Chapter 257: The Spider Who Forgot to Swing

I stopped the passenger van by hovering above its bonnet and asking the driver whether he wanted to live long enough to complain about me. He braked before reaching the dirt track, which gave the beast beyond the pumps time to display a mouth nobody needed a closer look at.

The guard reached for his whistle as though the problem was my parking. Hollis took it out of his hand before he could begin, then asked what I intended to do about a vehicle whose passengers couldn’t pay the protected road charge.

"We’re a medical delivery, they’re patients and I’m clearly the emotional support animal, so add them to our escort," I said. Iona looked inside the van, found an elderly man’s swollen ankle and immediately began asking the driver when he’d last stopped for water.

Hollis inspected the medical travel rule pinned inside her booth, then wrote the second vehicle beneath ours. She told the guard that anyone unhappy with the exception could explain why he’d attempted to send an injured passenger towards an active beast sighting.

[System: Look at you using the paperwork, mate; next week we’ll get you a hi-vis vest and you can rob the system while it thanks you for complying.]

I’m keeping the barrier intact and still annoying the bloke behind it, so this feels like personal growth with excellent customer service. Lukas drove through slowly enough for the van to follow, keeping both vehicles inside the reinforced lane while the beast tested the fence behind us.

I had expected him to celebrate solving a problem without waiting for permission, but he watched the dirt track until it vanished from the mirror. When I asked whether he’d travelled it before, he said he used to believe shortcuts were only dangerous to people who couldn’t climb.

"Then somebody I left behind had to walk home, which made the theory less impressive," he added. He kept both hands steady as he steered around an axle abandoned in a crater, and I let the silence last until he’d checked the following van was clear.

The van’s radiator began steaming beside the abandoned weigh station, forcing us to stop beneath a scrap canopy. Its passengers climbed out carrying bags that appeared to contain everything they trusted anybody not to steal. A man in a patched militia coat came out carrying a wrench, saw Iona and immediately asked whether she’d returned to argue about unpaid wages again.

His name was Pike, and he maintained vehicles for whoever could still obtain fuel. He had stayed outside Rusk’s camp after refusing to lock workers inside a sleeping shed, although the captain had kept enough of his equipment to make leaving the district difficult.

"We’ve recently developed an interest in collecting things people refuse to return," I told him. He glanced at my scales and asked whether that interest included his compressor, then decided we could discuss the answer after the van stopped boiling.

Pike needed a hose held in place while he fitted a clamp, and Lukas offered a web-line before considering whether holding it would pull against his ribs. I caught the line with a coil and anchored it around the canopy’s support instead, leaving him free to tie the clamp without becoming its main structural part.

The hose slipped and sprayed the spot where his face would have been, which improved my argument more than any explanation about personal responsibility. "You’re welcome to resume your usual methods once we’ve run out of objects that don’t have organs," I told him.

Bridget paid for replacement coolant, then asked Pike about the camp’s dawn convoy. It had been delayed because Rusk’s own northern patrol hadn’t cleared the closed road, leaving the nine workers at the cold store while the drivers argued over the safer southern route.

[System: Even bent bastards get delivery delays, mate; use the opening before their customer service improves.] That bought us time, provided we stopped wasting it. Pike marked the cold store on Iona’s map and warned that its guards answered to Rusk personally rather than the checkpoint command.

[System: Don’t tell him your dad owns half the bloody underworld, champ. He needs a compressor, not a family tree with a protection racket growing on it.]

I wasn’t going to mention Dad, especially when both uncles have already made inherited management sound like a medical condition. Pike took the repaired hose out of Lukas’s hands and said the passengers could wait beneath his canopy until the engine cooled.

Bridget confirmed the shelter expected the driver, then caught my appreciative look and asked whether competence had finally become my type. I decided answering honestly could wait until we were alone. Iona checked the injured man’s ankle, then returned to our vehicle when a low alarm began sounding from the settlement beyond the weigh station.

The noise came from a fenced camp built around water tanks and old maintenance sheds. Families were gathering near its gate, but the militia truck parked outside hadn’t moved, and the guards were dragging a portable barrier across the only open lane.

Hollis arrived from the checkpoint in a small patrol vehicle, following a call that had apparently interrupted the argument we’d left her with. She asked the gate guard why he was closing civilian access during a beast warning, and he showed her an order carrying Rusk’s command code.

I hovered above the water tanks, keeping within sight instead of announcing myself against the whole sky. A warm shape moved between the distant cars, followed by another, both turning towards the camp as if somebody had rung a dinner bell nobody else could hear.

Then a pulse sounded beneath the nearest shed, low enough to feel through the fence rather than hear clearly. Pike swore behind me and pointed at a fresh cable disappearing under the building, where a small transmitter flashed in time with the approaching beasts.

The gate guard received another order and began lowering the barrier while people were still outside it. Rusk wasn’t simply refusing to protect the camp, because somebody had switched on a lure beneath it and invited the hungry part of the frontier to breakfast.