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They live, enough of them. He leaves, like she expected. The water pours out and Furiosa has enough time to think to herself, we’ll need to learn how to distribute that better, before the little strength in her body trickles back out again.
“Make way, make way!” she hears the Dag shout. Hands hoist Furiosa up as her body hangs slack. She’s never heard the Dag shout before. And when the crowd won’t move, she speaks a language they’ll understand. “She bled for you and your redemption!”
No, that was all of us, she thinks as her eyes go black. I bled out and he bled in and the mothers just bled.
But she couldn’t say it. Her mouth wouldn’t work. And she wouldn’t say it if she could. There are things you shout to the wild crowd. There are things you barely whisper to yourself.
(She dreams of Angharad sleeping with her head in Furiosa's lap. Her long blonde hair is stained red with blood, but her face looks just as Furiosa remembers. "Do you ever wonder," Angharad asks, "if he did see me go under the wheels?"
"I do," Furiosa replies.
"And what do you think?"
"I think we couldn't have gone back either way."
Angharad rolls over onto her side. Furiosa can't see her face any more. "I died in agony. They ripped me open before I went."
Furiosa rests her hand on the curve of Angharad's cold cheek. "I know."
They never touched while Angharad lived. The wives lived like kittens, piled on top of each other, over each other, around each other, entwined in each other. Furiosa lived like that once too. On the other side of the Fury Road. On the other side of seven thousand days.
"What kind of redemption has a body count?" Angharad asks, the pacifist even in death.
Furiosa wakes and tells the quiet air, "The only kind I knew how to find.")
"You think he'll come back?" Toast asks. She sorts the bullets as she talks. New Citadel has made peace with the Bullet Farm and Gas Town. The peace won't last. The wives hated violence, but Toast is no one’s wife anymore, and she’s getting used to the weight of a pistol at her side. “Our boy, I mean.”
"No," Furiosa says. It’s been one hundred fifty days. If he needs water, he would have needed it by now. And she doubts there was anything else that could drag him back here.
Toast tilts her head. She chews a fresh cut piece of bangbang leaf, as the Dag calls it. The Dag names all the plants that grow from her seeds, and she explains none of them. Soon her baby will be born, and Furiosa wonders what name she’ll come up with for that. "That's too bad," Toast says. She slots another bullet into place. "We could use another decent driver."
"We've got plenty of those."
"We've got plenty of drivers. Loads of War Boys that are perfectly good till they get too eager. Loads still thinking Valhalla's waiting them." Toast raises her eyebrows at Furiosa like there was something ridiculous about wanting to die historic. Furiosa never believed Immorten Joe's bullshit. But she likes the idea of Valhalla. She was ready to die for her slice of something better.
“We have what we have.”
“I know,” Toast replies. “That’s why I’m gonna make them last. Make sure no one dies the wrong way, looking for some cheap glory. But I know I shouldn’t take Valhalla from them, as wild as it makes them. A lot of them are probably gonna die fighting. You wanna give them something to look forward to about that.”
“I can’t tell,” Furiosa says. “Are you for or against killing these days?”
Toast’s eyes are bullets, and her gun is a smirk. “Maybe I still wanna be a pacifist,” she says, “but if I am, it’s gonna be ‘cause I chose that. Not because I wasn’t ready for violence when it came.”
I’ll pick you, Furiosa thinks. When the time comes, I’ll give New Citadel to you.
Toast looks at Furiosa like she knows what she’s thinking, and she nods. Furiosa nods back.
“I don’t know if we can swing better lives,” Toast says as she taps her last bullet into her last row. “But I think we can offer them all better deaths.”
It doesn’t exactly sound like hope. But that’s fine. Furiosa’s used up all the hope she ever had, and she isn’t expecting to find anymore. She learned a long time ago that nothing springs eternal.
(She dreams of her mother. Her mother's body. “We don’t answer cruelty with cruelty,” her mother says, and then the men seize her head and beat it against the stone wall until she speaks no more.
She dreams of wrapping her hand around her mother's wrist until the laughing men drag her away by her hair. She dreams of pulling free. She dreams of the ripping sound. She dreams of the heat of blood. She doesn't dream of the pain. She doesn't feel it until later, when they catch her again and beat her until her eyes fuse shut and her mouth dribbles blood. That’s not this dream. Here, she dreams of the moment she learns freedom belongs to whoever can seize it. To whoever can leave something behind.
She leaves half her scalp in her enemy's fist for one last kiss goodbye. You live with the bargains you make.)
"I think he's dead," Capable says. She's nearly ready to give birth herself, the last bit of Immorten Joe left. The Dag birthed her child thirty-five days earlier. A boy. Only one lung. Only half a heart. The Dag rode out with him to the desert, flanked by Toast and her hand-picked favorites. She didn’t want that child planted in her garden. Capable, her belly swollen to bursting even then, had said nothing about the dead boy.
"Who?" Furiosa asks as she detangles her loom.
"Max." Capable looks down at the swell of herself and grimaces. "Or he's far enough away that it doesn't matter whether he's alive or dead."
“Matters to him.” Furiosa runs her fingers down the line of threads pulled taut, almost but not quite cloth. She might manage a blanket by the time the baby is a few weeks old.
Capable asks, "What was your mother's name?"
Furiosa hears a ripping sound. "Why?"
"Max if it's a boy," Capable says. "And if it's a girl, I don't think I could stand to call her Angharad or Splendid. And the Mothers already got claims on their friends’ names, or I’d do something like Valkyrie. Seems like a good name for a girl to have. But Yonica’s naming her babe that, so I need some other dead. You can't name a baby after someone alive."
You couldn't. The world was a complicated enough place without duplicates running around. "You're sure he's dead then," Furiosa says.
Capable thinks for a long while, her hand rubbing her curve. "I hope he’s not, but he's dead enough to us."
Furiosa looks down at her weaving. It isn’t very good. She hasn’t done it since before she was stolen, and she’s spent most of her life not looking too long at that time which shone too bright and tasted too sweet. Her hand has forgotten the special touch. “So is your War Boy.”
“Nux.”
“There’s a name then.”
Capable is quiet. She had witnessed, but she didn't always believe. People who should die manage to live all the time, she once said when the other wives pressed. Why shouldn’t someone worth living do it too? Let me think what I need to think. “I don’t know if this baby is going to survive,” she says at last. “I thought I’d save Nux for a kid who’d stick around. Max seems like more of a fighter.” Capable shrugs a shoulder, her arms wrapped around her belly. “I know it’s stupid. I barely knew him. I barely knew either of them. But they’re the only two men I ever met who were worth anything. If I’ve got to have a son…” Capable shrugs again. She rests her hand beneath her belly button. "It's kicking," she says. "Dag's never kicked."
Furiosa’s hand tightens on the frame of her loom.
“Here.” Capable touches Furiosa on her wrist. “Feel.”
Furiosa feels. Life shifts underneath her palm. “Why my mother?”
“She made you,” Capable says. “That’s a woman worth trying to be.”
On the other side of this membrane of flesh, a not quite person presses its tiny foot against Furiosa’s finger. Furiosa doesn’t say a word.
(She dreams of choices.
She dreams of licking the mold off her prison walls and sucking rocks to keep the hunger at bay. She dreams of how the smell of her own burning flesh only made her hungrier. She dreams of the rope. They tie it around her stomach, distended and swollen from starvation, and when they hoist her like she weighs nothing at all, they cheer. She dreams of the holes in the earth. The tunnels. The dark. She dreams of other voices in the dark, other screaming, squirming children light and small enough to fit through the crevices where the water trickles. They send her down with a pick and a bucket and the darkness. She sends up buckets of rock and clings to cliffs she cannot see. If she does her job right, more water will come. Sometimes, the water comes too quickly when the rocks aren’t cleared, and a child drowns, trapped by the debris and their own rope. Sometimes, someone has to clean them out. And so she dreams of the waterlogged body, forgotten so long in the dark that it falls apart like what it is. Like fistfuls of rotten meat.
She dreams of the long haul back to daylight, of the burning sun that blinds her afresh each time. She dreams of the man’s hands on her hips as he says, “You’re not so little as you once were, girlie. Might be time to find you a different shaft to work on.” She dreams how the other men laugh.
“We don’t answer cruelty with cruelty,” but who knows how death changes a person’s mind? Her mother knew nothing of cruelty. How cruel could the world be where it was fertile with love?
She dreams of how the man screams when she kicks him down the shaft, of the echoing splat of his body hitting rock somewhere in the dark.
You hurt or you are hurt. You kill or you are killed. So she dreams of choices. So she makes them. So she lives with them.)
“Do you ever think about if he hadn’t come back and we’d tried our luck on the salt?” Cheedo says. She sits on the bed cradling Kadee who snores in her arms as Capable snores beside them. They’ve spent the last few hours receiving visitors. The wretched and war pups and milk mothers and whoever put their name into the lottery and won. The War Boys built a plastic wall for them with all the reverence of a holy relic, and the visitors stood on one side and looked. And looked. And cried and looked and cried. They have never seen a sprog so perfect. Furiosa heard it over and over again. They stayed on their side of the plastic and cried because something so beautiful could still exist.
“No,” Furiosa says from her chair, watching the baby. She truly doesn’t think about it. She has enough actual regrets; she doesn’t need hypotheticals on top of them.
Cheedo looks down at Kadee, strokes her finger along Kadee’s cheek. “When the Dag was birthing, that was the one hundred and sixtieth day. I thought about that when he came out all wrong. It felt like a portent.”
Furiosa leans her head back and closes her eyes.
“Sometimes I wish we’d tried,” Cheedo says. “We’ve got a good life here, but it’s hard not to think that maybe there was something better on the other side of the Plains of Silence.”
“I’ll load you up a bike.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Then what did you mean, Furiosa almost but doesn’t ask. She knows what Cheedo means. It’s hard to give up the idea of what’s on the other side of the horizon. Furiosa would say it’s damn near impossible.
“Maybe that’s where we go when we die,” Cheedo says.
“That’s not what Toast’s been telling her boys.”
Cheedo laughs a little. “Toast and the Dag like making up their stories.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t know.”
When Cheedo doesn’t speak for a long, long time, Furiosa raises her head. Cheedo sits with her head bowed, her long black hair falling like a shroud. Kadee disappears behind it. And from behind the shroud, Cheedo speaks. “Toast gives them something to fight for. The Dag gives them something to live for. Capable makes them believe the stories. And I am still scared that I ran away from Joe’s vault in the first place.”
“He’s dead,” Furiosa says. “If that helps.”
Cheedo’s head rises a little, the curtain shifts, her eye looks out. “It does,” she says. “Sometimes. But it’s not as though evil died with him.”
(She dreams of the faceless women. The first brides. Or not brides, not even. The soft women. The beautiful women.
She dreams of how they walked. She dreams of how they walked faster when she was done with them. She dreams of how she marched them into their vaults, their prisons, their beds. A defective woman to guard the perfect ones. No risk of unauthorized breeding. She’d been one of the Many Mothers, and now she sent children to a grown man’s bed with a gun at their back. She dreams of wide eyes and wet eyes and red eyes and no eyes, she dreams of eyes squeezed shut and eyes screaming out, she dreams of eyes with stares like iron chains that she loops around her neck until she can’t remember what it was like to live without the weight.
Long after you become your own enemy, you’ll do anything to save yourself.
They’re faceless. Then there’s Angharad. The first. The favorite. “You are not a thing,” she tells Furiosa. It’s an accusation. You don’t hold a gun accountable for where the bullets go. It’s the triggerman you chain to your bumper and drive until some justice is found. “You are not a thing,” Angharad tells Furiosa, “and neither are we.”)
“I saw him,” the Dag says. She is coated in mud up to her elbows as she kneels in the East Sky Gardens. Furiosa squats next to her, watching the Dag’s fingers work prayers into the earth. Most in New Citadel work in gardens these days. Even a few War Boys. Toast has most out on defense runs maintaining the perimeter of New Citadel and sweeping up trouble before it starts, but the ones at the end of their half-life tend to the gardens. It keeps them useful. They get to pick the plot of land where they’ll get mulched. They can cultivate the plants that will grow from their corpses.
I live, I die, I live again, Furiosa thinks. Strange hope grows in high places.
“Where?” she asks.
The Dag pats the earth around her sapling. Barely a foot tall. She doesn’t look up. “Sixty days ago. When I buried War Lord Junior in the sand. Toast’s War Boys were all around me like a wall, and one said, look, up on the ridge, and we looked up at the shadow looking down.”
“A shadow can be anything.”
“It didn’t fire at us,” the Dag says. “And we didn’t fire at it. So it was him.”
“Could be a lot of things.”
“Even the rocks spit bullets out there. It was him.” The Dag runs her hands up the narrow stem of her latest tree. “They’re starting to worship him, you know. Him and you.”
Furiosa reaches down and worms her fingers into the dirt.
“The War Boys say the mandate of the gods passed to you two when you killed Immorten Joe,” the Dag says. “And he was the will of the gods made flesh to aid you in your work. He wanders the wasteland looking for other falsity and he finds divine vessels to strike it down.” The Dag looks up at her, her eyes unknowable.
“You know I’m not a god,” Furiosa says.
The Dag scoops up moist soil in her cupped hands and squeezes until it squelches through her fingers. “This earth used to be a War Boy named Daxxer.” She drops it with a plop. “This Keeper of the Seeds used to be a war lord’s wife.” The Dag stands. Furiosa looks up at her, as the sun frames her like a halo. “The world changes. It’s no harder to go from human to god than it is to go from jailer to savior.”
Furiosa shields her eyes. “I am not a savior.”
The Dag looks down, rimmed in fire. “We forgave you a long time ago,” she says. “You know that.”
Furiosa stays on her knees in the strange mud of a fertile land. “I do. And I thank you. But that doesn’t mean I found my redemption.”
(She dreams of him. Not just him. Her head is overcrowded. She carries the dead in there. Those she watched die. Those she helped kill. But he's the only living person she still must carry.
His blood still thrums in her veins. Hope, it turns out, leaves a copper taste in the mouth.)
Furiosa kisses Kadee goodbye as the little girl just begins to coo. She won’t remember Furiosa. Except perhaps as a bedtime story.
She kisses Kadee goodbye, and she goes. She takes a truck that never worked as well as it should have, and when she drives up the outer perimeter gate, she parks and leans out the window. She can’t see the rifles trailed on her, but she knows they’re there. Furiosa looks up to the cliff side where the watchers keep vigil. She shades her eyes and waits.
If Furiosa squints, she can just make out the figure draped in white standing on the watcher’s post. After a moment, two flares go up. After a moment, Furiosa raises her hand, the one that New Citadel made for her. After a moment, the figure raises its hand back.
The gates open. Furiosa drives.
Furiosa left a note tucked in Kadee’s arms. All she wrote on it was, “Good luck.” She means it. What else could she say? New Citadel was theirs, these new young mothers and a few of the old ones. Furiosa hadn’t been a mother for a long time. She doubts she’ll ever be one again. The dead stay dead, after all, and the past may haunt you, but it never comes back. It keeps rolling back whether you move or stay. If you wait long enough, even your present can become your past, and you’ll be trapped in it like tar if you don’t get moving.
Max understood that. Maybe she’ll find him out on the road. Maybe she won’t. It’s a big world out there. A lot of wrongs to set right. A lot of paths to nowhere in particular. She wants to see him again. She wouldn’t mind a little company. She could tell them all the things they became, back in the stories at New Citadel. And he is the only person in her life who left without dying. There’s something tantalizing about getting the chance to say hello for the first time.
If she finds him, she finds him. If she doesn’t, she’ll dream about him. One way or another, she’ll see him again. That’s not hope. It’s too certain for that. It’s something she can work with.
Either way, the road opens up before her. And Furiosa drives.