#bolties

My sister, two thousand days younger than me, was born in the wastes, after the Parting of the Clans. Our Green Place was gone, swallowed by toxic swamp, and the Many Mothers had decided to disperse, one Clan going east, another west, one for the distant mountains, and another for the long-forgotten sea. Dozens of tribes, each carrying a fragment of our culture, set out into the wastes like seeds on the wind.

My sister was born in those early days on the road, and our mother named her Taunt, as though daring the world to take anything else from her.

We will send word, the Mothers all said, if we find a new place that can sustain us. We'll find you and gather our family together again, we promised -- without really believing that day would ever come. Those were the stories I was raised on, in Clan Lavender Hill: the death of the Green Place, and the baseless hope of a better tomorrow.

We traded when we could, shot when we had to, gathered as much of the beauty of the old world onto our bikes and sleds as we could fit. I learned to haggle, I learned to snipe, I learned how to grow tiny green things in the saddlebags of my motorcycle. The Green Place was gone, hope was elusive, and this was the only life I had ever known.

We weren't expecting much when the wastelander wandered within hailing distance of our camp and asked if he could approach. Opening with talking was always a good sign, and he was hardly the first stranger to materialize out of the desert mist, so we invited him in for tea and barter, and shade from the midday sun.

He carried with him tools and spare parts for trade, all suspiciously relevant to the motorcycles in our fleet, though we had neither seen nor heard a bike that might belong to the wastelander. But after he laid them out, he reached inside his battered leather jacket and drew out a double handful of small brown paper wrapped packages, each labeled in scrawling charcoal script.

Citadel Peaches read the first miniature parcel I touched. Peaches. I knew the word, but we had lost the taste, for me no more than a fleeting memory of childhood, of a trader who had two tiny peaches we managed to share between all of us, before we tucked the seedpits away for safekeeping. I showed the package to my Initiate Mother, Mara, watching the wastelander out of the corner of my eye, and felt Mara's intake of breath where our arms were pressed together.

"May I inspect the goods?" she asked the stranger, showing him the package I'd picked up. He barely met either of our gazes, but he nodded easily, and Mara carefully folded back the paper to find a pile of small, flat, crescent-moon shaped dried fruit, with a color like the last minutes of a sunset, orange and yellow shot through with pink, that somehow still promised juiciness. Mara put one into her mouth and closed her eyes, savoring.

After a quick glance at the wastelander, I did the same, the small piece of fruit leather taking me back to that one taste of peach as a child, the fuzz against my cheek and the juice on my chin.

Mara passed the rest of the package down the line -- we were definitely bartering for these, it was a question of how much they were worth, now -- and a Mother on the other side of the circle asked the stranger, "Where do you come from, son?"

"Citadel," he answered on a grunt. "East," he added, tilting his head the way he'd come. He cast a glance around the shade tent, taking in our tapestries and pillows, though clearly uncomfortable with that many people in an even partially enclosed space. "Are you, ah, Vuvalini?" he asked after a moment. "Many Mothers?"

Harsh whys where uttered from several corners, exactly the voices I would expect to snap whip-sharp at such a question, Taunt among them, and at least two rifles chambering a shot. I stared at the stranger, studied his body language and his face, tried to feel what he was feeling, separate from what my tribemates were feeling. There was a tension, yes, but that seemed to be a personal space issue, the stranger leaning back every time one of us leaned forward out of our loose semi-circle. But below that tension, he seemed at ease, the sort of looseness in his muscles that made me think of someone who knew where his next meal was coming from, who could sleep knowing his back was watched. We had it, in good times, but strangers wandering in from the wastes were often wound tight with desperation.

He was digging inside his leather jacket again, checking multiple pockets until he found a small folded piece of paper, finer and brighter than the paper wrapping the peaches – and more packages labeled Lizard Jerky and Seeds of the Citadel, I had caught at a glance -- and smoothed it flat between his oil-smudged hands, revealing a dark wax seal. "You've, mm, been called home," he said, handing the folded paper to the nearest Mother. "New Green Place, trying to gather all the Clans back together."

"I know these names," an older Mother said, leaning over the shoulder of the first and reading the opened letter. "But this here, this is Jobassa's child, that can't be right," she said, pointing at something at the bottom of the paper and shaking her head, frowning.

"Furiosa," the stranger supplied, the gazes of several of the Mothers older than me snapping to him, sharp and alert. "She's, mm. The Boltcutter. There was a revolution. At the Citadel. And now... New Green Place," he finished with a shrug. He wasn't here to force our decision, that shrug said, just to bring us the information.

"How many days east?" Mara asked, her voice level, but the wastelander was already pulling a tattered cloth map from another pocket. It was peppered with landmarks drawn in ink or blood, some I recognized, most I didn't. Three fingers’ width away from the landmarks I recognized was what looked like one symbol drawn over another: a red skull in a circle, overlaid with the rough approximation of what I took to be boltcutters in miniature and a circle clipped open at one side, both drawn in fine black ink, half obscuring the red skull.

The stranger tapped the double symbol with his finger, glancing up briefly to be sure we were listening. “The Citadel,” he reiterated, tapping it again. “Boltcutters. Ruled by, mm. Council of Mothers, now. Water, hydroponics, terraced mesas. Three days hard ride, east-north-east. Or four at caravan speed. You’ll see ‘em long before you get there.”

“Why would you help us?” another Mother spoke up, only five hundred or so days younger than me; the generation with dust in our veins, older Mothers sometimes said. “Why shouldn’t we assume this is a trap?”

He seemed almost to huff at that, but he gave her a flat look. “Was part of the revolution,” he said. “Not good at staying, but maybe I can… help,” he said, gesturing between himself and the map and us as a group.

He didn’t have the posture of someone laying a trap, nor of trying to force a decision upon a group, nor that of someone trying to control their body language. He seemed jumpy, but honest. I caught Mara’s gaze and lifted my eyebrows, and she offered the smallest of shrugs against my shoulder.

“You can see it, day or two out,” he grunted, gesturing at a rifle propped in the corner of the tent, retrofitted with a large scope. “Stop and take a look. You aren’t, mm. The first Vuvalini I’ve found. There are a couple tribes on the heights, now. Should be able to…” he made a gesture like opening a spyglass, “…see them.”

“And these Boltcutters will just welcome us in? With open arms?” someone else asked.

“Council of Mothers said,” he started then stopped, like he was chewing over the words, trying to remember their correct order. “Mm, this is the way it’s done. New Green Place, the Clans are all called home.” His gaze skittered over us and down to the pile of small paper-wrapped parcels on the dusty carpet between us. “Tell them… your names. Clan names, Mother names. New Citadel is, mm. Big on names.”

The stranger picked up a package with Lizard Jerky scrawled across the front and opened it, revealing thick strips of dark brown meat. He lifted a strip out carefully, then handed the rest in the open paper to me, neither of us quite making eye contact. I considered a long moment, feeling the gazes of my Clan on me, before I broke a strip in half, and passed the rest of the package to Mara, who was watching me with warm eyes.

The jerky was rich on my tongue, sweet and spicy with herbs I had forgotten the names for, tugging at something in my memory buried deeper than the childhood peach, something from a time when we still had family recipes, passed down from mother to daughter, and the time and space to indulge in making them.

Who were these people, these Boltcutters of the New Citadel, who could share food so easily, who would welcome us into their home for no reason other than a half-meant promise more than seven thousand days old? I had hardly any memory of the Green Place, I had known no life but that of a wandering Clan. But I could see something like hope in the eyes of the older Mothers, a need for action in the tension of their shoulders.

“Tell them, mm.” The wastelander turned the piece of jerky over in his hands, like it was something precious, rather than something he had shared with strangers without hesitation.