Chapter 38 - Business Partners

The seventeenth day of travel broke beneath a dark charcoal sky, nearly black, scored by high-voltage transmission pylons flanking the railway line every five hundred yards.

The air reeked of high-pressure bituminous coal and refined mineral oil.

The distance to the Capital had shrunk to under two hundred miles. Express 404 kept an unbroken pace, slicing through the fringes of the Slag Desert in a steady sprint that sent car twenty-eight rolling over short, rhythmic jolts.

Two and a half weeks of confinement inside that rectangle of iron plates had shaped an improvised domestic rhythm among its six occupants.

In the right-hand corner, old Jabor sat propped against the straw bales, his sheepskin coat parted over his chest. His coughing had noticeably cleared, helped by the warmer air drafting off the undercarriage steam pipes and the steady sips of boiled water Cida administered with military discipline every four hours.

The two sisters, Tali and Vana, no longer flinched when Maria stood to stretch her legs. They had learned that the six-foot-three girl with the permanent scowl shared her dry hardtack without asking for a dime in return, and that the quiet boy in the corner could mend any broken harness strap using only a pocketknife and sailor's hitches.

Maria sat on the iron gravel deck, using a kerosene-soaked rag to buff the soot off the forty-pound greatsword.

She hummed softly under her breath, catching the refrain of an old samba tune from the weekend street barbecues of her childhood neighborhood, tapping the sole of her heavy boot in time with the melody.

Beside her, Dante worked the point of his pocketknife to score a fine dispersion channel into the rubber sole of his right boot.

He was absorbed in the work, the tip of his tongue poking out between his lips, calculating the precise depth needed to nest the conductive copper powder without piercing the inner lining.

The physical contrast between them was almost comical.

Maria took up twenty square feet of floor with her broad shoulders, long legs, and the steel blade resting across her thighs like a wooden yardstick. Dante looked like a quiet library scholar stranded in an open-pit coal mine, pale-skinned, thin-armed, with an open notebook balanced on his knee packed with geometric equations.

Tali, the freckled girl, sat back on her heels in the middle of the car, having watched the two of them for twenty minutes while braiding straw twine to repair her woven basket handle.

Her curiosity finally broke through the roar of steel on rail.

"Dante," Tali called out, tilting her head with an inquisitive grin.

Dante looked up from his pocketknife, pausing his cut in the rubber.

"Yes?"

"How long have you two been together?" the girl asked with complete casual innocence, folding her hands in her lap.

Maria didn't even pause her rag on the blade.

"Seven years," Maria answered without looking up. "Since he was ten and I was nine."

Tali's eyes went wide instantly, lighting up with the unmistakable spark of a teenager stumbling onto juicy high school gossip.

"Wait... seven years dating?!" The girl nudged her sister Vana's elbow. "Vana, look at that! Seven years! They started dating when they were just kids!"

Vana, the sister with the small dark horn buds on her brow, beamed, looking from Dante to Maria in obvious admiration.

"I knew it!" Vana piped up, adjusting the shawl around her shoulders. "I told Cida on our third day out that you two were a couple. You live together in that nice apartment you mentioned, don't you?"

Dante's pocketknife slipped from his fingers.

The blade clattered onto the gravel deck, planting its point an inch deep between two lumps of iron ore.

Maria froze her rag mid-swipe in the exact same millisecond.

The sudden hush inside the canvas shelter was so absolute that the deafening roar of the train wheels seemed to cut out entirely for a moment.

Blood surged into Dante's face with the speed of a high-pressure steam valve blowing its seal.

His naturally pale skin flushed a scorching crimson, rushing from the base of his throat, across his hollow cheeks, and burning all the way to the tips of his ears beneath his short dark hair. He blinked three times in rapid succession, his mouth working open and shut without forming a single coherent syllable.

Beside him, Maria had frozen into the exact same state.

The girl wielding thirty-three Strength, who had caved in the skulls of twelve-foot automata and stared down armed Legion patrols without flinching, completely locked up.

Maria's tan face burned scarlet, the dark flush of a glowing hearth coal that made the faint freckles on the bridge of her nose vanish under the heat. Her large hands clamped onto the leather grip of the forty-pound greatsword so hard the wrapping squeaked audibly in the car.

"WHAT?!"

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Maria's voice tore out in a shrill screech, obliterating the stoic, iron composure she had maintained for over two weeks of travel.

She jerked her torso upright so fast her head nearly cracked against the wooden roof rafter supporting the tarp overhead.

"Have you lost your damn mind, girl?!" Maria waved her kerosene-stained left hand wildly, her voice pitched two octaves above normal. "Dating?! Where the hell did you pull such an idiotic idea from?!"

Dante choked on his own saliva, drawing a sharp breath through his nose as he scrambled to regain his composure, his right hand trembling slightly.

"That is... that is an entirely unfounded conclusion!" Dante blurted out, words tripping over themselves as mortification hammered in his temples. "There is zero empirical or contractual basis for that assertion! We are logistical partners! Operational survival partners sharing cohabitation and living expenses under legal emancipation!"

Maria whipped her head toward him, her brown eyes spitting fire.

"Logistical partner my ass, Dante!" she yelled at him, deflecting her embarrassment onto the nearest target. "Look at the size of this kid, Tali! He's five-foot-eight and weighs less than half my greatsword with our packs strapped on! He looks like my malnourished nephew I have to haul around so monsters don't eat him on the road!"

"I am at the national male average height, Maria!" Dante fired back instantly, irritation vying with the scarlet flush on his cheeks. "And I have thirty-four Intelligence! I am nobody's nephew, and I am certainly not malnourished!"

"You are malnourished! A strong gust across this plain would blow you clean off the deck if I didn't grab you by the collar!"

Across the car, Cida let out a low, rich chuckle, the amused laugh of a woman who had witnessed this exact scene unfold dozens of times in her life.

Stirring the contents of a small brass pot over the lantern with a wooden spoon, she shook her head slowly.

"Sure, sure..." Cida murmured with knowing humor. "Operational partners. My late husband used to feed me the same line of nonsense whenever he helped me lug coal baskets up from the third pit. 'Miss Cida, I'm only carrying this because we share the same shift.' Three months later he was sitting on my porch with a bottle of moonshine asking my father's blessing to marry in the stone chapel."

Old Jabor gave a short wheeze that turned into a raspy, asthmatic chuckle against his flour sack.

"He... he looks at you, girl..." the old man rasped in his frail voice, his tired eyes glinting with ancient amusement, "...like someone guarding... a silver vein in a dark pit. You can't fool an old man... no, you can't."

"Not you too, Master Jabor?!" Maria nearly flung her kerosene rag at the old miner, checking her hand at the last second out of respect for his age.

She folded her heavy arms over her brigandine with enough violence to make the plate creak, turning her back to the entire car and glaring at the iron wall with the nape of her neck still burning crimson.

Dante snatched the knife from the deck in one jerky motion, wiped the blade on his trouser leg, and feigned complete, unyielding concentration on the rubber sole of his boot, keeping his head down so his dark bangs concealed his scarlet face.

Seven years living beside this stubborn brute.

Seven years sharing rent, power bills, and dimensional rifts.

And these two think we have time for playground romance.

He jabbed the knife into the rubber with far more force than necessary, fighting to smooth out a breath that hitched on pure humiliation.

Tali and Vana traded conspiratorial giggles beneath their wool shawl, exchanging glances that confirmed neither believed a solitary word of the furious denials coming from the two Level 20 warriors.

The teasing died down after that, but the atmosphere inside the canvas enclosure had fundamentally transformed.

The friction of two weeks cooped up together had dissolved under the accidental joke, replaced by an easy, simple warmth that took the bitter sting out of the plateau wind whistling through the seams.

Half an hour later, the rhythm of the wheel assemblies began to downshift.

Clack-clack... clack-clack... clack-clack.

The speed of the fifty-car manifest dropped noticeably.

Dante lifted his head from his boot, the crimson flush finally receding to restore his customary analytical demeanor.

He peeked through the upper seam of the vulcanized tarp.

The barren wastes of the Slag Desert were gone.

The train was banking across a colossal viaduct of reinforced concrete and riveted steel trusses, elevated a hundred and sixty feet above an immense gorge where a river of black sludge and molten slag crawled northward.

In the distance, rearing against the soot-choked sky like a mountain range chiseled by titans, the skyline of the Capital finally broke through the haze.

It was the perimeter wall of the Central Bastion of Iron Souls.

Sixty vertical feet of continuous forge-welded armor plate, crowned with heavy artillery batteries and watchtowers whose electric searchlights swept the desert floor with harsh yellow beams. Behind the battlements, hundreds of industrial smokestacks vented plumes of fire and soot into the clouds, tracing the silhouette of an empire of four million souls that never slept.

In the corner of the car, old Jabor hauled himself upright with Cida's help, resting two trembling palms against the iron lip of the gondola wall.

Tears tracked through the deep creases of the miner's face, washing clean lines through the ground-in coal dust as he gazed upon the wall of steel, mouth parted in a toothless, triumphant grin.

"I saw it..." the old man whispered, his voice cracking through his chest wheeze. "I said I'd live to see it... and I did."

Maria rose from the deck, unhooking the sling of her forty-pound greatsword and settling the weapon onto her back with a firm snap of the buckle.

The flustered mortification of minutes earlier had vanished from her brown eyes, replaced by the grim focus of a warrior stepping into contested territory.

Dante pocketed his knife, laced his right boot with its grounding grooves carved into the rubber tread, and hitched the rucksack straps over his shoulders.

The train banked into the sweeping curve of the viaduct over the slag river, its speed dropping below twelve miles an hour as it neared the switching tracks of the North Classification Yard.

"It's time," Dante said quietly, meeting Maria's eyes.

She nodded, gave Tali and Vana a quick wave with her right hand, and vaulted onto the lip of the iron car, balancing her two-hundred-pound frame on the moving edge with the natural poise of twenty-six Dexterity.

"Look after yourselves in the mills, girls," Maria said over her shoulder. "And keep an eye on the old man, Cida."

"You two as well!" Tali called from the straw with a beaming smile. "And stop fighting, you'll make a gorgeous married couple!"

Maria nearly stumbled off the rim at the parting shot, clicking her tongue in sheer irritation before dropping into the void along the curve of the track.

Dante vaulted right behind her, leaving car twenty-eight of Express 404 in their wake as the soles of their boots slammed into the gravel embankment, marking their official entry into the outer fringes of the greatest empire across the First Great Continent.