Page 160 of Dustwalker
A tall, slender woman with brown hair and dirt smudged on herface and arms pushed to the front of the group and sneered at Lara. “Not all of us are spreading our legs to bang bots for food.”
Her name was Scarlet. She was about the same age as Lara, but they’d never been close despite growing up together. Tabitha had been Lara’s only real friend.
Clamping her mouth shut, Lara closed her eyes. She wouldn’t give in to anger. She needed these people on her side, on their ownside. When she opened her eyes again, she ran her gaze over every person she could see, meeting their eyes one by one. They were scared, hungry, uncertain, and angry. The only difference between Lara and these people was that she’d learned to hope for something better.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “I left here with a bot. A dustwalker named Ronin. I did it because I was hungry, yeah, but more because I wanted to find my sister.”
“Another bot-fucking whore.” Scarlet spit on the ground in front of Lara.
“That’s enough!” Gary stepped forward. At the edges of her vision, Lara saw Cooper and his men closing in.
“You gonna stand here and defend this filth?” Steve asked.
“Filth? Lara sacrificed to help my family when no one else would. She had nothing, and she still gave to us. She traded good salvage for scraps of food, and we took it for granted. I’ll always regret that. But I’m standing beside her now like I should have all along.”
“The bots she left with killed your children!” someone shouted.
Gary’s expression tightened, and he clenched his fists at his sides. “No. Warlord killed my children, and Lara is here to end him.”
Humorless laughter spread through parts of the crowd.
“She ain’t ending anything!” someone called.
“Not by myself,” Lara replied.
“You can’t expect us to fight him!”
“Why? Why can’t we fight him? Because we fear his retribution? He can only take what we let him take, and he does it because we don’t fight back. Maybe you want to keep living like this, but I’m done. I won’t. Not any longer.” She nodded to Cooper. “These people came to stand beside us, to join our fight against Warlord.”
The captain stepped forward with his soldiers. Despite the tattered coats and cloaks over their uniforms, they stood out from the crowd.
“Who the hell are they?” Steve asked.
Lara returned her gaze to the people, and she swore she saw a hintof fire in their eyes, a glimmer of hope. But the morning remained too dim to know for sure. “They’re soldiers. And this is only a handful of them.”
“Why would they help us?”
Everyone was silent as they stared at Lara and the soldiers. Conflict was clear on so many of their faces.
“Warlord killed my sister and dismantled the bot who was caring for her because they broke his rules. Me and Ronin left before Warlord could do the same to us. We risked the Dust to be together. Call me whatever you want, but Ronin is as human as any of us, and he’smine. He may be built differently, but he thinks, he feels. He loves.
“And Warlord chased us down through a fucking dust storm. He chased us down, deactivated Ronin, and left me beaten in the dirt to die, just so I’d suffer a little longer. All he’s ever done is hurt people, because our pain amuses him. But haven’t we all suffered enough?”
Murmurs spread through the crowd. People shifted uncomfortably on their feet, looking around at friends and neighbors who’d lost loved ones, who’d been maimed, who’d been made to live in fear and squalor.
Lara turned and met Newton’s gaze. “Newton, the bot who offered us shelter during the storm, is the only reason I’m standing here now.” The plates over his eyes shifted subtly, and she nodded at him.
After a moment’s hesitation, he stepped forward, pulling down his hood and removing the cloth from his lower face. The people gasped, their quiet conversations fueled with new energy.
“He reactivated Ronin and took us to a place where we could find help. These people”—Lara gestured at the soldiers—“saved us. They fed me, tended our wounds, gave us shelter. And now, they’re here to help all of us.”
She found Steve in the crowd and locked eyes with him. “But you want to know why, right? Why now, after everything we’ve been through? Because monsters like Warlord hold on to power by keeping people divided. By keeping neighbors suspicious of each other, by forcing bots and humans to live separate lives, by telling us we have to look out for our own and fight each other for limited resources so we don’t realize that by working together, we could have everything we need.
“They’re helping us now because they know it’s the right thing to do. Because they know a world under the thumb of someone like Warlord will always be nothing but a lifeless husk. Because they knowwhat I’ve always known—that we’re capable of so much more, of so much better than this.”
She pointed in the direction of the wall, the top of which was visible over the shacks. “As we speak, there’s another team going in there. They’re going to start the fight, but it’s up to us to rally together and help them finish it. Together, we’ll march into the market, and Newton will convince the bots to join us.”
The faces in the crowd were a chaotic display of emotions—hope, fear, doubt, determination.
