It all started with the horses.

I first saw them as a column of red dust on the horizon. As with anything new and strange, my first reaction was terror. I squatted low on my vantage point, squinting against the glare on my mask’s dirty lenses, as the dark shapes materialized from the grass desert.

It was hard to believe I wasn’t dreaming at first. Dozens of the creatures all tramping out of the crimson cloud in an orderly line, snorting through colorful masks, saddlebags bouncing, dust sticking to flanks slick with sweat.

And the riders, confident and proud, upon the backs of their mighty steeds, whooping and hollering to each other in some arcane tongue. They wore thick fur coats and masks with visors so dark they were almost black, though their heads were wrapped in silk scarves of vibrant reds, purples, blues.

“Where did you come from?” My muffled whisper steamed the bottom of my lenses, and from the safe distance of two stories above I pinched myself.

Yes. It’s always hard to tell when one story ends and another begins, but this one should start with the horses.

I’d seen pictures of the beasts in books, back in the library, when I was a child, but until that fateful day, I’d assumed they were just another casualty of the Bad Times. In the flesh they were more massive, more intimidating, than I could have imagined. It’s easy to shrink things down in your imagination when they are flat on a page.

I watched the column of riders pass my hiding spot, not daring to even move, let alone shout out to them in greeting. All those animals in one place, all that meat. My stomach clamped tightly around three days of nothing. My childlike wonder disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. I’m not proud of this, but my thoughts turned quickly to the question of how long a single person could feed themselves from a single horse.

Quite a while, I calculated.

And so I waited, my mouth growing moist with anticipation, until the Horse People had disappeared into the overgrown maze of ruins that was the city, and their hoofbeats were just a distant rumble. Then, I pulled myself from my hiding spot, checked the filter on my mask, picked out my least bent spear, and began the careful climb down to the trail they’d left in the dirt.

I moved slowly as I tracked their course through the city, sticking to the shadows and the undergrowth wherever possible. The last thing I wanted was to stumble into another Loner, or even a whole Tribe, who’d spotted the Horse People and recognized the same opportunity I had. It was an amount of meat most would kill for.

Obviously, there was no chance of catching up to the Horse People while they were on the move, but the sun was already low, golden light turning crumbling buildings into elongated fangs of shadow. Any sane group of people would stop to make camp soon.

I froze whenever I heard the slightest noise. Always just rubble settling, or debris rustling in the wind, the usual distant bursts of gunfire, or my own stomach’s growl.

In the quieter moments, I pondered. Who were these strangers? What did they want? Where had they come from? Were they racing toward a goal or fleeing from a foe? Where did they get their wonderful horses and their exotic scarves?

At one point, I came across a pack of dogs chewing on horse droppings. Amber veins of magic pulsed beneath their translucent skin, and there were five of them— enough to make a meal of me if I was foolish enough to let them. But, I jealously noticed, their hairless bellies had some fat to them, so they probably weren’t desperate enough to fight for what little sustenance I would have provided.

Their minds were prickly with warning, like an exposed wire humming with a lethal amount of current. {Back. Stay back. Leave. We kill.}

{Easy.} I pushed my soothing intent back at them. {No danger.}

I’m translating for you, of course. Animals, and most people, don’t usually think in words like that. What I really ‘see’ is… well, actually, it’s impossible to describe accurately to someone that doesn’t have the gift. Like trying to explain to a blind man what the color red looks like.

The analogy I like is that minds are like clouds: sometimes they drift loose and carefree; sometimes they are dark, compact, and ominous; sometimes they crackle with lightning and lash out at the world around them. Peering into these clouds, I get brief snatches of memories, thoughts, feelings, but it’s all hazy and vague most of the time. Enough of an impression to get the gist, but a far cry from the precision of the spoken word.

The monster dogs kept their weeping yellow eyes fixed on me, occasionally bearing their too-many-teeth, until they’d polished off their feast, then slunk back into the shadows.

I continued on my way.

Almost an hour later, I crept around the corner of a building and came upon the Horses People’s camp.

I winced. If the horses hadn’t been enough of a giveaway that this Tribe were new to the city, their choice of camp site was.

The light of the day had almost fully retreated, and campfires glowed from between the rusting train cars in the railway yard. To an ignorant traveler, it looked like an excellent spot by all the usual metrics, especially for a group of that size: enough cover that it was hard to spot fires from a distance, vantage points to post sentries, and lots of open ground on the approach to make sneaking up on them difficult.

No one camped in the old railway yard though, because it was on Bridge Street. Bridge Street, obviously, led to one of the big bridges over the river, and that particular bridge led to the fortress of the Sweepers.

The Sweepers weren’t the sort of Tribe you wanted to stumble across you when your guard was down.

Someone stepped up beside me, but I didn’t need to look to know who it was.

“Not now, Mother,” I growled.

“Someone should warn those people. They’re going to get themselves killed.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” I said, still refusing to turn to face her.

“You should warn them, Alan. It would be a Good thing to do.”

I pointed to the silhouettes squatting atop the train cars. Quivers of arrows were unmistakable on their backs. “They’ll probably just shoot me.”

“Why would they want to shoot you?” I could hear the smile in her voice.

“You talk to them, then, if you’re so confident.”

She laughed. “You know I can’t.”

I jumped a little as she touched my shoulder. Which only made her laugh again.

“Don’t stay out too late,” she said.

“Of course.” I shrugged her off, and finally turned to face her, but she was already slinking away into the shadows.

I blew a frustrated breath through my filter. I wasn’t wrong, but she was right: a Good person would try to warn the strangers. But there are two things you have to understand about my Mother. The first is that she generally only appears for long enough to make me feel terrible about myself, before disappearing to… wherever it was she spent her time. The second is that if I listened to everything she suggested, I’d have died a hundred times before that point.

I doubled back on the way I’d come and crept into a building across the street via a back alley. This was familiar turf for me, and I knew which buildings had missing doors, intact staircases, and a low probability of being filled with monsters.

From the second-floor window, concealed by the leaves of the creeping vines that strangled the brickwork, I could get a better look with my binoculars. Most of the people and animals were milling about near the center of the rail yard, around the fires, but they’d posted sentries on all the outer train cars, forming a tight perimeter.

I sighed, thinking it was probably impossible to steal a horse tonight after all. I’ve never been the type to kill people just because they’re in my way, and at that point I’d never actually killed anyone for any reason, though I’d seen a lot of death. But with only one good knife, one bad knife, and three hand-made spears in the way of weapons, it wouldn’t have done me much good if I was the bloodiest ravager that the city had ever known.

So I told my stomach he’d have to wait another night at least, and set up a light camp. Setting up my filter tent would mean taking it down again in a hurry, so I decided against it, but I still hung up some janglers and laid down some crunchies on the staircase, just in case something or someone followed me.

It occurs to me you might not have any idea what I’m talking about. Janglers are cans, jars, things like that, filled with something… jangly. If you hang them across a doorway, most monsters big enough to worry about will walk right into them, which makes a lot of noise, and the result is you hopefully don’t get eaten in your sleep. Crunchies are just little bits of glass, pebbles, thin metal, or anything else that crunches underfoot. They serve the same function as janglers, but most humans are smart enough to not walk into janglers.

My camp secure, I switched the filter on my mask out for a clean one, cleaned the dirty one, checked my canteens, and then unpacked my blanket and settled in for an uncomfortable night.

Since the end of the library, I’d become a feather-light sleeper. It was a mandatory trait out amongst the dirt and the bones and the magic. I’d wake up when the Horse People broke camp, track them again, and hope they made a mistake.

I drifted off quickly but woke with a start. Something was cawing at me from the windowsill. A crow as big as my head and with feathers of dark purple. A protrusion burst from the side of its distended skull— a third eye. The taint of Magic was unmistakable.

{What? What do you want?} I glared at the thing.

I learned quickly, once I was out on my own, that some birds are worth trying to eat and some birds are not. Crows are most certainly not worth trying to eat, no matter how hungry you are. They generally have lots of friends and those friends bear long, bitter, grudges.

It stared at me with two of its three eyes. Its mind was opaque, but smooth and shiny, like a cold black marble.

{What?}

It continued to stare, and I considered revising my stance on crows.

{If you’re just going to stare at me, I’m going back to sl—}

{Death comes.} The crow interrupted me. {Death comes. But from death, opportunity blooms.}

I told you that animals don’t usually think in words. Crows are one of the exceptions.

{Um, all right?} I sent back, thoroughly uneasy now. Perhaps it isn’t obvious to you at this point, but this wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to me regularly. At least, not yet. I stood up slowly, and the bird didn’t fly off as I approached the window.

Outside, all was dark and peaceful. The campfires in the railway yard had long petered out to nothing. No hint of dawn or dusk light.

{What do you know?} I asked the crow.

{Death comes. My kin will feast. You will feast. Though we will feast upon different meats.}

With a chill running down my back, I took a step toward the door. It was one thing when my mother was worrying about the strangers, another entirely when an ominous crow descended from the dark heavens to foretell doom. It might be a risk, but would I ever have the opportunity to consider myself a Good person if I didn’t at least try?

The floor thrummed beneath my feet, and my brief surge of courage fled. Instinctively, I froze, fell into a crouch, and padded back to the window.

{Death comes!} The crow cawed, and finally flapped away into the night.

The thrumming grew in intensity, the unmistakable rumble of an engine, the dull rhythmic thumping of music pounding the air from massive speakers.

The Sweepers were here.

Down in the rail yard, chemlights and lanterns were flickering to life. Tiny silhouettes swarmed to face the oncoming cacophony. The miniature defenders raised their bows and knocked arrows, preparing to face what was coming.

“You poor souls,” I said, and lifted my binoculars to my eyes.

The Sweepers’ truck screeched to a halt at the boundary of the railway yard, and more silhouettes poured from the back, at least sixteen. Muzzle flashes lit the scene as the Sweepers let loose bursts of gunfire into the air. Bowstrings were pulled tight as they swaggered towards the Horse Peoples’ camp.

I don’t know what the two groups said to each other that night. They were far too distant to read their minds. From my distant vantage point all I could really tell was that everyone was quite angry.

What I do know is that the Horse People struck first.

In the midst of an intense bout of shouting, one of the Sweepers shrieked in pain and fell. Before he’d even hit the ground, every one of his friends shouldered their weapons and began emptying them in the general direction of the Horse People.

I’d been shot at before. It’s horrible. The bullets snap at you as they pass, punching against your eardrums, it short circuits something deep in your brain, and every part of you screams to run or hide or both. That was just my experience from a handful of pot shots.

Nothing I’d witnessed before could have compared to the storm of death the Sweepers unleashed upon the Horse People. It was like a storm had erupted from one side of the railway yard, booming with lightning, shredding the other side with a torrential downpour of lead rain.

Even from complete safety, I flinched and cowered, crouching lower behind the foliage that crawled over the windowsill. The defenders were cut down almost instantly, folding over and falling from their perches.

The Sweepers moved in, whooping and cheering loud enough to pierce through the warped lyrics of the music still emanating from their truck. They made their way between the rail cars, and more bursts of gunfire ripped through the night.

“You could have stopped this,” a voice whispered in my ear. “I told you this would happen.”

“That’s not true,” I snapped, and shoved my mother away from me. “I’d be dead too.”

She didn’t say any more, but I could feel her lurking somewhere behind me.

And so I sat and watched the massacre unfold through my red plastic binoculars, the ones I’d had since I was a child, the ones that matched my mask.

It wasn’t long before I’d seen enough. I looked away, and perhaps only because I did, I saw something huge tear out of the far side of the camp and disappear into the night.

A horse. I was sure it was one of the horses.

My empty stomach clenched, drawing attention to the dull empty ache there, and I turned away from the window.

My Mother was blocking my path. I didn’t meet her gaze, instead staring at her shoes.

“Move aside please, Mother,” I mumbled.

“At a time like this, Alan?” She took a step toward me, and I took a step back. “All those poor people, and you’re concerned with food? You used to be such a Good boy.”

“Being Good doesn’t keep Good people alive. And then only the Bad people are left.” I held up my hand so that I wouldn’t have to see her face, circled around her, and then began collecting my gear. “Besides, there’s nothing I can do to help them now. It’s done.”

“You could fight.”

“I would die!” I snapped. “Almost instantly. Is that what you want?”

That silenced her. I finished packing my gear up without saying another word. Outside, the bursts of gunfire were growing less frequent.

When I turned to leave she had disappeared again. For that, I was grateful.

I dismantled my noise traps, crept out into the back alley I’d entered by, and began the long stealthy trek around to the other side of the railway yard, to where I’d seen the horse disappear. I had only a weak crank-operated flashlight to light the ground in front of me. Usually, I wouldn’t have risked wandering about in the dead of night, but the Sweepers’ gunfire and music should have scared off even the most fearsome of monsters away from the area. Except dragons, maybe, or bears, but I wasn’t entirely sure those existed.

After a few minutes of walking, the gunshots seemed to have finally stopped, and only the distant thrum of the music remained. My thoughts grew louder to fill the void.

“Nothing I could have done,” I whispered to the inside of my mask.

But I didn’t need Mother to materialize and call me a liar. I knew.

It took me a good ten minutes to creep around the surrounding streets, but eventually I reached the one I’d seen the horse disappear down. I stopped in an alley to assess what the Sweepers were up to. From ground level it was impossible to see what was going on amongst the rail cars, but their damned truck was still playing their damned music. They were probably stripping the camp and its occupants of anything of value. Likely they’d shot all the horses and were figuring out how to get the obscene amount of meat back to their base.

Guilt was the first emotion to surface as I imagined the scene, then rage, then envy, then disgust, at myself, for envying the murderers. Then guilt, again.

I moved on. It was easy to track the horse through the dirt and dust of the street, even as dark as it was. I had no idea if horses had a good sense of smell, but I reasoned that deer do, and deer are basically small horses, so I’d have to be careful to stay downwind of the thing.

A while after the distant music had faded to whisper, the trail led me to the old hospital. Again, I winced. The horse had as poor taste in hiding spots as its owners.

The hospital had a big rusty iron fence, mostly scavenged by the time I first started roaming that part of the city, and beyond that perimeter, a large car park that was slowly being reclaimed by tall grass, wildflowers, and other plants. The building itself was several stories of solid brickwork, with plenty of windows.

It would be an ideal spot for a Tribe to turn into a fortress, if it weren’t for the ghosts.

I once had to trade with another Loner for medicine. He was a twitchy, shriveled man that always looked through you instead of at you. Twitcher, people called him. Names were rarely subtle amongst the Loners. He told me that he’d once been part of much larger group. When they were new to the area and didn’t know the stories about the hospital, they’d spent the night. He couldn’t explain to me what had happened, but only he survived, and he made me swear to never, ever step foot on the grounds of the hospital before he’d give me my medicine.

I swore I wouldn’t. Mostly because of my horrible cold. But his wasn’t the only warning I’d received about the hospital.

But, as I skirted close to what remained of the fence, I could see the outline of the horse.

The beast was huge. Taller than me at the shoulder and with muscles tight beneath its brown fur coat. It was walking in circles, whipping its head around, stamping its hooves. Its snorts were distorted behind its horse-sized filter mask.

So much meat, and it was right there, only just out of spear throwing range. Surely the car park was fair game, even if the building itself bore some sort of death curse?

I crept in closer, thinking through my options. The horse would probably bolt away as soon as it saw me, and I had no way to hem it in by myself. I’d have to hit it with a spear, then hope the motion of it running away from me let the barbed head tear up its insides.

I got close enough to make my throw. Close enough to feel its fear and panic firsthand as its overwhelmed mind scattered and reformed again and again, like a cloud fireflies chasing each other’s lights.

I readied me spear.

The horse saw me and stopped still.

{Help.} It thought at me. {Help.}

“Sorry about this,” I said, and pulled my arm back to throw.

The horse held its ground, staring at me from behind the lenses of its mask. {Help. Help Girl.}

I froze in place.

“What?”

{Help Girl.} The horse snorted and turned to trot away towards the yawning black cavern that was the entrance to the hospital. It must have once been filled with some big double doors, but they were long gone.

“Just throw, you idiot,” I mumbled to myself. My stomach complained urgently as I stood still, arm back and ready to throw, but I couldn’t find the strength.

Curiosity, and perhaps a little guilt, got the better of my survival instincts, and I followed the horse toward the hospital.

{Don’t go in there,} I told the horse.

{Yes,} the horse agreed. {Don’t go in there.}

It stopped at the base of the three steps that led up to the entrance, then those enormous black disk eyes on me. It was close enough that I could have reached out and grabbed its reins if I wanted. Close enough that it towered over me.

{Girl in there,} it said. {Help Girl.}

‘Girl’ came with a burst of warmth and fear and anxiety all at once. Clearly the horse cared a lot about its Girl.

I sighed, fogging my mask a little, and then shone my flashlight into the blackness of the hospital. I didn’t see anyone in the reception area beyond, but there were some very conspicuous boot prints from small shoes. They took a sharp left turn and disappeared from view down a hallway.

“Hello,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Anyone there?”

No response.

It was very rare that I had to raise my voice, or talk to other people in general, so it took me a moment to work up the courage to shout.

“Hello. Anyone there? I, erm, have your horse. It’s…” I glanced at the horses’ under carriage. “He’s worried about you. Are you all right?”

Again, no response.

The horse looked down at me and snorted.

I frowned at the thing. {Well if you’re so brave, you go get her. Is she hurt?}

{Help,} was all it said.

I scratched the back of my neck and considered if walking into the infamous hospital was any less suicidal than charging a dozen gun wielding psychopaths. I decided it probably was. The danger of the hospital came from stories and rumors. No one needed to spread such things about guns.

Besides, Mother would never forgive me if I ran away from this opportunity to do a little Good.

I took a deep breath, readied my spear, raised my flashlight, and began to slowly ascend the steps.