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Nothing happens at the Bullet Farm.
Well, that may not be the precise truth. They fill the War Rig with bullets and boomsticks, just as Immortan Joe’s asked them to. They – or rather, Jack – swap insults with some idiot bullet farmers. They drive off the disgruntled with a couple of growls and, more effectively, stony silences. And then the gate rises again, and the War Rig and its convoy rattles out back to the road, back to the endless expanse of sand, sand, sand.
All in all, nothing special happens at the Bullet Farm.
On the way back, Jack lets one of those War Boys take the wheel. Settles in next to Furiosa in the smaller V8. They exchange glances.
Jack’s eyes are crinkled at the corners. A secret smile that Furiosa reads and answers, with a shallow nod.
When they ride off the road the War Boys shout out in consternation, but Jack waves jauntily and they accept it without question, flashing bone-white teeth, and Furiosa, uncharacteristically, adds a small wave of her own. She thinks of that one War Pup and what Immortan Joe might do to these boys when he realizes she and Jack won’t be reporting back anytime soon.
She thinks, and then she stops thinking.
Jack is a steady presence. A foot to the right, close enough to touch. Should she reach out, that is, which she will not.
They drive until they can no longer see the convoy’s dust cloud, until the sky turns from yellow to a dusky orange – and soon Jack will see what oranges are like again, won’t he? – until they are sure, quite sure, that no one pursuing would be able to catch up for a handful of hours at least. And then they stop.
Furiosa’s back is killing her. Jack doesn’t seem to be faring any better; old man, she almost says.
In the end, she simply goes with: “Call it a day?”
“What a day,” he mutters. She hears the rest all the same. Yes, let’s. Best not to drive in the dark. Or something like that. She has needed neither instructions nor explanations for a long time.
They settle. The dark settles.
One thing that refuses to is the wind.
Throughout the night they hear howling. At a certain point Jack sets his hand down on the gearshift. His fingers curl loosely around it like his hand is used to another shape (namely, the War Rig’s femur). Furiosa startles. It’s only when Jack makes no further movement that she realizes Jack has not even woken up, not entirely.
They may both be light sleepers, but Jack’s the one that can fall asleep anywhere; pity he could not teach her.
Pity she could not learn.
But she tears her gaze away, back at the Wasteland, and tries to close her eyes. She ends up watching, though. The nights are not completely dark out here, not with a sort of gloomy light pervading every grain of sand, and there are stars. Of course, there are stars.
She searches them for a familiar constellation. When she finds it, she begins to count.
It does not quite take a thousand stars to put her to sleep, but it does come close enough.
They abandon the truck at the agreed-upon point, and from there they take the bikes. It’s a harder ride; Furiosa hasn’t had to ride these sorts of bikes for extended trips since oh-so-long-ago, not since she’d cemented her place as Praetorian Furiosa.
At least the pace they set is unhurried. The Citadel would have sent out the boys by now, to hunt them down and bring them to heel, but their earlier tracks would have been swept away, and whoever’s after them would have nothing to go on but a general direction.
The longer they ride, the greater the area of search. It’s what Jack says, as they split a packet of powdered greens, swapping the same one spoon back and forth until the packet’s been scraped empty and all Furiosa can taste is Jack’s spit on the spoon. They’ve thrown a tarp over their bikes and crawled into the space underneath, a sort of makeshift tent, waiting out the worst of the heat until high noon turns into a cooler evening.
It’s the closest she’s come to kissing Jack, since they drove out of the Bullet Farm.
Jack is not, as a matter of fact, a particularly tactile man. Which is not to say he makes an exception for Furiosa; they fit, and that’s all there is. It’s only natural that the better two pieces fit, the better they may close their gap without breaking one or the other. And the not-breaking part is necessary, she supposes, because they are brittle people unlikely to go soft for anyone.
(Anyone including themselves. Confer: exceptions.)
Jack takes the spoon from her, his fingers brushing hers. He puts it in his mouth and chews it. She ought to feel this is disgusting.
Furiosa feels – lethargic.
In the end Jack’s the first to move again, as if by some internal clock. He stands and takes the tarp with him, lifting and then shoving it away. Light streams back into their little transient refuge. Jack looks down, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile in his glance.
Furiosa notes that his eyes are green.
How in the world had she not noted it before?
“Furiosa?” he says, and she shakes off her distraction. Jack says nothing else as he swings his leg over the bike.
She would have remained silent, too, if a question had not come bubbling up. It slips through her lips before she catches it.
“Have you ever ridden a horse?” she asks.
Jack blinks once. “I don’t suppose so,” he says, and then – as if he’s just remembering – adds, “I might have.”
“Before all this?” Furiosa makes an encompassing gesture. Jack must have thought it a request; he grabs her hand and pulls her up by it.
This time, they don’t stop at nightfall; they are far away now and secure enough in their fuel supply to use the headlights. As always it is Furiosa leading the way. She feels the bike thrum under her body, feels the sand shake. There is more buried in the latter: vibration from Jack’s bike. It centers her.
Dawn comes.
They set up the tarp again, as has already become rote, and take turns with a bottle of water. The winds have calmed; good. It will be easier to navigate by stars, without a persistent cover of dust obscuring the sky.
They are on the last leg of their journey. It’s not just the stars that tell her this, even. She can feel it in her blood, in her full-life marrow, in the writhing under her inked skin. She says so to Jack.
“I used to hear,” says Jack, “that some animals can feel Earth’s magnetic fields.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asks.
A beat passes, then a shrug. “Tomorrow?” he says, without answering the question.
“My sister might be there,” she says in kind, a reply that is not really a reply. And then some inexplainable – lie, because her sister has made her think of her mother – urge has her saying, “I was never fond of bikes.”
“I see,” he says.
The words do not feel as empty as they might have, coming from others. Jack knows her, both her story and her history, inside and out. Of course he sees. But there are no Bikers here, no Dementus. It’s odd how the only other breathing body for miles is Jack; Jack whom she trusts, implicitly if not completely. There are eight knives on her person and no one to turn them on.
They should sleep. Rest until evening, cover some distance before the stars come out, and then pick a careful path until they reach their destination. Instead, Furiosa raises her hand and rubs at Jack’s face.
“Furiosa,” he says. “Fury.”
The grease paint, already flaking, peels off in streaks. Jack’s hands come up to cup her face, rubbing gently first at her forehead and then around her eyes. Furiosa breathes, easy and slow.
“Tomorrow,” she says, like a promise.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
They end up going no further than that. They curl under the tarp and erase the grease paint with sweat and sebum. At one point Furiosa wrinkles her nose, which gets a short chuckle out of Jack, but all told it doesn’t take long for the two of them to be done away with the marks of praetorship. Jack’s bare face looks back at her with warmth in his gaze.
Furiosa, her forefinger black with the last of the paint, trails a line down from Jack’s brow to his jaw. A slight pressure has him tipping his chin.
She realizes, with some substantial surprise, that this must be what leisure is like.
Her hand falls. Jack takes it, holds it to his cheek and closes his eyes. She can sense his breath tickling her wrist. The scruff of his beard presses into her palm.
Fury, he calls her, but she finds that . . .
She has not thought of Dementus for a long while, not at least with the sharp thirst for vengeance. She has not felt more than a passing annoyance at Rictus, a healthy amount of caution at Immortan Joe. All that’s been at the forefront of her mind: the Green Place, the journey there, and the companion.
When she leans in, Jack wraps his arm around her shoulder. She does not sleep, but does manage a light doze.
And then they pass the crows, but that, perhaps, is a tale for another night.