Ay sat straight, beak steadily opening and closing, watching the undulating path as they made slow progress between two vast banks of crystal sand where a hillside had long ago been crushed into dust. It had been hours since they started the descent, taking this less accessible route. It was a harder-to-spot passage, but the hunter was adept. In the meantime, he had taken to watching those he had bound in the rigging. Their bodies were slowly twisting and bloating, hair falling out, and weeping sores appearing on their hides — side effects of the tumour.

Ay 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. It was a fair choice, given the sheer concentration of mutagen in wasteland tumour.

Despite his stoic silence, it was what Ay hadn’t said in their conversation that raced through his head. Everyone has urges, he imagined himself explaining to her. It’s not so simple, the idea that everyone can go without eating. Food was needed to grow, develop, and repair. Most importantly, you needed to consume aug seeds to grow them into your flesh without a grafter.

In Bee’s case, he thought about telling the child she was not even fully grown. She must feel hungry all the time. 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. He doubted the vat-mother just wanted a daughter.

Briefly, he considered the vat-mother birthing Bee in order to simply devour her and take the child’s face for herself.

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 just disappeared after all. A fleeting memory of holding Nence in the warm and humid darkness of the Idiocene Flats crossed his mind, a lifetime in the abandoned reaches, where they’d never need to worry about nobles warring over their home.

Besides him, Ay 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 from her 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 girl. 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 the time. After all, he was certain the Vat-Mother of Acetyn and The Pilgrim both sought her genes for themselves. Then again, what could she do? He was to deliver her to their forces himself.

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.

Screaming filled the air.

Hitting the sand hard, Ay tumbled and turned into a swift roll, the hard ground rocking his skeleton and his hardened armour. 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 air 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 in tow — 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, casting up plumes of sand.

“Please! Please, don’t let it get away!” Bee begged, pulling on his third arm, succeeding only in shaking her own fragile and injured body.

“Be quiet,” Ay snapped at her, two of his hands ready on the lance. “They’re already dead.”

“No! Please!” Bee begged as if she hadn’t heard him. “I can’t lose them too, Ay. Please!”

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

A flash of fire and a crack of thunder. The blast from the lance drove all in the air back with a flurry of sharp metal. Bee looked over to see the monster tumble and split. One of its wings spun away, jets of blood arcing outwards, 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.

Ay snarled and shoved the child back. Bee hit the ground hard, her breath knocked out of her flutes. Ay hissed something, beak snapping open and closed. Her ears were screaming, though, and she couldn’t make out exactly what he said.

Bee rolled onto her side with a groan, managing to 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 on the broken bones of the cage, Bee peeked out from behind the wreckage. Immediately before 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 limp from shock.

Then, ahead, 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.

A wave of terrible flechette-like spines tore up the dune. The injured thrall was ripped to pieces, and the wreckage sparked where star metal and bone collided. 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. Bee ducked behind the broken cage again, eyes wide, quaking with fear.

Daring to look out again, Bee saw Ay coil into a compact shape before lashing out to tackle and intercept the charging beast. Their collision was as palpable through the ground as in Bee’s chest and ears, a resounding smack. Their bodies wrestled together, the hunter coiling around the wasteland hound. Looking on helplessly, Bee watched Ay struggle to tame each weaponised limb of the beast, trying to bring it to the ground.

When Ay failed to drag it down, he brought his massive, armoured beak down towards the neck of the monster, stabbing and tearing, ripping loose flesh and wires. The hound bucked, trying to throw Ay from his body. Blood sprayed from the battle in huge, wet gouts that surged 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.

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

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

Yet the hound only howled and slammed itself back against the ground, dragging Ay through the crystal sand, against rocks and through sharp wreckage before suddenly wrenching into a turn and pulling an arm loose.

The arm, gleaming with a molecular blade, turned and raked 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, grabbing 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.

Bee was running towards them on frail legs — screaming — holding his lance high with her remaining hand.

Summoning up his remaining strength, Ay’s arms scrambled and clutched at the beast’s limbs. Then, desperately trying to hold on, he reared his serpent body with all of his might, straining to present the scavenger’s underbelly to the child below, who lifted the lance and took shaky aim, its length propped back against the ground and forward onto her stump of an elbow.

There was another crack of gunfire, and the body of the scavenger twisted loose. Ay felt himself punched in the gut, alongside the splintering of bone from the torso of the hound that he still wrestled with.

One final time, Ay drove his beak deep into the monster’s neck, and they both collapsed to the sand together.