Yet he wriggles down from the blind nimbly, walking on his hands and lifting his torso and stumpy legs with sheer muscle as he does so. He’s too good at getting around without legs; must have been doing it for a while now. He makes it over to you before you’re able to climb to your feet. “It really is you. I thought, I heard you were only fourth ring, did you really punch through my torus? I’m a sixer. Six! But that’s how I knew, see, you still sess the same, still quiet on the outside and rusting furious on the inside, it really is you.”
The other commless are starting to creep down from their spires and such. You tense as they appear—scarecrow figures, thin and ragged and stinking, watching you from stolen or homemade goggles and above wraparound masks that obviously used to be somebody’s clothes. They do not attack, however. They gather and watch you with Maxixe.
You stare as he circles you, levering himself along rapidly. He’s wearing commless rags, long-sleeved and layered, but you can see how big his shoulder and arm muscles are under the tattered cloth. The rest of him is scrawny. The gauntness of his face is painful to see, but it’s clear what his body has prioritized during the long hungry months.
“Arkete,” you say, because you remember that he always preferred the name he was born with.
He stops circling and peers at you for a moment, head tilted. Maybe this helps him see better with one functioning eye. The look on his face tells you off, though. He’s not Arkete, any more than you are Damaya. Too much has changed. Maxixe it is, then.
“You remembered,” he says, though. In that moment of stillness, this eye in his previous storm of words, you glimpse the thoughtful, charming boy you remember. Even though the coincidence of this is almost too much to digest. The only thing stranger would be running into … the brother you actually forgot you had, until just now. What was his name? Earthfires, you’ve forgotten that, too. But you probably wouldn’t recognize him, if you saw him. The grits of the Fulcrum were your siblings, in pain if not in blood.
You shake your head to focus, and nod. You’re on your feet now, dusting leaf litter and ash off your butt, though awkwardly around the pulling weight on your chest. “I’m surprised I remembered, too. You must have made an impression.”
He smiles. It’s lopsided. Only half his face works the way it should. “I forgot. Tried hard to, anyway.”
You set your jaw, steeling yourself. “I’m—sorry.” It’s pointless. He probably doesn’t even remember what you’re sorry about.
He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“No.” He looks away for a moment. “I should have talked to you, after. Shouldn’t have hated you the way I did. Shouldn’t have let her, them, change me. But I did, and now … none of that matters.”
You know exactly which “her” he’s referring to. After that whole incident with Crack, bullying that exposed a whole network of grits just trying to survive and a larger network of adults exploiting their desperation … You remember. Maxixe, returning to the grit barracks one day with both his hands broken.
“Better than what they did to Crack,” you murmur, before it occurs to you not to say this.
Yet he nods, unsurprised. “Went to a node station once. It wasn’t her. Rust knows what I was thinking … But I wanted to search them all. Before the Season.” He utters a ragged, bitter chuckle. “I didn’t even like her. Just needed to know.”
You shake your head. Not that you don’t understand the impulse; you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t thought it, too, in the years since you learned the truth. Go to all the stations. Figure out some way to restore their damaged sessapinae and set them free. Or kill them as a kindness; ah, you’d have been such a good instructor, if the Fulcrum had ever given you a chance. But of course you did nothing. And of course Maxixe didn’t do anything to save the node maintainers, either. Only Alabaster ever managed that.
You take a deep breath. “I’m with them,” you say, jerking your head back toward the road. “You heard what the headwoman said. Orogenes welcome.”
He sways a little, there on his stumps and arms. It’s hard to see his face in the dark. “I can sess her. She’s the headwoman?”
“Yeah. And everyone in the comm knows it. They’re—This comm is—” And you take a deep breath. “We. Are a comm that’s trying to do something different. Orogenes and stills. Not killing each other.”
He laughs, which sets off a few moments of coughing. The other stick figures chuckle, too, but it’s Maxixe’s cough that worries you. It’s dry, hacking, pebbly; not a good sound. He’s been breathing too much ash without a mask. It’s loud, too. If the Hunters aren’t nearby, watching and perhaps ready to shoot him and his people, you’ll eat your runny-sack.
At the end of the coughing fit, he tilts his head up at you again, with an amused look in his eye. “I’m doing the same thing,” he drawls. With his chin, he points toward his gathered people. “These rusters stick with me because I’m not going to eat them. They don’t fuck with me because I’ll kill them. There: peaceful coexistence.”
You look around at them and frown. Hard to see their expressions. “They didn’t attack my people, though.” Or they’d be dead.
“Nah. That was Olemshyn.” Maxixe shrugs; it makes his whole body move. “Half-Sanzed bastard. Got kicked out of two comms for ‘anger management issues,’ he said. He would’ve gotten us all killed raiding, so I told anybody who wanted to live and could stand me to come follow me, and we did our own thing. This side of the forest is ours, that side was theirs.”
Two commless tribes, not one. Maxixe’s hardly qualifies, though; only a handful of people besides himself? But he said it: Those who could endure living with a rogga went with him. That just didn’t turn out to be a lot of people.
Maxixe turns and climbs halfway up to the blind again, so that he can sit down and also be on an eye level with you. He lets out another rattly cough from the effort of doing this. “I figure he was expecting me to hit you lot,” he continues, once the cough subsides. “That’s how we usually do it: I ice ’em, his group grabs what it can before I and mine can show up, we both get enough to go on a little longer. But I was all fucked up from what your headwoman said.” He looks away, shaking his head. “Olemshyn should’ve broken off once he saw I wasn’t going to ice you, but, well. I did say he was gonna get them killed.”
“Yeah.”
“Good riddance. What happened to your arm?” He’s looking at you now. He can’t see your left breast, even though you’re slouching a little to the left. It hurts, weighing on your flesh.
You counter, “What happened to your legs?”
He smiles, lopsidedly, and doesn’t answer. Neither do you.
“So, not killing each other.” Maxixe shakes his head. “And that’s actually working out?”
“So far. We’re trying, anyway.”
“Won’t work.” Maxixe shifts again and darts another look at you. “How much did it cost you, to join them?”
You don’t say nothing, because that’s not what he’s asking, anyway. You can see the bargain he’s made for survival here: his skills in exchange for the raiders’ limited food and dubious shelter. This stone forest, this death trap, is his doing. How many people did he kill for his raiders?
How many have you killed, for Castrima?