Chapter 2: What's Left

The old woman was going to die whether River helped her or not.

That thought arrived about six hours into the day's walk, when River crested a low ridge of broken asphalt and scrub grass and saw what was left of a town called Millhaven. She knew the name because the sign was still standing—bent at a forty-five-degree angle, riddled with bullet holes, but readable. WELCOME TO MILLHAVEN, POP. 4,200. HOME OF THE EAGLES.

Population zero now. Home of nothing.

But she hadn't seen the old woman yet. That came later. First, she had to deal with the water situation, which had graduated from problem to crisis somewhere around dawn when she'd tipped the skin back and gotten three drops and a mouthful of warm air.

---

Millhaven had been a decent-sized place, the kind of small town Grandmother described from Before—a main street with shops, a school, residential blocks spreading outward in tidy grids. The grid was still visible if you squinted, the streets defined by rows of collapsed houses whose foundations marked property lines nobody would ever argue about again.

River approached from the south, staying low, watching for movement. Scavengers liked places like this. So did raiders. So did the kind of desperate, half-feral people who'd gone too long without food or sanity and would kill you for a pair of boots.

Nothing moved. The wind pushed a sheet of corrugated metal back and forth against a doorframe somewhere, a rhythmic screech that set her teeth on edge. A bird—some kind of crow, though bigger than any crow she'd seen, with patchy feathers and a beak that looked wrong—watched her from the peak of a collapsed roof.

"Don't start," she told it.

The crow tilted its head. Didn't fly away. Birds in the Wastes had learned that humans meant scraps or corpses, and both were worth waiting for.

River moved into the town proper, checking buildings as she went. Most had been picked clean years ago—doors torn off, windows smashed, anything useful stripped out by the waves of scavengers that had passed through in the first years after the Collapse. She found empty rooms with water-stained walls, mold climbing the corners, floors thick with dust and animal droppings.

The fifth house had a basement.

She almost missed it. The house had collapsed inward, the second floor pancaking down onto the first, but a gap between two fallen beams led to stairs that descended into darkness. River pulled the screwdriver from her pack—not much of a weapon, but better than nothing in a tight space where the knife might not have room to swing—and went down.

The basement was intact. Concrete walls, concrete floor, the ceiling bowed but holding. It had been a workshop, she guessed—a pegboard on one wall still held the outlines of tools long gone, and a workbench ran along the far side, its surface warped with moisture.

Under the workbench, shoved against the wall, she found a plastic bin with a cracked lid.

Inside: four cans. Labels gone, rusted at the seams, but when she shook them the contents sloshed. Not empty. Could be anything—soup, vegetables, motor oil, paint. The rust worried her. Grandmother had been clear about that: *rusty cans swell, and swollen cans kill. If the ends are flat, probably fine. If they're puffed out, leave them.*

River checked each one. Flat. All four.

She also found a length of nylon cord—real nylon, not the frayed garbage she'd been carrying—coiled behind the bin. And a plastic jug, cracked along one side but mostly intact, with about two inches of rainwater collected in the bottom from a leak in the ceiling.

The water was brownish and smelled like basement. She drank it anyway, straining it through a piece of cloth torn from her sleeve. It tasted like concrete dust and old plastic and it was the best thing she'd had in her mouth in four days.

She sat on the basement floor with her four cans and her nylon cord and her empty jug and took inventory again. The dog meat strips were holding up, wrapped tight in cloth. The compass still worked. The leather map was getting soft from sweat and handling, but the lines were still clear. She had the knife, the screwdriver, the fire starter.

Not rich. But better than yesterday. Better counted for something.

One of the cans she opened with the knife, working the blade around the rim in the way Grandmother had shown her, careful not to cut herself on the jagged metal. Inside: pinto beans. Twenty years old, gray-brown instead of the reddish-tan they should have been, but they smelled okay. Smelled like food.

River ate half the can cold, scooping the beans out with her fingers. They were mushy and bland and tasted vaguely of tin and she ate them so fast she nearly choked. Her stomach cramped—too much too fast after days of almost nothing—and she had to sit with her arms wrapped around her middle until the cramps passed.

She saved the rest. Sealed the opened can with a strip of cloth tied tight and put it in her pack. Three unopened cans, half a can of beans, four strips of dog meat. Enough for maybe a week if she was disciplined.

A week was a long time. A week was enough to reach the water source on the map, maybe. Enough to put distance between her and the Crimson Riders. Enough to—

The metal sheet outside screeched again. Then stopped.

River went still.

The wind hadn't changed. She could hear it moving across the town above her, the same steady push from the southwest that had been blowing all morning. But the metal had stopped its rhythm.

Something had blocked it. Something standing in the doorway of whatever building held that loose sheet.

River picked up the knife.

---

She moved up the stairs like smoke, keeping her weight on the edges where the steps met the wall, where the wood was less likely to creak. At the top, she pressed herself into the gap between the fallen beams and looked out through a crack in the wreckage.

A figure. Moving down the main street with the careful, scanning gait of someone checking for danger. Average height, wearing layers of mismatched clothing—a patched jacket over what looked like a hospital gown over cargo pants held up with a belt made from electrical wire. Bare feet. Bare feet on broken asphalt in the Wastes, which meant either desperate or crazy, and in River's experience the two overlapped more often than not.

The figure stopped. Looked around. Then sat down in the middle of the street, slowly, like the act of folding required planning.

An old woman. River could see it now—the white hair escaping from under a knitted cap, the thin shoulders, the way she held one arm against her body with the other like it was something fragile she was afraid of dropping.

She was hurt. The arm she was cradling was wrong—angled in a way arms weren't supposed to go, the forearm making a shallow V where it should have been straight. Broken. And from the way she moved—stiff, listing to one side, each breath visible work—that wasn't the only thing wrong with her.

River watched for three minutes. Counted them by her heartbeat, which Grandmother had taught her was a decent clock if you stayed calm. The old woman didn't move from her spot in the street. She sat with her legs folded under her and her broken arm pressed against her chest, and after a while her head dropped forward and her shoulders started to shake.

Crying. Or trying to. The sounds didn't carry, which meant she was doing it quiet, the way everyone in the Wastes learned to cry—small and silent, because grief was a luxury and noise was an invitation.

*Walk away.*

The thought was clean, automatic, stripped of everything but math. The old woman was hurt. Badly. A broken arm in the Wastes without a splint and someone to set it meant infection, meant fever, meant death in days or weeks. River didn't have medical supplies. Didn't have food to spare. Didn't have time to nurse a stranger through injuries she couldn't fix.

The old woman was going to die whether River helped her or not.

*So walk away. Go north. Find water. Find the Sanctuary. Save yourself, because nobody else is going to do it.*

Grandmother's voice, except it wasn't. Grandmother would have helped. Grandmother always helped. That was why the village had loved her, why people brought their sick children and their festering wounds to her door, why she'd traded away food and comfort and safety to keep people alive who couldn't keep themselves alive.

That was why she'd turned back toward the Riders with a hatchet instead of running.

*And look where it got her.*

River pressed her forehead against the splintered beam. Closed her eyes. Opened them.

"Ash and dust," she muttered, and climbed out of the basement.

---

The old woman flinched when River appeared. Tried to stand, failed, and settled for pushing herself backward with her good arm, dragging herself across the asphalt like a crab retreating into its shell.

"Easy." River held her hands up, palms out, knife sheathed. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"That's what they all say." The woman's voice was a rasp, dried out, cracked at the edges. "Right before they hurt you."

"Fair point." River stopped moving. Kept her distance. About ten feet between them—close enough to talk, far enough that the woman didn't have to decide immediately whether to bolt. "What happened to your arm?"

"Fell." The woman's eyes—pale, washed-out blue, rheumy with pain—darted left, right, behind River. Looking for others. "Coming down a hill in the dark. Stupid. Should know better by now."

"How long ago?"

"Yesterday. Maybe the day before. Hard to keep track." She winced, adjusting the broken arm against her body. "You alone?"

"Yes."

"Liar."

"Believe what you want." River crouched, making herself smaller. Less threatening. Grandmother had taught her this too—how to approach scared animals, scared people, anything that might run or fight because it couldn't tell the difference between help and harm. "I have water. Not much, but some. You want a drink?"

The woman stared at her. The calculation was visible—the same math River had done in the basement, running the numbers on trust versus survival. A drink of water wasn't free. Nothing was free. Taking something from a stranger meant owing a stranger, and debts in the Wastes had teeth.

"What do you want for it?"

"Nothing."

"Bullshit."

River almost smiled. Almost. "Okay. I want information. Where did you come from? What's north of here? Is there water between this town and the mountains?"

The woman's mouth worked. Chewing on the question, tasting the angles. "There's a creek. About a day's walk northeast, past the old railyard. Used to be poisoned, but the rains cleaned it out a few years back. Tastes bad. Won't kill you."

"A creek."

"Closer than whatever you're looking at on that map you keep touching through your pack." The woman's eyes were sharper than they had any right to be. "I've been out here a long time, girl. I know what a map-checker looks like."

River pulled the water skin from her pack. Uncapped it. Poured a measure into the tin cup and held it out.

The woman took it with her good hand. Drank in small, careful sips, the way people who'd been thirsty for a long time learned to drink—too fast and your stomach rejects it, and wasted water is the one sin the Wastes never forgives.

"My name's Hettie," the woman said, when the cup was empty.

"River."

"That your real name?"

"Real enough."

Hettie's gaze tracked over her—the knife at her belt, the pack on her back, Grandmother's coat that was too big in the shoulders and too long in the arms. "You're young. Too young to be out here alone. Where's your people?"

The question landed hard. River's hand moved to the coat's collar, Grandmother's coat, gripping the fabric the way she used to grip Grandmother's hand when she was small and the thunder sounded too close.

"Gone," River said.

Something shifted in the old woman's face. Not pity—River would have walked away from pity. Recognition.

"Mine too," Hettie said. "Six years ago. Settlement called Archer's Point, about two hundred miles south. Raiders hit us on a Tuesday. Tuesdays." She shook her head. "Always thought the world would end on a Monday. Tuesdays are supposed to be boring."

River didn't know what to say to that. She'd never been good at the parts of conversation that required matching someone else's grief with your own. Grandmother had been good at it—had known the right words, the right silences, the right way to hold someone's pain without trying to fix it.

River just stood there.

"Your arm needs setting," she said, because that was something she could actually do. "I don't have medicine. Don't have a proper splint. But I can straighten it and bind it and it'll heal crooked instead of not at all."

Hettie looked at her broken arm. Looked at River. "That's going to hurt."

"Yes."

"You've done it before?"

"No." Honest answer. Grandmother had shown her how, on a goat with a broken leg once, talking her through the steps while River's hands shook and the goat screamed. But a goat wasn't a person, and a forearm wasn't a leg, and knowing how wasn't the same as having done it.

"At least you're honest about it." Hettie's jaw set. "Do it, then. Before I lose my nerve."

---

Setting a broken bone without anesthesia was exactly as bad as River had imagined.

Hettie screamed. She tried not to—bit down on the strip of leather River gave her, clenched her good fist until the knuckles went white—but when River pulled the arm straight and felt the bones grind back toward alignment, the sound that came out of the old woman was past anything she could control. Raw, animal, ripped loose from somewhere deep. It echoed off the dead buildings of Millhaven like a summons.

River worked fast. Straight as she could get it, then two flat pieces of wood from a broken chair on either side, bound tight with the nylon cord. Not pretty. Not professional. But the arm was roughly the right shape, and the binding would keep it from shifting.

"The cord," River said, and hated herself for thinking it. That was her good cord. Twenty feet of nylon, the best material she'd found since leaving the village. She'd just used half of it on a stranger's arm.

Hettie was gray-faced, sweat standing on her skin despite the cold. Her breathing came in quick, shallow gulps that sounded like a pump losing pressure.

"Don't pass out," River said. "If you pass out, I can't carry you."

"Wasn't planning on it." Hettie's voice was a thread. "Just need a minute."

A minute. River looked at the sky. The sun was past its peak, sliding down the western half of the haze. She'd lost hours here—hours of walking, hours of northward progress, hours she couldn't afford.

The scream would carry, too. Sound traveled in the Wastes. Anyone within a mile—dogs, scavengers, Riders—would have heard it.

They needed to move.

"Can you walk?"

Hettie tried. Got halfway up, swayed, went back down. Her good hand gripped River's arm with surprising strength. "Give me another minute."

"We don't have another minute. I need to move. Now." River glanced toward the southern horizon, where the highway was, where the Crimson Rider trucks had been. "There are Riders in the area. I saw them yesterday. If they heard—"

"Riders." Hettie's face changed. The pain was still there, but something else came through underneath. Old fear, deep in the body, in the muscles, in the way her shoulders hunched and her eyes went flat. "Crimson?"

"Yes."

"Then we move." And Hettie stood. Stood through whatever her body was telling her, stood through the arm and the pain and the gray tint of shock that hadn't left her face. She stood because the Crimson Riders were worse than a broken arm. Everything was worse than a broken arm if the alternative was Riders.

"Northeast," Hettie said. "The creek. It's in a ravine. Hard to spot from above. Good cover."

River looked at her. The old woman was barefoot, broken-armed, probably concussed from her fall, and proposing a day's march through rough terrain.

She was also the only person in River's world who wasn't dead.

"Northeast," River agreed. "Stay behind me. Try to keep up."

"Girl, I was walking these Wastes before you were born."

"Then you know to save your breath for the walking."

Something crossed Hettie's face—the ghost of a smile, or maybe a grimace. Hard to tell the difference these days.

They walked.

---

The terrain northeast of Millhaven was broken country—low hills of loose shale and dead earth, cut through with gullies carved by flash floods during the storm years. Hard walking even for someone healthy. For Hettie, it was torture she endured in silence, each step a negotiation between the arm and the ground and the parts of her body that wanted to quit.

River set a pace she thought the old woman could manage. Slower than she'd have gone alone. Much slower. Every minute dragged, and she kept looking behind them, scanning the horizon for dust clouds or the glint of metal.

Nothing. Just the Wastes, empty and vast and indifferent.

They stopped twice to rest. The first time, River gave Hettie another measure of water and half of the opened can of beans. Watched the old woman eat with her good hand, scooping the gray mush with two fingers, chewing slowly.

"Where are you headed?" Hettie asked between bites.

"North."

"Everything's north, girl. North of what? Toward what?"

River hesitated. Grandmother had been careful about who she told—the Sanctuary was a word that drew attention, not all of it welcome. People killed for less than a rumor of safety.

"Just north," she said.

Hettie studied her. Those washed-out blue eyes saw more than they should have. "The Sanctuary."

River's hand went to the knife.

"Relax." Hettie held up her good hand. "I'm not going to rob you or follow you or sell the information. I'm a seventy-two-year-old woman with a broken arm and no shoes. What am I going to do?"

"How did you—"

"Because everyone heading north with that look on their face is heading for the Sanctuary. I've seen it a hundred times. Young people, mostly. Scared. Desperate. Carrying maps they got from someone who got them from someone who heard a rumor." Hettie's expression was unreadable. "Most of them don't make it."

"I'll make it."

"Maybe you will. You're tougher than you look. And you're not stupid, which is rarer than you'd think." Hettie paused. Seemed to decide something. "The creek I told you about—there's a settlement near it. Small. Fifteen, twenty people. They call it the Nest. They're not friendly, but they're not raiders either. If you approach right, show you've got something to trade, they might let you resupply."

"What do they trade for?"

"Labor, mostly. They've got water and shelter but not enough hands. Fix a wall, dig a latrine, stand a watch shift—they'll give you food and a dry place to sleep."

River filed this away. A settlement. Real people, with walls and resources and information about what lay further north. It was more than she'd had an hour ago.

It was also a risk. Every settlement was a gamble—some welcomed strangers, some tolerated them, some used them. Grandmother had told stories about settlements that looked safe from outside and were something else entirely behind the walls.

"You've been there?"

"Passed through, twice. They let me fill my water and move on. Didn't try to keep me or rob me." Hettie shrugged with her good shoulder. "Low bar, I know. But that's the bar these days."

The second rest stop was shorter. River's knee was stiffening again, the bruise tightening with each step, and she wanted to reach the ravine before dark. Hettie was flagging too—her breathing had gone shallow and fast, and her skin had a waxy look, like someone running on nothing.

"Almost there," River said, though she had no idea if that was true.

"Liar," Hettie said again, but she got up and kept walking.

---

The ravine appeared just before sunset—a crack in the earth maybe twenty feet deep and fifty wide, its walls steep and lined with scrub brush and tough grass. At the bottom, River could hear it: water. Moving water, the kind that ran over rocks, the kind that meant current and flow and maybe, possibly, something drinkable.

She helped Hettie down the slope, half-carrying her over the worst sections, feeling the old woman's weight against her side. At the bottom, the creek was exactly what Hettie had described—shallow, fast-moving, brownish-clear with a mineral tang that stung River's nostrils.

Not clean. But not poison.

River filled the water skin, then the plastic jug, then drank directly from the creek until her stomach protested. The water tasted like rocks and iron and something faintly sulfurous, and it was so cold it made her teeth ache.

Hettie drank too, kneeling at the creek's edge with her good hand cupping water to her mouth. She drank and drank and drank, and when she finally stopped, she sat back on her heels and closed her eyes, her face tilted up toward the thin strip of sky visible between the ravine's walls.

"Thank you," she said.

River busied herself checking the splint, making sure the nylon cord hadn't loosened during the walk. "Don't thank me. You showed me the water."

"That's not what I'm thanking you for."

River didn't respond to that. She focused on the cord, on the wood, on the angle of the arm beneath the binding. Anything but the old woman's voice, which sounded too much like—

*Don't.*

"We should set up for the night," River said. "I'll make a fire. Small one. The ravine should hide the light."

Hettie opened her eyes. "The Nest is about four miles downstream. We'll see their watchfires before we see them."

"Tomorrow. You need rest."

"I need a lot of things, girl. Rest is the least of them." But Hettie didn't argue. She let River help her to a sheltered spot against the ravine wall, where an overhang created a natural alcove, and settled in with a sound that was half sigh, half groan.

River built the fire. Cooked strips of dog meat over the flames—two for herself, two for Hettie, which left her with nothing. The opened can of beans she split evenly. The three sealed cans stayed in the pack. Emergency reserves.

They ate in silence. The creek murmured. Somewhere above the ravine, the wind pushed across the flatland, carrying the sounds of the Wastes.

"How old are you?" Hettie asked.

"Seventeen."

"Jesus." The word came out flat, all the religion stripped out of it, just a sound people made when the world was too much. "Seventeen. Out here alone."

"Grandmother was sixty-eight. She was out here."

"With a village around her. Walls. People. You've got a knife and a coat."

"And a compass," River said. "Found it yesterday."

Hettie's mouth did that almost-smile thing again. "A compass. Well, then. You're practically a queen."

River looked at the fire. The flames were low, orange and blue, eating the last of the chair-leg wood she'd carried from Millhaven. Firelight made the ravine walls look close, almost safe. Almost like a room.

Her throat tightened. She swallowed against it.

"Grandmother used to—" She stopped. Shook her head. "Never mind."

Hettie was quiet for a while. Then: "My daughter used to sing while she cooked. Every night. Same three songs, over and over, until her boy would cover his ears and beg her to stop. Terrible voice. Wonderful woman." A pause. "I hear her sometimes, when the wind hits right. Not real. But I hear her."

River stared at the fire and said nothing.

The night settled around them. River took first watch—Hettie was in no condition to stay awake—sitting at the edge of the alcove with the knife across her knees, listening to the creek and the wind and the old woman's uneven breathing.

She'd given away half her food. Half her good cord. Hours of walking time. She'd made herself responsible for someone who couldn't keep up, who'd slow her down, who was—she forced herself to think it—probably going to die out here regardless.

Stupid. Grandmother-level stupid. The kind of stupid that got people killed.

But Hettie knew the terrain. Knew about the Nest. Knew things River needed to know about the land between here and wherever north turned into something other than more Wastes.

And she was warm, on the other side of the fire. Breathing. Present. Another human being within arm's reach, which was something River hadn't had since the village, and the lack of which had been wearing her down in ways she hadn't let herself think about.

She adjusted the knife on her knees.

Downstream, barely visible through the ravine's curves, a faint orange glow marked the horizon.

Watchfires. The Nest.

Four miles, Hettie had said. Tomorrow.

River watched the distant light and thought about walls and water and the kind of safety that was never really safe, and she didn't sleep for a long time.

When she did, she dreamed about her grandmother's hands. Just the hands. Steady and sure, holding a cup of tea that steamed in cold air. No face, no voice. Just the hands, and the steam, and the smell of lavender soap.

She woke with her cheeks wet and the fire dead and the first gray light of dawn pressing down into the ravine.