Harper watched the dust trickle down between her gloved fingers. Payton’s gun, the one he had entrusted her with, was gone. It saved her life in the Siegfried. And she lost it.

  The young duster felt a tug in her heart, shame mixed with fear. She told herself it was stupid. Maybe those cartel scouts grabbed it on their run, maybe a passing scavenger or even one of the Randuur. If it was the latter, maybe she could even get it back.

  She didn’t want to think about it too long. No, Mirko was dead, had to be. Who knows how many shots Walters got in with the Macher. Old news. Just a shame she couldn’t get the gun back.

  She turned and began to walk towards the Hail Mary. The back was open to allow the Randuur to load it up, internal fans blaring to keep the dust out. A cloud of the stuff was kicked up by the flow of air, and though Harper wore goggles, she instinctively held up her arm to protect her eyes as she walked in.

  When she lowered it, Carin’s rifle was pointed at her face.

  “What the fuck, Carin?!” she shouted. She glanced at Walters in the pilot’s seat, hands up with young Lukas pressing the barrel of his gun to the back of his head. Ivo stood in the middle, between piles of salvage taken from the Siegfried’s carcass. He shouted something Harper couldn’t hear over the sound of spinning rotors.

  The next thing Harper felt was a kick from the butt of Carin’s rifle, force that would have broken her nose if it wasn’t covered by her dust mask. She stumbled and fell on her ass. Head spinning, she saw the doors close while the Hail Mary lifted in the air.

  “You fucking cunts!” she shouted and stood. The duster could do nothing but throw a rock at the ship as it flew off into the dust, disappearing into a cloud of grey. Rage filled her, not like anything she had felt before. There was no room for it when she faced Mirko. But here, alone, betrayed, unarmed and left behind? There was room for nothing else.

  She rushed back to the wreck, hoping to find herself a gun. Even if she had to scour the corpses to get it. She had three options: try to walk back to Crantown, try to follow the Hail Mary east and figure out where Walters landed, or sit here and wait for the cartel to show up, hoping they take her on board.

  Alone in the dust, each option carried the distinct risk of getting her killed: by slayers, by wild beasts, by the cartel, by Randuur.

  She found that guard turned slayer she had shot. It felt like a lifetime ago now. His body was rotten and bloated in the open air. Her first kill, made when she was a different person. The guard had been moved since she last saw him, probably by the cartel scouts.

  But his gun was still there. Pistol, 9mm, semi-auto, standard issue for Zindler’s forces. A gun like that wasn’t ideal in the dust, but it was a fine weapon otherwise. A stroke of luck.

  Harper grit her teeth and robbed the corpse for everything it still had. Two magazines, each carrying nine bullets, plus the three still left in the half-empty one still inside. Now she just had to choose which certain death to walk into.

  Walters… that old creep. Concern for his life was what made her decide to follow the Hail Mary, the riskiest of all choices. She didn’t even like the guy, but he saved her life. It would have been so much easier if she still saw him as nothing but a slimy creep, ogling her chest back in the dust ship.

  But now, she knew too much about him. The way he treated Anna, the fact he’d been raised among the Randuur, spent a decade with Payton, somehow found God along the way. Harper doubted any deity would let that greasy old goblin through the gates of heaven willingly, though. She’d make sure he wouldn’t take that journey too soon.

  “Can’t believe I’m risking my life for fucking Walters,” she said to herself as she pushed east, replacing the half-empty magazine with a full one.

  She made her way through the overgrown park into the ruined streets of Riga, as she considered how little everything that had just happened made sense. The Randuur kept Walters and not her because he was a pilot, that much was obvious. But if they were telling the truth about bringing the loot to Crantown, why were they flying the other way? And why did they leave Harper behind in the dust instead of killing her?

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  She couldn’t answer the second question. But the first? Did it mean they had another pilot at camp? Someone to fly the Hail Mary for them, or pawn the ship off to for some extra cads?

  “Oh fuck… no, no, no…” Harper said as the answer flashed through her mind. The missing gun, the fact the Randuur had been lucky enough to guess a dust ship had landed in Crantown. Mirko. He checked every box.

  She told herself there had to be another explanation, even as she rushed through the abandoned streets. Fast, too fast, not even sure if she was headed in the right direction, her breath catching short, her legs starting to ache.

  An hour of climbing over ancient wrecked cars clogging the narrow streets, watching for shadows through the windows of ruined apartments. Old bones hidden under dust cracking under her boots. An army of rust-rats crawling out the nooks and crannies and forming up to rush her, scattering in a panic as she shot a bullet into the horde.

  Her heart beat faster than ever before as Harper realized she was in hell. Alone. Walters was doomed and so was she. She waved her gun around in a panic, pointing at shadows.

  Then she heard gunfire. Close, a hundred, two hundred meters at most.

  She rushed towards it as if it were a cry for help. A few stray shots, nothing more. Harper wondered if she had just heard Walters’s execution, and was doing nothing but run into her own.

  Her first relief in hours came when she saw the Hail Mary, sitting on the rooftop of an abandoned factory. A relief that ended as soon as she saw an unmistakable silhouette limping towards the dust ship.

  Tall, thin, almost lanky. A long black dust coat, unmasked, dark hair flowing in the wind.

  Mirko looked down from the rooftop, right at her. He gave her a salute and a wave. His other hand reached for a holstered revolver. Payton’s Zaykov.

  “No!” Harper screamed, pointing her gun up, firing three times. But she could not calm her breath, could not aim, the range too much for her gun.

  Every shot missed.

  But they were enough to make Mirko give up on the idea of drawing his gun. Instead, the mad duster disappeared into the Hail Mary.

  Harper rushed forward towards the factory, a hopeless endeavor. The dust ship’s fans began to spin. And it rose into the sky, a slave to the madman who killed her captain.

  Harper kept screaming as she emptied the rest of her magazine, firing into the Hail Mary until it disappeared into the ashen sky. Condensation formed in her goggles from the tears welling up in her eyes and the stinging sweat around them.

  There was nothing she could do to stop him now. Harper opened the large doors to the factory and walked in. Her addled mind wondered what sort of ancient arcane technology the factory was for, head spinning, unsure what emotion to land on. She almost laughed as she picked up an empty can from the line. A large Latvian label with a tiny English translation underneath. Canned herring. Something that wouldn’t have been out of place back in New Helsinki.

  Up, down, forward… she wasn’t sure which way to go until she spotted a thin trail of blood, just a couple of tiny drops, leading down into the basement. Perhaps Mirko took a bullet, perhaps his old wounds had reopened. Harper could only hope the injury was making him suffer.

  She followed the trail down, through a heavy steel door left open by Mirko’s escape. The sound of sobbing and screaming in the distance. There was no dust down here, at least not much. No miracle, just simple physics: the chamber was deep enough underground that it didn’t trickle down. This was where the Randuur had made camp.

  It was now a series of tents, some handmade by the nomads using drein hides, others polyester, looted from ruins or bought from the cartels. Many were stained with blood.

  There were nearly two dozen corpses. Women, children, the elderly. Many of the very old and very young were blue with no visible wounds, perhaps poisoned.

  The women and older boys had their throats slit in the night, apart from a couple with bullet holes. The ones who woke up to witness the massacre.

  The only adults among them were Ivo and young Lukas.

  Carin knelt beside her husband’s body, weeping, her clenched fist pounding the ground. Her scarf had fallen down and she glanced at Harper with tearful amber eyes for only a moment, before hiding her face against Ivo’s still chest.

  “Hey Harpy…”

  Harper heard Walters. His voice was weak and quiet. She saw him, lying on the ground. His dark mustache was stained with blood, the shirt under his duster gone from off-white to dark red. “Looks like you made it,” he said, “Just missed the best parts.”

  “No!” she shouted and rushed next to him, pressing her hands over the wound on his stomach. Walters groaned in pain. He gripped her wrists.

  “Don’t… bother kid,” he said, reaching forward to pull down her mask, “It’s nice to see your face one last time. You’ll do alright… Proud of you.”

  His hand dropped to the ground. And the light left those small, beady brown eyes forever.