are Hunter,” the woman said. “She can call us Hunter.”
“Right,” Lemon nodded. “Of course you are. Pleased to meet you, Hunter.”
“No, Lemonfresh. Pleasure is ours.”
“… Oh yeah? How you figure that?”
“Look around.”
Fearing some kind of grift, Lemon kept her stare fixed on her captor.
“Look,” Hunter insisted. “Look hard. Then tell us what she sees.”
The girl risked a glance at the wreckage of the old town. The empty shells and dead cars. The sun was burning white, bleaching everything beneath it whiter still. The men who’d wanted to make them corpses had been made corpses themselves. Everyone scrapping and killing over trash that people would’ve just thrown away back in the day. The wind was a whisper, the only thing growing was a thin desert weed, spindly roots digging into the shattered concrete and slowly prying it apart.
In a decade or two, all that would be left of this place was rubble.
“I dunno,” Lemon finally shrugged. “The world?”
“Yes,” Hunter nodded. “And Lemonfresh is the flood that will drown it. The storm that will wash all of it away.”
Hunter smiled, all the way to her eyeteeth.
“Lemonfresh is going to change everything.”
“I don’t feel so fizzy.”
They’d been riding for the best part of the day, and the sun was hot enough to give an aspirin a headache. Hunter had reached into her saddlebags, given Lem a spare cloak, the same rusty desert red as her own. Lemon pulled up the hood to shield her from the scorch, but that only made her sweat buckets and feel sicker.
She’d been tasting off-color since that morning, talking true, but she figured it was just the leftovers from the bad meat, the sad from seeing Grandpa die, leaving Eve behind. Her heart still hurt when she thought on it all, and she didn’t have much else to do. Feeling miserable and all the way helpless. But as the day ground on, the sickness in her belly had roiled, and finally, as they neared sundown, come bubbling up out of her mouth again.
There wasn’t much to puke—just the water she’d been sipping from an odd, leathery flask in Hunter’s saddlebags. But she kept heaving long after her insides were outside, holding on to her belly and wincing in pain.
“I gotta sit …,” she begged. “I gotta sit still for a minute …”
Hunter slowed the horsething’s pace, brought it to a gentle stop. Sliding off the strange beast’s back, she lifted Lemon down onto dry, cracked earth. They’d cleared the maze of gullies a few hours back, and now they were deep into a stretch of blinding salt flats. The ground was like rock beneath her feet. The glare was blinding. If Lemon squinted to the east, past the broken foothills, she could make out the irradiated edge of the Glass.
Thinking of Evie in that tower.
Thinking of the cardboard box she’d been found in as a kid.
Thinking she’d been abandoned all over again.
She thumped down on her hind parts in the dust, toying with the silver five-leafed clover around her neck and feeling sick all the way to her bones. Watching as Hunter unclasped her strange organic armor, peeled it back to expose her honeycombed throat beneath. The woman hummed an off-key song that reminded Lemon of the wind when it stormed in Zona Bay. A dozen bumblebees crawled out from Hunter’s skin, took to the wing, up to the sky and back off to the north.
“That …,” Lemon whispered, “is the freshest strange I’ve ever seen.”
“They will watch,” the woman said.
“For what?”
“Pursuit.”
“You mean my friends.”
“And those not.”
The woman massaged the translucent resin that bound Lemon’s wrists, and the bonds came away like soft, warm putty. Stashing the resin in her cloak, she handed Lemon the leathery water flask, nodded gently.
“Drink,” she urged. “Long road to CityHive.”
Hunter turned to the salt flats behind, slung her strange long-barreled rifle off her back. The weapon was pale, oddly organic, looking like it was made out of a collection of old fish bones. Hunter held it to her shoulder, peered down the long telescopic scope at the horizon. Her back was turned, and Lemon was keenly aware of the cutter in her belt, drawing out the blade with a slow, steady hand.
Fortunately, Lem was also mindful of the dozen ultra-poisonous-if-sorta-cute-and-fuzzy killer bees flying in lazy circles around her captor’s head. And deciding that getting ghosted by bugs was a less than fizzy way to cash her chips, the girl kept the blade hidden in her palm.
Lemon had grown up hard in Dregs. She prided herself on knowing bad news when she saw it. And though Hunter was all the wrong sort of trouble for the wrong sort of people, Lemon didn’t sense any hostility from the woman directed at her. If anything, she seemed … protective? The way she spoke, the way she wrapped an arm around Lemon’s waist as they rode. Standing close and guarding her like a keepsake.
Whatever BioMaas wanted Lemon for, they obviously wanted her alive. But the girl sure as hells wasn’t happy about getting snaffled from her friends.
First chance I get, I gotta …
What?
Run? On foot? Out here in the wastes?
Dammit, Fresh, being gorgeous just won’t cut it here. Time to use that Brain thing people keep telling you about.
Lemon sucked her lip, searching inside her skull for some sort of plan and coming up empty. Hunter reached into a saddlebag, fished out a small rectangular package wrapped in wax paper. Unfolding the wrapping, she held it out on her palm. Lemon squinted at the offering, saw it was a block of mottled green …
… actually she had no idea what it was.
“Does she hunger?” Hunter asked.
“That’s food?”
“Algae. Insects.”
Lemon felt her gorge rising again. “Thanks, I’ll skip it.”
Hunter shrugged, shoved the block into her mouth and chewed soundlessly. Lemon took a swig from the water flask, spat the taste of vomit from her mouth.
Might as well get her talking …
“So how’d you find me, anyways?” she asked.
Hunter ran a hand down the horsething’s flank. “Mai’a smelled her.”
The beast shivered, the mane of spines rasping against each other.
“Look, sorry,” Lemon said. “I know it’s been a while since I had a shower. But I didn’t think I stank bad enough to track me from the BioMaas capital.”
Hunter’s lips curled in a motherly smile. “Had scent from Lemonfresh’s blood sample taken aboard kraken. Nau’shi’s Carer did not realize how important Lemonfresh was, or she never would have been released in first place. But we knew where Lemonfresh came ashore. Tracked her from there. A Hunter never misses our mark.”
“Our mark?”
“We are legion, Lemonfresh,” the woman said. “We are hydra.”
Lemon sucked her