Mated to the Beast of the Wasteland novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Three Minutes

Ember rides into Wasteland City, meets Gran and a town that expects her to quit, and in the night counts while Brand holds his wolf far longer than his clock says he can.

Brand stepped between me and Perrin without a word.

He didn't touch anyone. He didn't have to.

The two collars behind Perrin each took a step back.

"Inspect whatever you like," I said. "Bring a pen. I know you like those."

Perrin's left hand went into his pocket.

Last time, that was the hand I'd put his fountain pen through.

This time it had never happened, and he didn't know why he'd done it.

"Thirty days, Ember," he said, and left.

My uncle stayed in the doorway a moment longer.

"Sweetheart, please. You don't know what you've done."

"I know exactly what you did," I said. "Go home."

He went.

Sable's truck was a flatbed with three different colors of door.

Brand climbed into the back without being asked and lay down on a pile of tarps.

I got in the cab beside Sable.

She drove through the Gate tunnel and out into the Wasteland at twenty past midnight.

The air outside smelled like hot metal and dust.

Sable handed me a filter mask from the dash. "Wear that till you're used to it. Haven lungs are soft."

"Thanks."

"So." She drummed the wheel. "You bonded my brother. In a cull pen. For sixty coins of my money."

"I'll pay you back."

"With what? You walked out of Haven with a badge and a jumpsuit."

"I'll work."

She snorted. Then she glanced at the rear window, where her brother's boots stuck off the tarps.

"You know what they call him in Haven?"

"The three-minute."

"You know what the Haven girls at the trading post say it means?"

"I can guess."

"Three minutes, start to finish." She grinned at the road. "Poor thing. I'm telling you now so you're not disappointed."

Through the glass behind us, a deep voice said, "I can hear you."

"I know, that's the fun of it."

I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it.

Sable looked at me sideways. "Huh. She laughs."

Brand didn't say anything for thirty miles.

At a dry riverbed she stopped to let him piss and check the tires.

He came to my open window and leaned on the frame.

"Here's how this goes," he said. "You get a roof. You get fed."

"In thirty days, when they stop looking, you go back through the Gate and tell them it was a mistake."

"No."

"Haven girls don't last out here."

"This one will."

"You'll want a hot shower in a week."

"I'll want a lot of things."

He looked at me too long. Then he walked back to the flatbed.

Wasteland City came up out of the dark at three in the morning.

The walls were made of everything. Car doors, shipping containers, old billboards, sheet steel welded on sheet steel.

A gate of two bus chassis rolled open on a chain.

Inside, the streets were dirt. The houses were sheds and containers with tin roofs.

People came out anyway, in the middle of the night, to see the three-minute come home alive.

Men and women with scales on their arms and necks and cheeks.

Every one of them looked at me and went quiet.

Sable parked in front of a long low house built from a railway car.

An old woman sat on its step in a blanket.

She was small and hunched, with white hair braided down to her waist and black scales across the backs of both hands.

Gran.

In my first life she'd taught me to make flatbread on a car hood.

She'd sat with me the night Brand's tag came back.

Now she looked at me.

"Show me," she said, and held out her hand.

I gave her my left wrist.

She turned it to the lamplight and looked at the ring of marks.

Then she laughed. A big cracked laugh that set her coughing.

"A Haven girl with a Tarrant bite. I've lived too long."

"Gran," Brand said.

"Shut up, boy, you're alive. That's twice tonight I've been surprised." She patted my hand. "What do you do, Haven girl?"

"I'm a shield engineer."

"Good. Then you can clean filters."

The filters were the town's dust screens. They sat in racks on the wall and clogged every night.

Cleaning them was the job they gave whoever had made Gran angry.

"Starting when?" I said.

"Dawn."

"Fine."

Gran's eyebrows went up a fraction.

Brand's shack was a shipping container at the end of a row, with a window cut in one side and a porch made of pallets.

Inside was one cot, one stove, one chair, and a shelf of salvaged books.

He threw a blanket on the cot. "Yours."

"Where are you sleeping?"

"Out."

"It's cold."

"I've got fur."

He shut the door behind him.

I lay on his cot in my jumpsuit with my wrist throbbing.

The blanket smelled like him. Smoke and dust and something warm under it.

I didn't sleep.

At four I heard it through the wall.

Cloth tearing. A long breath that turned into a growl.

The porch boards creaked under something much heavier than a man.

I got up and looked through the gap in the shutter.

A black wolf the size of a pony lay across the doorway, its scaled flank to me, its head on its paws.

Facing out. Guarding.

I looked at my badge's clock and started counting.

One minute.

Two.

Three. The number on his cage.

The wolf didn't twitch.

Four minutes.

Its ears swiveled toward the shutter.

It turned its head and looked straight at me with clear amber eyes.

Still a wolf. Still him.

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