Chapter Text
Inside, the Citadel was crowded and noisy and dark. Each voice—and he couldn’t tell if he heard too many for the number of people present—was like a claw raking over his nerves, making them alive with irritation and anticipation of worse. Glimpses of faces—not cruel faces; most focused on their own business and a few even smiling—made him tense beneath his skin. This many strangers, his instincts clamored, in this place which held only flashes of ugly, unpleasant memories, were a bad sign.
Even though Max knew they were not. Even though anywhere else, this crowd would have been nothing more than aggravating, and he had just been among what was probably a worse one. He had agreed to come here willingly. He wasn’t a prisoner this time.
The people walking, wheeling, and being carried through the tunnels were occupied with maintenance, domestic tasks, even conversation. Their skin came in every shade and none of it was painted white. The only warriors there were himself and the woman walking beside him.
Her watchful posture, and the air of concentration she’d worn on the long drive here, had eased the farther they went through the winding halls. As they started up a flight of stairs, she pushed her hood back and ran a hand through her short-cropped hair. The crowd was sparser on the upper level, but those who were there stepped out of her way, more it seemed from respect than wariness. Maybe respect was also what kept anyone from questioning them. From asking Toast the Knowing what she was doing with a stranger out of the Wasteland.
He doubted anyone would remember him from the day the women were raised up. Just the man who drove the car, who kicked the Immortan’s corpse to the ground. The moment Furiosa climbed out and they cheered for her he had been forgotten, as it should be. Nobody in the Citadel today seemed to have seen a former bloodbag, either. It helped that his beard had grown out enough to hide his face from a casual glance.
He had thought he’d been unrecognizable. More than that, there was no one to recognize him. When he first heard someone calling his name in that border town, he’d dismissed it. It wasn’t that he never heard voices calling out to him. Only they were ones he couldn’t answer.
‘Border town’ might be too grand a term. It wasn’t a town; it was barely a place. One hundred days before it hadn’t been anything, and in another hundred days it might be nothing again. At best, its tents would be rolled up and each board and sheet of corrugated tin would be packed up, then trucked off somewhere else, leaving dust to blow over the ruts and tire tracks that had formed streets. At worst, a raid would come through and strip it all bare.
For once, the worst wasn’t likely. The town had picked its border well—unclaimed territory, at least for now, and just a short day’s ride out from a stronghold with a reputation that discouraged raiding. Max had added this information to his map. He knew how close he came to the Citadel, but he tried not to let the knowledge be a distraction.
He was one of those warm bodies who wound up here with anything they had to spare that might be exchanged for something they wanted more. Trading goods scavenged or cobbled together. Business wasn’t brisk but deliberate, accompanied by glances that were in turns evaluating, suspicious, and rarely direct. Smoke drifted over canvas roofs, carrying the smell of roasting lizard, and a baker’s family laid out fresh cakes of insect flour. Max’s pockets and knapsack were heavy with items valuable enough to buy near anything in sight. Two knives he had taken from the Organic Mechanic’s cache, along with a spare whetstone that had kept them surgically sharp. Ammunition for a gun he didn’t have. And, taken from the belly of the War Rig before they left it for the Salt, a miraculously unbroken bottle of rotgut liquor.
There was a woman in this town legendary for the collections of old parts she had available. He walked the canvas arcade of her stall, examining everything from engine blocks to axles to handfuls of bolts laid out on fabric plush enough for ordinary people to sleep on. At last he found what he needed to repair the car he’d rolled in on.
The parts trader had to be at least 23,000 days old, but she was well-preserved. Her garments were even plusher and cleaner than the cushions for her wares. Enough of her teeth remained for her smile to gleam in her brown face and her hands were clean except for permanent crescents of oil under the nails. Her eyes were clear and bright. And, she assured him, she had no use for alcohol. She had even less use for it than for knives or bullets. And she didn’t want them, either.
There would be something in this town she wanted, if he was just able to barter for it. Failing all else, there would be water, the most liquid of commodities. But that meant more time, more wandering under the hot sun and more attempts to negotiate with minds honed sharp as needles for a bargain. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to return to his car and drive off, but if he’d been able to make another seventy klicks on the bare wheels and welded axle, not to mention with the patchwork engine, he’d never have come here in the first place.
He adjusted the weight on his back and scanned the surrounding stalls. The voice shouting to him didn’t penetrate at first. All around people were making bids and counteroffers, calling over their partners to see something, spicing their haggling with insults that ranged from the affectionate to the aggressive. And when it came again—“Max! Hey! Is that you?”—that still didn’t meant it was really him they were looking for, or that they were really someone looking for him. He had heard his name called often enough by nobody at all.
But this voice was different, its timbre stronger; a young woman’s voice, neither angry nor afraid. If anything, she sounded excited to see him. Her words didn’t echo in his thoughts, didn’t pulse along the borders of his skull or send images flashing from the corners of his eyes. They seemed to come from right behind him.
Max turned around. The realization that he was being called, and by name, was enough of a shock that he expected nothing and anything.
A road warrior for sure, even though she was slight, younger and much better preserved than most, and not visibly armed. Few here were; he didn’t doubt she had something secreted in the pockets of her leather trousers, or hidden in her high boots or up her full sleeves. She carried herself with the hard confidence of the well-armed, the somewhat stiff poise of those prepared for anything bad.
She pushed back the hood shielding her head from the sun, revealing short, dark hair and keen eyes in a familiar bronze face. Yet as he met those eyes, they widened, suggesting she didn’t know just what to expect, either.
“It is you,” she said.
He nodded.
When she approached, he let her, even though coming much closer could be considered aggressive.People tended to give each other a wide berth around here. Sheer numbers, noise, and wariness filled the air with pressure anyway. He could raise both arms without reaching anyone, but still felt crowded in.
“Do you remember me?”
“Of course.” It had been two hundred and forty six days, give or take the ones he had lost track of, since he had last seen Toast the Knowing. Aside from her outfit and some of the subtleties of her bearing, she hasn’t changed all that much.
But if she had appeared exactly the same way as he had last saw her, he could have taken her for…not herself. Something much worse. A sign that the worst had happened.
Although he wasn’t certain the ghosts were even real—and he had only ever seen them after watching someone’s death; they’d never tracked him across the Wasteland—he could have believed it.
“You’re from the Citadel,” he said, a question as much as a statement.
“Everyone’s well,” she said, picking up at once.
He nodded, grateful.
This young woman, not a ghost, was looking at him with an intensity he almost took for suspicion. “And what about you?”
He understood, then. It was concern.
“Max?”
It was strange to be addressed by name. Not because he was entirely unused to hearing it, but because it never came in that tone—prompting, patient, fully expecting an answer. The voices of his dead had long ago become used to going unanswered.
He gave her the best he could, shrugging and saying, “I’m okay.”
“Good.” She smiled at him around the pick she settled between her teeth.
Everything had been said. But when he started to move on again—his car waited at the end of the street, such as it was, and he could reevaluate the damage, see if he could do with replacing fewer parts—Toast followed. From anyone else, following anyone else, that could have been suicidal. She had to be aware of that. The thought that she might not be was as boggling as it was alarming.
She didn’t blink or back down when he turned to stare at her. “Is that it?”
“What else?”
“I don’t feel like I should just let you go.”
He responded with the motion of one eyebrow.
It wasn’t a surprise when that failed to quell her. “You want to know how everyone’s doing? Come see for yourself. Come back with me.”
“No.”
“Why not? You know you’d be welcome there.” Something stirred in her face, and he saw that she was neither as recklessly naïve as she acted nor as poised as she appeared. At least not when it came to him. “What do you have against staying at the Citadel, anyway?”
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. And maybe a part of her was still naïve, after all, to have to ask that question. “It’s no place for me. I’ll get what I need here.”
Toast crossed her arms, gripping the right just beneath a thick black armband of woven fabric. He remembered the night she had received that, a gift from the Vuvalini. Odd, how much seemed to change just from knowing someone’s history; looking at them and knowing how they had become what you saw. The reciprocal feeling that, looking at you, they saw the same. She couldn’t see as much as his ghosts. But she knew enough.
“We can do much better,” she said. “Think of it. Clean water. Better food—” sniffing at the smoke of cooking fires. “Somewhere safe to sleep. And we can fix your car,” she added, eyeing the vehicle he’d approached. It had rolled in on more rust that tire, and that was only one of the visible issues.
She must have seen him weakening. “We can get you anything,” she said. “And loads better than whatever you could get from the shacks here.” The angle of her head changed. “Unless you need to stop by the brothels first.”
As she said that last she met his eyes and made an exaggerated version of the face she made smelling the roasting lizards, not disgust so much as disinterest, and relief to be disinterested. They shared thin smiles. He would have laughed except his throat and the joke were both too dry for it. No shame towards those who willingly offered or respectfully traded for that service, but for him, what could be got in a brothel would be nothing but a waste of goods and time. He wouldn’t seek it at the Citadel, either, and he hadn’t been likely to assume anyone would offer.
And that was what decided him, in the end. Being joked with. On top of which, it wasn’t a bad invitation.
“Okay,” he said.
“That means you’ll go?”
He shrugged. “Do I have a choice?”
“Of course you do.” Her expression fell, and beneath it flashed a spark as if in response to an insult or accusation.
His own attempt at humor—if that was all it was—hadn’t landed right. He said more solemnly, “Well, I’ll go.”
“That’s good.” Her smile returned, broke wider. She didn’t look a bit like a road warrior when she grinned. “I can bring my rig around to yours. We’ll hook it up, pull it back.”
He nodded and started walking again towards the vehicle. She walked with him a ways. Before she turned off, waving a signal that made him realize for the first time that she hadn’t come alone, she murmured, “She’ll be glad to see you.”
First he took the emotion that swept through him for dread. Heavy, cold expectation, growing through his chest, putting pressure on his guts and lungs. By the time it passed, before he could figure out whatever it was about, Toast had approached his car and was examining it. She asked questions over her shoulder about the parts that needed fixing, and as he answered the clammy anticipation was forgotten. By the time the sun was westering, they were underway.
Toast’s vehicle, although ‘rig’ might be grandiose, was a truck tall enough that not only did she have to climb up into it, but so did her escort—two boys who might be former War Pups or lifted up from the wretched who gathered around the Citadel. Their slight frames could stem from youth or malnutrition. They and Max greeted each other silently in between adding a substitute wheel to his car and chaining it to the back of hers.
Her truck was bright against the rusting hulks surrounding it, freshly painted with stripes of sun red and desert gold. The bed, which the men clambered into, was covered by a metal frame, and the window between it and the cab was hung with light fabric. More fabric had been draped over the seats, not enough to smother but enough to make the old leather more comfortable and…pretty, Max decided. His eyes traced an embroidered pattern in deep purple that could be a star or even a flower. Vuvalini—he recognized the style from the blankets they had given him with the motorcycle. A motorcycle now slowly rusting at the edge of the Salt, unless someone else had come along to salvage it. Glancing back through the gauze curtain at the hulk of his current vehicle rattling along behind them, he almost regretted leaving the cycle there. Almost.
Toast reached under the wheel before starting, her fingers moving to the click of hidden switches. As they rode from the town onto the gravel flats, she shifted gears. Max had politely kept his gaze averted from the kill switches, but the brightly polished gearshift caught his eye. The grip had a finger guard like a hilt and below that it bulged like the cylinder of a revolver. Which it was. He knew why it looked familiar; the gun had rattled on the floor of the Immortan’s Gigahorse as he pulled Furiosa in, lay her down. Toast had claimed it and transformed it. A tyrant’s gun into a gearshift; not a bad trophy.
The scar that gun had left was a thin, irregular line in front of her right ear, faint enough that it might be overlooked unless you already knew it would be there. He did. It didn’t mar her looks, and she didn’t seem to be self-conscious about it, but it stirred memories in his brain like dust rising in a wave around their wheels.
***
The moan of the desert wind around the cab, and the strumming of the Gigahorse’s flags above, almost covered the low sound of Furiosa’s breathing. Her chest rose and fell, slightly, slowly, not steadily enough for his liking. But watching and worrying wouldn’t help that. The red stream still flowed through the tubing connecting them, and that at least was steady and helpful.
He was slowly coming back to himself, after it seemed like he had been drawn inside her with his blood. Lost in her failing body, and if it failed completely…
But it hadn’t.
He looked up, around. The Vuvalini on one side and the pale-haired girl on the other still held the needles steady in his and Furiosa’s arms. He felt the pressure of their hands, a slight sting below his right elbow that wasn’t quite painful. The other three women (not wives) leaned against the back of the seat, looking down at them with drawn faces. Damp with sweat or drying tears. Calmer now, still worried of course but mostly okay—except the one on the far left was injured, a blow that had split the smooth bronze skin on the side of her face.
Something to do besides watch and worry and wait. Something helpful. He met the young woman's eyes and gestured her closer. “You’re bleeding.”
She climbed over the seat. He found another scrap of clean-enough cloth and began to dab first at the thin smear of blood under her nose, then at the edges of the wound. Working with his left hand, not wanting to jar the needle in his right arm, he wasn’t as steady as he wanted to be. She winced with the corner of her mouth but held still.
“Sorry,” he murmured absently, peering into her eyes. They were clear, the pupils even, and everything under his hand seemed to feel all right.
She asked, “Are you okay?”
Unsure how to reply, he only nodded. A few bruises and scratches. His hand still worked, and the hole through it had stopped bleeding, but it hurt so much it might as well have gone numb. The ringing in his right ear hadn’t subsided after two gunshots in as many days. He was thirsty, although the Vuvalini already reached for one of the water canisters they had found in the vehicle. Drinking felt like work. He was tired. Almost tired enough to let go, to flow out with his blood, to drain, to sink, to rest.
Instead he had to pull his faculties together, and his thoughts. It was a slow process made strange, because this time he hadn’t been broken down so much as broken open. There was nothing to resist or fight. He couldn’t draw strength from the engine of rage he had carried inside for so long, which seemed to have stalled. There was the other old standby, survival instinct—somehow crossed, transferred from himself to her. Furiosa. Alive, safe…victorious.
He didn’t know what hope felt like, but it was taking all his strength not to start shaking in relief. And no, he wasn’t okay. Whatever the direction of the break, he was broken nonetheless.
“So, Max.” The name jolted through him. The young woman didn’t seem to find anything wrong; she was smiling. “I’m Toast. Some of them call me Toast the Knowing.”
“I’m Capable,” said the one who leaned over the seat, her hands still resting close to Furiosa.
“Cheedo,” murmured the tall girl with an arm on Capable’s shoulder.
From beside him, “They call me the Dag.”
“Thanks,” Max said. “Thank you.” He finished cleaning Toast’s cut and gave her the cloth to hold in place; bandaging her wound properly would have to wait until the Citadel. Their introductions didn’t lead to more conversation, which he was also grateful for. They hadn’t been awkward—courtesy didn’t feel entirely out of place here. He didn’t think of it as more than courtesy.
He’d given Furiosa his name because he felt he had to, an offering as essential as his blood, for reasons he didn’t examine. These women, too, deserved to know who he was. After all they had gone through together, names weren’t too much to share. But intimacy between them wouldn’t go beyond that. Their routes ran together for a short while yet.
He’d hold himself as if unbroken for that long.
He packed the contents of the medical kit away, once more working with his left hand. His right, keeping still because of the needle and cannula, cradled the back of Furiosa’s head. His thumb was stroking her face, had been all this while, even when he was nearly too shaken to notice. Her hair prickled against his palm as she stirred, then settled again. He listened to her breathing grow stronger. They remained like that until, kilometers later, she opened her eyes.