understand you. I told you that my rules are to be obeyed, didn’t I? I don’t think my memory’s been corrupted in the last month. Maybe you can refresh me, so we can be sure.”
“Your bots let me through without a word. They—”
“You know that’s not what this is about!” Warlord growled, jabbing a finger at Ronin and stepping forward. “You’re smarter than that, dustwalker. At least you think you are.”
Ronin’s processors blazed through data, searching every moment he’d spent in Cheyenne. There weren’t many conversations with Warlord to review, but there’d been many rules, rarely presented with clarity.
Warlord pursed his lips and strode forward, slowly circling Ronin. “Did you think we wouldn’t notice, Ronin?”
Ronin forced himself to remain in place. “Notice what?”
“You’ve been purchasing a great deal of food considering you can’t eat, along with clothing in sizes much too small for that impressive frame of yours. You’ve spent more idle time in Cheyenne over the last month than you have since you first came here.”
Realization hammered into Ronin’s mind, battering his CPU into overload. There were too many possibilities to assess. Too many things they could do to her, too many things they could’ve done while he was incapacitated.
“You brought a human through my wall.” Unhurried, Warlord strolled back toward his gearheads and turned to face Ronin. “None of my people have seen her leave. That means you’ve been keeping her.”
The gearheads shifted their stances, spreading their feet and squaring their shoulders.
Their exaggeratedly grim expressions might have been comical in any other situation.
But Ronin didn’t fear for himself. Any pain he suffered at their hands would be over in an instant, relegated to the depths of his memory.
The same wouldn’t hold true for Lara.
His processors superimposed her face on Tabitha’s broken body. Had some of these gearheads taken part in that brutal beating? Which of them had harmed Lara’s only family, which had ensured that Tabitha’s suffering had been profound and prolonged before her death?
“If I had a woman, why would it be a problem? I’ve seen humans on the arms of bots within your walls, right in the faces of your people,” Ronin said.
Warlord shook his head. “I’m starting to wonder if you’ll ever learn.
And that’s a damned shame, because bots of your talent are a boon to this community.
” He walked up to Ronin, narrowing his eyes, and lowered his voice.
“Nothing happens in Cheyenne without my say so. Especially not one of those parasites taking up residence behind my wall. Their place is out there, in the world they destroyed.”
“So, I’m expected to know your will in all things without being told?” Though the question was already a risk, he nearly let himself say more. They couldn’t do much to him—on or off, as he’d told Lara—but there was a lot they could do to her.
Warlord motioned to a pair of gearheads. “Boulder. Northside.”
The synth with the exposed lower jaw, Northside, had been guarding the gate to the bot district the night Ronin brought Lara inside, and Ronin had seen the boxy bot called Boulder around town.
Each of the bots grabbed one of Ronin’s arms and pushed. He locked himself in place, exerting force against them. Warlord didn’t look away, his expression unchanging as he gestured the two remaining gearheads forward.
More hands clamped down on Ronin, and they quickly swept his legs out from beneath him. He hit the pavement hard. The gearheads knelt on his limbs before he could rise.
Warlord approached slowly, as though he had nothing better to do, nowhere else to be, and stopped over Ronin’s head.
Ronin poured excess power into his actuators and struggled to sit up. The gearheads swayed, adjusting their weight to press him down.
Warlord eased into a crouch. “You’re expected, Ronin, to get rid of that worthless meatbag.
You’ve done well for us, brought in valuable resources, so I’m willing to extend my generosity to you one last time.
There’s fight in you, and I can admire that…
but it doesn’t mean shit if you try to fight me.
Get rid of the meat, or I will. And then we’ll tear you apart, one piece at a time. ”
Ronin stared up at Warlord’s face, fury roaring inside him.
Reason said to agree politely and be done with it.
Deception and charm were the safest ways to extricate himself from this situation.
But with whatever Lara had awoken inside him, this fire, this emotion, this…
love, he couldn’t accept the threat with a nod and a forced smile.
He railed at the thought of letting this happen without protest.
But he had to swallow his rage. He had to get back to her.
“You can prosper with us, or you can become the scrap that fuels us. Don’t ever say I didn’t give you the choice.” Warlord rose and walked away, boots thumping on the pavement.
The gearheads delayed for fifteen seconds before releasing Ronin and following their leader.
Ronin sat up and watched the group leave, their shadows stretching across the road in the setting sun. They turned east when they reached the main street; they weren’t going to Ronin’s residence, at least not directly.
What if they’d already been there? What if they’d already harmed Lara?
No.
They wouldn’t have done anything. Forcing Ronin to harm her himself was part of Warlord’s cruelty, part of the way he exerted control. They couldn’t have hurt Lara.
Not yet.
He pushed himself to his feet and ran. He should’ve listened to her, should’ve taken her away from Cheyenne sooner. He shouldn’t have gone on that last run. What had that delay cost them?
The front door of his residence was locked. He forced it open, splintering the wood, and it slammed hard into the wall.
“Lara!”
Striding into the main room, he swept his optics over it. There was precious little time to gather their supplies, and he’d have to prioritize based on her needs. Food, water, clothing. The Dust would not be forgiving to her.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. He snapped his head to the side as Lara raced down, turning toward him as soon as her feet were on the floor of the entryway.
“Ronin?” She flicked her worried gaze between him and the open door. “What’s wrong?”
For once, he was glad to see her clothed. Her ring hung around her neck on a thick piece of twine. Ronin wished she could wear it on her finger, but it was too obvious a target for thieves and reavers.
“We need to go,” he said, striding to her.
“Wasn’t that the plan already?”
“Now.” Taking her hand, he led her upstairs, climbing the steps swiftly.
“Ronin, wait!” Lara hurried behind him. “What do you mean, now? It’s still light outside, and we haven’t traded anything.”
He entered his bedroom. She’d already packed his rucksack and laid out their folded clothing on the bed.
His tools were arranged in his belt pouches, the handgun in its holster nearby.
Releasing her, he went to the closet, pulling down the spare bags from the upper shelf and tearing two coats off their hangers.
“What the hell’s going on, Ronin?”
“We need to leave.”
“You said that already.”
“Warlord knows you’re here, Lara.” He turned toward her to find the color drained from her face. “He doesn’t know it’s you, I don’t think, but that doesn’t matter. We have to gather everything that’s essential and get out of here.”
Ronin held up the smaller of the two coats and compared it to her body. It was still much too large, but it would be her only real protection from the unforgiving weather of the open wasteland.
She took the coat from him and hugged it to her chest. “Shouldn’t we at least wait until dark?”
“No.” Swinging the other coat on, he returned to the bed, picked up the pistol, holster and all, and offered it to her.
“It needs to be now. We’ll cut through backyards until we have to cross the street, then swing south, through the slums, until we’re out of sight of the wall. Then we’ll head west.”
“What about the guards?”
“They’re only posted at the gates and the checkpoints on the main road. Most of the time.”
“And we’re going over the wall.”
He nodded and held the gun closer to her. “Take it.”
She closed her fingers around the holster and stared at it. “I’ll…go get ready.”
As she turned to walk away, Ronin caught her upper arm, drawing her back toward him.
Stepping close, he cradled her face between his hands and pressed his forehead to hers.
His immense relief at seeing her unharmed wouldn’t mean anything until Cheyenne was far behind him, but he could relish a single moment of togetherness, of her beauty.
“I’ll keep you safe, Lara Brooks.”
She smiled, her breath tickling his skin, and placed a hand on his forearm. “I know.”
“Pack as much food as you can. Focus on anything that’ll last more than a day or two. And fill as many containers as you can find with water.”
“Okay.” Lara withdrew from him and hurried out of the room.
He didn’t turn to his gear until she reached the staircase and exited his field of vision.