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“You’ll be safe, yeah?” Toast blinked up at him sternly. “No trying to out flip Shrike.”
“What?” Spaz’s shoulders sagged; “But he’s a lynch pin! He’s not even a real lancer! Just takin’ over for Butterfingers while he has his lumps out.”
“Spaz,” She tugged at one of his bracers, pressed her thumb into the eye of a bird carved into his upper arm. It was new, still tender and red under his paint. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”
“’s not stupid if you’re…” He sighed, bowed his head against hers and nodded, “Alright, nuthin’ stupid.”
“Good man,” She nodded, eyes still on the green around his neck. Nothing else, she wouldn’t let herself. It was only then she realized what she’d done. Something innocent, really. She’d heard the Vuvalini say it often enough, ‘Good girl,’ ‘Good boy’… She’d just said it.
Toast felt him grin against the top of her head, felt him shifting on his feet as he squared his stance in excitement, the arm around her back pulling her closer. ‘Man’ she’d called him. ‘Good Man’.
He rumbled low in his chest in pride, “You namin’ me, Knowin’?”
“Shut it,” She knocked her fist against his ribs, not nearly as hard as he knew she could, “Tow-headed jackass.”
“Hey,” He had big hands, slender and rough like the Needle. Curled his fingers under her chin so gently when she’d seen him break jaws and spear jackrabbits with a careless flick of his wrist. He’d never raised a hand to her in anger, never struck her in frustration or humiliation. He had never treated her as anything other than a person, and… He was grinning when she turned her face to look at him.
Crooked and wily. She wanted to rub his stupid face in the dirt and sit on him and—and…
Someone dropped a tray of wrenches. Spaz could almost make out their sizes by the sound of them hitting stone and one another. Musical. Like the chimes the Vuvalini Women hung in the wind.
—His smile faded and his eyes flicked back and forth, unsure, when he had always been so certain about everything. Then he leaned forward and— And kind of bumped their mouths together.
Toast pulled away slowly. Eyes wide, face reddening.
Spaz swallowed a growing tightness in his throat and glanced at the floor, more to guide his hand into a pocket than out of embarrassment or self-consciousness. Tucked his hand into hers and left it filled with warm metal and wire and what felt like string.
He stayed long enough for her fingers to uncurl and her eyes to meet his after seeing what this thing was he’d given her, then he drew away, watched her until someone slapped his shoulder and said to hurry up.
Toast didn’t move. Not really. She drew her lower lip between her teeth and pulled it out again, scraping it until it was red and a little swollen. She watched until his car was lowered, until it was part of the line heading east. A Long Patrol.
They would skirt around the mountains…
She uncurled her fingers and stared. STARED like for the first time in her life, she didn’t know what it meant. Some unsolvable riddle, or question without a solid answer. A curiosity of wire and spent cartridges, hope suspended between the remade remnants of war.
Toast lifted her eyes to the dust trail heading off into the wastes. Her stomach fluttered and her heart sped up, a rapid pitterpat behind her ribs.
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Sometimes it rained in the high country.
The craggily, poisoned mountain peaks where not even the rock riders lived. It had always foretold coming war in the Before times… Not the BeforeBefore… but the time Before the Mothers came. Back when there was only the Immortan and his cold, high-octane rule.
The Vuvalini Mothers had a different opinion of rain. They thought it could, sometimes, be a portent of life.
“It used to rain when I was a child…” The oldest one had said. “And we would dance in it.”
Couldn’t dance in this, no… It’d eat your skin off, or give you burns.
Spaz saw the clouds building on the first day, down to the south, a long black line against the spine of the mountains.
Copah, his driver, still claimed the old ways and cried out for war and battle. Spaz… Spaz thought of Toast. Tucked himself into the cab incase some of the rain came their way. He thought of Toast and all the green on the Tops. He thought of the carrots he’d stuck in the ground with Ludis, the pup he and Copah had been sponsoring Before. Ludis wanted to be a green thumb, and in secret-special talk when it was dark in the bunks, Spaz said he kind of did too. Wanted to watch something grow because all his life all he’d known was killing.
So, Ludis went to study at Mother Dag and the Green Thumbs, and at night, when they should have been sleeping, Spaz listened while the kid spoke, told him everything in hushed whispers.
Toast had found out, secured seeds and a little space of the carrot patch just for him.
“They’ll be havin’ their Giving Day Ceremonials.”
“Eh?” Copah said through the empty side of his mouth. All those teeth had been pulled, gums sopped in Hel Water to draw out the infection. He was full life now, but still painted himself up like a Half-Life. Felt it gave him some kind of purpose.
“Ludis, and Spangler, and Tot, and Wikkis. Their havin’ their Day. Gonna be real Green Thumbs.”
“Oh,” Copah turned back to the road.
It was quiet, just the roar of engines and the hand signals of the lookouts on the rig ahead of them. Scout Rig. Funny thing that. Got everything they need to make it the whole Long Patrol twice over.
Spaz turned and watched the storm spitting fire over the mountains.
“You tryin’a pair off with that Claw girl? Tossed?”
“I ain’t tossed with her,” He didn’t deny the pairing off part.
“You gonna pair off and you ain’t tossed it?”
“Leave it—“
“You had your mouth on her though!” He cackled.
Spaz rolled his eyes, “Seen you with your mouth on your shift once, don’t mean nothin’.”
“You traded paint?”
“No.”
“You even know what her bits look like? She might be all warty like Dov is!”
Spaz punched him in the arm.
“She ain’t nothin’ like Dov.”
“How do you know?” He turned and peered at Spaz with one eye. “Hell, might not even make it back to her anyway. You see the rain comin? It gets the Rockers all riled up. Come pourin’ outta the hills like Jack Jumpers!”
“Watch the road,” Spaz braced his feet against their supply chest, knees up around his ears, picked at a fray in his trousers.
Copah rattled the teeth on the string around his neck, cackled that maybe he’d get a full set this time and some fingers to go with it, grinned like the moon with his knobby face.
“You wouldn’t understand anyway,” Spaz muttered, mostly because he couldn’t help but feel the need to win the conversation. “It’s not the same as just pairin’ off… It’s—“ He turned his eyes back toward the Citadel. “—We’re makin’ something new.”
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