Ay sat straight, beak steadily opening and closing, watching the undulating path as they made slow progress between two steep banks of crystal sand. It had been hours since they descended, taking this more accessible route; this was a harder to spot passage, but the Hunter was adept. He had taken to watching those he had bound in the rigging. Their bodies were slowly twisting, bloating, hair falling out and weeping sores appearing on their hides.

He looked down at Bee, resting beneath her blanket. She had been smart enough, at least, not to partake, choosing to go hungry and weak instead. Despite his stoic silence, what he hadn’t said in their conversation raced through his head.

Everyone has urges, Ay imagined himself explaining to her. It’s not so simple that everyone can go without eating. Food is needed to grow, develop, to repair. In Bee’s case, he thought about telling the child she was not even fully grown. She must feel hungry all the time, he reasoned. The Vat-Mother must have designed her for something. Whatever that reason is, she must feel the urge to grow and, once that is done, a compulsion towards her actual purpose. She was made for some alien design, after all.

With a hiss, Ay shifted in his seat and looked ahead again. He had never travelled with someone so young, ignorant, and helpless for so long. A painful sense of guilt overtook him before he swallowed it away. Maybe he shouldn’t have taken the work. Perhaps he should have taken the money or disappeared after all. A fleeting memory of holding Nence in the warm and humid darkness of the Idiocene flats crossed his mind.

Besides him, he noticed Bee squirming in her seat to lift her feet onto the rigging, ribbed and armoured shoulders sliding down the chair so she could stare at the sky, swaddled in her blanket. Her back arched awfully before she decided to stay there, despite the discomfort and terrible posture. The child studiously avoided looking at the thralls again, with their growing sickness, the blisters on their skin weeping blood. Their pace was slowing, Ay noticed, but they were very nearly at their destination.

He took a waterskin, dumping it down on her lap. She yelped with surprise, but he only said, “Drink.”

Bee did, watching him with barely concealed suspicion. Ay pretended not to notice. Then, swallowing to clear his beak, vision bobbing, he lowered his gaze and tried to decide what to say to the poor thing. If there was anything he could tell Bee, to save her from whatever horrific fate those on High would inflict upon her, it was fast approaching too late.

The column of dust and smoke was spread broadly over the horizon, past the nearby dunes. It felt like at any moment, they could crest the next embankment and find themselves upon The Crawling City.

The wagon exploded.

The child screamed.

A thump rocked Ay’s skeleton and his hardened armour. Hitting the sand hard, Ay tumbled and turned into a swift roll. His body coiled and threw him upright again through sheer reflex. He opened his beak in time to look back and see a winged giant tear the wagon in two, iron and bone splintering. A thrall was thrown limply over the monster’s shoulder, discarded with a howl, before its bladed wings lashed out and beat down hard.

The wave of pressure cast out sand and pieces of sharp debris. Ay raised a hand and closed his beak to guard against it, then opened it again to see the scavenger arc high into the air with bags of their supplies, their water, all that was in the back of the wagon quickly and easily snatched away.

A scream turned into a wail. Ay turned to see Bee pull herself out from under a wreck of the broken carriage, covered in smears of red and black, the abrasive sand sticking to her skin. He picked up his lance and looked after the monster, which fell into a wide turn in the sky, a hundred feet above and ahead.

“It took them!” Bee panicked, lopping up to Ay and grabbing his arm. “My sisters!”

The Hunter only snarled, keeping an eye on the threat, weapon in hand. The scavenger picked through its findings, discarding several things to fall and hit the ground with distant thumps and plumes of sand.

“Please, please, don’t let it get away!” She begged, trying to pull on his third arm, succeeding only in shaking her fragile and injured body.

“Be quiet,” He snapped at her, two of his hands ready on the lance.

“Please! I can’t lose them too. Please... Please.”

Ay set his posture forward as he decided. Then, he hefted the lance over his shoulder and aimed it. Bee looked up to how he held the weapon, wide-eyed, the moment before his grip tightened.

A crack of thunder and a flash of fire. In the distance, Bee looked over to see the monster tumble and split. One of its wings spun away, and all of it fell quickly towards the ground, where it impacted the sands hard enough to crater a dune and cause a collapse, waves of crystal sliding down beneath it.

The blast from the lance drove all in the air back with a flurry of sharp metal. Ay snarled and shoved the child back. Bee felt her own body hit the ground hard, her breath knocked out.

Ay hissed something, beak snapping open and closed.

Bee rolled onto her side with a groan, managing to bend her legs and crawl behind a shattered piece of the wagon. She almost heard him call out again, the flashing of his weapon still burned in her eyes and through her dazed mind, and she shouted something back but couldn’t quite hear herself speak.

With a trembling grip, Bee peeked out from behind the wreckage. Immediately in front of her, the thrall she had spoken to struggled to her hands and feet. One of her legs was missing, and she tried to prop herself upright, blood gushing from her injury. Her body was limp and numb from shock.

In the distant crater, the monster thrashed and threw itself out. Landing on two hooked legs, it then scored the ground with scythed arms and began to gallop towards them. It tore over the sand with terrifying speed.

As it ran, its back swelled before splitting open. Two bony chambers separated from its shoulders, between its whole wing and the stump of the other. Both cannons visibly surged with luminescent green gore before bursting and firing with ballistic force.

Bee ducked behind the wreckage after seeing a wave of terrible flechette like spines tear the thrall ahead of her into pieces. The projectiles snapped and sparked off of Ay’s armour, and the glowing green fluid that sprayed around them caused flesh, bone and sand alike to bubble and steam.

Daring to look out again, she saw Ay coil into a compact shape before lashing out to tackle and intercept the charging beast. Their collision was as palpable in the ground as in her bones and ears, a resounding smack. Their arms and bodies wrestled, the Hunter coiling around the scavenger.

Looking on helplessly, she watched the Ay struggle to tame each weaponised limb of the beast, trying to bring it to the ground. Then, failing, as the scavenger bucked and shook, Ay’s massive, armoured beak came down towards the neck of the monster, stabbing and tearing, ripping loose flesh and wires, blood emitting from the battle in huge, wet gouts that sprayed high into the air.

Ay strained his entire body, constricting the scavenger with as much force as his serpentine body could muster. Each of his three arms heaved to contain the scythes and bladed wing of the aug mad hound. Again and again, he felt the biocannons on his adversary’s back flex and swell, trying to fire, but held choked by the Hunter’s desperate coiling hold.

They thrashed and turned in the air, slammed against the ground. The scavenger, enraged, lurched this way and that, using its massive strength to try and loosen Ay’s grip, get a hold of him, and cut or gore him.

Something cracked. One of Ay’s armoured plates fractured against his arm, muscles burning as he tried not to let himself come loose. Then, desperate, realising he was physically outmatched, he took his beak to the monster’s neck again. Biting and tearing, ripping at whatever he could, his vision burned and turned red with the blood that filled his mouth.

Yet the scavenger only howled and slammed itself back against the ground, dragging Ay through the crystal sand, against rocks and through sharp wreckage, before suddenly turning and getting an arm loose.

The arm, gleaming with a molecular blade, turned and raked itself along Ay’s body. A flood of pain followed. Then, something became wet and loose, and Ay’s second arm turned from trying to restrain the scythe, now out of his reach, shoving itself into the monster’s jaws and pulling until a mandible cracked and came loose.

Tightening his arm around the scavenger’s head, he opened his beak to find Bee, to tell her to run. But, instead, he saw her with his lance.

She was running towards them on frail legs, screaming.

Summoning up his remaining strength, Ay’s arms scrambled and clutched at the beast’s limbs. Then, in a desperate attempt to hold on, he coiled, straining to present the scavenger’s underbelly to the child below, who lifted the lance and took aim.

Another crack of gunfire and the entire body of the scavenger twisted loose. The splintering and cracking of bone became discernible alongside a punch to Ay’s own gut. Then, for good measure, he drove his beak deep down into the monster’s neck one final time as they both collapsed to the sands together.