Mac was flying through the city streets, living up to the name Macaw. She was heading towards the shooting and using the rooftops of Footfall’s broken fortifications to avoid the conflict below. The thought of seeing Krav alive again forced her ever onward.

  She could see the glowing beams of laser as it torched the ruins of Footfall. It was like shooting a condensed flame, but it didn’t just scorch. This weapon melted, disappearing most matter in its path. Lines of glass were drawn in the sand, buildings were scarred black and half melted. The bodies were reduced to ash. But there was something else she could here.

  The buck and shout of another new weapon. Had the contact given them a whole new arsenal? It was hard to tell, but from her position this high up, it almost looked like they were dueling with each other. Large bullets flashed out of the city and into the sands. The beam lit up the edge of town. Did Krav have one of them? Was it another ally?

  Below her, she saw a flash of grey. It looked like a shaggy creature had emerged from the sands and dove into the building she was standing on. The creatures from the jungle were here as well. That didn’t bode well for her. If they were here, they probably wanted revenge on the clan. She was still in her clothes from Mallum Vid, but to the untrained eye, her extravagant outfit looked similar to the colorful garb the Gordo were known for.

  “Fuck…” she mumbled. If she could get down there and meet the creature, perhaps she could form an understanding. They might even help in her plan. She looked out at the beam and machinegun as they fired at each other. They would have to wait for her.

  Mac had to climb down into the building through a collapsed staircase. One foot after another, she guided herself by the crumbled steps that still jutted from the walls. She looked like a rock climber without any rigging, and looking down, she wished she had some. Four stories didn’t seem like much until you were staring at the bottom.

  Slowly she descended, carefully. The heavy satchel hanging off her shoulder felt like an anchor, but she couldn’t afford to lose a single item from it. Each pass of her hands on the wall made her sink and slip, but she clung for dear life. She had to survive so that Krav could.

  As she reached the second floor, Mac was surprised to hear groans of pain. This high up, there was probably a pipe rifleman taking up a sniper position or a deserter who had found a good spot to hide and get high. There shouldn’t be anyone injured.

  “Hello?” she called. The green haze of the twin suns burned its way into the building, but it was still hard to see. Shadows cast by collapsed walls and rotting furniture made it look abandoned. Mac did a quick pass over the second floor and began her descent again once it was clear no one was there.

  “Please…” a voice called. “Please help me.”

  “Hello?” she called again. “Who’s there?”

  “Rico the…” he coughed and groaned again. “Just Rico. Is that you, Macaw?”

  Another Gordo clansman. She knew him once. Rico carried a blinker and often bullied her for her drugs, but he was just a kid. Barely fourteen, if she remembered right. If Jackmaw knew he was up here licking his wounds, he’d execute on him on the spot.

  She had cooked up the demise of the Gordo clan, but letting the youth die didn’t sit right with her. Kids like Rico and the Tallyman still had time to be redeemed. It was why she didn’t create a poison when she loaded up the flares.

  There was medicine in her bag, perhaps she could spare a moment to ensure the future. A future where the youth of the Gordo clan were taught to aid one another. They might even spread that kindness out into the wasteland.

  “Where are you?” she called. The landing for the second floor was mostly intact, but she still had to get to it. A few feet away felt like a mile, but she shimmied for it all the same.

  Rico fired a burst of bullets up in the air and it lit up the room. Mac could see where he was by the smoke coming off of his gun and the holes in the ceiling. It seemed like an easy spot to reach behind a burnt-up desk, but there was something else in here. She could have sworn she saw the grey-haired creature in the muzzle flash.

  She had to hurry if she wanted to reach him before the creature did. Since she had been back, the clan hadn’t offered her a new weapon. All Mac had to defend herself against the beast was her training in hand-to-hand combat, but she had learned from the best. Jackmaw Yapyap might be a flea-brained tyrant, but he could throw a damn punch. With her own spin on his technique, she could take this beast.

  Mac met the landing with a thud as she leapt from the wall. Quickly, she ran towards Rico. Something large passed by one of the windows, and she knew it was also running for him. She would have to be quicker. With a dancer’s grace, she vaulted over the broken furniture, slid beneath half caved in walls, and got to Rico before the creature could.

  “Watch my back,” she said. Her fingers fished out a small woven sack filled with white powder. Rico had a gash on his thigh. It was a miracle he didn’t bleed out. Mac packed his wound with the powder and he winced.

  “Fuck!” Rico cried out. “Oh heavens and hells, can’t you give me an injection to ease the pain first?”

  Normally she would, but there was no time. Rico hadn’t seen the thing coming. With his leg full of coagulant, the bleeding would stop soon, but he needed to be sewn up. She would have to deal with the creature first.

  “You’re making me woozy,” Rico said, then before she could answer, a spear rammed into his chest. Blood splashed Mac’s face and left her stunned. A look of shock became the boy’s death mask, and a gurgling rattle escaped his throat. A pair of human hands gripped the spear and pulled it out of Rico, but when Mac looked up, all she saw was the strange creature.

  It twirled the spear and whipped a thick sheet of blood from the blade. An ugly red face stared at Mac beneath the grey fur for a moment, then the Disciple removed her headdress. She was surprised to find a human underneath.

  “You!” Nala said. “You’re the one from the jungle! You were with Shi-Toh! You killed my flock!”

  “Wait! Wait! Wait!” Mac begged, but the spear was already swinging toward her. She defended herself by kicking the shaft of the spear before it could make contact.

  Nala spun her weapon and stabbed it towards Mac. Again, the Gordo alchemist deflected it with a kick. The spear snapped out of Nala’s hand, but she quickly pulled a knife from her belt and continued to fight on.

  Mac didn’t want this fight. She needed to get to the front lines and deploy the flares. The shock of losing Rico dulled her nerves and forced her to fight on, but she knew this was a waste of time. There was no point in trying to kill the jungle woman.

  “We’re on the same side!” she tried. The knife came flying towards her in a backhand strike. Mac caught Nala by the wrist, and by reflex, sent a jab at Nala’s face. It popped the Disciple in the nose with a wet crack. Nala stumbled and held her nose as blood poured from it. “Sorry!”

  There was a war cry from the Disciple, and she charged Mac like a knife wielding maniac. The blade was high above her head and ready to bite down. If Mac wanted to spare the girl’s life, she would have to get creative. She could wear her out slowly, draining her with controlled attacks while she let out her rage. Or… she could just dose her.

  Mac drew a needle from her bag, then the two were locked in a close-range fight. The knife came down and swished past Mac’s face. Mac stabbed with the needle and Nala leapt out of the way. One more attempt, and the two caught each other by the wrist. They were holding each other back from dealing the decisive blow.

  Nala was built for war in a way Mac never was. Even though the Disciples lived a peaceful life in the jungles of Paradise, they were bred to combat the wildlife. A lifetime of climbing through the trees and hunting creatures three times their size made them warriors of unmatched strength and agility. She was more than a match for the Gordo clan girl.

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  As hard as Mac tried to force the syringe into Nala, her arm didn’t move an inch. The grip on her wrist held her tighter than any shackle she had come across. The knife, on the other hand, was inching towards her shoulder as she failed to hold it back.

  “Please!” Mac tried. “Just wait!”

  “Gordo clan scum! I shouldn’t have run away! I should have killed you!” Nala shouted back. There were tears in her eyes, and her anguish seemed to increase her terrible strength.

  The muscles in Mac’s shoulder felt like they were ready to snap. They bunched and clustered uselessly as they tried to repel the attack. She could feel the serrated bone as it shook and stammered against the exposed skin around her neck. It drew white lines in her flesh and coaxed out thin drops of blood as it tried to dig into her.

  One final burst of strength, and Mac lifted Nala away. The blade drew back until its tip was nearing her eye. She tried one last time to reason with her. “Please! I’m on your side! Krav’s my best friend! I…”

  Nala dropped the knife. It fell and stabbed into Mac’s shoulder with a flaring pain. She screamed as she threw the Disciple aside. Mac was reaching for the knife, trying to pull it out, when she saw Nala already pressing her advantage. If she focused too much on the knife, this girl could follow up with something worse. She left it in and tried her best to fight on.

  Luckily for Mac, the martial prowess of the Disciples was similar to her own style. Most fighters in the wasteland were the brawling sort like Jackmaw and Ulrich. They focused on heavy blows and wrestling their opponents. A mentality of victory through strength. Mac used her agility and grace to combine kicks and punches to wear out her opponents, and it seemed Nala was similar in that regard.

  Mac read Nala’s movements like she was sparring with a mirror. She could dodge her quick kicks and block the punches with her good arm, but every movement that twisted the knife in her shoulder was more agony than she could bare. She had to finish the fight soon.

  Another sweeping kick to the torso, and Mac took her chance. The odds weren’t in her favor, and it would be very unpleasant, but she leaned into the kick. Nala’s shin collided with Mac’s ribs, and she felt her organs shift from the power behind it. Mac wrapped her wounded arm around Nala’s calf and pulled her down to the floor. The Disciple struggled, but before she could counterattack, Mac jabbed her in the thigh with the syringe and pressed the plunger.

  A warm liquid filled her leg, and then Nala couldn’t feel anything below the injection site. Mac let her go and stumbled before collapsing onto the floor near to her, out of breath. Nala tried to crawl to her and finish the job, but the numbness was spreading.

  “What the hell was that? What did you dose me with, you junkie bitch!”

  Mac was fanning her fingers over the bone knife jutting from her clavicle. Her chest rose and fell with anxiety as she worked up the courage to pull it out. If she had saved the injection to use on herself, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but she was forced to use it all to stop the fight.

  “It’s just a pain killer, you’ll be alright. In large doses it can cause muscle failure. It’ll wear off in a couple of hours. I suggest you take a nap until this all blows over.”

  “No!” Nala cried. The numbness had consumed one leg and moved into her pelvis now. She could feel the beginnings of the muscle failure in her other leg. “I need to fight! I need to kill you!”

  Mac looked at her manic face full of rage. She wondered if that was how Krav saw her when they first met. She had been dosed then, snorting a pinch of zerker before the raid had ever even begun. Sure, Krav knocked her out then, but he didn’t kill her when he had every right to. This girl had so much hatred for her, for the Gordo clan. Maybe this was mercy.

  “The Gordo clan won’t exist after today,” Mac said. She offered her a pale smile as the pain in her shoulder grew. “Krav’s going to kill Jackmaw Yapyap. You can count on that.”

  “I don’t want to count on anything! I need to keep going! I need to…” Nala’s second leg went dead, and now she could only pull herself along the floor with her arms. She scraped her elbows on the splintered floor and clawed her way forward. Mac had to give it to her, she was persistent.

  “You’re out of the fight. You can thank me for not killing you.” She was wasting time again, she thought. If she kept talking, she’d never pull the knife out, never get to Krav. The girl was still coming for her, but Mac knew it was impossible to reach her before the drug took effect. Already by the waxy look on her face, it had reached her heart. Once it took to her head, she’d be out for the rest of the battle.

  Mac ignored the girl now. She placed the strap of her satchel into her mouth and chewed like she was trying to bite through it. One shaky hand gripped the blade’s grip, and even that small touch sent fire down her nerves. Her free hand clawed at the floor to find anything to hold onto for dear life. With a few preparatory breaths, she pulled hard on the knife. It wrenched out of her clavicle like uprooting a weed. A pulpy crack could be heard from within her ear, and it rang with the pain.

  She didn’t realize it, but she was sobbing into the satchel strap.

  When she finally forced herself up, Nala was asleep on the floor. It was hard not to admire the girl’s had tenacity. The Disciple had dragged herself all the way across the floor, laying less than a foot away from Mac. Any longer and she might have been able to throttle her before she could have extracted the knife.

  Mac bound her bleeding wound and held her ribs as she left the building. She stopped to close Rico’s eyes before offering him a prayer. “I’m sorry.”

  The thought of the jungle women terrified Mac. There was an oppositional force that didn’t consider her a friend. It was just like those idiots to not mention her. If she could regroup with any of her friends, her allegiances might be more obvious, but there was no time. The mask would make a good disguise to blend in with them since its hair covered most of her garb, but then she would have to dodge gunfire from her own clan. There were too many enemies, she thought.

  There was no way for her to even continue her journey. The route she took across the rooftops would be too dangerous with her injuries. She was so close now, she couldn’t give up. Outside, however, she saw the carapace that Nala had used to sneak into the town.

  That was the perfect plan. The Disciples would ignore it, and the Gordo clan firepower couldn’t pierce it. She winced as she crawled underneath, then she was off.

  The battlefield was warm. It burned hotter than any raid Mac had been on. The twin suns scorched the air of Footfall with their infernal heat, but it was the gunfire, the death, that really burned the earth. Mac was crawling along through corpses and spent shell casings with a sheet of sweat coating her skin and sticking her clothes to her flesh.

  There was a sickly-sweet smell of carrion seeping into the sand and erupting under the carapace. It clung to the back of Mac’s sinuses and she tried to swallow it down. It was strange, she’d never noticed that bodies smelled like that. She had been around countless hundreds in her time with Jackmaw Yapyap and the Gordo clan, but the horror of it all was finally dawning on her.

  Just one more fight. Just get to the frontline.

  Little did she know from her position on the floor that she had made it. The fighting had spread throughout the town and turned into a full-blown urban firefight as the Gordo clan retreated into the buildings and faced the spears in close quarters.

  A few stragglers remained. Mac ran into one by chance. She was crawling along when her carapace bumped into something. A blinker sprayed into the top of her shield, and Mac covered her head as she waited for the bullets to pierce it. None did. When she heard the magazine fall to the floor, she popped out of the shell and stood up to reveal herself.

  “Wait! It’s me!”

  She froze when she saw her clansman. Blood covered him entirely. One eye was swollen shut, and his face was sliced open beneath it. The flap of skin hung down by his mouth and exposed his broken teeth. There was a hole in his chest where a spear had gone in and been removed. Something had taken his arm off, and he looked like the fight had sobered him up to the brink of death.

  “Oh man…” she said. She prayed he wouldn’t ask for help. There was nothing she could do for him in that state. By karma, be it good or bad, her clansman blinked once with his good eye, then turned and wandered off into the desert. She never saw him again, but the interaction was a grim reminder of the horrors of war.

  She knew where she was now. Many of the buildings she was surrounded by looked like they had been hit by that laser beam. It was time to pull out the big guns. A block or two away, she could hear the bucking of the machinegun. She climbed the closest building that wasn’t collapsing and got onto the roof.

  Three stories up, she could see most of the town from here. It would have to do. From her satchel, Mac screwed together an old-world mortar. The Tallyman and his scouts used them to cast signal flares full of smoke up in the air to communicate with the clan from miles away. She had stolen this one from them.

  It went together with ease. The hardest part was aiming it, but the concoction she had created didn’t necessarily require accuracy. So long as it landed in the general area, her plan would work, and there was enough here to cover the entire town in it.

  As she loaded the first flare, a pang hit her chest. There was no telling what the consequences of this action might be. Her brief interactions with the injured members of her clan had done something to her. They reminded her that they might be monsters, but they were still human. Was this really worth it?

  Then she reminded herself who this was really for. She rephrased the question. Was Krav’s life worth the lives of the Gordo clan?

  Yes, it was. His life was worth a hundred of her clan’s and then some. She lined up the first flare and dropped it in. There was a powerful boom as the mortar fired it into the air, and she watched it sail towards the frontline. It didn’t fully make it, bursting in the air about a block away.

  Green smoke plumed outward and drifted down like a falling cloud. As it seeped into the buildings and burned through its concrete, she could hear the first of its victims breathe it in. Animalistic screams and guttural roars tore out from the cloud and froze the blood of everyone on the battlefield.

  “Oops… one more time,” she said as she made her adjustments. She aimed another and fired, increasing the timer on the flare this time. Already, she could hear more of the results of her concoction as an unceasing shout of gunfire could be heard from the first cloud.

  If she was being honest, she would have loved to try it on herself. Perhaps in another life, where it wasn’t so necessary, she might like to have a hit of it with Krav. For now, however, he would have to enjoy it with Jackmaw Yapyap.

  “Good luck, Krav.” Mac adjusted her aim, zeroed in on the place she heard the gunshots, and prepared to fire again.