Page 6 of Dustwalker

There was no light inside, so he switched his optics to infrared and swept the room. The stalls were all open, all empty, and the only heat he detected was from his own reflection in the shattered mirror.

He proceeded to the men’s restroom. It was similarly cold; whoever had been here was gone. Reverting to his normal optics, Ronin drew his flashlight from an inside coat pocket and clicked it on.

The remains of a small fire lay beneath the open ceiling vent. Nearby were a few tiny scraps of cloth, the dried-out bones of a small animal—a prairie dog, based on the size and skull shape—and a crumpled tin can. The dust wasn’t as thick in this room, but the disturbed spot on the ground indicated someone had lain near the fire.

Ronin stepped around the leavings and moved to the sink. Though the porcelain was yellowed and run through with fine cracks, it remained in one piece. Within lay a few hand-rolled cigarettes, with flakes of whatever plant had been used to make them gathered in the basin. A canteen, wrapped in tattered canvas, stood on the flat part of the sink near the mirror.

Dark, rust-colored drops had dried around the edges and inside of the sink. Blood.

An injured human had sheltered here and had either left in a hurry or been taken.

Letting the shoulder strap take the weight of his rifle, Ronin picked up the canteen and shook it. Liquid sloshed inside. The container didn’t have many uses for a bot, but it would for a human. He’d done good trade with them in the past. If not in Cheyenne, he’d exchange it elsewhere. There were other towns on the edge of the Dust, and he had no true ties to Cheyenne.

He slipped the canteen into his largest coat pocket. It clinked against the ammunition.

Returning to the cafeteria, he switched the flashlight off and put it away, turning his optics toward the sunlight. It had taken on the red-orange hue that signaled the approaching sunset.

There were thousands more square feet to comb over, even without counting the trailers outside, but it would be best to head back. Minor as it was, his damage would only cause more complications the longer he ignored it, and his pack was full of scrap already.

He’d spent 51,642 nights in the Dust and the surrounding wildssince his awakening. More than enough time to know that, despite his night-vision and infrared optics, the world was even more dangerous after dark.

Return, trade, recharge, repair. Then he could set out into the Dust again.

The bot district’s lights shone bright as Ronin closed in on Cheyenne’s eastern entrance. The buildings inside the wall stood in stark contrast to the ones outside. Most of the structures in the district had been constructed before the Blackout, maintained over the years by automated units that had such tasks hard coded in their programming. Those bots existed in many towns. The majority lacked the higher cognitive functions of more advanced bots and synths.

Still, Ronin envied them. They possessed definitive purposes, dictated directly by the Creators, that hadn’t been claimed by the ravages of time.

The town’s upkeep wasn’t unusual. Many towns with high concentrations of functioning bots had pre-Blackout buildings, in some cases with electricity and running water. But the wall set Cheyenne apart. It surrounded the entirety of the bot district, with a separate section containing the market. Standing three meters tall, it was an amalgamation of mismatched materials, much of which had been salvaged from the buildings that once stood outside its borders—sheet metal, wooden boards and planks, bricks, concrete blocks, and corrugated tin roofing.

Ronin had only seen such structures erected by humans. This one protected only bots.

The main road into Cheyenne followed mostly buried train tracks. To the north stood the wall, sheltering the pristine buildings within and blocking everything from view save the light cast onto the clouds overhead. To the south were several old factories, now silent and still. A pair of guards waited in front of the roadblock between the disparate sectors.

One was a synth who’d had the skin peeled off the top of his head to display the polished metal cranial casing beneath, where the gear and skull symbol serving as Warlord’s mark was painted. He called himself Reg.

The other, Baron, was an earlier model bot, lacking an artificialepidermis. It was humanoid, but its limbs were disproportionate; it could never be mistaken for an organic. Baron wore Warlord’s mark on its chest, the paint faded and flaking.

Not unlike the wall, the guards’ rifles were hobbled together from mismatched parts that shouldn’t have fit together.

Ronin’s vision flared and darkened as his optics adjusted to the changing light.

“Coming in late, dustwalker,” said Reg.

“Warlord doesn’t appreciate visitors after dark.” Baron’s words were tinny, as though echoing within its vocal synthesizers.

“But you already know that. We’re simply obligated to inform you of the local customs and policies.”

“Praise the Creators,” Ronin replied, “for they programmed you with far more patience than I. Warlord actually make you play these games every time, or have you two learned to take delight in it?”

The guards exchanged a glance.

Reg lifted his chin. “What’s in your bag?”

“Scrap,” Ronin said.

“I expect vague answers from meatbags, dustwalker. What’s in it?”

Responses flitted through Ronin’s processors, assessed and discarded rapidly. It would be easy to deactivate these two. He had twelve rounds in his rifle; from this range, it wouldn’t take more than three shots into each bot to knock out their power cells. Even if they managed to get their rifles up quickly enough to return fire, their weapons were as likely to explode as they were to shoot.