Finally, the damn village. It had been pathetically close to the car they'd made their bed. It was useless to spend energy grouching about it now, but they grouched anyway. On principal.

They passed a front lawn dotted with old graves. A season's worth of soft new wildflowers thrived over the mounds, soon they would overgrow the rocks True had placed as headstones. The village stood empty, a shell of a ghost town overrun with poplar saplings and a rampant raspberry bush. Its residents dead or gone and its remnants all looted in the earlier days. It didn't even have a name anymore. Some dumbass had robbed the town sign long before True had come along, and the place was too tiny to have a pinpoint on any map True had scoured. Although they knew generally where it would be based on bigger towns to the north and the east, so this place worked as a half decent map marker.

Nott that they would admit it out loud, but they liked the place. They liked the quiet, the isolation. Nobody bothered to stop for long because everybody knew the village, like every other small town, village, hamlet, et cetera, had been cleaned out. Nobody bothered, except True, who stopped to bury a few more ex-residents whenever they passed through.

Not this time.

There, something to grouch about. They didn't have time to stop and dig muddy holes for a couple rotting corpses because the infernal Red Faction was trying to end the world. They hoofed a hunk of broken curb. Radio skittered out of the way of the formidable concrete missile.

"Don't get in the way," they grumbled, marching past it down the center road that had one been the village's main access, shopping district, and town square all in one. Tall elms spread wide branches over the roads, saplings filled the spaces between the older trees. The pollen irritated True's allergies, but on the east end of the village a house sat back from the road, with a yard dominated by a pine tree that suffocated the encroaching wildflowers under a thick blanket of pine needles, and when it rained the air felt fresher under its branches. True couldn't really smell the pine, but they pretended the could in those rare moments.

Like the graves, the pine house would have to wait for another day. They could only afford one stop in the village.

A gas station full of rust and broken window glass was losing the battle against local flora. Grass pushed cracks through the tile floor and a chokecherry tree swarmed the west wall of the squat, square building. True argued with a tangle of determined grass for access through the front door.

"I'll light you on fire," they threatened between sneezes. Out of the corner of their eye, Radio twitched and slinked off to do whatever it did when it wasn't hovering. They should have called it Whiitigo for all the skulking it did. Wiping their nose and accompanying hole, they wedged their way into the gas station and trampled a path all around the empty shelves.

The contents of erupted milk cartons coated the insides of the glass door refrigerators. Someone had been very careful to shut each door, trapping the colony of rot inside. Turning from that disaster, they kicked around under the front counter until they scrounged up a map. The paper was soft with age, grime yellowed the edges and faded the ink. But it was legible. Swiping off the counter with a crash, they flattened the map over it. Now, how were they getting to Vancouver.

That far west was out of their usual territory. They needed a way through the mountains, preferably a straight shot but they would settle for a winding highway if they had to. Their sense of direction was decent, but they weren't keen on getting lost in the great Canadian Rockies, what with all the great Canadian angry bears and the great Canadian miserable weather.

A swish and scrunch pulled their attention to the door. They reached for their shove. If Linc or his goonies showed face in this village, True swore they would mash their noses in. Was it too much to ask for one put stop where something didn't go catastrophically wrong?

A kid popped into the station, shaking a tangle of grass from her ankle. It took her a beat to get free and look up, hair beads swishing around her chin. One of her eyes turned in, and the vision in her other eye must not have been great because it took her another beat to make out True. Then, of course, she screamed.

"Mom!" She fumbled a switchblade from her belt. "Shadow dweller!"

True groaned, eyes rolling. Children. The last thing they needed was an overprotective mom taking their head off over a case of mistaken identity.

A metal staff preceded the mother into the gas station. True levelled their shovel right back at her close-cropped curls.

The woman scanned them up and down, finally settling her gaze on the scar. Neither revulsion nor fear warped her expression, which was more than True expected.

"Friend or foe?" she asked, lingering on the scar.

"Neutral," True answered.

A second form materialized behind the woman, broader and roughly the same height. He nudged her.

"Look at the pack," he said into her ear.

The woman's gaze flicked over their pack, and, hesitantly, she drew back her staff to rest it on her muscled shoulder. A nice gesture, but it didn't do much to put True at ease. She was blocking the only exit.

"You must be brand new if you're looking through this place," she said.

True lifted a corner of the map for her to see. "Looking for a route."

"Where you headed?"

"Vancouver."

Recognition flickered over the woman's face. She bit her lip, and they could tell by the way her foot tapped on the buckled vinyl floor that she was weighing out a decision.

"We could get you out there," she offered, "depending on what's in that pack."

A trade. Now there was a language they could speak. Come to think of it, they hadn't traded their haul from the cul-de-sac. That left them decent stuff to negotiate with. And they could let themself by a little generous with it, the idea of hiking that extra weight across the mountains did not appeal to them.

"How fast can you get me there?"

"In a hurry?" the start of a laugh lightened the woman's question. It died under True's mirthless expression. "Fourteen days."

"Can you make it quicker?"

The levity returned, wry and teasing. "Twelve, if you can keep up."

"Twelve, then." True nodded, clipping their shovel to their pack. They motioned the strangers inside and took a moment to assess their clients. A woman, a man, and a beanpole of a half-grown child. Family unit, maybe? All with dark skin, bodies toughened by the elements, and hiking packs. All of their footwear was sturdy and well-worn. Traveller footwear. They noted the outline of a pendant under the man's grey shirt and pinholes in the woman's earlobes. That was as good a place as any.

"I've got earrings," they started, tapping the silver hoop in their own right ear. "Good quality."

"Clean?"

"Clean." If you counted 'plucked from a corpse and dumped straight into the bag' as clean. There was no visible gunk on them, anyways. Besides, they'd never known anyone to die from wearing corpse jewelry.

"What else?"

"What are you looking for?"

"Thread, sewing needles, bandages," the woman listed, "got any of those?"

"Dental thread," True offered.

"That'll do."

Negotiation continued for a few more minutes, the woman did most of the talking while the kid wobbled around the store plucking price tags off the shelves. She held the tags up to her good eye.

They settled on the dental floss, two pairs of good wool socks, a half skein of yellow yarn that had probably started to dry rot but at least wasn't infested, the matching knitting needles, three carabiners, and an empty metal bottle with a screw top.

"The west cost is a little far for a scavenger, eh?" the man spoke up. He had an accent they couldn't place. They leaned away as he bent his head over the old map. Crowds were one thing, they couldn't help getting bumped around once in a while. But they didn't have to like people in their space.

"You're going," True said.

"We are meeting with our caravan," the man replied.

"Know anything about the Faction over there?"

The man's head snapped up. At once, the civility the woman had been trying to hold up, dropped. Rocking back on her heels, she tapped her staff twice on the floor to catch the kid's attention.

"Kiari, outside."

In one fluid motion she had the end of the staff jammed under True's chin.

Shit, maybe they'd misjudged the group. A family, dressed for travel, on their way to a caravan. It screamed civilian. And True had never seen a factioneer as young as the kid, but maybe that was part of the disguise. The woman tipped her head, and the man broke from the counter, following the child out the door.

"Whatever your business with the Faction is, we don't want any part of it," the woman said. Not factioneers, then. True's fingers lifted slowly to the staff, curled around it. They kept their other hand out where she could see it, displaying their empty palm.

"They're killing people," they said when they were sure the staff wouldn't kick into their throat when they spoke.

"We know. We're staying out of it. Whatever new world order they're trying to pull, it's not our business."

"It will be when there's none of us left to feed you."

The woman shook her head, lowering her staff. "If we stick out necks out there won't be any of us left to feed, and I have a daughter to protect.

True bit their tongue, considering. "The Faction is going after civs now?"

That was new. Until two days ago, even the violence against scavengers had been limited. True was under the impression that the Red Faction needed civilians on their side. Everyone needed civs. Just like everyone needed scavengers to fuel the After Market, and everyone needed the After Market to bolster the market, and everyone needed, however reluctantly, the Faction to act as healers. They were all cogs in a closed system, one part couldn't mangle another part without collapsing the whole machine.

But maybe the Faction wanted that.

"Not exactly, but there have been an awful lot of suspicious disappearances lately." The woman flipped her staff onto her shoulder and moved to exit.

"Wait," True called. When the woman hesitated, they pulled a highlight from a dust-coated mug by the register. "I'll give you everything we agreed on if you show me the quickest way to Vancouver on the map."

The woman drummed her fingers on her staff.

"I have some chocolate, too," they added reluctantly. It was basically robbery, considering the woman had been ready to walk them there herself a minute ago.

"Fine," she said, plucking the highlighter from their hand. Bending over the map, she started tracing. "You're awfully determined to start shit with the Faction."

"Yeah, well, they killed a merchant I liked."

The woman gave them a look that felt like an x-ray peeling back all the layer of bloodshed that had soaked into their skin those past few days. She popped the highlighter cap. The path was traced, the goods handed over.

"Good luck," she said as parting words. She sounded like she meant it.

True was busy studying the highlighter path marked on the map when Radio drifted in. It dangled a length of springy black fabric in front of their nose.

"What's this?" They took the fabric. It was soft to the touch and formed a tube. Radio motioned to the lower half of its face. Oh, a mask.

The fabric rested gently on the line where their bandana had dug in.

"Thank you," they said. They passed it a pair of socks.

Radio drew a bumpy bubble in the dust on the dead computer monitor and pointed to the door, a questioning look on its face.

"Travellers, I traded for directions." True answered. They peered over the top of their new mask a Radio while it bent to examine the map. A question rolled on their tongue. They hadn't forgotten last night. Radio was a shadow dweller, a monster. The thing children hid under the covers from.

But they hadn't forgotten yesterday morning, either.

"Are you coming with me?" The enemy of their enemy was their friend, that was the saying, wasn't it?

It tilted its head a smidge. They mirrored it. Once, they would have mistaken its gaze as vacant. An easy mistake to make, with eyes that black and lonely, and a face that seemed to forget emotion. But they could see the sharpness there now. The way it studied, not stared.

"It'll be dangerous." They added, memories of Radio effortlessly dislocating Eliza's arm flashing through their head. "I know stalking me is your thing, but I'm sure you can find another ugly bastard to follow around. Maybe one who gets blown up less."

Radio shook its head, a wry smile fighting for a place on its lips. It held out a fist, waited for True to touch their knuckles to its.

Well, that was settled then.

"We're gonna die," True said, picking up the map. Radio lost its battle with the grin.