Page 60 of Dustwalker

When her tears spilled down her cheeks, she released a small, embarrassed laugh.

“You’re turning me into such a sap,” she said, throat tight as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

Ronin closed the short distance between them. Slowly, he raised a hand and cradled her jaw, brushing the moisture from her cheek with his thumb. Her heart quickened. His touch was so light, so gentle, that she couldn’t believe it was the same hand that shattered the counter.

Lara stood utterly still. Such tenderhearted contact was foreign to her, and yet, it felt…right. She knew he’d stop if she asked, knew that she could pull away and he wouldn’t pursue her. Instead, she smiled and leaned into his touch, pressing her cheek into his palm. It was warm.

It wasreal.

Ronin’s gaze softened. “I’ll come back as quickly as I can.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Nothing appeared out of the ordinary when Ronin stepped out of his dwelling. It was another typical morning in Cheyenne—the sky was a yellow-tinged gray, the wind blew steady at a speed of sixteen kilometers per hour from the west, and the temperature had already hit seventy-nine degrees. It would be in the mid-eighties by the afternoon. The park across the street was empty, quiet, and green, alive but unchanging.

The sound of the deadbolt sliding into place as he locked it was oddly pronounced, shattering the morning’s peacefulness.

Lara’s words from three weeks ago echoed from his memory.

I’m sure that’ll do wonders to keep bots out.

He walked forward, crossing the bot district, passing through the gates into the market, then continuing south into the human slums. All the while, his sensors searched for something, for anything, abnormal enough to justify turning around. He noted the discrepancy in his stride, which was twenty-five percent slower than usual, but he couldn’t bring himself to adjust it.

Countless calculations and simulations concluded that Lara would be fine during his absence. The chances of anything happening were slim so long as she remained indoors. And if any bots came knocking, she knew to hide in the attic.

The words from the journal skittered across his processors, and heabruptly shifted functions. Diagnostics checks, system analyses, rough mapping of his potential route; anything but revisiting what he’d read.

Ronin forced his attention to his surroundings. The humans’ homes had been constructed from rubble Warlord didn’t want. They were collections of disparate materials, often in poor condition, that should never have held together. Yet somehow, they stood in defiance of the pristine buildings within the wall, in defiance of the Dust and its furious storms. In defiance of Warlord.

There was no elegance here, no precision or cleanliness. Just rugged determination. The humans had taken what the bots deemed trash and repurposed it with imagination and ingenuity.

Some of the residents stopped to stare at Ronin as he passed. They would know, if only by the state of his clothing, that he wasn’t one of them. No one spoke to him.

Many of the humans kept small gardens of stubby, struggling crops, some in patches of dirt behind their shacks, others in cracked pottery or ancient tubs and sinks. A few residences had makeshift pens with pigs, goats, or chickens. It was a far cry from the fields outside Cheyenne, where Warlord kept agricultural bots tending neat rows of crops to harvest and trade to the humans, but it was something.

It was surviving.

These people didn’t need programming to dictate their day-to-day activities. They did whatever their situation called for, whether it was growing food, repairing a building, or battling an enemy.

Lara made her own way. She found small pleasures where she could. Where she couldn’t, she gritted her teeth and pressed on.

One point six kilometers south of the human slums, Ronin stopped. Without meaning to, he’d followed the route Lara had taken the day he’d made his offer to her—down Morrie Avenue into the ruins of southern Cheyenne. The silent, crumbled, sunbaked remains of houses where humans and bots once lived in peace surrounded him, but he could see the area as it had been that day. He could see the relentless rain, the small rivers flowing along the cracked streets, the puddles filling the breaks in the concrete.

His memory replayed Lara, defeated and soaked, kneeling over the storm drain now at his feet, her tears indistinguishable from the rainwater.

Ronin tilted his head, staring down at the clogged drain. A glint ofreflected light caught his attention. He dropped to one knee, enhancing his optics to locate the source. Decades of buildup cluttered the drain—small chunks of concrete, scraps of tattered cloth, broken pieces of wood.

And there, lodged amidst the refuse, was a bit of gold.

Slinging his rifle behind his back, he took hold of the metal grate with both hands and pulled up, diverting extra power to his actuators. The grate resisted briefly before the asphalt around its edges cracked and crumbled. Dust rose in the air as the metal broke free, raining bits of debris.

Hefting the grate aside with a heavyclang, Ronin targeted the spot where he’d seen the glint and reached into the refuse, clawing out the object. He held it up on his open palm.

It was a ring. A slender gold band, unadorned but for its solitaire diamond setting. After brushing the dirt off it, he took it between forefinger and thumb and raised it to the light. The diamond wasn’t its only adornment, after all. There were words etched in delicate script along the inside of the band.

Yours Until the End of Time.