The Wasteland Soldier, Book 1, A Fractured World

One

Adam watched her in the rubble strewn street below, his gloved hands tightly gripping the worn binoculars trained on her.

"Is she one of them?"

Hugo was asking the question. He was fidgeting, shuffling from one foot to the other. He blinked up at the blue sky, ripped with streaks of crimson, the hot wind whipping around them on the sloping rooftop, tossing dirt and grit in every direction. The only sound was the relentless wind and Hugo hated it. He wanted this finished so he could return home. He was tired, hungry, and irritated with a hunt that had stretched into so many weeks that he had now lost count. The payoff would be good, incredible, in truth, but this was torturous. He missed his bed, his life partner and his children. There had been four of them at the beginning. Now there was only three. He wondered, briefly, what had happened to Bramble.

Six feet tall, he was the largest of the three men and bristled with an array of weapons; a curved wooden club across his back, a selection of blades hanging from the belt around his narrow waist, a rifle swung over his shoulder. His clothing was scruffy and worn, thick with layers of dirt. He wore a helmet, scratched and scarred, and a pair of rubber goggles pushed down over his eyes.

"Adam?"

Hugo scratched his unshaven jaw, waiting for a response.

"Adam. Are we sure?"

They had spotted her at dawn, the sun rising across a landscape blistered and forgotten. For several hours they had tracked her through the city, a place of no name, a dead city, abandoned to the scavengers and bandits. She had picked her way through the remains of a world no one remembered, or cared to, buried beneath a thousand years of dust. She had moved silently from building to building but there was nothing to be found. This city had been looted centuries before. No food, no weapons, no supplies, these places had mattered once but not now; memories had faded, they were husks, choked with debris and bones.

"I think so," said Adam, his voice coarse from the dry heat.

A slender frame, little more than five feet in height, she skipped lightly across the fallen rubble. A brightly coloured scarf covered her face, goggles concealed her eyes, and a hood was drawn over her hair.

"What's she looking for?" asked Rafa. "Nothing left."

His voice was little more than a menacing growl, even when he was devoid of aggression. The youngest of the three, he struggled with words, often suffering from a blaze of redness as he painfully formed sentences. Out here, he felt less judged, free to speak and ask questions but as he waited for an answer no one volunteered any reply.

The wind sent another shower of grit through the air, causing Hugo and Rafa to duck. Adam remained unmoved, his gaze never faltering. He saw the wind flick at her hood and glimpsed dirty copper coloured hair. She stopped to straighten it, then adjusted her face scarf and lifted her goggles to wipe her left eye. In that briefest of moments Adam gasped as he witnessed the scars that criss-crossed her skin, saw a black patch covering her right eye, and then her head turned and lowered and Adam smiled thinly.

"She's what we've been searching for," he said.

She was a Pure One. There could be no mistake. The disfigured skin. The one eye. Female.

She was the rarest of rare things. A miracle for the land of Gallen.

"Then let's go," said Hugo. "Come on, Adam, we need to get down there before anyone else spots her."

"No one around," muttered Rafa. "Us and bones."

He had a choking laugh; it was as if he needed to clear his throat.