“I’m Delta,” I say. “This is Asher. We’re headed north.”

She eyes me skeptically. “You won’t get far on foot.”

“I know. That’s why I’m going to help you get your wind wagon working.”

“Is that so?”

“Unless you don’t want help.”

She peers up at me, a glimmer in her eye.

“Delta’s real good with gadgets and contraptions,” Asher adds. “I bet the two of you can figure it out.”

“So, Harlie,” I say to the woman. “What do you think?”

“How’d you know my name?”

“Just a guess, since you said you founded this place. Now what do you think?”

“I think your minds might be mucked-up, and you got as much sense as a chicken running headless. But I ain’t turning away help. Climb down, and we’ll get started.”

There’s not much left to Harlie’s Hope. A well that pulls less water each day, a designated outhouse away from the well, and Harlie’s ramshackle hut. She hasn’t bothered to repair it in nearly five years, and it shows.

“Can’t afford to,” she explains with a shrug. “Any bit of wood I get my hands on goes toward the wind wagon.”

She’s been working on it for the last three years. Her pack originally lived closer to Powder Town, but when Kara the Prime took power and began building a defense wall around the settlement, Harlie’s people were in the way. The Prime offered them safety behind their wall, but Harlie prided herself on being independent. She also believed the answer to defeating the bad men taking over the wastes wasn’t to hide behind walls, but to beat them to the Verdant. She moved her people north, to the edge of what proved to be an uncrossable desert. They brought wagons full of lumber and supplies with them, and for the first ten years, traders visited Harlie’s Hope regularly. They come less frequently now, once a season if she’s lucky.

She survives on the water from the well—meager, but enough now that she’s the only person calling the place home—as well as tubes and weeds that grow in a shaded section on the south side of the rock outcropping. She also shoots whatever birds she can. If she falls sick, if bad weather hits at the wrong time, if a trader doesn’t make it to her, she’ll be dead. It’s so bad, it makes Dead River look like a paradise.

“If I don’t get the wind wagon working by winter, I’ll be heading for Powder Town with my tail between my legs,” Harlie says. “I’m not sure my pride can handle that, but I also know this place is dying. I won’t last.”