The impact crater is still hot enough to sear my face, and as I peer down I see that it’s useless. There’s nothing left, only blackened streaks and shards.

I start to walk away when my gut lurches, as if it’s trying to drag itself east. The images come on fast again: a bird with black wings, cold metal, bloodied hands… Spitting, I straighten up. They are obviously not finished with me.

I get back on the mule and drive away from the wreckage, towards the rising sun.

Morning in the Barrens is beautiful, but it comes with an asking price of hunger and cold, loneliness and near-insanity. A price that almost no one is willing to pay.

I have paid, many times over, but I don’t spare a glance at that hard-won beauty. Instead, I stare at the track that has carved its way through the dirt. At the end of it, beside the twisted remains of a lifecraft, two figures lie motionless on the sand.

In the few seconds before I reach them, I think about turning the mule aside, leaving the bodies and continuing on, into another future.

But I won’t, and they know that. They know my choice was made long ago.

Twenty paces away I stop, reaching for the knife at my belt. Gangs like the Seekers or the Rooks sometimes use bodies as bait. I edge closer.

The downed lifecraft is dull silver, new-looking, with no markings or badges to suggest what kind of ship it might have come from. That isn’t unusual. Ever since the war it has been standard practice to strip all lifecraft bare, in case of a landing in enemy territory. Not that Factus took a side; no one wanted it anyhow. Even the Free Limits had little use for a waterless wasteland where the enemy was everything and nothing.

Wisps of smoke coil from the ruined craft, and the whole thing stinks of hot metal and melting plastic. Gripping the knife, I lean over the figures. They lie huddled, so close together it’s difficult to tell them apart, covered in sand as they are. The larger one is a man, I think, cradling a smaller one. I nudge the man with my boot. When he doesn’t move, I pull off my ragged gloves to reach in through the smashed helmet of the flight suit.

His face is cold but there’s a pulse, faint and faltering. The helmet of the smaller figure is raised, a little. I worm my fingers through the gap and feel that the flesh there is warmer, the pulse stronger. The man’s arms did their job.