“Look,” the stranger said, voice suddenly soft. “I just wanna know one thing.”
Lunafreya looked up at her.
“Can I trust you?”
Once again, Lunafreya stared down a barrel of steel. But the stranger’s eyes were no longer those of a killer. The question was sincere.
“I am afraid I cannot say with certainty,” Lunafreya responded.
“Why not?”
“I have no way to prove to you that I am who I say.”
She did not want to lie. The stranger stared at her, and she felt compelled to stare right back. Lunafreya held her eyes open wide.
The gun barrel lowered. But instead of relief, Lunafreya felt her knees begin to tremble. She’d been so on edge, she hadn’t even recognized her own fear.
“Just remember this,” the stranger added. “One wrong move, and you’re dead.”
Then the gun was back in its holster. A small sigh escaped Lunafreya’s lips.
“If you want to show me you’re trustworthy, I could use a hand pushing the bike. This looks like more of a repair job than I can handle here on the road.”
The driver looked back at Lunafreya and added, “This is mostly your fault, y’know.”
“I’d be happy to,” Lunafreya responded, “Miss, um . . . ”
She realized she had not yet asked the stranger’s name.
“Sol,” the stranger answered.
It was unclear whether that was a surname or given name, or perhaps some manner of nickname, but Lunafreya nodded.
“C’mon then, Lady Oracle. Let’s get going.”
She hoped, at the very least, they’d found trust enough for the stranger not to give a false name.
Sol was breathing hard.
“You’re . . . a lot stronger . . . than I would’ve guessed,” she remarked, flicking a glance at the self-proclaimed Oracle as they pushed the poor, busted three-wheeler down the road.
“That’s . . . very kind of you . . . to say.”
The stranger―Lunafreya―was speaking in the same short, concentrated bursts. They were both gasping for air, a clear sign of the effort it was taking to push the vehicle along the road.
She’s a lot stronger than she looks, Sol thought, feeling a bit perplexed.
When she’d asked the woman to give her a hand, her expectations weren’t exactly high. Pushing the bike was obviously going to be an effort well beyond her. Not that the woman’s shabby attire was doing her any favors, but from the way she spoke and conducted herself, Sol could tell she’d had a pretty posh upbringing.
Still, when they righted the motorcycle and its sidecar, and when they began rolling it down the road, Sol quickly realized the woman was pulling her own weight.
Come to think of it, she’d held her own, more or less, during the fight with the Deathgaze, too. She’d held her little stick as if it were a real polearm, and her movements were those of someone trained to fight.
Frankly, the woman was suspicious with a capital “s.” Who went around claiming to be the Oracle? And that spell or whatever she’d used against the daemon. And the wound. Now here she was, blithely pushing away like nothing had happened, like a Deathgaze hadn’t just sunk its claws right into her arm. Sol had been staring straight at the wound when it closed up. It was weird. Creepy as hell, she thought.
On the outside, Sol was doing her best to keep a straight face. “How about . . . a bit . . . of a break?” she asked the woman.
“Yes, please,” came the response, voice thick with exhaustion. They stopped, each leaning against the bike, then sliding down to sit on the ground. Sol was careful to keep her arm positioned for a quick draw if needed.
This was the second time they’d stopped to rest. Sol glanced once more at the bike. The Deathgaze had managed to mangle it pretty bad. No amount of roadside tinkering was going to get it moving like this. They needed access to spare parts, as well as the space and time to make the repairs. Pushing it to the nearest temporary outpost was the only choice they had.
Not that it was a bad choice. It was the right thing to do, and part of what the outposts were set up for in the first place. Aside from functioning as bases from which to conduct reconnaissance and strikes against the daemons, they were dotted throughout the former imperial territories as makeshift shelters for anyone who found themselves in unexpected circumstances.
She’d told the so-called Oracle that Wael outpost was just a stone’s throw away. In reality, that was mostly to keep the woman from getting any funny ideas. It seemed reasonable enough to think she’d go along with things quietly if she believed Sol’s comrades weren’t too far away.
When they’d had a minute to catch their breaths, Lunafreya asked, “Might I ask, do you often travel by yourself?”
“Are you nuts? Of course not. It just worked out that way today.”
It wasn’t a lie. Traipsing around daemon-infested territory on your own was gambling with your life. The kind of thing only a mad fool would do.
Yeah, Sol thought. It just worked out that way.
More precisely, she’d had an unfortunate run-in with a pack of daemons. She’d taken the things on and, in the process, ranged a little farther out than she’d intended. When she realized what had happened, she was pretty far separated from her squad. Naturally, she’d immediately headed toward the rendezvous point. It would have been fine if she hadn’t been sidelined by an Oracle and a Deathgaze along the way.
Anyway, the important thing now was getting to the nearest outpost. Fixing the bike was the next priority, even if it meant heading in the opposite direction of the rendezvous.
“It seems strange that there isn’t any other traffic along here,” Lunafreya ventured.
When they’d had their first break and Sol had stopped the bike right in the middle of the road and sat down, the Oracle had asked, “Shouldn’t we at least push it to the shoulder?” She’d said it with a completely straight face, too. That had been the first clue that maybe she wasn’t full of it, maybe she really had been living under a rock for the past ten years.
“Didn’t you hear me last time?” Sol responded. “It’s empty out here. Lestallum’s the only town we have left.”
Sol had explained that because of the daemons, the world was in a state of perpetual night. The corners of the Oracle’s mouth tightened at the news. And when Sol told her how daemons ran wild in Insomnia―that it was more or less a nest for the things―the woman’s face visibly paled. To top it off, Sol mentioned a rumor she’d heard, that the king had been pulled inside the Crystal itself. At that, the Oracle began to tremble, as if she might faint altogether.