Waking up covered in blood seemed to be a pattern in Lilijoy’s life recently.

She wasn’t sure where she was at first. She felt cool night air across her face, followed by sticky, itchy and crusty sensations that were entirely unwelcome. It was very dark and there was a gentle sensation of movement. In the distance, she could hear the thrumming of the factory mine.

She was lying on something soft, with hard lumps and an unpleasant smell. Strike that. A really unpleasant smell. She lay there, uncomprehending for another instant, and then launched to her feet, doing the ‘I just slept on a dead body dance’, which involved much shuddering and retching, and very little rhythm.

The cabin smelled of human waste, blood and sweat. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the low light, and she could see the (very) dead body of the vampire, next to Anda’s hopefully still living body. She steeled herself and checked him for signs of life; he was warm and breathing.

“Anda!” she hissed, and then wondered why she was whispering. He mumbled something and stirred, but did not wake entirely.

She went over to the compartment, where she had seen a water container. It was too heavy to lift, even if she had two arms, but she felt around and found a spout near the bottom. The compartment was empty, other than the water, so she figured out how to get the water to come out and let it run, until she could haul the container out onto the deck. Then she got down into the compartment carefully, afraid at first it would be too deep for her to get out easily. As it turned out, the edge was only just above her rib cage, so she relaxed, shed her pillowcase dress and began to rinse herself in the cool water as best she could, at least to get some of the blood out of her hair and off her face.

As she finished, she became aware that Anda was sitting up and looking over in her direction.

“I have to say,” he said. “Of all the times I have woken up not know who was sleeping next to me, this is by far the most disturbing.”

He pulled himself up onto one of the seats saying, “I really hate to do this. Cover yourself or cover your eyes, I’m going to turn on some lights.”

Lilijoy couldn’t imagine any reason she would need to cover herself from light, although she was starting to feel chilly. Her eyes on the other hand...she quickly put her hand over her eyes, as parts of the canopy began to luminesce, casting a gentle green glow over the inside of the hovercraft.

“Well,” he said. “I can see I missed a few things as I caught my beauty rest! Are you up to telling me how on earth a...pulped vampire came to visit our humble craft?”

Lilijoy enjoyed the funny way he spoke. “He came through the window,” she said. “The pulp part came later.”

Anda chuckled and shook his head. “I have lived to see a little girl destroy a fully enhanced vampire with nothing more than a...” He looked around “...hammer?”

“There was a buzzy stick too,” Lilijoy admitted, uncovering her eyes now that she knew the light wasn’t too bright.

Anda shook his head again, testing his leg. He hissed through his teeth, and then seemed to relax.

“That was some extraordinarily nasty stuff in those bullets. I think even Marcus would have had a little trouble.”

Lilijoy tilted her head, and he elaborated.

“I keep forgetting how little you know of the world. Mr. Vampire here had a device called a ‘gun’ that could shoot out pellets full of bugs at very high speeds. One of them hit me in the leg, and fighting them off took all of my attention. I went through my entire supply of med bugs, little guys I keep in a special place in my body to help me survive and heal in emergencies. I try only to use them if my life is in danger, because they are very expensive, and not always easy to replace. The bugs in the pellet were designed to neutralize other bugs without destroying them, and then make their way into my brain and put me to sleep. Thankfully, enough of my brain bugs recovered to get my network up and running again, but I’m afraid the med bugs are a total loss.”

He shrugged, “Well, I imagine I owe you thanks for keeping me from bleeding to death, along with everything else.”

He looked her in the eyes with a serious expression.

“Lilijoy, I owe you my life. That is no small thing. I am not what I once was, but I will be able to help you without reservation while you adapt to a new world and learn about your legacy.”

She made a noise of confusion, and again he patiently explained.

“When a bug is found that is unknown by today’s wisdom, we call it a ‘legacy’ bug. Long ago, thousands of different bugs were designed by many different groups, over several decades. Bugs for every purpose imaginable. When the world collapsed, and Guardian rose, just as many were lost as were maintained. Most of the lost bugs are gone forever, destroyed or decayed, but once in a great while, one is found that still functions as intended. Often, they must be eradicated immediately for breaking Guardian’s rules. Equally often, they have been surpassed in their design by the generations that followed and offer little to us. Once in great while, a bug is found with functions or abilities not seen in over a hundred years. Those are the Legacy Bugs, and that, my dear, along with enough spirit for ten men my size, is what I strongly suspect you have within.”

***

After a very unpleasant cleanup, a bite to eat, and other bodily necessities complicated by their various injuries, they resumed their journey. Any predators in the area had stayed well away from the hovercraft, but Lilijoy saw a group of the beasts converge on the body they left behind as they drove away.

“Do you think the predators will get any blood bugs from the vampire?” she asked Anda as they moved through the night, lights once again completely off.

“I don’t see why they wouldn’t,” he replied. “Blood bugs are usually pretty simple. They act just like the part of our blood that carries oxygen to other parts of the body, only vastly better. If he had any immune bugs, which destroy diseases and some poisons, then those doggies might be for a rough time.”

After this followed a long and mutually confusing conversation about the predators, which turned out to be something called dogs, and then oxygen, and cells, and the immune system. By the time they wound down their conversation, the smear of vaguely round light known as the sun was coming over the horizon. They settled into a long, comfortable silence, which allowed Lilijoy to process all that she had learned from Marcus and Anda.

Oddly to her, she no longer felt disoriented as new information was poured over her head. Rather it felt like she was building an enormous structure, and though she had very few parts of it, she had an instinct for where each new piece should go.

After turning things over in her head some more, she asked Anda, “If the dogs can carry some kinds of bugs in their bodies, do you think that’s where my legacy came from? I think I bit that dog that attacked me an awful lot. Maybe I vampired from the dog.”

Considering the new verb ‘to vampire’ for a moment, Anda replied, “It’s very unlikely, almost impossibly unlikely. Even if you ate the dog’s brain, at most a few thousand bugs could have made it into yours. The problem is, it usually takes thousands of thousands to set up even a basic network. I would consider it more likely that some mysterious person gave you the bugs without your awareness. Or that you ate something containing a very small pill. Your legacy bugs are very unusual creatures, and we know almost nothing about them. Maybe you breathed them in in mist form. Or maybe you’ve had them for a very long time, and they became active recently. It could be anything!”

Disappointed that her idea was probably wrong, Lilijoy slumped in her seat, her legs dangling. She looked out over the landscape for a while. They were driving through an area of rolling hills, covered by hardened grasses. The desolate, glassy wasteland had been left behind sometime during the night, exchanged for the narrow dark blue-green blades of the grasses.

There was a constant low level cracking as the hovercraft drove through the tallest of the grasses. Though most didn’t rise more than a foot or so, the tallest hardened grasses were more inclined to snap than bend. When they stopped for a bathroom break, the hissing sound of the wind passed through the stiff blades with a high pitched harmonic timbre, beautiful and eerie.

While on the ground, they needed to step carefully to avoid punctures and cuts on feet and calves. Lilijoy was worried for Anda with his injured leg. If he fell into the grass, she thought, he might be pierced in a hundred places and bleed to death. When she expressed her fears, Anda waved her off.

"I grew up in grasslands much like these. My people have cultivated bugs for our skin that protect us from simple cuts, and even powerful weapons. If that vampire hadn't had special bullets, I wouldn't even have a scratch from his gun."

There were no signs of animal life, though hundreds of low mounds dotting the landscape were evidently filled with insects called ‘termites’, who seemed to be one of the major beneficiaries of the new natural regime. Anda had told her that in the past this area was filled with so many trees that it was almost impossible to navigate, but that the trees had dried up and burned over a hundred years ago. Here and there were patches of tall soft grasses, little groves of small hardened trees, and even a rare hardy tall tree that had somehow clung to existence amid all the changes.

Lilijoy felt sad for the old trees, she thought they must be very lonely.

Overall they had been gradually descending for some time now, headed for what Anda called the Rio Negro wetland. The first sign that they had arrived was a consistent flattening of the landscape. This was followed by a smell almost like Night’s Safety during the rains, and then, most horrible of all, dense clouds of tiny flying insects that came in through the broken canopy and got in her eyes and nose. She flailed at them ineffectively, and had to resort to covering her lower face by pulling the neck of her pillow case dress up. Anda laughed off the irritation, and told her to be thankful that these didn’t bite.

Following the former river was easy for the hovercraft, but the foul smell and flying companions made Lilijoy question his judgment in their travel plans. They followed a narrow channel of open water surrounded by mud and grasses, Lilijoy wasn’t sure what kind. Sometimes there were even huge stands of cattails!

Lilijoy couldn’t understand why Anda was resistant to stopping to procure their succulent roots and stems, though another part of her would have been just as happy never to see a cattail again.

After hours of travel down the channeled mud she saw the first sign of human presence, an ancient craft of some kind rolled on its side and half consumed by the mud. Lilijoy wanted to stop and look, but Anda said, “If we stop for every abandoned boat sticking out of the mud, we won’t reach the city for weeks.”

Upon seeing her quivering lip, he relented and they slowed and moved closer. Covered in slime and moss, the relic was about the size of the hovercraft, though it must have been much taller when upright. The top part had been a cabin, and she could still see a single tall seat projecting sideways in the air. She saw movement, and became aware of a family of small eyes looking back at her from the dark interior.

“Look Anda! Rats!” she squealed.

Lilijoy loved rats. There had been a small population living in the piles somehow when she was younger, though they had moved on, probably following after the factory mine and its organic waste. They were the only animal she had seen until the predators, and the rare daytime sighting of a rat at the edge of the piles had been the most exciting event in young Lilijoy’s existence.

Anda seemed less excited, and with a shudder, he turned the hovercraft away and headed back down the flats.

Over the next hour they saw abandoned boats, shacks, and even the back end of some massive treaded vehicle sticking out of the swamp.

Anda gave a chuckle at that one. “I’ve always wondered what the story is with that one,” he said as he pointed it out. “There must be a good story why a construction crane that size ended up in the middle of the river channel, several miles up-stream from the city.”

After the crane, there were more and more structures visible off to the sides of the former river, mostly just a wall or two sticking out of the grasses. The sun was at the horizon as they emerged onto a body of water so far beyond Lilijoy’s experience she could only gaze in awe. If she could walk across it, she thought it might take fifteen minutes or more! Her eyes followed the water to the other side and stopped, refusing to interpret what was in front of them. She pointed her hand in the same direction and for several long moments made inarticulate noises, as Anda looked on with fond amusement. He had been looking forward to Lilijoy’s first sight of a city, and it was everything he had hoped for.