Page 54 of Dustwalker

Someone to protect.

No. The Dust was no place for her, no place foranyone. The danger was immense, even for an experienced bot like Ronin, and he would never put her at such risk.

He opened the journal again, and he was still reading when therising sun crested the roof to cast its pure, golden light on the treetops across the street.

The letters on the last page were distorted by haste.

They’re coming for me. I think everyone else is already gone, and in a few more days, they’ll have that wall finished and I’ll be trapped. I don’t know why I stayed this long. Probably because I can still remember the smiles on the faces of my wife and kids while we played at Holliday Park… Maybe, if I make it out, I’ll see them out there, where the dust always blows.

This is it now. If you’re human, you’d better get the fuck outside this wall. During the big fight outside the bar on 19th, someone cut the leader bot’s face, and now there’s no mercy, no warnings. This part of Cheyenne belongs to those things. We can have the rubble beyond.

After all the damage and destruction we’ve faced, people haven’t learned a goddamned thing. They didn’t fight the bots for survival, they fought because they thought this place, these buildings, really matter. The lives we lived before…they’re gone, and we’re never getting them back. They’re

The tail of that final letter trailed across the page like it had been slashed by a knife. Ronin stared at it while the sun came up, as trapped in place as the writer had been.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lara bit down on the cucumber to hold it in her mouth. Leaning forward, she placed her hands on the edge of Ronin’s worktable and pushed it to the other side of the main room, directly before the wide front window. Climbing atop it, she drew her legs up and draped a forearm over her knees. The cucumber crunched when she took a bite. Its fresh, mild flavor—with just a hint of bitterness—burst over her tongue.

She looked out the window as she ate, past the short wall of shrubs surrounding Ronin’s home to the field across the street. Ronin called it a park. The sun was bright today, shining through the trees to cast dancing shadows over the lush grass beyond.

In the distance, strangely shaped bots tended the park. Some of them looked a lot like the cars in the book upstairs. They seemed to be trimming the grass. Others that were more human shaped moved amongst the bushes and trees scattered around the grounds, clipping and watering.

Lara envied the bots their purpose. Damn it, she needed one, too! She’d never been idle for so long. Three weeks in this house with nothing to do but stare out the windows was driving her crazy. Yeah, it was a roof over her head, food in her belly, and clothes on her back, so she would’ve been stupid to screw it up…but boredom was harder to deal with than she’d imagined.

When Ronin was around, it wasn’t nearly as bad. Itwas still hard to look at him after her dream, but their conversations broke up the tedium of her days. While he was gone—whether resupplying at the market or searching the bot district for signs of Tabitha—she wandered the house, as though she’d suddenly find something new in the mostly empty rooms. She’d even untangled the knotty mess of fishing lines on her chime and hung it in the kitchen beside the pots suspended from the ceiling.

If Lara were honest with herself, part of her was grateful when Ronin was gone. Though nothing had been as vivid as that first dream, he remained in her thoughts every night, their bodies intertwining in the depths of her sleep. She saw flashes of that too-real dream whenever she looked at him.

Weren’t dreams supposed to fade over time? The clarity of this one had only intensified as the days passed.

Today, lethargy had taken root in her, and she’d lounged in bed far longer than normal. It wasn’t until midday that she’d dragged herself out of her room. When she’d stepped into the hallway, Ronin’s door had been closed. After her usual routine in the toilet room, he still hadn’t emerged, so Lara had gone downstairs to get something to eat.

She’d danced for him each night, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes here in the main room. Never the same moves, never quite the same rhythm or flow. Ronin, however, was unchanging. He sat and stared, expressionless and without comment. His answers to her questions afterward remained infuriatingly brief and evasive.

And, despite that, she still couldn’t look at him without thinking about his body atop hers, his hands all over her, his cock?—

No. Stop it, Lara!

She took another bite, chewing quickly in her annoyance. These thoughts hadto stop.

When she finished the cucumber, she wrapped her arms around her legs, locking them in place by grasping her wrist. She tapped her feet on the table and hummed softly to occupy her mind. Soon, she was swept up in the song. She swayed her shoulders and rocked side to side, hair brushing her back.

Something moved at the edge of her vision. Lara jumped, releasing her legs. Her toes hit the wall, and she hissed in pain.

Rubbing her sore toes, she glared at Ronin, who stood a few feet away, dressed in his fatigues and a gray, short-sleeved shirt that showed off his biceps. “Damn it, Ronin, can’t you ever saysomethingwhen you walk into a room? Or do you always have to do it silently like some creep?”

He stared back at her. “Am I required to announce myself in my own residence?”

“Yeah. You are. You don’t just sneak up on people like that.”

Eyes narrowing, he cocked his head. “Why are you sitting on the table?”

She glanced down, ran her palm over the table’s surface, and looked back at him. “Why not?”

Ronin lifted a hand, extended a finger, and pointed to the chair she’d left near the other wall with his tools piled on the floor next to it.

“What about it?” Lara tossed her hair back over her shoulder.