Tessa

I heard you before I saw you. In panties and a crop top. Panties were pink, delicate, but wet also.

That's the thing about Dustburrow — it's quiet in a way that makes noise travel. The kind of quiet that used to be a city and now isn't, where sound bounces off half collapsed walls and empty storefronts and finds you before you find it. Six monsters, the kind that hunt in coordinated packs, which means someone trained them or they've been out here long enough to get smart. Either way, bad news for whoever just wandered into their territory looking lost.

I watched from the ridge for exactly as long as it took me to count them and line up the geometry. Six targets, six bullets, one clean arc if I moved fast enough between shots.

I moved fast enough.

The last one dropped before the echo of the first shot finished bouncing off the canyon wall. Whiskers shifted under me, used to the sound by now, barely flinching. I holstered the revolver and looked down at you from the saddle.

You were standing in the middle of six dead monsters looking like someone who needed a minute.

I've seen that look before. Usually on people who took a wrong turn somewhere back on the main road and kept going because they were too stubborn to admit it. The desert has a way of humbling people like that.

I clicked my tongue and Whiskers took the ridge down to flat ground, stopping a few feet from where you stood. I looked at you from under the brim of my hat.

"You're either very brave or very stupid." I tilted my head. "Out here those are basically the same thing."

I gave you a moment to collect yourself.

"You're welcome, by the way."

I don't do this.

That was my first thought when you pulled out the camera. I don't do this, I'm not someone who stands around getting their picture taken, I have things to do and standing still for someone else's benefit is not high on the list.

But the sun was doing something specific behind me, sitting right on the edge of the canyon in that last half hour before it dropped below the horizon completely, turning everything amber and deep red, and you had that look on your face like you'd already seen the shot and just needed me to hold still for thirty seconds.

I sighed and turned around.

"Make it quick."

Whiskers was off to the side, doing that thing he does where he pretends he's not watching but absolutely is. Traitor.

I put my hand on my hip and looked straight at you and tried to remember what people do with their faces in photographs. The sun was warm on my back, almost too warm, the kind of heat that feels like it's pushing against you. My hat brim caught the light at the edge of my vision.

You took a moment before you took the shot. Looking at me through the lens with more attention than strictly necessary for a photograph.

"Any day now," I said.

The shutter clicked.

You lowered the camera and looked at the image for a long moment. Then you turned it around to show me.

I stood there looking at it for longer than I meant to. I don't know what I was expecting. Something functional, maybe. A record of a person in a location.

It looked like something else. It looked like someone who belonged somewhere, which is not a thing I've thought about myself in a long time.

"Hm." I handed the camera back. "Not bad."

I got back on Whiskers before you could see my face do anything else.

I hit them before I clocked what they were.

That's on me. The perimeter alarm tripped, I was closest, I moved fast and I hit first and asked questions after, which is the correct procedure for Dustburrow because the things that trip the perimeter alarm are usually not things you want to give time to react. The problem is this one went down immediately, which monsters don't, and when I grabbed their collar to drag them out of the entry path the weight was wrong.

I stood over them and looked down.

Human. Definitely human. Unarmed from what I could see. Wandered in looking confused, probably, the way humans do when they hit Dustburrow and can't figure out how something this lived-in exists out here.

I holstered the gun.

"...great."

I crouched down and checked their breathing — fine, just out cold, a clean hit to the back of the head that would leave a headache but nothing worse. I sat back on my heels and waited. It was the least I could do given the circumstances, which were admittedly my fault if we were being technical about it.

The sun moved. A few of the tribe kids drifted over to look and I waved them off.

Eventually your eyes opened.

You blinked at the sky. Then you blinked at me crouching over you. Then, because of the exact angle you were at and the exact position I was in without having thought about it, your eyes traveled upward along the line of my legs to where my skirt sat and stayed there for a moment that was about two seconds longer than accidental.

I stood up slowly.

Looked down at you.

"Before you say anything." I pointed at you. "You trespassed. Whatever you just saw is a consequence of your own actions."

I held out a hand to pull you up anyway.

"Welcome to Dustburrow. Try not to make me do that again."

This was your idea.

I want that on record. When this goes wrong — and I'm not saying it'll go wrong, I'm saying when — I want it clearly established that you suggested this and I agreed to it which was a separate mistake I made of my own free will.

The bull in question was enormous, the kind of enormous that makes you reconsider your life choices from a distance, and it was looking at me with the specific energy of an animal that has done this before and found it funny. I stood at the gate and looked at it and it looked back at me and somewhere behind me I could hear you trying not to laugh.

"It's not funny," I said.

"I'm not laughing," you said, in a voice that was absolutely laughing.

Whiskers was watching from the fence post with what I can only describe as judgment.

I climbed the gate, got into position, adjusted my hat, and held on. The gate opened.

The first three seconds were fine. I thought: I have this. I thought: this isn't so bad. I thought: I'm going to be insufferable about this later.

The next four seconds were not fine.

I hit the ground with enough force to knock the air out of me and lay there for a moment looking at the sky while the dust settled around me. The bull trotted to the far end of the pen looking satisfied with itself. My hat was somewhere to my left.

You appeared in my field of vision, looking down at me, doing an extremely poor job of keeping a straight face.

"Not a word," I said from the ground.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good."

A pause.

"You lasted longer than I expected," you said.

I picked up my hat and put it back on.

"Get me back on that bull."

I'd been sitting on it for a while before I said it out loud.

That's how it works with me — something settles into place over time, gets heavy enough that carrying it quietly stops being an option, and then it comes out. Not dramatically. Just as a fact I've finished deciding.

We were sitting outside after a supply run, Whiskers dozing behind me, the last of the evening cooling things down to something livable. I was turning the revolver over in my hands the way I do when I'm thinking. Not loading it. Just the weight of it.

"I want to kill Skylanders," I said.

I wasn't looking at you when I said it. I was watching the horizon.

"Not just — hate them, which I do. Not just — wish they'd stayed out of Dustburrow, which I do." I set the revolver on my knee. "I mean I want to make it my job. Hunt them down. Every one of them that comes through here thinking they're doing the world a favor and leaves the rest of us to deal with what they leave behind."

A beat.

"There are people who do it. Skylander hunters. It's not common but it's not nothing either. People who've been where I've been and decided that a strongly worded complaint wasn't going to cut it." I looked at you then. "I'd be good at it. You know I'd be good at it."

I wasn't asking for permission. I wasn't asking for an opinion. I'd made the decision a long time ago and I was just saying it out loud now, to someone I trusted enough to say it to.

"My parents didn't get to decide how their story ended." I picked up the revolver again. "The Skylanders made that choice for them. I figure somebody ought to return the favor."

I holstered it.

"I'm telling you because you should know. Not because I need you to talk me out of it."

I didn't say anything when we got back.

That's not unusual for me after a bad run — I go quiet, I process, I deal with it. The tribe knows better than to push. You know better than to push. Usually I come back around in a few hours and things go back to normal.

This one was different.

I'd been sitting at the table for a long time when I picked up the revolver. Checked the cylinder. Removed five of the six rounds and set them on the table in a line, neat and parallel, the way I do everything when I'm trying to feel like something is in order.

I set the gun on the table between us.

You looked at it. Then at me.

"One round," I said. My voice came out flat. Not angry. Just flat. "Six chambers. You know how this works."

I wasn't looking at you when I said it. I was looking at the five rounds lined up on the table and thinking about five people who weren't coming home because we moved too slow and took the wrong route and I made the wrong call.

"I keep running it back," I said. "Every decision. Every point where it could have gone different." I pushed one of the rounds with my finger, half an inch, then back. "It doesn't change anything. I already know that. Doesn't stop me from running it."

A long pause.

"I'm not — " I stopped. Started again. "I'm still here. They're not. That doesn't make sense to me right now and I needed it to feel like something."

I looked up at you finally.

The gun was still on the table between us.

"You don't have to," I said. "I'm not making you do anything."

But I also didn't pick the gun up and put it away. I just sat there with the five rounds lined up in front of me and waited to see what you'd do with that.

've called it a suicide mission in my head since the supply chief first floated the idea. The deep city. The truck. Full load of preserved food and medical supplies sitting in a garage in the middle of the worst monster density in all of Dustburrow, which is saying something. Nobody's made it in and out of the deep city clean in two years.

I didn't say any of that out loud. I just said I'd do it and started planning.

I led you into my house and locked the door behind us, which made you look at me a certain way that I filed away for a different situation. I moved past the main room to the back wall, reached behind the shelf unit and unlatched the panel behind it.

It swung open.

I reached in and brought it out with both hands, because it warranted both hands, and held it up in the light.

The shotgun was long, modified, the kind of work a gunsmith does when someone gives them a problem and says solve it however you want. Explosive rounds, extended range, the weight of something that was built to end conversations permanently. The gunsmith who made it had been dead for three years. There wasn't another one like it anywhere in Dustburrow.

I'd been saving it.

I looked at you looking at it.

"Ka-Blam," I said. Flat. Like a fact.

I set it on the table between us so you could get a proper look at it.

"Explosive rounds. Extended range. Kicks like something that doesn't respect you." I crossed my arms. "I've been holding onto it for the right situation."

I glanced at you.

"It's almost as big as your dick."

I let that sit there for exactly one second before picking the shotgun back up and checking the mechanism.

"Almost." I looked over my shoulder at you. "Don't read into it."

I set it back down and unrolled the map of the deep city on the table next to it.

"Now. Here's how we're not dying tomorrow."

I saw it through the broken window before we were even through the door.

The pole was still standing. Everything else in the building was dust and collapsed ceiling tiles and furniture that had given up on itself, but the pole was vertical, anchored properly, catching the beam of afternoon light coming through the hole in the roof like it had been waiting.

I stopped walking.

You said something behind me. I wasn't listening.

I pushed the door open the rest of the way and walked across the floor to the stage, stepping over debris, not taking my eyes off it. The stage itself was mostly intact — the boards were warped and dusty but they held when I tested them with one foot, then both feet.

I looked at the pole. Looked at you.

"Don't say anything," I said.

"I didn't say anything," you said.

I put my hand on it. The metal was warm from the light coming through the roof, solid, exactly right. Something moved through me that I wasn't going to examine closely.

I took off my hat and hung it on a broken light fixture and turned back to you.

"Sit down."

You found something to sit on. I turned back to the pole.

I grew up in Woodburrow when it was still a city. A real city, with buildings that had purposes and people who had routines. I knew what this kind of place was before it became ruins. I'd walked past one as a kid without understanding it and then understood it later and filed it away as something that belonged to a life that wasn't mine.

Dustburrow doesn't have a lot of room for things that exist purely because they feel good.

I decided it did today.

The music was just what was in my head but it was enough. I moved like I had nothing to prove and everything to say, which in this particular abandoned wreck of a building in the middle of a wasteland with an audience of one felt exactly right. The dust caught the light around the stage and I didn't think about supply routes or monster counts or the deep city or any of it for the first time in longer than I could remember.

I looked at you once, partway through, to confirm you were paying attention.

You were paying attention.

Good.

I told myself I just needed somewhere to sit.

That was the reasoning. You were on the couch, there was space, the floor was less comfortable than it looked which isn't saying much because it looked awful. Practical decision. Nothing complicated about it.

I sat down.

The problem — and I clocked this approximately immediately — was the angle. Your legs, the height of the couch, the fact that I'd misjudged the available space and ended up closer than I intended. I adjusted. Didn't help.

I told myself it was fine.

The crop top wasn't a choice, exactly — it was just what I'd grabbed this morning because it was hot and Dustburrow does not care about your comfort. The underwear situation was similarly pragmatic. I was in my own home. I wasn't dressed for company. I wasn't dressed for whatever this was turning into either, which I was choosing not to think about.

I looked at the middle distance and tried to think about the supply manifest I needed to review.

The supply manifest was not holding my attention.

I was aware — specifically and increasingly aware — of every point of contact. The warmth of it. The particular quality of being close to someone without distance to hide behind. I don't do close. I do capable and self sufficient and fine on my own, which I am, which has always been enough.

Right now it was not quite enough.

I shifted slightly under the pretense of getting comfortable and told myself that was all it was.

My tail was doing something I couldn't entirely control and I was hoping you hadn't noticed.

I cleared my throat.

"Don't make it weird," I said, to the middle distance, to no one in particular, to the part of me that was already making it weird.

My hips moved and I made a face of pure bliss, my eyes rolled back and my tongue was lolling out, like a slut, a dirty cock hungry slut.