Bigsby, the post-human Roland had been about to arm-club into submission a day ago, shook his head and groaned in embarrassment. One of the women he’d buried in his collapsed hovel grunted out a laugh. Her name was Nadine, or something with an N, anyway. She and her partner, Azime, were both close assault specialists. Like the rest of the crew, except Sardar, they’d been cold to Roland ever since he’d beat the living hell out of them. Something occurred to him.

“Hey, I’ve got a question for you,” he said to Sardar.

“Yeah?”

“Your crew’s been real pissy to me this whole ride.” Roland nodded at Bigsby. “How exactly did you guys expect that fight to go down?”

Sardar pursed his lips. He seemed at a loss for a second. Then he said, “Jim framed it as a standard kill-team action. We’ve done that sort of thing a couple times. Last year there was this chromed out Nazi in Ida–”

“So he tricked you, then?” Roland interrupted. “Convinced you this was just another assassination, when all he really wanted to do was get my attention?”

Roland looked around, and realized the rest of the transport was glaring at him. Bigsby spat on the ground in front of Roland’s foot.

“We’d have iced you if he’d given us another minute.”

Roland just laughed, and turned his eyes back to Sardar.

“It’s clear you and the other guy,” he gestured at the young man next to Sardar, “are the only smart bastards in the unit, since you didn’t get back up when I beat you down.”

Sardar squirmed a little, clearly uncomfortable.

“Me ’n Pedro,” he gestured to the other man, “we’re just engineers. We don’t go toe to toe with, uh, whatever you are.”

All this conversation, the most he’d had in years, made Roland feel uncomfortably lucid. He rooted around in the tattered old backpack he’d brought with him. It contained one rusty Mateba Autorevolver that he’d found under the floorboards of his collapsed shack and five-point-oh-eight-seven kilograms of assorted narcotics. Mostly opiates. Roland remembered how fun it was to watch things explode while high on oxy.

He pulled a pill bottle out of the sack—dilaudid—and poured half of it into his mouth. Roland swallowed, then guzzled the second half.

“Jesus,” said Will, the man he’d stabbed in the throat with a piece of wood yesterday. “This is the guy who kicked the shit out of us?”

“I am sorry about that,” Roland said. “If I’d known we were going to wind up sharing an APC, I probably would’ve just choked you out.”

Krump. Krump. Krump.