THE SENTINEL

Chapter Two

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The road out of the Eastern Alliance was not a road at all.

It was a scar—a long, jagged wound cut into the earth by the weight of a hundred years of overpopulation and under-repair. The asphalt had long since crumbled into gravel, and the gravel had long since been swallowed by the dust that never settled in this part of the world.

Lian drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand resting on the console beside him—a habit he had picked up from Caius, who had always said that a man who drove with both hands was a man who was already planning to crash.

Wei sat in the passenger seat, her posture perfect, her gaze fixed on the horizon as if she could read the future in the haze.

Neither of them had spoken for two hours.

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Finally, Lian broke the silence.

"You don't ask questions."

Wei turned her head. "Would you like me to?"

"I'd like to know why you don't."

She considered this. "Questions are for people who are trying to understand something. I already understand you."

Lian's grip on the wheel tightened.

"You don't know me."

"I know that you drive with one hand because you learned it from a dead man. I know that you haven't eaten in seventeen hours because you don't like the taste of things that come from vending machines. I know that you're looking for something you can't name, because if you could name it, you would have found it by now."

Lian stared at her.

She stared back.

"You see?" she said softly. "I know you."

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The checkpoint came an hour later.

It was not a formal border—there were no formal borders anymore, not in the way there used to be. It was a wall of shipping containers, stacked three high, with a single gap wide enough for one vehicle to pass at a time.

Armed men stood at the gap. Their uniforms were mismatched, their weapons were obsolete, but their eyes were sharp.

Lian slowed the vehicle to a crawl.

"Don't speak," he said to Wei. "Don't look at them. Don't do anything that makes you look like what you are."

"And what am I?"

"Expensive."

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One of the men approached. He was tall, thin, with a scar that ran from his temple to his jaw—a mark that Lian recognized as the signature of a particular kind of blade used in a particular kind of knife fight.

"Papers," the man said.

Lian handed over a set of documents that were not entirely forged, but not entirely authentic. He had learned from Caius that the best lies were made of truth.

The man studied the papers. Then he looked at Wei.

"Passenger?"

"My sister."

"She doesn't look like you."

"She got the good genes."

The man stared at Wei for a long moment. She did not blink. She did not smile. She simply sat, her hands folded in her lap, her face calm and unreadable.

Finally, the man grunted and handed the papers back.

"They're watching the roads ahead. Something about a shipment that went missing. You see anything unusual, you keep driving and don't look back."

Lian nodded.

"I always do."

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They passed through the gap and drove into the wildlands.

The landscape changed quickly—from the grey of the Alliance to a brownish yellow that stretched in all directions, broken only by the skeletons of old buildings that had been abandoned long before Lian was born.

Wei spoke again.

"You didn't tell him I was a Sentinel."

"Obviously."

"Why not?"

Lian was quiet for a moment.

"Because if he knew what you were, he wouldn't have let us pass. He would have tried to take you, or kill you, or sell you to someone who would do worse."

"And you didn't want that."

"No."

"Why?"

Lian looked at her. Really looked at her.

"Because you're the last thing he gave me."

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Wei said nothing.

But something shifted in her eyes—something that almost looked like the beginning of understanding.

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Night fell over the wildlands like a blanket made of ash.

Lian pulled the vehicle into the shadow of a collapsed overpass, killed the engine, and sat in the silence.

Wei turned to him.

"You need to sleep."

"I'm fine."

"You haven't slept in forty hours."

"I said I'm fine."

She didn't argue. She simply reached over and placed her hand on his wrist—not restraining, just touching.

"I will watch," she said. "I will wake you if anything comes."

Lian looked at her hand, then at her face.

"You don't sleep?"

"I don't need to. I rest in other ways."

"What ways?"

She didn't answer. She only smiled—a small, subtle smile that barely moved the corners of her mouth.

"That's a question," she said. "And questions are for people who are trying to understand something."

Lian closed his eyes.

The last thing he heard before sleep took him was her voice, soft as a whisper:

"Sleep, Lian. I am here."

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(End of Chapter Two)