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There are fires and engines fused to the slick outer edge of the melting horizon. Furiosa can hear them rattling just like a demon's red teeth out beyond the glassy swamps. Can't see much, but sight isn't everything. She knows they're chewing on each other, and wheeling about, and drawing nearer by happenstance in the heat of conflict. Knows it somberly, the way that others might dread drought. All of the most merry Vuvalini tease her, say she's taken a shine to knowing things she can't prove. They're wrong, she thinks fondly. There's always proof. Some sign or spoor. It's just a matter of picking it out from all the rest, all the screams and throttles and music going off in the back of your head.
(And then there's the one who never doubts her. The Valkyrie never mocks a solid hunch, never misses a clear shot. If there's any certainty in Furiosa's life, it's her. She always says the same thing right before she nicks a target straight out of the sky: Told you. No word yet on the true name of you, or what they've been told.)
Lucky for her, the afternoon sun suddenly turns its light sideways and catches a laminate edge here, a lick of flame there. Although lucky might be a strong word; after a few minutes, Furiosa feels sick with all the squinting. It's like straining to see a knife dropped in soupy water. If she really leans into the heat haze, she can perceive the situation. But it's all abstract. Deep desert metal bodies are moving out there, flashing mad and toothy with every sideswipe, every lurch and every catastrophic roll. Streaks of greasy black smoke start to go up before her eyes. There's no wind, so the soot rises slow and hangs sodden. Like the burned, empty skins of invaders, strung up outside someone's territory.
The Valkyrie is coiled up tight beside her, clutching her arm. This is a common vista, maybe; but it's better suited for elsewhere. The Green Place isn't someone's and it isn't plain territory. It's flush with life and flooded with scaling, blooming riches and it makes the Many Mothers wealthy in their hearts and souls. Perched side by side on the shady shoulders of trees still supple enough to sway in the hot wind, they are witnesses to the end of something, watching high, burning banners of war tangle and unfurl. They are the last girls in the world, maybe. They are together enshrined in the sky.
"One of them got close to the dross," Furiosa says breathily. Her arms shiver with excitement and exhaustion. Just for a minute she lowers herself to rest and watches the muscles jump, same as they would under pinpricks or little electric shocks. "Too close. Maybe it'll sink. They'll have to leave it behind. We can go strip it but we'll have to drag the salvage back ourselves. And others will be coming for it too."
She shudders to think of rare parts thumping and sucking behind her, hauled in a frantic retreat. If she wants them, they must come through the mire that bubbles black and foreboding around home. It would be a near-deadly journey for nice things made brittle by the heat and sand. They'd be ruined. But she soothes herself. That's how you keep a thing safe: ruin it. Really fuck it up. Then you can say, I got there first, it's mine. And maybe it's not pretty anymore but what good is pretty? How much water does pretty save from stagnation? How fast can pretty carry you when starving motors are roaring closer across the open flats, racing smoothly along the white shelf of noise that follows one last bullet out of a cracked muzzle raised to the gasping sky?
The Valkyrie sighs sharply, feeling the tension transferring between their bodies. "Furiosa. How come you've always gotta be thinking about raiders?"
(They're around the same age, but as for that one? Things seem effortless for her somehow, like she was born to conquer the world in tiny pieces. To demonstrate, she balances on one arm briefly, contorting in an effort to hook the rifle at her back and bring it around beside her. She doesn't fall and slide in a jumble through the sharp shoots and prongs below. Doesn't want help unless she asks for it. She mutters to no one, intending to go unheard. Always a thoughtless invoker, talking to herself about the old gods. Old gods! As if gods stick around long enough to grow old.)
Furiosa carefully flexes one hand and peers again at the writhing horizon, exquisitely noncommittal. Or so she hopes. "You've always gotta be thinking about what might be on the road."
The Valkyrie smiles down at her. Furiosa doesn't see it, won't look away from what little she can see in the distance, but in front of her the blinding sky begins to blush as though ashamed of its own inadequacy.
"I'm not afraid of the road." She gives up on the gun, swings back to a secure grip with a huff and then descends, submerging herself in the mangrove shadows. "Hey, get down here. We need to cool off."
They slither down onto a silver mat of squeaking roots, long limbs stretching and coiling like the arcs of the canopy overhead. Furiosa pitches herself down into a squat and balances on her heels, rocking with the lurch of the forest entire, while the Valkyrie finally draws up her rifle and sights gaps in the thin leaves.
"I'm not talking about the actual road," Furiosa begins to say, because a half-articulated thought always sticks in her teeth until she gets the chance to properly spit it out.
"There's nothing coming down it for us," the Valkyrie interrupts.
A dapple of light makes her resplendent. She cuts it, dark. It paints her, bright. Furiosa loses the track of her thoughts, tries to think of words that suit her sudden reverence.
From the edge of the wasteland, hidden now by the froth of the forest, comes the sound of a hollow blast. Gunshot, or backfire. The sun begins to bleed out across the sky and all the echoes of distant industry come to nothing.
(It gets cold outside at night, Furiosa thinks pitilessly. Very cold.)
Halfway into her mind, the Valkyrie snaps around and glowers at her. The threat of dusk whittles her down to hard angles, mercenary eyes. "Too dangerous. Don't even think about it."
"I'm not."
She doesn't seem appeased. The expressive seams in her sunshelled skin are set firmly into a map of displeasure. It's often easy to tell what she's thinking - but in brief, awful moments that can change in a blink. When Furiosa looks again, the angry furrows around her thick brows and lashes have scratched themselves up and left her blank. On light feet she starts to move across the mesh of roots, the dance slow, her eyes down. She doesn't believe that. She says quietly: "Good. Sorry."
Furiosa considers that for a long while. Long enough that damp mouths of shadow begin to stretch open between the trees and the leaves blur around the edges, vague shapes that lap at those towers of dust still billowing into the pink sky. She doesn't have to be sorry. Don't even think about it, don't be stupid, don't get hurt, don't go. Those are good things to demand from a lover. Furiosa's not even sure exactly which one she meant this time. Makes no difference. All are worth observing.
The problem is that she dares not respond, not thoughtlessly. She has done that before. She has learned from it. Grown wise, the more merry Vuvalini would say. Wrong, she thinks firmly. Grown wary of the way that truth can give way underfoot. Not that she would, ever, lie to the Valkyrie. It's just that traps have pitted the earth in every place she has known. Childhood gives her an old foreboding: a memory of snapping, metal mechanisms, of things to fear sifted low in the sand. Out on the mire, the crow fishers seem to share her obsession; they dig their deadly drowning pools deep, sunk below the black water that rots the reeds they use to make shelter. Even the Green Place itself has burrows and blinds, the hidden hollows where snakes and scorpions nest, the vines that nettle and insects that sting. Even here, a promise might crumble away to a sharp point that prickles with venom.
(She would never lie to the Valkyrie, no; but she has been keeping a secret.)
"Hey," Furiosa says, and at first that's all she can think to offer.
The Valkyrie turns back to her, her expression smoothed of all its nuances. Maybe it's just the quickening darkness, but she looks like another person. One who might learn to doubt. One who might decide to go be enough for herself, alone.
At last Furiosa says: "There's something I've been meaning to show you." Because a silent, unreadable Valkyrie scares her in a way she doesn't really understand. And because it's true; her secret was never intended to last so long, to lure her so far. She puts out her hand without thinking, and the Valkyrie grasps it instantly. Warmed in a small way, Furiosa hides her face and starts toward home and solid ground, her strides long and careful. Already the only difference between a root and a shadow is the weight that each is willing to bear. A big difference, unfortunately. She takes great care not to land her oldest and dearest friend in a bath of corrosive muck, knowing that would probably be the best way to never have a friend again.
Rather than climbing the darkening slope back to the high camps, she turns them onto the hard path that loops around and below. There's a bit of accidental resistance from the Valkyrie before she catches on and leans in the right direction. Sunset usually maps the clearest route of all: home, in a hurry, any way you can. But they're old enough to tend to themselves in the dark a little. All the most merry Vuvalini will think they know what's going on. Normally they'd even be right, but for once Furiosa is cold inside as she rounds the scarred rock face to the place where it finally splits and swallows the path. Immediately their breaths seem to surround her, loud and strange. She pulls the Valkyrie through a kiln of unlit passages until they've gone down all the familiar ones and she is dragging at her again, more insistently, what are you doing?
Then Furiosa stops and follows a sudden draft to an open space, dimly lit and whistling with the sound of sky wind. A cleft in the wall pours twilight onto the smooth stone floor. Fascinated, thinking perhaps that this is the surprise, the Valkyrie goes to the breach and gazes down. It's a huge, reeling vantage, a window stuck in the air over miles and miles of low land and precious lichen kept safe from hands that would do it harm. She is transfixed by that for a long time and Furiosa just leaves her alone, just watches her selfishly. The cave space is large enough that they can stand there without really paying attention to the bulky form pushed up against one wall so it goes unnoticed. There's an oily tarp thrown over the thing and Furiosa finally starts talking again as she strips it away, pushing the skeletal hulk of a half-built motorcycle forward to the Valkyrie's side where it can better catch the last powdery light.
"I meant to get it working before I gave it to you, but it's taking so long, it's taking forever since parts just come from anywhere, and I just kept waiting because I thought it should be perfect first, but now, I didn't mean to make you worry. So. You know." She shrugs to stop her words from wrestling themselves into the ground. "I thought it would be nice if you had a way to run people down."
The Valkyrie inspects the whole construction, all the way from grease to tarnish, marveling. There is one pristine, polished piece that draws her eye, slowly but with visible power; she torments herself and saves it for last. An undamaged side mirror glints gold from its temporary mount as the sun slips away. She locks eyes with Furiosa in its flawless circle, smiling to match the spooked eyes of a mountain cat toying with prey. "It would be nice. Especially shifty people like you."
"Well, sure," Furiosa replies, alarmed. "But first how about everyone else who asks for it?"
The Valkyrie laughs, the best sound in the world, and studies her in a strange way. It's a good kind of strange, Furiosa decides, and it gets even better as she comes around the bike and puts their lips together and draws them both down as night slips in close alongside them.
For a little while she still feels some live connection to those bright fires burning out of sight. She can smell and hear and taste them, smoking fragrant in the tranquil desert dark as they wet the edges of a salvager's treasure trove. But she is looking at the Valkyrie and seeing the true name of every hunger in the world. She is breathing the scent of her hair, kissing her throat, hearing: "I'd hunt you down, if only you didn't come back to me every time."
(That's the thing about the truth. Sometimes it's not so bad to get caught in it, and to hell with everything else that might be headed your way.)