Mated to the Beast of the Wasteland novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: The Drains

The town met at the pump before the sun was fully up.

Gran banged her lid. Nobody needed it. Everybody had seen the banner.

"Food, a month," Sable told the square. "Filters, three weeks. Coil, none. We used the last of it on the governor."

"And the dome?"

Everybody looked at me.

"It holds an hour now," I said. "The crystal runs hot and the nodes drain."

"For a whole storm I need heavy coil for a second governor, and the big storage cells. Four of them."

"Where do those come from?"

"Haven. Through the Gate. Down that road."

The square was quiet.

The road had a line of rifles across it.

Then somebody at the back cleared his throat.

It was the boy from the collars.

He was twenty-one now. His hair had grown out over the old collar ring.

"There's a drain," he said.

"Under the highway. Old flood culvert from before the collapse. It runs from the dry riverbed to the ditch under your south wall."

The old salvage man frowned. "I've lived here forty years. I never heard of any drain."

"No," the boy said. "You wouldn't have."

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