CamelToe was a city-state of roughly five thousand. The name had come about because the settlement’s founders, homeless teens, thought it was funny. A few hundred orphaned or abandoned kids had settled in the McMansions clustered around the mountain’s western side and foothills. They’d scrounged grow lamps and engines and weaponry and, today, the denizens of “the Toe” had the strongest city-state between California and the Kingdom of Albuquerque.

Roland was their guardian.

Mind you, they’d never asked him to guard them. The polis had been doing quite well, thank you very much, when he’d shown up and built his shack in the middle of their only park. A delegation of armed Toe-ans had shown up to politely evict Roland and he’d been forced to carve off their foreskins as a show of dominance. They’d sent a single negotiator next and worked out a thoroughly beneficial arrangement: Roland would aid in the city’s defense in exchange for his now-­departed shack and, twice a year, all the narcotics he could carry home from their harvest.

It was an arrangement Roland had enjoyed. He was frustrated that Jim’s men had forced him to destroy his beloved hovel. But it was hard for him to be angry, all the same. The sun was out now, and it was early enough that the day’s heat had yet to set in. The great red desert and the carcass of Phoenix stretched out around them and, to Roland’s eyes, it was all beautiful.

Once Jim had called the fight, a pair of boxy, armored heli-­transports had flown in another squad of his men. They’d assembled a brunch spread, complete with a table and two wicker chairs. Roland hoped his old friend was doing this to show off and not planning an actual meal. The acid twisted Roland’s guts into knots and effectively killed his appetite. He was still high enough that familiar boulders around his home seem to flex and wobble like great mounds of red jelly.

Jim’s face, however, was rock solid. Roland focused on it while the rest of the world blurred. A towel came into his hands, and he realized a moment later that Jim had handed it to him. Roland wiped the crusted gore from around his shoulder, where the tiny robots in his blood had finished re-attaching his arm. It was a messy process that involved a lot of shuffling bad blood out of the skin in sludgy red globs. The globs looked a bit like the boulders, now that he thought about it.

Jim’s mercs were over by one of the aircraft, getting worked over by a medical team that must’ve been waiting in the wings this whole time. The acrylic stink of fear wafted off them from thirty feet away.