The morning passed quietly. Mazelton ate a hearty breakfast, made a point of neatly packing everything, and started moving down the trail. The seemingly endless ribbon of animal dung and occasional corpses lead him directly to the caravan, no need to worry about getting lost. Were there more bodies than usual? Hard to say, hard to say. Rations were running low, very low, for some. No money left to resupply in Cold Garden, and bonds of community and loyalty weakened as hunger grew stronger. Were they Confed… no, were they from the Collective? Or Dusties? Probably Dusties or independents, if he was honest with himself. The Collective had a lot of faults, but letting their people starve wasn’t one of them.

Well. Sometimes they did. Greater good and all that. But not in a situation like this. There would be a single quartermaster feeding the whole group. He had often thought of finding a way to poison their food supply, but never could figure out anything practical. The Collective weren’t dumb. Those wagons were always under heavy guard.

It was another nice day. A little cloudy, and that breeze was definitely on the cool side of pleasant. But nice. The young wood was a wild mess, with dense undergrowth and spiny thickets weaving between trees too small to shade them out. It was an absolute riot of small animals and birds nipping in and out of cover, dodging the dappled sunlight that drifted across the forest floor. Hunting, and being hunted. Sometimes it was hard to say which was which.

Mazelton quietly walked Bastard the Cheve, wanting to conserve his strength, and concentrating on his hearing. A little after lunch, he thought he was just about able to hear the rumbling of wooden wheels over dirt and stone. Just faintly. Maybe his imagination. He rode another quarter hour, and was sure. He had caught the back of the wagons. Mazelton directly dismounted, hobbled the cheve, and had a snack. He didn’t need to catch up with them during the day. No rush, no rush. Every day, every hour, that passed peacefully was to his advantage.

When night fell, he made his pack, and set off on foot. He didn’t know if the Collective had set pickets to watch for him. But it would be dumb to think they weren't’ watching their back. Not after everything. So he went on foot and tried to move in cover as best he could. There was a trick to moving silently and invisibly in the woods. A trick no one had ever taught him. But he knew how to vanish into the shadows of a city, and that more or less translated. Moving silently was much, much harder, but he wasn’t too noisy, at least.

He slipped along the edges of the trail, drifting from shadow to shadow. He hadn’t had much practice, over the long journey west. But some things are learned in the bones. So long as the teachers hammer them in hard enough.

The Outer Courtyard trainers had everything, except light hands. They had no end of long whips. And sweet candies. Mazelton could practically taste those candies now, all boiled up beet sugar and a hint of spice. He got his first candy for clearing the obstacle course without any faults on the first try. It was amazing. He could taste the trickle of the sugar carrying the warmth of the spice down his throat, ten years later. He could feel the lashes from the whips still warming his back too. But those little candies, and the shouted approval from the trainers made it all worth it. Like he was good at something. Like he mattered.

“We aren’t setting you up to fail, Mazelton. We want you to be good at this. When you screw up, you will be punished at once. No waiting, no fear, instant correction. Rewards you have to wait for. But it’s so worth it, right?”

“Right!”

He was so damn naïve. But they were right. He learned well. And truthfully, he liked being a Hurricane Lily. He was doing something he was good at. He could practice the art he loved. And if his parents despised him, and the core of the Clan looked down on him, well. That stung. A lot. It was pretty lonely, actually.

He didn’t want to be lonely any more. And whatever shred of restraint might have lingered in Mazelton’s mind blew away with that thought.

He could see the fires ahead. The little clusters of wagons, friends gathering to share what little food they still had, and maybe some songs afterward. Singing together was a great thing, it felt good, and it got better every time you practiced it.

Little clusters of wagons. Not the tightly knit wagon forts. The Collective had shifted their spot in the column. They weren’t at the end of the line any more. It looked like the independents. Well. Fuck.

Mazelton circled the perimeter of the camp. The Collective set guards over their wagon forts, but generally didn’t set pickets outside of the barricades. From the day they set out from Sky’s Echo, they had feared internal enemies more than external threats. But they had already changed one pattern.

It took ages. The number of detours he had to make to avoid people relieving themselves in the woods drove him slightly mad. He wound up falling back even further from the wagons, making an even wider loop. Of course, that ate up even more time, and meant struggling through ever denser thickets, all while trying to remain silent and find the wagon forts.

His shirt snagged on a thorny bramble, and he bit back a swear. Mazelton stopped at once, finding a shadow to sit in. He steadied his breathing, and tried to meditate lightly. Just enough to bring his emotions under control. Anger was a symptom. Anger is a secondary emotion. What drove his anger? Fear. Anxiety and frustration. But he was being careful, and taking steps to relieve his anxiety. One step at a time. It was going to be fine. He just had to stay calm and do the job. He opened his eyes, and started moving again. All the time in the world, so long as he stayed focused on the job. Nothing to it.

At long last, he found the dense clusters of the wagon forts. They hadn’t set pickets at the camp’s edge, but they did set watches with bright light cores sweeping the ground around their part of the camp. That would keep the neighbors up, Mazelton reckoned. Not that the Collective gave a damn. The wagon forts were tightly knit, each circle forming part of a bigger circle along the river’s edge. Did something else happen while he was away? This seemed excessive, even for them. But the rest of the caravan looked calm enough.

He was avoiding the problem. He knew he was. But that’s not how anything worked. Not if you planned to live long enough to breed.

He couldn’t control the horror. Not really. He just pumped power into it and turned it loose, trusting it to attack the biggest, closest, group of people. It wouldn’t attack those near its jar, and it would come back when it ran low on power. But that was as far as he could manage it. Presumably the Bo knew how to use it safely, but they hadn’t seen the need to write detailed instructions on the jar. As for identifying targets… forget it.

It would have been fine if the Collective were still at the end of the caravan. Just sneak into the next section, unleash the horror close to the Collective and fall back. He would be the barricade keeping the Horror from the rest of the caravan. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Now, he had to make a choice.

The Nimu Caravan was still at the front, but not… all that far forward. The Dusties, his notional future neighbors and definite co-religionists, were barely twenty meters from the Collective’s wagons. The independents, at the end of the convoy, were about the same distance away. So. Where to release the horror?

Between the Dusties and the Collective? That should protect Duane and Policlitus, so that would be a good choice. But it also put Lettie in the line of fire. Was she back yet? She must have been, she was moving way faster than he did, and she didn’t have a little “bullet hole repair” time out. Yeah, he couldn’t see her, but it would be insane to think that she wasn’t back yet. Now. Lettie could presumably look after herself a lot better than the rabble she traveled with, but… she did lack that certain resolve. She claimed she cared about people. Would she run, or try to defend them? He didn’t know. He would break some rando’s leg and let the horror kill them first, but then, he was raised right.

Duane had become like a silent brother to him. He looked after him when he was sick, when his mind couldn’t carry the weight of the world any more. They fought side by side, and rode side by side, across half a continent. And when you got right down to it, Polyclitus had been more than a boss to him too.

Lettie… was the first peer he could talk to without playing the game. The first honest conversations, or as honest as Mazelton was capable of. She was funny, and weird and got him on a level that he would have once found scary. And they had been through some shit together too. But it was the long talks with her. Poking at the strange world they both lived in, but understood so differently.

So. He looked out over the lights sweeping the campground, and the people grumbling as they tucked themselves into their tents and under their wagons. Who did he trust his back to? Or more to the point, who was he willing to stake his life for, if the jar didn’t work as advertised? Whose life would he risk?

Mazelton went back and forth, locked in the loop of only bad choices. He couldn’t let the Collective go. He couldn’t risk it. He could smell the fires burning, hear the knives rubbing. The flashing lights and shadows were no different than in the tunnels. He was still in the tunnels under Old Radler. Still in the tunnels, running from the Collective. The Confeds. Them. He was still running from them. He fought for his breath, slowing his heart. The objective. What was the objective. He was on the job, and a job has an objective.

Kill the Confeds. Collective. Kill the Collective.

Why?

Safety.

Who’s?

Mine. And Danae’s. New family. New home.

Family means people. Community. So…

Lettie would have to be big enough and ugly enough to look out for herself.

Mazelton slowed his breath further and further. Deep breaths, until his body was forced to relax, then hyperventilate to force oxygen into his blood powerfully. He marked his route from the edge of the forest to the border of the Dusties and the Collective. He got on his belly, and started to crawl. It took an agonizing amount of time. It was just plain agony. His ribs were on fire. It was exhausting to try and move a tiny fraction of an inch above the ground, slowly, freezing any time he thought movement might give him away. Trying to time his movements with the flickering wind. To move with the grass and shrubs. It hurt. It was the job.

He skirted the fires and the rare core lights. They were luxuries, and most of the Dusties were poor. The Collective probably used all they had to check for infiltrators. But that was fine. Brighter lights in some places meant darker shadows in others. He just had to move slow and low. Break up his silhouette whenever he could. Make sure nothing was shiny. It just took time.

The woman he was creeping past frowned and stopped snoring. Mazelton stopped breathing. Ten seconds later she ripped an almighty fart, rolled over, and started gently snoring again. Mazelton crept a bit further on before he gambled on another breath. On to the next wagon. Not long now.

Mazelton lay under the wagon closest to the Collective, carefully lying down behind the couple already asleep under their wagon. Even if the Collective shined a light straight at them, they weren't going to see anything. Nothing to see, right? Just us… settlers…

Oh Father Sun strike those blasted stupid, corpse fucking Bo and all their half witted inventions. Did those brainless wonders remember to teach the horror to kill only humans, or just all life above a certain size? Was this thing going to waste its charge, and the element of surprise, slaughtering aurochs? Because wouldn’t that be the fucking cherry on top of a very, very trying week.

In fact, it would neatly cap a very bad year.

But there was fuck all he could do about it now. He closed his eyes and started to run heat into the jar. He was basically out of his own cores, at the moment, but he remembered the last time he deployed the horror. That time, he used a core in his hand as the catalyst. And strictly speaking, he did still have a core in his hands. Mazelton gently poured in the heat, then started drawing heat from the cores of the people around him. It was small, thin stuff. Nowhere near as good as a mature tree. But many a little makes a mickle, and the charge built and built in the jar. He could feel the horror stirring. But he kept feeding it, so it kept waiting. He fed it twice what he did last time, topped off the cores in his hands, and gently rolled the jar out towards the Collective. Not far, maybe a yard or two, but… every little bit helped. He hoped.

Mazleton lay flat, keeping an eye on the horror with his heat perception. Once again, the jar slowly opened on its own. Tentacles poured out, some central mass flowing behind them, as it oriented itself. Mazelton couldn’t breathe as it stayed put for a horribly long moment. He genuinely didn’t know which way it would go.

One tentacle stretched out, then another. Then another, and the horror was off, racing for the Confed campsite. Collective. The Enemy. It went for them, scurrying, barely an inch off the ground, and not more than a foot high at its peak. They couldn’t see it. It ran right past the pickets and went for the closest body it could find. Then the next. Then the next. Mazelton could barely sense what it was doing on the farthest edge of the wagon forts, but beyond that, he was blind. So he just stayed put. And prayed.

He didn’t know how long he lay there. He knew time tended to get sticky when you were waiting for an explosion. But there was nothing more to be done. He remembered the first time he poisoned someone. It wasn’t his first kill, but killing had always been an active process. Get in there with a knife of a spear or something and kill the fucker. Not sitting at a bar and watching them drink, and waiting. Wondering if it worked. If anyone saw you. Just patiently looking like you weren’t looking, until they dropped.

He didn’t know how long he lay there. It felt like a long time. He nearly spasmed off the ground when the rifles started cracking and a sharp whistle blew. The people next to him did spasm off the ground, looking around and wondering what the hell the riot was about. Mazelton had long since rolled away, back from the firing line. The Collective were not reacting calmly.

TOOWEEEE! TOOWEEEE! TOOWEEEE! The whistles screamed with shrieking urgency, with bullets cracking wildly through the wagons around the camp. Someone was shouting in the Collective’s fort, but there were more screams every moment, and now the screaming was coming from inside the rest of the caravan. Nobody was in the mood for fire discipline. Mazelton didn’t know what great mind decided to start shooting back, but someone did. Someone from the Dusty side. And the Collective knew just what to do about that.

Gun ports opened in the high sides of the wagons. Long barrels poked out, then with a horrible BRAPPATAPTAPAP, bullets started ripping through the Dusty wagon circles. Screams. Screams everywhere. Lanterns fell and fires started. Aurochs were screaming from somewhere. Then flaming torches splashed against the sides of the Collective’s wagons- glass bottles filled with some kind of accelerant and pine tar, clinging to the wood and burning madly. First one or two, but quickly dozens flew across. Someone, a lot of someone’s, had seen this coming.

The sheer weight of fire was brutal, the machine guns sawing through any large clump of people their gunners could get eyes on. People figured out the rules really quickly- get low, get behind some dirt or rocks, or get dead. But the horror was cutting its way through their back line, the Collective was turning more of its attention inward, and the fire had caught on their wagons. One of the guns went out of commission. There was a gap in the fire net.

And the Dusties weren’t afraid of a good death.

It was a woman, from what Mazleton could see. She had some kind of pack on her back and a heavy shield in front of her. She got her head down and charged into the gap in the fire net, letting the heavy rounds from desperate settlers bash into her shield. It was enough to get her to the out of commission wagon. She dove under it, the flames bringing her briefly into sharp profile. Her pack hung up on the undercarriage for a moment. Then the whole thing exploded.

Shrapnel tore, snarling, through the grass and emigrants, scything them down equally. Fragments of the wagon rose into the air and collapsed, spreading fire and fear as they fell. The woman wasn’t done killing though. Where she fell, brown smoke poured out. Where it touched people, blisters rose. People choked on the gas, unable to scream as their eyes burned out alongside their lungs. Another wagon went down. And another martyr went in.

Mazelton crept forward, keeping to the shadows, trying to keep someone or something between him and a stray bullet that would kill him as dead as a carefully aimed one. He needed to get the jar back. What the hell had he been thinking? But smart people didn’t stand between two sets of shooters, one of whom had machine guns.

The Collective were bringing machine guns to the disputed territory. And someone, someone he didn’t even spot in the caravan, over months on the trail, had made sure that death warriors were mixed in with the Dusty emigrants. Where had they learned to make chemical weapons?

He got a long stick with a bit of a curve to it. He stuck it out and tried to rake the jar a bit closer to himself. Another explosion went off, knocking him ass over ears and tumbling away again. His vision was blurry, and his head was ringing. He gave up on the jar, and tried to scamper for the tree line.

He wasn’t too clear on what happened in the next few minutes. He was back in the tunnels under Old Radler. There was a lot of traffic. But this time, they could see him. This time, they came right for him.

Mazelton wasn’t a very good Ma. He liked to dance, and sculpt, and draw, and flirt. But he was a Ma. And he had been killing people since he hit puberty. His head cleared as the first body slipped off his knife.

He caught the body under the arms and shoved it back into another person, presumably from the Collective given the rifle, then went down and to the side. Came up in a blind spot, the knife slamming into kidneys once, twice, three times before he moved to the person’s back and the knife came over and down into their neck. His knife got slippery from the blood, but he jammed it back in the sheath anyway. Mazelton grabbed their rifle, fired off the clip as fast as he could work the bolt, then dropped it and ran deeper into the woods. Return fire ripped through the place he had been standing a second before. He got on the ground and kept crawling. The bullets tearing through the underbrush reminded him of that eternal truth- Concealment Is Not Cover.

Mazelton kept circling the wagons. Whatever plan there was, was gone now. It was full on civil war inside the caravan. People were clubbing each other to death in the woods, knives flashing, guns barking. Nobody could see shit, light coming from cores but even more so, from burning wagons. Anybody could be anybody, so if you didn’t know them on sight- kill. Mazelton was an ambush predator. When someone came too close, they died. He put his hands in someone's brain. It didn’t matter who brained them. As long as he was alive, and moving.

Something, someone, started a sharp series of whistles. Loud enough to be heard over the riot of the guns. A block of people burst out of the Collective’s burning wagon forts, armed, moving in a disciplined stack, covered by rifles and machine guns as they made for the wood line. They were going to swing around and try to take whoever was doing this from behind. Mazelton could tell.

It was a desperate move, and met with the scattered fire from the Dusties. More terrifying was the launched incendiaries. Some bright soul had figured out you could launch them from a sling and not put out the burning cloth in the process. One hit the group dead center, two more landed close, on the ground. One veteran went up like a torch, screaming and rolling, trying to put out the fire. Four more had their boots and pants catch fire, spreading fear and chaos, and the smell of roasting meat.

One hero kept it together. Roaring out orders as he fell back into the wood line, his rifle firing disciplined shots into the Dusty lines. Fell back right into Mazelton, who smiled for the first time all day.

He was going to eat Mendiluze’s heart after all.