The Gordo clan returned to Kiva Noon with their trophies. For the head of Garth and Cathartes Voll, the tinkers of Kiva Noon managed to recreate their holy Ammo. Crates of it waited for Jackmaw Yapyap’s return, and he was not disappointed.

  The warlord was pleased, but Lenny walked between the crates and smelled the black powder like hellish brimstone. Each one was capable of claiming someone's soul, and they easily outnumbered every citizen of the valley.

  He picked one up and rolled it in his palm. It was a cold, heartless thing, just as he presumed. Under the effect of the mask, the Ammo roiled like a mound of beetles. Lenny stared into the crate for a long time, and after a while, a vision emerged from the gleaming metals within.

  Ever since Lenny had made the map with Jackmaw, he had a sinking feeling that the warlord may actually be capable of finding the mythical Emerald Expanse. In the shifting brass before him, he saw that his worst fears were within reach. He saw the destinies of the Ammo the same way he saw the paths of the soul. Each one was destined to end the life of a stranger Lenny didn’t know yet, but as he inspected the Ammo individually, he became familiar with them.

  Whoever these people were, they possessed powerful souls. They seemed to reach through time and space, begging Lenny to put a stop to what was to come. He held his temples and tried to silence the pleading voices. In the dark glass of the mask’s eye lenses, he saw the bullets rattle and explode, each one bursting and sending splattering blood over the crates. The voices became maddeningly loud, and Lenny tore the mask off.

  The unknown victim’s voices were replaced with the Gordo clan’s excited chatter. They were packing up the Ammo and loading it into their caravan. Some had belts Lenny hadn’t seen before, and they were filling small slots on them with the brass beetles for quick reloads when war finally came. They all seemed so elated to have it in such excess.

  As Lenny leaned against the crate sucking in the dust of the valley, Shi-Toh found him. The sauntering raider had watched him for a time now, and he could tell when the boy received his visions. He walked towards him with a drunk’s gait and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Everything alright, war sage?” Shi-Toh’s grasp was positioned like it was supposed to be comforting, but when he pulled Lenny close to him, the boy felt anything but assured.

  “What is this stuff?” Lenny asked. He knew that they called it Ammo. He knew what it was capable of. What he didn’t know was how it inspired so much feverish visions from him.

  “The holy Ammo is a piece of technology lost to time. In days gone, it was the currency spent by conquerors… by kings, you could say. They fought their wars with it. Loaded it into their guns and even put it into their automatons,” Shi-Toh gestured to the lobotomites who helped carry the crates. “With it, we’ll bring the valley to its knees.”

  “How could you have possibly managed to recreate it?”

  Shi-Toh smiled. He enjoyed how inquisitive the boy was, but he knew answering a seer’s questions was a dangerous game. “Secrets of the clan, boy. Did they not reveal their history to you when you stared into the crate? Or perhaps, they showed you their future?”

  “They didn’t show me anything. They were popping and filling the crates with blood,” he purposefully left out the bit about the voices, but he felt a pang of guilt. Holding back the full truth meant postponing the goal of ceasing this madness. “You said you plan on bringing the valley to its knees? Do you think you can really do that?”

  Shi-Toh grabbed Lenny by his chin and turned his head to look at Jackmaw Yapyap. The warlord was loading his belt with more of his own personal weapon’s Ammo. When he was done, Lenny wondered if he ever feared that the belt might explode, bathing him in flames. Then he redressed himself. From his experience, Jackmaw didn’t fear anything.

  “Do you see that man? I don’t know who he was in a past life, but Karmic winds bend to him. He is a force of nature, a primordial sin made manifest. We call him the king of the world because we believe he has already conquered it in his heart. Every war waged, every drop of blood, every corpse is a brick laid in his path to achieve that dream. Don’t you feel it too?”

  As much as he didn’t want to admit it, Lenny did feel it. Ever since he had first laid eyes on Jackmaw Yapyap, he knew that he was more than a man. The more time he spent in the mask, the more that fact became clear. Rufus had always taught him that Karma wasn’t something that had a will of its own, that it shifted like currents whenever incredible spiritual energy acted on it. But somehow, Shi-Toh was right. Karma’s currents seemed to bend around him.

  When the red devil noticed he had an audience, a wicked smile spread beneath his mask. He finished loading his belt and crossed the bustle of the caravan. He forced aside lobotomites like they were overgrowth in his way, and as he approached Lenny and Shi-Toh, he removed something from his waistband. A femur with screw holes.

  “The bitch without any eyes gave me this. Said my apprentice had it on him when they arrested him, but they didn’t think to put it with his belongings. Touch it.”

  Jackmaw stretched the left-over femur out to Lenny. The boy hesitated, and the warlord’s face turned. “I said touch it. Don’t make me say it a third time.”

  Lenny swallowed hard and refused. “It doesn’t belong to him. If I touch it, I’ll only get visions of the person this belongs to.”

  Gently, Lenny took Jackmaw by the wrist and tried to push the bone back. But the warlord wasn’t satisfied. Jackmaw snatched the boy up by his collar and shook him. With a smile, he said, “Third time’s the charm!” and he forced the bone to his forehead.

  A flood of emotion tore through the boy. Exuberance for a new prosthetic. Shame for paying the flesh toll with his sister. Hatred for the deadly beast that took his leg. Then pain. So much pain he thought he might die.

  First it was a fiery burn. The scorching heat tore up through him in slow motion, like a soft candle licking at his ankle, then his knee, then his thigh. Then came the thousands of tiny pricks. Something was going into his skin, tearing out chunks in some places and burying themselves in others. He felt one leg shatter and the other go flying. He was spinning in the air, and then he hit the sand.

  They were the final moments of a man named Thurman Roade after stepping on a landmine, and as soon as he was finished experiencing them, he forgot the name all together. Lenny felt the winds carry the sand dunes of the valley over him and tuck him in like a coarse blanket. Then there was darkness. It was so long, he felt like he might actually be dead as well. Then a hand dug him out.

  It was Krav. His brother was digging him up and wielding him like a club. He had a smile on his face as he swung it back and forth, but it didn’t make Lenny feel any better. As quickly as the relief had washed over him, he saw Krav’s eyes.

  Again, they were the crusted black of a waster. Krav was flipping the bone in his hand, then he was in a bar fight, then the entire bar was being torn apart. A hastened recap of events thus far flashed so quickly that Lenny’s head spun. He was watching his brother fight a group of raiders outside of Kiva Noon. He saw him in the tunnels of the Bone Eaters talking to Rufus’s skull. The agonized surgery to replace all of his teeth nearly broke Lenny. But the quick transition to the Pit made him forget even that. Krav rampaged through an entire arena and emerged victorious, and then he stood too close to… well Lenny didn’t know what the hell that laser beam was.

  What mattered was where he was now. Lenny could feel Krav being pulled. He was being dragged through the sand on a sled. Whatever he had been next to had done so much damage to him, he couldn’t feel anything any longer.

  The boy couldn’t turn his neck to see who was carrying him off, but he could see the stars. Judging by their position, they were heading East.

  “Lenny?” Krav asked from a scorched throat. “Lenny are you there?”

  Through Krav’s eyes, Lenny watched his brother slowly raise his hand, reaching it for the sky. “Come back, Lenny.”

  The boy reached out for his brother. From the heavens above, Lenny watched himself ghost into existence above Krav. Their fingers were just barely out of reach. Then, as soon as they touched, he was ripped back to reality.

  Jackmaw dropped him to the floor. Lenny crumpled like a pile of dirty laundry in Kiva Noon's sandy streets. The warlord grinned until his mask audibly stretched. “What did you see?”

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  Shi-Toh had him by the shoulders and dragged Lenny up to his feet. He dusted him off with rough swats of his robes and turned him to face Jackmaw. The boy was still shaken from his vision, but he tried to give Jackmaw the answer he wanted without revealing too much.

  “I was the man who died. He had just gotten his leg remade when he stepped on a landmine outside the city.”

  The femur appeared inches from Lenny’s face, and he flinched. Jackmaw stopped it just before it could hit him. “And your brother?”

  “He fought the Bone Eaters here, then at their base. He suffered a grievous injury and lost most of his teeth, but he went through some sort of procedure to restore them. Last I saw, he destroyed something called the Pit and was being dragged through the desert.”

  Shi-Toh and Jackmaw exchanged glances. Lenny guessed that they didn’t believe him. If they had heard of the arena that he saw in his vision, they might know it was no easy task to bring the fortification to its knees. Shi-Toh leaned over him and asked, “Which direction was your brother being dragged in?”

  Lenny really considered lying. If he could lead the Gordo clan on a wild goose chase, they might get bored and forget about Krav. Jackmaw’s red glare froze his blood in the sweltering heat, and suddenly, he didn’t feel like he could even lie to him. All that talk of Karmic winds bending to the red devil had psyched him out. “E-East.”

  A low growl rumbled in Jackmaw’s thick neck. His smile had soured, and he was digging through his pockets for something. The map they had drawn out together was kept on his person at all times, but this was the first time Lenny had seen him pull it out rather than trust the mega vulture.

  One large finger traced the map. Eastward of the Pit was the opposite direction that he and Shi-Toh wanted to go. Worst yet, nothing had been mapped there for miles. It would take days to clear that portion of land and find any civilization. If they didn’t hurry, Jackmaw would be out an apprentice, and Lenny out a brother. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

  “My Lord, do not lose yourself just yet!” Shi-Toh was trying to grab Jackmaw by his arm to stop him from slapping himself. The red glare met Shi-Toh’s onyx glasses, and the consul smiled sheepishly beneath the raging warlord.

  “Don’t lose myself? Fuck me! This is the detour of all detours!” He was turning the map over and over, trying to see if flipping it would change its contents. Then he paused as if it had. “There aren’t many places to look for the Emerald Expanse. If there’s nothing mapped between the Pit and Thousand-Eye Gulch… we could check.”

  The grin returned beneath the map. Jackmaw was watching it like a small boy watches his favorite puppet show. His consul pressed a finger onto a point of the map. It was far to the North-West and the only thing that was charted for miles around was frantic handwriting saying, “MEGAFAUNA FUCKING EVERYWHERE”.

  “This area seems to be the most promising, Lord.”

  “Most promising my ass. We go pick up my apprentice and then we check out all of that.”

  A schism had formed between Jackmaw’s grin and Shi-Toh’s frown. There was no convincing the warlord that he was wrong, Shi-Toh had always known that. But there were always loopholes in his thought process that could be exploited.

  “May I suggest a solution?” Shi-Toh mused. Lenny cowered from both of them automatically. His visions had shown him something in their interactions before. Jackmaw was not as stupid as he let on, and Shi-Toh not as meek. When they clashed, as they often did, their auras mixed. Jackmaw’s dark crimson haze ebbed into Shi-Toh’s poisonous purple, and they swirled until they were a deep black that swallowed the whole clan. Whenever they worked together, there was no force in the wasteland that could hope to stand against them.

  “We can split the clan. I’ll lead a group of us up to meet the boy and return him to you. Perhaps the Macaw is with him. You take the main fighting force into the land of the megafauna and clear a path. We can convene here,” Shi-Toh said, and pointed to a spot in the middle of the megafauna territory.

  “I want to go get my apprentice,” Jackmaw growled, but his grin didn’t faulter.

  Shi-Toh shook his head. “I’m afraid cooler heads will prevail when recruiting him, and I’m no leader when it comes to combat. There will be too much danger in these lands for me to effectively clear a path through.”

  Jackmaw Yapyap slid a finger into his mask and scratched. “We can’t split the boys up. Too risky. How many do you really need to grab one kid?”

  “If he lives up to expectations, perhaps twenty. We’ll need a healthy force to cross the wasteland regardless.”

  Lenny shot a glance over the lounging raiders. They were all watching the lobotomites load up the caravan and smoked something the people of Kiva Noon called downer. There was easily over a hundred of them, but from what Lenny knew of megafauna, they needed every last one of their members. They would quickly dwindle down their numbers in a place marked “MEGAFAUNA FUCKING EVERYWHERE”.

  There was a snap, and Lenny’s attention flipped back to the warlord. Jackmaw had a wicked smile cast on Shi-Toh. “How many of these Kiva Noon scab heads do you think there are?”

  “The tallyman recorded thirty-eight surviving members of the black thumb clan and fifteen lobotomites.”

  Jackmaw’s grin was dripping with saliva. “We can take them.”

  The betrayal came quick. One moment, a gate guardian in their formal trenchcoat was directing the lobotomites to load a crate of Ammo onto a pack beast, the next there was a hole in his finery. Shi-Toh stepped over his sputtering body as he sucked air through the new hole in his chest. The feathered man put another bullet through his head to finish him off without any emotion.

  The sound of gunfire whipped everyone into a frenzy. Blinkers rattled off in the air as their wielders howled in excitement. An officer among the Black Thumbs shouted at the lobotomites loading the caravan, but before they could finish their command, one of the riflemen with a pipe sniped away their shoulder, sending an arm spinning through the air.

  There was a bustle as the defenders of Kiva Noon collected their weapons. They were charging the newly open battlefield with confused shouts. The red-eyed woman snapped her bionics shut like a camera shutter. If she could weep she would. There was no reason to go to war with the Gordo clan. If they wanted something, they could have it. They had lost their city, they had lost their warlord, but they wouldn’t lose their lives.

  The red eyes opened with a whir. When she looked at the flock of cowards who remained by her side, she smiled weakly. “The only hope is to surrender. Don’t worry, the Gordo clan is fair to their prisoners. Fairer than the Bone Eaters, surely… fairer than us.”

  A few looked at her as if she had told them that the world was coming to an end, and perhaps they even thought that. Some of the more grizzled veterans of the Black Thumbs scoffed and brushed passed her. They had only stayed for their orders, she knew. But what orders could she offer besides surrender?

  One of the veterans stepped out and tore off his robes. Beneath was an extra set of arms that stretched from his back like a bloom of steel. Jackmaw took noticed and signaled to his men. A challenger was approaching.

  “Mine!” he yelled. He hadn’t even unholstered the burner on his hip yet. Instead, he pulled the two bowie knives and juggled them as the veteran charged. “Make sure the yappers don’t tell the robots what to do!”

  The veteran wielded a spear that he pointed at Jackmaw as he charged. The two extra arms snatched at the left-over weaponry from the toppled shop stalls. They were low quality and not worth scavenging before, but desperate times meant you couldn’t be picky. Both were spindly swords, and as the veteran swung one for Jackmaw’s neck, he swung a knife up to intercept it. The sword shattered.

  “Oops,” the red devil smiled. “Go ahead and get another one. I’ll wait.”

  The veteran swung the other, but Jackmaw was getting bored of the same attack. He launched one knife at the veteran like a dart. It hit him so hard, the Black Thumb flew backwards a full meter before he hit the floor. The handle jutted from his collarbone, and he reached his human hands up to it. Fingers danced around it as if he was afraid to touch it.

  Jackmaw appeared over him. “You have four arms, scab head! Maybe you should have made yourself two brains instead! Look at all the cool shit you could have hit me with! And you chose swords?” Jackmaw put a heavy boot on the veteran’s head and wrenched the blade out. The veteran cried into the sole of Jackmaw's boot and clutched at his spurting wound.

  Jackmaw was feeling merciful that day. It wasn’t his fault he had to betray the Black Thumbs. As fate would have it, he needed more men, and they were just the sort. They would never leave their safe walls, however, so he needed a symbol.

  The veteran groaned as he was lifted in the air. “Listen up!” Jackmaw’s voice split the battlefield, rendering all combatants still. “If you don’t want to end up like this guy, line up and join my fucking clan.”

  With a hand on either shoulder, Jackmaw tore the veteran apart. The bowie knife wound gushed, and split wide like a spreading smile. It stretched from his collar bone down to his stomach, and he came apart with a painful scream. The warlord tossed both halves aside. Covered in blood, her turned to the crowd of struggling Black Thumbs. “What do you say!”

  “We surrender,” the red-eyed woman said. She appeared from the eaves of a workshop with those who had cowered with her. They all approached Jackmaw slowly and bowed their heads when they reached him.

  The red devil’s grin grew. “That’s more like it!”

  Lenny watched the whole thing, unable to move. It had happened so fast, so unexpectedly. One minute they were the benevolent liberators, the next they were the murderous extortionists. He watched Jackmaw split the four-armed veteran in half and thanked all the karmic heavens that the mad warlord was at least willing to take prisoners.

  Not prisoners, he thought. Slaves.

  Soon after they rounded up all of their new quarry, Jackmaw Yapyap and Shi-Toh convened once more. This time, Lenny was brought along by his collar.

  The plan was simple. Jackmaw would lead the clan into the area on the map populated by megafauna and Shi-Toh would go after Krav. Joining the feathered man would be lobotomites from Kiva Noon, one operator of the lobotomites, and just enough Gordo clan muscle to keep them in check: three blinkers for muti-target engagements and a pipe in case the operator tried to make a run for it. Their journeys would see them separated for a week, but after they would meet again deep in megafauna territory.

  “One last thing,” Shi-Toh said. He snapped a fistful of hair out of Lenny’s head, and the boy whined in protest. He rubbed his stinging scalp and watched the feathered man cut out a lock of his own hair.

  Shi-Toh placed both into small glass bottles and tied them with twine. His hair was placed around Lenny’s neck and vice versa. “With this, we can communicate long distances. But first we have to train your remote communication skills. Come along, we must be quick about our business.”

  Shi-Toh pulled on Lenny’s collar. Already, he could hear Shi-Toh’s thoughts through the bottled hair. Judging by the smile on his face, Shi-Toh could sense Lenny’s thoughts as well, because all Lenny could think about was his brother.