Page 100 of Dustwalker

Every minute of his journey back to Cheyenne had felt longer than a year of his life before. Each step had been an unfathomable distance for his damaged stride. The possibility of never seeing Lara again had altered his perception of…everything.

Stepping outside, he closed and locked the door behind him. The merest hint of dawn left the sky a dark, smudgy gray. He walked north toward Warlord’s pieced-together wall.

Love.

He understood the word, at its most basic level. It was a deep, affectionate attachment to someone or something. How could a seemingly simple term carry so much weight, so much depth?

To his left, leaves rustled in the wind, a reminder that life always found a way, even if it needed help from time to time.

Curiosity had taken root in him that first night, and it had sprouted into fascination. Now, it was a tree tall enough to put all others in its shade. Lara was part of his existence. Every simulation he ran regarding his future invariably included her, and he dismissed any that didn’t, because he knew he could never let her go.

Despite her loathing in the beginning, Lara had come to see him not as a casing housing a collection of parts, not as a bot, but as Ronin. She sawhim. The change in her perspective was clear, and it had been highlighted by how fiercely she’d struggled against it.

She’d told him she loved him. That was no small admission, and she hadn’t made it carelessly. They both knew words could be cheap, even meaningless, that they could be spoken without conviction, uttered with duplicity, or hurled with cruelty. But she had proven her words through her actions.

This was all too new to him, too difficult to sort out in a mind operating on logic and mathematics, but…he thought he loved her too.

Ronin turned the corner and proceeded east, parallel to the wall. The man who’d written the attic journal had undoubtedly walked this same road years ago. The writer had loved his family, had been loved by them, and had livedbefore Warlord tore his already damaged world apart.

Despite the powerful storms, lack of resources, and sharp contrasts between hot and cold, the Dust wasn’t the true danger of this world. It was a force of nature, incapable of malice.

The true danger, the true tragedy, was wrought by the Creators’ children, who destroyed each other without thought.

People like Warlord were what Lara needed to be protected from.

Amidst all this indifference, death, and devastation, had Ronin really found love?

Why else would he be so ready and willing to give up everything he’d known for decades? Why else would he be so eager to embrace change? He was about to cast logic aside in pursuit of an emotion he should never have experienced.

The clinic was quiet as he turned off the main street and approached it. The gearheads on guard outside stared at him, making no comment as he passed. Only the glass entry doors were illuminated. Inside, the place was as white and sterile as ever, so unchanged that when Mercy looked up at him from her usual spot at the front desk he wondered if he’d lapsed into a full-sensory memory. His stride was suddenly weightless, and everything moved too slowly.

Mercy’s lips parted, but she didn’t smile, didn’t greet him. Following her gaze, he glanced down at his ruined torso.

“Just need some reskinning,” he said.

She didn’t seem to appreciate the humor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Ronin watched as the skin on his right leg was cut and peeled away. The machine’s larger arms lowered, and numerous attachments went to work. Within a minute, everything from his knee down had been detached. He didn’t shut down the sensors in the area. The pain was intense, but fleeting, a brief flicker of life. He knew such sensations were both more intense and longer lasting for humans.

After his leg was repaired and reattached, the machine moved upward, making minor repairs to his damaged internals and sealing the holes in his casing, buffing and polishing the once damaged areas. Finally, it loomed over his head, its tiny arms extracting the shrapnel embedded in his left optic. Before the final repairs began, Ronin obeyed the attendant’s directions and deactivated his optical input.

He occupied himself by sifting through his memory. He replayed Lara’s dance, reviewed their conversations and their arguments, lamented the amount of time he’d spent apart from her. Echoes of what he’d experienced during their couplings skittered across his electrodes.

More than anything else, he replayed her confession of love.

The attendant directed Ronin to the epidermal synthesizer once his optics were online. He continued his reveries inside the chamber.

He hadn’t told Lara he loved her. He hadn’t known how to, though the words were so simple; they would’ve taken less than one second to say. She’d given no indication that she had been bothered by it, but that didn’t make it all right.

When the dermal repairs were completed, Ronin dressed himself. The shirt Lara had made was more comfortable against his skin than anything had ever been, apart from Lara herself. He headed for the exit after thanking the attendant.

He’d been away from home for twelve hours and thirty-five minutes, and he wanted nothing more than to be back with Lara. To tell her that he loved her too.

An itch pulsed across his cheek. He ignored it.

“Good to see you fully repaired,” Mercy said pleasantly when he reached the front desk.