Page 7 of Dustwalker

And what then? It would accomplish nothing, would fulfill no directives, would bring Ronin no closer to the truth of his core programming.

And Warlord had many more bots bearing that symbol in his service.

The few belongings Ronin had left behind in his residence in the bot district could be replaced. He could turn around and walk away right now.

He recognized it as an illogical overreaction, but that didn’t stop him from being tempted by the idea. The Dust had eroded his patience for these overbearing formalities. Out there, things were dictated by the rules of survival, not the arbitrary policies of a self-important local leader.

But Cheyenne remained an important place to restock and care for his gear. No one could walk the wasteland for long without supplies.

“Steel. Copper. Plastic. Damaged power cells,” Ronin said.

“Quantities?” demanded Baron.

“Will be determined by the scrapper.”

For five and a half seconds, none of them spoke. The wind wailed over the wastes and the distant shouts of humans drifted over from the slums.

“We need to send on word and wait for your entry to be approved,” Reg finally said, head twitching to the side once.

“Fine. Be sure to send the answer over to Centennial, and don’t forget to explain to Warlord why my haul is being traded there instead.” Ronin turned on his heel. Centennial was one hundred and thirty kilometers away. He could be there by morning. But it was a much smaller community and couldn’t offer the same price for goods as Cheyenne.

“Wait, dustwalker,” Reg said.

Ronin halted, slipping a finger behind the trigger guard of his rifle. Most settlement-dwellers, whether mechanical or organic, had been relatively fair in their dealings with him. The reavers kept to the Dust, for the most part. But Warlord’s town wasn’t normal in many ways.

After another pause, Reg spat, “Enter.”

Ronin didn’t immediately remove his finger from the trigger. He’d been pushing for a fight, he realized. Baiting, as humans sometimes called it. He forcibly eased his grip on the rifle and redirected himself toward Cheyenne.

“You’d be better served behind the barriers. Picked up sight of you just over two miles out. Easy targets,” Ronin said as he passed between the two guards and through the concrete barricade.

They made no reply, but he saw them exchange a glance in his peripheral vision.

He walked in the shadow of the wall. The factory to his left had once been a refinery, but Warlord’s bots must have repurposed it; there hadn’t been any oil pumped in this region for at least two hundred years. The chain link fence around it was mostly intact, though it was a patchwork of rusted steel and newer sections likely taken from the supply warehouse Ronin had searched on his way back to town.

Steadily, voices came into audio range—the drone of conversationsfrom the market and the shouts of humans calling for children to return home, as nightfall was fast approaching. He didn’t divert any processing power to isolating and amplifying the individual voices. Their words didn’t matter. Everyone was simply doing their best to survive.

Ronin simply needed to offload his scrap and get repaired. Come morning, he’d pick a new direction and start walking. He didn’t have to return to Cheyenne if he didn’t want to.

As he walked, another sound caught his attention over the rest. High-pitched, clanking tinkles; little bits of metal tapping together, perhaps. He’d noticed it in this part of town before but had never investigated.

The first of the human shacks entered his view as the path shifted gently northwest, leading away from the fenced-in factory. Ronin glanced up at the cracked remains of the roadway that had once bridged the tracks. The north end used to lead directly into the bot district. Most of the rubble had been scavenged, leaving only the most irregular chunks of concrete and rebar piled beneath the crumbled ramps.

The sound grew more distinct as he neared the human dwellings. He couldn’t help but compare the shacks to the wall on the other side of the road. The resemblance was undeniable. Both were makeshift declarations of defiance in a homicidal world, imperfect but somehow practical.

He didn’t understand the logic chains his processors followed, not that he could call them that; there was little logical thought involved. These were observations and baseless speculations. Nothing that did him any good.

Yet wasn’t it that manner of thinking that allowed him to find what other dustwalkers had missed in the wasteland?

Louder, higher clangs claimed Ronin’s attention. He turned his head to the left, where a shack stood at the edge of the dirt-and-gravel pathway. A metal loop with an eclectic array of items attached to it dangled from its eaves.

He changed his course, walking to the hanging object. The metal ring was hung by fishing line, with more lines of varying lengths suspending forks, spoons, knives, and keys from it. The items bumped into each other in the wind, producing sounds in erratic tones and pitches.

Why would a human create such a thing? Did they find the noises it made appealing?

Another sound drifted to his receptors, this one from a living throat, wordless but distinct. Humming. Inside the shack, a female human hummed along with the chiming, matching its pace but not its notes, complementing it without mimicking.

Tilting his head to the side, Ronin approached the shack’s entryway. A gap had been left between the door and its frame, granting him view of the figure moving inside.