Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Because Colorado had been far more densely populated than Wyoming before the Blackout, the lands south of Cheyenne made for more lucrative scavenging. But that was a longer journey, and Lara’s urgency had seeped into Ronin, making him hyperaware of time’s passage.
They needed to get out of Cheyenne as soon as possible. They couldn’t afford a delay of three or four days.
So he strode west. There were places sleeping in these hills that he hadn’t scavenged. The risk of returning empty-handed was higher, but this was the quickest route back to Lara.
Twenty-nine kilometers outside of town, he spotted a line of wood fence posts atop a hill, nearly lost amidst the scrub grass and dirt. As he climbed, his guidance system pushed him to turn east. To return to Lara.
She was waiting for him in Cheyenne, trapped in the territory of the bots who’d killed her sister. She’d begged him to take her away from that place, and he’d forced her not only to stay, but to stay alone.
All because he wanted her to keep the ring.
They both knew it would’ve traded for enough credits to acquire any supplies they needed for their journey and more, especially combined with his last haul.
Logic dictated that they should’ve taken it to the market the moment she suggested selling it.
They could’ve left town together immediately afterward, without the agony of waiting, without suffering through uncertainty.
It was an object only as valuable as the materials that made it—or it should’ve been. Her description of how humans used such rings and what they symbolized might’ve been enough to convince him, but the inscription on the inside of the band had truly made up his mind.
Yours Until the End of Time.
Simple words. Like the ring itself, they shouldn’t have held any deeper meaning. But Ronin had known he had to give it to her once he’d read them.
He crested the hill, stopped beside one of the posts, and tapped it with the toe of his boot. The rotted wood broke with a dull snap, partly disintegrating. The inhabitants of the old world had been fond of boundaries. Their reward was the boundless Dust.
Ronin swept his optics over the area ahead.
The ground ran down into a small valley, likely carved over millennia by a long-dried stream, before rising into another hill.
The land continued like that for kilometers—peaks and valleys, steadily higher, steadily rockier.
Sediment had gathered at the base of this valley over decades of countless storms, from which rose a surprisingly intact shingle roof.
As he descended, his processors began the daunting task of calculating the probability of finding this exact place at this exact time. His attention shifted to Lara long before he could produce an answer.
How improbable was her existence?
So much about human reproduction was left to chance.
Two people had to meet, had to connect, circumstances had to be perfect for fertilization, particular parts of their genetic code had to be passed on to their offspring, and those descendants had to repeat the cycle again, and again, and again.
Lara’s ancestors had gone through that process for untold generations.
Out of infinite possibilities, all those couplings had resulted in her.
And if all that wasn’t improbable enough, Ronin had happened to be led directly to her shack by the sound of her chime tinkling in the wind, on a night when she’d left her door cracked open, right when she’d been dancing.
The chain of unrelated occurrences leading to their meeting was staggering to contemplate.
How long would Ronin have wandered, unsettled by the emptiness of his existence without understanding it, if not for Lara? Would he have ever tasted even a fraction of the emotion she’d awoken in him?
Circling the buried structure, he dropped his right hand to the grip of the pistol at his hip and unclasped the holster with his thumb.
The firearm wasn’t likely to significantly damage most bots, but it packed enough of a punch to allow Ronin the opportunity to get closer, and it was more practical in tight spaces than his rifle.
There was no trash outside, no tracks, no path worn in the dirt near the only window above the ground. Ronin forced all his processors to divert from thoughts of Lara, difficult as it was, and focused on his sensory inputs.
Wind rustled the dry grass and kicked up loose bits of dust to patter on the roof.
He moved to the window and knelt beside it. Only a few flakes of white paint clung to the splintery gray wood of the frame, and decades of abrasion and sunlight had left the glass too cloudy to see through.
Pressing his fingers to the bottom rail, he applied upward pressure, but the window didn’t move.
After another optic sweep of his surroundings, he drew his pistol and hammered it into the window. The wooden muntins supporting the glass panes were brittle, snapping inward as the glass shattered. He froze and listened for any indication someone had heard him.
The wind sighed its disapproval.
What would Lara think of this? Would she be excited by the unknown, by the discovery, or would it frighten her?
Clearing out the remaining shards from the window frame, Ronin pulled himself inside feet-first. Glass crunched beneath his boots as his optics adjusted to a low-light setting. The room came into focus.
Though everything was covered in thick dust, this had clearly been a bedroom.
A rusted bed frame lay in one corner, and the skeleton of a mattress stood against the wall, little more than rotted wood and corroded springs draped in tattered, discolored cloth.
Crumbling drywall revealed the wood supports inside the walls.
Despite his care, the floorboards creaked beneath him as he searched the room. He found only a few bits of plastic before proceeding into the hallway. Motes of dust, disturbed by his passage, floated in the air. Each of those specks represented years of stillness and neglect.
Entering another bedroom, he continued his cautious search. There were books in this one, their covers worn, spines creased, and pages yellowed with age. A lone book lay upon the bedside stand. Gently, he brushed the dust from its cover to reveal the word DIARY printed upon it.
He couldn’t bring himself to pick it up.
Books weren’t valuable to the bots of Cheyenne, and Ronin didn’t have connections amongst the humans to find fair trade for them. He couldn’t justify the space they would’ve taken up in his bag. Practicality had to outweigh curiosity now.
But the books served as more proof of what he’d already known—people had lived here before the Blackout. They might’ve even survived it and remained for a time afterward. They’d slept in these beds, had walked in the hallway, had prepared meals in the kitchen he knew lay somewhere deeper inside.
He moved to the closet. The sliding doors had fallen off their tracks and lay on the floor nearby.
Twenty-two clothes hangers hung on the rod, seventeen wire, five plastic, four of which held moth-eaten garments.
He holstered his pistol, set down his bag, and collected the hangers, bending the metal ones into more compact shapes and breaking the plastic into manageable pieces.
He tossed the garments into a pile in the closet’s corner.
Something on the shelf above the rod caught Ronin’s attention when he was done.
A cloud of dust billowed in the air as he pulled the plastic bin down. Setting it on the floor, he crouched and pried the lid open. Despite his care, the brittle plastic snapped. He tossed the pieces aside.
Ronin reached into the bin and took out the stack of papers on top.
They were thick and textured, in a variety of faded colors, and many had shaky, simplistic drawings on their fronts and the same name written on their backs—Lindsey.
It was always accompanied by a number, ranging from five to ten, and the drawings became clearer and more confident as the number increased.
He placed the papers on the floor and removed the next object.
It was small enough to hold in one hand, with a hard, plastic casing and five buttons along one side.
There were symbols on the buttons—a square, a triangle pointing right, two sets of double triangles facing opposite directions.
He pressed the button with the upward-pointing triangle.
With an audible click, the clear-paned door on the front of the device opened. Inside was a slot with two pegs. Ronin had a sense that this had been old technology even before the world fell apart, but he did not know its function.
He looked into the bin. Neatly arranged along the bottom were twenty-six plastic cases with words printed on their sides.
MICHAEL JACKSON THRILLER, MADONNA BEDTIME STORIES, RATT REACH FOR THE SKY, DEF LEPPARD HYSTERIA, MEATLOAF BAT OUT OF HELL.
There were numbers on all of them, but he couldn’t discern a meaningful pattern.
Selecting one at random, he pulled it from its place and turned it.
There was a picture on the front of a dark-haired woman holding a guitar.
JOAN JETT, it read across the top, with Bad Reputation written lower.
Ronin ran his fingertips along the edge of the case, finding the grooves, and opened it.
Another plastic object was inside, which contained twin reels of tape visible through a tiny window.
That’s what it was called—a tape. He removed it from the case, slid it into the tape player, and closed the door.
With his fragmented memory, all he had were assumptions, but he guessed these tapes were recordings of music. And if they could be played, they would offer a unique glimpse into a bygone era. A taste of a civilization that had collapsed two hundred years ago.