Polyphia

ch. I

Polyphia /ˈlatn/ (n.)—many sounds.

It comes as breakneck as it is rushing through a glade—with all the fury of a woman's hunger after a self-administered fast, relinquishing temperance and restraint and reaching for that ever-elusive peach growing on a gangling bough and thinking, inanely, that it would be enough to ward off hunger forever with just one bite.

Furiosa had always known it was inevitable.

Repeating the same thing and expecting different results, she's been doing that for something of twenty-two years, and she's become exceptionally good at it. That's the only option here, regardless if you're a breeder, a soldier, or nothing that would otherwise put greens on your plate. Run side-by-side with the insane, and you'll never truly succumb to their madness, because their madness is what keeps you focused on what you could become.

He was never that much more talkative during the preparations for the runs. If he was, she can't say that she'd have responded with breaking her mute façade, so it's all pointless to think about it that way. Jack's leagues above her in sophistication when it comes to running a war vehicle. She'd just leave him alone, try to get out of his way to let that happen smoothly. And most times, it did.

Something about the triangular, monotonous sequence—Citadel, Bullet Farm, Gas Town—Citadel, Bullet Farm, Gas Town—she sees it bring about a semblance of ordered chaos to the lives of both apocalyptic royalty and someone as inconsequential as her.

Inarguably, it's a resource-driven, necessary evil he's doing. Never enough. Gone in a month. Back on the road.

That's what makes him such an asset. Something she needs to replicate immediately if she's going to have any chance of making it now.

Praetorian Jack's always the hero through offhand accounts. Her mother's stories about the old world remind her of how the boys blether about him. How, in one ancient story, there was a god of death who unavoidably stirred upon seeing the goddess of Spring plucking trumpet-bellied daffodils—that was one of her favorites. In her world; however, the War Boys carol epithets for him and fuel his legend with renditions as the fleet-footed messenger of Death himself.

She didn't believe most of them.

On impulse, she'd thought he'd be taller than he is, larger like that brute, Rictus, boisterously loud and vulgar with an unswerving manner to him that would make him seem as theatrically immortal as Immortan Joe.

But he's none of that, and that's been scratching at her mind more than parables that don't thread oiled fingers through chocolate-colored tufts or look straight-on, shocked, angered, betrayed, she doesn't know, but still in that characteristically silent, brooding way. On the Fury Road, a man-turned-woman in the pleather cushion at his side.

They make the remainder of the ride in utter silence—and limp be damned—she refuses his help out of the fucking rig, because she doesn't need it. She's been a woman to him for less than an hour and he's already turning her into his fragile, marble Galatea.