Page 101 of Dustwalker
Ronin glanced at her and halted abruptly. Her smile was gone, belying her tone.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Her optics flicked to the entry doors. “It’s just that…hecame looking for you while you were in there.”
“He want me to go see him?”
“No.” She dropped her gaze, and her brows twitched down briefly. “He’s been waiting outside for the last three hours and forty-two minutes.”
Ronin turned his head toward the doors. Between the contrasting lighting and the reflections on the glass, the details were blurry, but he counted five distinct figures standing outside about ten meters from the entrance.
There were undoubtedly other exits from the building, but Ronin had only been in the lobby and the repair room, so he dismissed the possibility of an alternate route. Such an escape would only lead Warlord to Ronin’s residence, and he didn’t want that scar-faced tyrant anywhere near Lara.
He walked toward the exit, ceasing his processors’ attempted speculations. Warlord’s whims seemed as difficult to predict as Lara’s. The doors whirred open, their sound indicating an inevitable motor failure in the near future.
If the group of bots had been conversing, they fell silent when Ronin stepped outside. They all looked at him as he approached. Warlord stood at the center of the group, unassumingly average in height, build, and features compared to his companions save for the sutured gash on his cheek. Even though the gearheads displayed far more bare metal, Warlord’s damage was somehow more imposing.
Ronin stopped several feet away.
Should’ve brought the pistol.
A single round in Warlord’s optic could have been enough to short his system entirely.
“Dustwalker. Looking better than you did when you came in last night,” Warlord said, his expression neutral.
“Feeling it, too.” Ronin met the gazes of each of the gearheads before settling his focus on Warlord again. “Just here to make sure I’m adequately repaired?”
“You push boundaries, dustwalker. Maybe that’s good out there. Maybe that’s why you’re so productive. But we’ve been over this already.”
“I didn’t intend to come back in after dark, but I wasn’t exactly in any condition to race the sun yesterday.”
“I’ve dealt with your type. I understand you. I told you that my rules are to be obeyed, didn’t I? I don’t think my memory’s been corrupted in the last month. Maybe you can refresh me, so we can be sure.”
“Your bots let me through without a word. They?—”
“You know that’s not what this is about!” Warlord growled, jabbing a finger at Ronin and stepping forward. “You’re smarter than that, dustwalker. At least you think you are.”
Ronin’s processors blazed through data, searching every moment he’d spent in Cheyenne. There weren’t many conversations with Warlord to review, but there’d been many rules, rarely presented with clarity.
Warlord pursed his lips and strode forward, slowly circling Ronin. “Did you think we wouldn’t notice, Ronin?”
Ronin forced himself to remain in place. “Notice what?”
“You’ve been purchasing a great deal of food considering you can’t eat, along with clothing in sizes much too small for that impressive frame of yours. You’ve spent more idle time in Cheyenne over the last month than you have since you first came here.”
Realization hammered into Ronin’s mind, battering his CPU into overload. There were too many possibilities to assess. Too many things they could do to her, too many things they could’ve done while he was incapacitated.
“You brought a human through my wall.” Unhurried, Warlord strolled back toward his gearheads and turned to face Ronin. “None of my people have seen her leave. That means you’ve been keeping her.”
The gearheads shifted their stances, spreading their feet andsquaring their shoulders. Their exaggeratedly grim expressions might have been comical in any other situation. But Ronin didn’t fear for himself. Any pain he suffered at their hands would be over in an instant, relegated to the depths of his memory.
The same wouldn’t hold true for Lara.
His processors superimposed her face on Tabitha’s broken body. Had some of these gearheads taken part in that brutal beating? Which of them had harmed Lara’s only family, which had ensured that Tabitha’s suffering had been profound and prolonged before her death?
“If I had a woman, why would it be a problem? I’ve seen humans on the arms of bots within your walls, right in the faces of your people,” Ronin said.
Warlord shook his head. “I’m starting to wonder if you’ll ever learn. And that’s a damned shame, because bots of your talent are a boon to this community.” He walked up to Ronin, narrowing his eyes, and lowered his voice. “Nothing happens in Cheyenne without my say so. Especially not one of those parasites taking up residence behind my wall. Their place is out there, in the world they destroyed.”
