Chapter 49 #2
Gary soon caught up with her, and people seemed more receptive to him. What had been done to his daughter and wife had been cruel beyond description, and by the look in people’s eyes when they saw him, Lara knew that many of the townsfolk had witnessed it firsthand.
Everyone had suffered the gearheads’ justice at some point.
Their victims were everywhere—scarred men and women, some missing fingers, hands, or legs.
More homes than Lara remembered bore Warlord’s symbol on their doors.
But Maggie and Kate…that had been a step too far, even for these broken people.
Would that spark of outrage be enough?
It has to be.
When she finally reached the common area around the water pump, a crowd had already gathered, speaking in hushed voices. The air was thick with tension.
She found Newton and the other soldiers on the fringes of the crowd. He was wrapped in cloth from head to toe, concealing the bare metal of his casing.
“Spot any gearheads?” Lara asked.
Newton shook his head. “No. Everything is quiet. Relatively, at any rate.”
“Won’t be for much longer,” Captain Cooper said, shifting his gaze to the northeast. “Best get on with this so we can move when the time is right.”
Lara brushed her clammy palms over her skirt and approached the crowd.
We will make this work. We have to.
“What’s this all about?” an older man demanded, his voice carrying over the din to silence the other conversations. “I could be out pickin’ already. We’re losin’ good time!”
Lara recognized his scowling face. Steve had been a fieldworker since she was young, one of the few humans allowed to tend Cheyenne’s crops. An infected cut on his leg had nearly killed him a decade ago. He’d kept the leg, but he walked with a heavy limp to this day.
The crowd’s attention swung to Lara.
A tall, slender woman with brown hair and dirt smudged on her face and arms pushed to the front of the group and sneered at Lara. “Not all of us are spreading our legs to bang bots for food.”
Her name was Scarlet. She was about the same age as Lara, but they’d never been close despite growing up together. Tabitha had been Lara’s only real friend.
Clamping her mouth shut, Lara closed her eyes.
She wouldn’t give in to anger. She needed these people on her side, on their own side.
When she opened her eyes again, she ran her gaze over every person she could see, meeting their eyes one by one.
They were scared, hungry, uncertain, and angry.
The only difference between Lara and these people was that she’d learned to hope for something better.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “I left here with a bot. A dustwalker named Ronin. I did it because I was hungry, yeah, but more because I wanted to find my sister.”
“Another bot-fucking whore.” Scarlet spit on the ground in front of Lara.
“That’s enough!” Gary stepped forward. At the edges of her vision, Lara saw Cooper and his men closing in.
“You gonna stand here and defend this filth?” Steve asked.
“Filth? Lara sacrificed to help my family when no one else would. She had nothing, and she still gave to us. She traded good salvage for scraps of food, and we took it for granted. I’ll always regret that. But I’m standing beside her now like I should have all along.”
“The bots she left with killed your children!” someone shouted.
Gary’s expression tightened, and he clenched his fists at his sides. “No. Warlord killed my children, and Lara is here to end him.”
Humorless laughter spread through parts of the crowd.
“She ain’t ending anything!” someone called.
“Not by myself,” Lara replied.
“You can’t expect us to fight him!”
“Why? Why can’t we fight him? Because we fear his retribution?
He can only take what we let him take, and he does it because we don’t fight back.
Maybe you want to keep living like this, but I’m done.
I won’t. Not any longer.” She nodded to Cooper.
“These people came to stand beside us, to join our fight against Warlord.”
The captain stepped forward with his soldiers. Despite the tattered coats and cloaks over their uniforms, they stood out from the crowd.
“Who the hell are they?” Steve asked.
Lara returned her gaze to the people, and she swore she saw a hint of fire in their eyes, a glimmer of hope. But the morning remained too dim to know for sure. “They’re soldiers. And this is only a handful of them.”
“Why would they help us?”
Everyone was silent as they stared at Lara and the soldiers. Conflict was clear on so many of their faces.
“Warlord killed my sister and dismantled the bot who was caring for her because they broke his rules. Me and Ronin left before Warlord could do the same to us. We risked the Dust to be together. Call me whatever you want, but Ronin is as human as any of us, and he’s mine.
He may be built differently, but he thinks, he feels. He loves.
“And Warlord chased us down through a fucking dust storm. He chased us down, deactivated Ronin, and left me beaten in the dirt to die, just so I’d suffer a little longer. All he’s ever done is hurt people, because our pain amuses him. But haven’t we all suffered enough?”
Murmurs spread through the crowd. People shifted uncomfortably on their feet, looking around at friends and neighbors who’d lost loved ones, who’d been maimed, who’d been made to live in fear and squalor.
Lara turned and met Newton’s gaze. “Newton, the bot who offered us shelter during the storm, is the only reason I’m standing here now.” The plates over his eyes shifted subtly, and she nodded at him.
After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped forward, pulling down his hood and removing the cloth from his lower face. The people gasped, their quiet conversations fueled with new energy.
“He reactivated Ronin and took us to a place where we could find help. These people”—Lara gestured at the soldiers—“saved us. They fed me, tended our wounds, gave us shelter. And now, they’re here to help all of us.”
She found Steve in the crowd and locked eyes with him.
“But you want to know why, right? Why now, after everything we’ve been through?
Because monsters like Warlord hold on to power by keeping people divided.
By keeping neighbors suspicious of each other, by forcing bots and humans to live separate lives, by telling us we have to look out for our own and fight each other for limited resources so we don’t realize that by working together, we could have everything we need.
“They’re helping us now because they know it’s the right thing to do. Because they know a world under the thumb of someone like Warlord will always be nothing but a lifeless husk. Because they know what I’ve always known—that we’re capable of so much more, of so much better than this.”
She pointed in the direction of the wall, the top of which was visible over the shacks.
“As we speak, there’s another team going in there.
They’re going to start the fight, but it’s up to us to rally together and help them finish it.
Together, we’ll march into the market, and Newton will convince the bots to join us. ”
The faces in the crowd were a chaotic display of emotions—hope, fear, doubt, determination.
“We can only do it if we’re all together,” Lara continued. “As one, we can defeat him. We can take back this city and live.”
“What the hell’s going on here?” a familiar voice called.
Lara clenched her jaw as Devon pushed his way to the front of the crowd. She hadn’t spoken to him since the day Ronin took her to the bot district.
He looked the same as she remembered, but her experiences had altered her perspective.
Beneath the dirt smudges on his face and the rags over his clothes, he was a well-built man with a filled-out face and a healthy color to his skin.
A man who always had plenty of food. A man who always avoided the gearheads despite the attention his prosperity should’ve attracted.
“We’re taking down Warlord,” she said.
Devon’s stride faltered and his eyes widened before he burst into laughter. He doubled over, hand on his stomach, guffawing. The crowd stood silent as he wandered closer to Lara.
“What can you do? Besides fuck bots, I mean.” He stroked his crotch. “You didn’t have to run off with one of them if you needed dick so badly.”
“We don’t have time for this shit, Devon.” Lara shifted her attention to the others. “If you want to be free of Warlord, stand with us. Anyone too weak to fight will be taken to a safe location where—”
“You’re fucking serious.” Devon furrowed his brow and turned to the crowd. “You believe this? Follow this bot-banger, and you know what’ll happen. You’ll all get killed. Hell, he’ll probably kill some of you just for listening to this bullshit.”
A middle-aged man pointed at the team behind Lara. “Those men are soldiers. Look at their guns.”
“Warlord’s got guns, too,” Devon said. “And even without them, one of his bots could tear any of us apart with its bare hands.”
“What other choice do we have?” another person demanded.
“Go home and keep living!”
Steve glared at Devon. “Easy for you to say. How is it you got so much, boy? How is it they ain’t come knocking on your door yet?”
Devon shrugged. “Not my fault if you aren’t resourceful enough to get what you need without digging through trash.”
Lara’s breath caught in her throat. With his words, everything fell into place. No one got by without trading in this world. For most of Cheyenne’s humans, that meant scavenging, scraping together meager harvests, or putting their unique talents to use, like shoemaking, tailoring, or trapping.
She’d never seen Devon work, and she’d never seen him hide when Warlord’s lackeys came around. The gearheads always seemed to know exactly who to look for, exactly what their crimes had been.
She glared at him. “It was you.”
He looked at her over his shoulder, frowning. “What?”