Chapter One

      J. B. Dix chewed a dust-dry blade of buffalo grass and leaned back against the wag, its sun-heated metal pinging as it cooled in the breeze. Beneath the low-tipped brim of his fedora, he watched a little girl named Sallee, scabbed legs splayed in the dust by the track, as she played with a flop-eared, vaguely humanoid bundle of rags.

      “What do you reckon that thing is, anyway, Jak?” he asked his companion, who perched on the wag’s hood walking a short leaf-bladed throwing knife along the backs of his bone-white fingers. “Rabbit or mutie?”

      Jak Lauren flicked his keen ruby toward the rags and laughed. He was scarcely more than a child himself, despite a veteran’s scars. His skin was chalk white, and his long hair, wind-whipped around his shoulders, was the color of fresh-fallen snow.

      “Mutie,” he said.

      The sky’s blue skin was bare of clouds. The layers of earth defining the walls and pinnacles of the Big Ditch, the old Grand Canyon, glowed as though lit from within the Earth itself in bands of colors—yellow, red, burnt-orange—muted but so rich they seemed to vibrate. The sun that brought out all that glory shone down on the desert above the great canyon like a laser beam, and struck those below with the impact of heat of molten steel. But the tall, statuesque redheaded woman in the jumpsuit and blue cowboy boots didn’t mind. It was the sort of day that Krysty Wroth loved most. The kind of day where you didn’t have to be an initiate of Gaia, as she was, to find the beauty hidden in the devastation that was the Deathlands.

      She let her green eyes slide from her two friends, to the caravan of a dozen battered wags parked by the edge of the Big Ditch with their engines cooling, while several people labored to change a flat tire, on to Doc Tanner, standing by offering unsolicited advice to Mildred Wyeth as she checked the dressings on the stump of a woman’s shin. A diamondback had bitten her on the ankle three days before, just outside the ville of Ten Mile, and her own husband had chopped off her leg with an ax to keep the venom from spreading.

      Nothing was dampening the travelers’ spirits, though. They were bound from the fringes of the Deathlands proper, away to the east across the Rocks, to the fledgling ville of New Tulsa, where some of their kin had already begun to carve a living out of the land. The land wasn’t much less desolate than what surrounded them, although better watered by rain. But that very land, sere tan land dotted with cactus and hardly less unfriendly scrub, looked like Paradise to a folk accustomed to rains of acid and skies of murk.

      And that sky of pure, open blue, with only a few clouds as white and innocent as baby lambs, affected them like some kind of happy drug: jolt without the edge. They laughed and chattered like kids and even sang. Some just wandered aimlessly, gazing around themselves in wonder.

      “I’m going into the bushes for a bit,” Krysty called to her friends, “to answer the call.”

      Ryan Cawdor, her lover, acknowledged her with a wave of his hand. He stood with his back to her on the rim of the precipice, the wind ruffling his shaggy black curls and gazed out and down into the giant cut in the earth’s flesh with his lone eye. A single dark shape wheeled out over that emptiness and the strange land forms striped with muted colors—ochre, orange, buff—at the level of the small party of humans and their machines perched perilously on the rim. From the fingerlike tips on the wings, Krysty was satisfied it was an eagle, not a screamwing.

      No threat. Having duly notified her companions, she went off into the scrub to tend to her affairs. For all the utter naturalness of such functions, Krysty had been raised to be modest.

      She didn’t hear the raiders until they were right upon them. No one did. The wind’s unceasing whistle and mutter masked the sound of engines coming fast from the east until the wags they propelled were braking to a stop alongside the halted caravan in a swirl of dust.

      Suddenly men were leaping off half a dozen wags, longblasters in their hands. Krysty caught a flashing impression they all wore olive or camouflage, military-style.

      Several travelers cried out in fear. Kids squealed and ran to parents frozen by shock. By reflex, Ryan spun, bringing his Steyr sniper rifle to his cheek.

      Two of the intruders’ wags were pickups with M-249 machine guns mounted on welded-together pintles behind the cabs. One MG snarled a burst. Krysty saw dust spout off Ryan’s coat.

      He fell from sight, straight into the Big Ditch.

      A woman broke shrieking toward the brush with a toddler in her arms. Several longblasters cracked, including at least one on full-auto. Mother and child fell kicking in a whirl of dust and bloodied rags. Their cries subsided into bubbling sobs. Another burst stilled them.

      Hidden behind scrub and a rise in the earth around the roots of a mesquite bush, Krysty felt as if she had been frozen into a block of amber like a mosquito Ryan had once shown her in some half-destroyed museum. Her hair, possessed of its own mobility and nerve-endings, flattened to her skull and neck.

      Her