It was a long way to Carlisle. A long way to anywhere, really, especially when one was traveling on foot, and extra-especially when one was traveling on foot accompanied by a child of eight years old. Normally that meant that Sara and Zahra had to take things easy, conserve their strength for long-haul movement across tens of kilometers. Not always though.

  For instance, immediately after robbing someone for food. Zahra’s foolishness had disabled Gilead and Ben long enough to get away, but it wasn’t going to last for more than a couple of minutes. It was easily possible that there were two armed men on Sara’s tail, waiting to take revenge. And the same foolish exertion that had helped them escape also meant that Zahra’s condition was degrading rapidly. She lasted about an hour before Sara had to choose between letting her imaginary pursuers catch up with her and carrying Zahra on her back.

  They stopped a little after sunset, making camp in a depression to ensure that Gilead wouldn’t be able to see their campfire, assuming he was even after them. It was starting to seem unlikely by that point, but there was really no way to be absolutely sure. Sara rushed through the process of making a campfire, gathering what firewood she could find, knowing that even in spring there would be frost on the ground come morning.

  Even once she had started the fire up—her and Zahra’s father had given her that lighter when Sara was thirteen, and it was still her favorite gift—there was still more work to be done. Zahra was pale, clammy, feverish, struggling for breath, and in desperate need of blankets that she was too weak to get for herself. Medications are hard to come by in Scrapyard, but less so for two Pretenders; there was a bottle of pills and a worn-down inhaler at the bottom of Sara’s bag; Zahra got one pill and half a breath as the first order of business.

  The food was substantially less dour of an experience. Fresh bread was a delight, enough to get a smile out of Zahra even as she lay sickly and weak, propped up on a pile of foliage. Better yet was the can of beef in gravy. Sara’s instincts were to save such a rich object of food for later, but she and her sister both needed the pick-up; she warmed the can over the fire, then gave Zahra as much as her under-developed stomach could fit before having any for herself.

  Sleep always came relatively easy after all the work the pair of them had been doing, but it was nevertheless the case that there was some time to talk before they slipped into unconsciousness.

  Sara started. “You didn’t need to do that. I had it handled.”

  Zahra frowned. “He was on top of you. He was going to hurt you.”

  “He would have tried to hurt me,” Sara. “And he would have failed. Once I was in my First Pretense, he wouldn’t have been able to hurt me.”

  “Why didn’t you use your things, then?”

  Zahra doesn’t remember the word, but by the direction her eyes were facing, Sara knew what she meant. Sara always kept blocks of explosive secured to her torso, front and back; her Pretension meant that the explosions only went in one direction, so they were a very useful defensive measure as long as she remembered to replace them.

  “I was concerned about the recoil,” she said. It was a lie; she hadn’t thought to use them at all. “With my back against the ground, the recoil that normally shoves me back might have been enough to break my ribs.”

  “So instead you tried using your First Pretension in the middle of a fight? He could have killed you while you were saying it!”

  “With his bare hands? I doubt it.”

  “You—“

  Sara held up a finger, and Zahra stopped, pouting with her arms folded across her chest. A child is a child, even when she’s dying.

  “The fact remains that you need to be more careful with your Pretension. Winning a fight a few seconds sooner isn’t worth walking you a few weeks closer to…” Sara couldn’t bring herself to say ‘death’, but both siblings knew that was what she was talking about. “A last resort is a last resort. That means when you know for certain the only alternative is dying.”

  Zahra adjusted her position. It was a good sign; the medication was taking effect, returning her strength to her.

  “When we were running from the cowboy, you told me that bullets kill before you realize what’s happening. That you need to get ahead of them.”

  Sara had said that. Maybe saying that had been a mistake, if it got Zahra to be so reckless. She scowled, then averted her face, letting the shadows swallow up that negative feeling before it could hurt Zahra.

  “I wish we didn’t have to hurt people like that,” Zahra said. “He looked so scared when you pointed your gun at him.”

  Sara sighed. “I wish we didn’t have to do that either. But we couldn’t trust him to just give us the food. And with how far it is from here to Carlisle, you would have died without food.”

  Before she’d robbed him, Ben Gibson had said that it was twenty-eight miles to Carlisle. For a small group, that meant about eleven hours of walking, so less than two days, but more than one day unless one was willing to push their stamina. Then again, that number assumed determined adults, not an adult escorting a sickly child.

  “I’m sorry for being sick,” Zahra said.

  Sara circled around the fire and pulled her sister into a tight hug. What could you say to that? Nothing. While Zahra couldn’t see her face, Sara took the time to let herself cry.

  With Zahra’s sickness at a high tide thanks to her stunt during the botched robbery, they took things relatively easily the next day of travel. The only threat, as far as they figured, was that Gilead or Gibson might decide to make chase for vengeance’s sake. If that was going to happen, though, it would have been in the morning. By the time she and her sister set camp next to a rural water pump, Sara was fairly sure that there was nothing out there waiting for her.

  There was something wrong about that night, though. It was cold, far too cold for the season, and the runes that swept the sky were off somehow, dim or discolored. An eerie wind swept in from beyond Scrapyard’s edge, carrying with it the slightest hint of the blood ocean’s raw-meat odor.

  Both of the sisters could sense it, whatever “it” was. As was her duty, Sara didn’t let the fear and discomfort show on her face: that way Zahra was free to shiver and frown and hide herself in her blankets. If Zahra did that and didn’t have Sara sitting upright at her side, expression blank and strong, there would be no point. Instead, the girl could press herself to her older sister’s side, relying on her strength to weather the ghoulish atmosphere.

  Theoretically, this was about when both of the sisters were supposed to lie down for sleep, but they quickly reached the wordless conclusion that that wasn’t going to happen. What was going to happen instead was that they were going to stay seated upright, leaning against one another, Sara tending to the fire for as long as she could force herself to remain conscious. They would eventually both find sleep, still sitting up, and be awoken by any noise at all. They’d slept like that before, too many times. Whenever the American soldiers were too close, or during the long days of pursuit by the cowboy, it would be too risky to sleep deeply.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The wind continued to blow and blow and blow, and to accompany its constant woodwind drone, the sounds of animals became ever more present. Beasts chuffed and skittered through the grass, grunting and screeching up in the trees. There were horses somewhere nearby, judging by the thudding sounds of their hooves tearing up the sod, and with how quickly they were moving, they must have been terrified. The trees were scared too, or they trembled as if they were, and that rattle of branch against branch only added to the general cacophony.

  Louder and louder it went, the wind whistling more strongly, the creatures of the woods becoming more frantic with their cries, the rustling of trees and branches growing more frantic until they seemed liable to snap. Somewhere in the distance, a man’s voice sang a deep, quick song, though the words were blurred into incomprehensibility by the noise. And the thudding hoofbeats grew closer and closer.

  All of a sudden, Sara lurched upright. “Zahra, put out the fire! Someone is coming!”

  While Zahra rushed to do so, Sara quickly made ready to defend herself. She took out her flashlight, but for the sake of stealth kept it off, and scrambled to put on her battle-gear, the ballistic vest and webbing containing all of her defensive charges. With each second that passed, what had started as a hunch became more and more certain: those horses weren’t just the runaway herd of some rancher, they were organized and on the move.

  Zahra took a stick and scattered the fire, leaving it to dwindle into mere tongues of flame, then embers. Darkness fell, and Sara ordered her sister to stay low and quiet, an easy task when everything around them had gone to hell in a handbasket.

  Sara crouched down onto one knee, the flashlight ready in her hand, and listened. In the dark, the chaos that had become of nature was all the more unsettling, birds daring the high winds with screeching calls rather than dare remain near the ground, and somewhere in the distance came the violent scratching and grunting of two small beasts—foxes or badgers perhaps—fighting to the death in a frenzy.

  But the hooves had stopped. Sara’s hands trembled; were they gone? Had she escaped? For a few seconds she was deaf to the howling wind and rustling of trees, peering into the dark in search of any sign or signal. But she found it. There should have been a visible reflection in front of her where the rune-light from above fell upon the metal of the pump handle. It was gone. Something was standing between her and the well.

  Sara flicked on the flashlight.

  They were completely surrounded by riders; though to call the things they saw merely “riders” would be to underplay the unnatural terror which they possessed. The majority of them were visibly, clearly dead, and long dead at that, the yellowed bones of men riding atop the yellowed bones of horses. Rusted clumps of what had once been medieval armor still sat atop their heads and shoulders. But the swords they carried? Those were so clean and so sharp that they shone in the rune-light.

  But the head of the pack was not like the others. He sat atop a great black destrier with eyes that glimmered crimson in the dark, steam puffing out as it breathed. No bones were exposed, nor any skin or flesh for that matter: from head to toe he was clad all in black, a black surcoat over black-iron armor, a black helmet with a black visor concealing his face. Only two things were not black: the blade in his hand, and a single image painted onto his surcoat, depicting a lance with three droplets of blood dripping from the tip.

  Sara said the first thing that came to mind. “Crusader, eh? Come to get your ass kicked by the side of the Mediterranean that knows how to cook?”

  It was stupid, but she was too scared to come up with anything better. She slipped a block of explosive into her hand.

  “I challenge you, interloper, to a duel of fair arms. Defeat me and you shall go your way; cheat me and my men shall slaughter you where you stand.”

  A battle of fair arms. Sara had a suspicion that that meant fighting the black knight with melee weapons only. Even if they were armed the same, Sara didn’t know shit about swordfighting. But she knew a few other things. Among them: bluffing.

  “Give me a sword, then. At least make it even.”

  The black knight nodded at one of his followers, who promptly dismounted and began walking up to Sara to hand her his own sword. Her eyes were firmly on the black knight, though. And sure enough, he was distracted.

  If there was one thing that Sara had forced herself to become good at since becoming a Pretender, it was throwing objects with the precise shape and weight of a small brick of home-made explosive. It sailed through the air in a perfect arc, missing the flank of the black knight’s horse by a hand’s breadth. But that was on purpose: it was easier to time things when they didn’t bounce.

  As though the bomb was a part of her own body, one impulse of thought from Sara caused it to detonate precisely how she meant it to, the high explosive blast directing in one direction: into the horse’s flank. Just as quickly, she had another brick in her hand, ready to throw it at one of the skeletal riders.

  It took Sara a fraction of a second to realize what was actually happening, instead of just following what she’d predicted would happen. The black knight’s steed should have been eviscerated by the shockwave. Even if it had durability enhanced by some kind of magic—Sara had seen worse—it should have been knocked to the side or stunned. But it was charging right at her, the knight’s sword ready to chop Sara’s head clean off.

  The only option was to go under, so Sara dropped into a forward roll, and hurled another bomb at the black knight as it passed her. Again, she detonated it with perfect timing, directly under the horse’s belly, and again it did nothing. This time she saw why: as the shrapnel of the second blast rained down, several stones passed clean through the horse and rider. Insubstantial, like mist; though Sara guessed that the same wasn’t true of his sword.

  While the black knight wheeled around for a second charge, one of the skeleton riders followed up with its own attack, trying to thrust its sword into Sara’s head as it rode past. This time, Sara didn’t have the time to take out another bomb. Instead, she rose suddenly, causing the sword to miss her head and instead go for her chest.

  Sara’s Pretension, the mystical thing that had been a part of her for so long, operated at the speed of thought, far faster even than her fighting reflexes. The sword never even pierced her ballistic vest: a few millimeters before impact, the nearest blast charge went off.

  Sara was thrown back by the recoil, but the bulk of the blast went directly at the skeleton’s arm, blowing it clean off. The rider continued its charge, racing off into the night even as it and its steed crumbled steadily into dust.

  There was no time, though, for Sara to keep track of whether that particular skeleton was down or not, because she was completely surrounded by them; at least fifteen, maybe more. The black knight had circled around again, but even as his followers attacked Sara with charge after charge—each one sapping her strength with exhaustion or recoil bruises—he took a different tack, dismounting and advancing with sword in hand.

  All at once, the skeleton riders retreated, leaving Sara to face the black knight alone. She drew her pistol and shot him five times in the center of the chest, failing even to pierce his armor. Sara looked around: there was no gap in the circle of knights, not one large enough to run through without taking a sword to the head.

  Sara’s hands trembled, her heart raced. She didn’t see a way out of this. Her techniques and tools were useless against whatever this thing was. Maybe she could pry him out of his armor, but she was no brawler; more than likely she would be dead on his sword long before she managed anything like that. Sara only hoped that Zahra had taken the time to escape while she was keeping their attackers occupied.

  She hadn’t. Or at least, she hadn’t made it very far. A second before the black knight attacked, there was a scream. Sara turned around, and even the black knight turned to look at the source of the noise. It was Zahra: one of the skeletal knights had found her, and was holding her by the back of the neck as she writhed and screamed.

  “No!” Sara spun back to face the black knight. “Don’t you dare hurt her!”

  There was a long span of hesitation, the only noise being Zahra’s growing sobs.

  “Is she yours?” asked the black knight.

  “Yes,” Sara said.

  He nodded, then sheathed his sword. All at once, the air totally changed. Without a word needing to be said, all the other warriors sheathed their weapons as well. The one holding onto Zahra let go of her, and the whole band of warriors turned about their horses and rode away. The black knight was the last to go.

  “I do not like to make orphans,” he said. “In the name of God, I spare you.”

  And then he was gone, racing away faster than the chill wind that accompanied him.

  Sara raced over, just in time to catch Zahra as the little girl collapsed into a coughing fit. They prayed to the Saints, held each other close, and blubbered about how close each had come to seeing the other die. The two sisters remained awake only long enough to return to their blankets. Always alone and always wary of foes, the sisters had learned to sleep despite mortal terror. It was the only way they could live.