Chapter 3 : The Wretched
Dawn brought chaos.
The water pipes groaned to life with a mechanical shriek that echoed across the camp, and every one of the Wretched surged toward the Citadel's base like a tide of starving bodies. I let myself be carried by the crowd, elbows jabbing my ribs, hands clutching at nothing, voices raised in desperate prayer.
"AQUA-COLA! Do not become addicted—"
Immortan Joe's amplified voice thundered from speakers mounted high on the rock face. The words were familiar—the same speech from the movie, delivered with the same mocking condescension—but hearing them in person hit differently. This wasn't cinema. These people were dying, and the man drowning them was calling it salvation.
Water gushed from the pipes in a torrent. The crowd screamed. Bodies pressed forward, trampling the weak, fighting for position beneath the cascade. I grabbed a discarded container and filled it in seconds before the flow cut off—controlled release, calculated desperation, just enough to keep them alive and addicted.
My hands shook as I drank. The Armor tightened around my wrists, uncomfortable with the wetness but unwilling to pull away from the sustenance.
Not food, it communicated. But the body needs it. Acceptable.
"Generous of you," I muttered.
The crowd dispersed slowly, clutching their precious rations. I retreated to the camp's edge and found a spot against the rock wall where I could observe without attracting attention. The water had bought me time—maybe two days before the dehydration became critical again. Two days to figure out my next move.
War Boy patrols swept through the camp on their half-hour rotation. I watched them carefully, noting patterns, memorizing faces. Most of them were young—teenagers, some of them—with the characteristic chalk-white skin and black grease around their eyes. Half-lives, they called themselves. Dying slowly from tumors and radiation poisoning, convinced that death in Immortan Joe's service would carry them to Valhalla.
Witness me.
The phrase echoed in my memory. I'd watched Nux spray his mouth chrome and leap to his death a dozen times on screen. Here, it was religion.
By midday, I'd identified three distinct types of Wretched in the camp.
The first were the desperate—families and individuals who had nowhere else to go, surviving on water rations and whatever scraps they could scavenge. They kept to themselves, eyes down, hoping to avoid notice.
The second were the traders—entrepreneurs who had carved out niches in the camp's informal economy. Food, shelter, information, companionship. Everything had a price, and they knew how to extract it.
The third type made my skin crawl.
They moved differently. Watched more than they talked. Drifted through the crowd without urgency, their eyes cataloguing faces and conversations. When the War Boy patrols passed, these watchers straightened subtly—not quite saluting, but acknowledging.
Sleeper agents. Joe's eyes and ears, embedded in the population to identify anyone organizing from below.
One of them looked at me.
The moment stretched. His gaze lingered on my wrapped forearms, then rose to my face. I kept my expression neutral, exhausted, broken—just another dying man in a camp full of dying men. After three heartbeats, he looked away.
Close. Too close.
I moved to a different section of the camp and found a spot behind a cluster of tents where the sightlines were blocked. The Armor pulsed against my ribs—nervous, I realized. It could feel my elevated heartbeat, my shallow breathing, and was responding with its own anxiety.
Safe? The question came through as sensation rather than words.
"For now."
A woman approached my new position. Middle-aged, weathered, her hands scarred from work I couldn't identify. She carried a bowl of something gray and viscous—beetle paste, probably, ground from the insects that thrived in the Wasteland's cracks.
She sat beside me without speaking and pushed the bowl toward my hand.
I stared at it.
"Eat," she said. Her voice was rough, unused to conversation. "You're new. New ones die first if they don't eat."
"I don't have anything to trade."
She shrugged. "Tomorrow you might. Tomorrow I might be dead. That's how it works here—you feed the stranger today, the stranger feeds you tomorrow."
I took the bowl. The paste tasted exactly as bad as it looked, but my stomach clenched around it gratefully. The woman watched me eat with something that might have been satisfaction.
"Thank you," I said when the bowl was empty.
She took it back and stood. "Don't thank me. Thank the desert for making us need each other."
She walked away without looking back.
The Armor settled against my skin, calmer now that the body was fed. Its hunger remained—always present, always pulling toward the nearest concentration of metal—but the urgency had faded.
Below, it reminded me. Metal below. Want to go.
"I know. Tonight."
The sun crossed its peak and began its descent. I spent the afternoon mapping the camp's layout, memorizing the War Boy patrol routes, noting where the Wretched were densest and where gaps appeared in their coverage. The sleeper agents moved in patterns too—predictable ones, once you knew what to look for.
Near dusk, an old man three tents over stopped breathing.
The pull came immediately. Warmth rising from his body like heat from cooling metal, drifting toward me on currents I couldn't see. My chest ached to inhale it.
Breath, the knowledge whispered. Take it.
I clamped down. Turned away. Forced myself to walk until the sensation faded.
One, my internal counter reminded me. Breath: 1.
One harvest from this morning's corpse. How many more would there be before I understood what the Breath was for?
The sun set. The camp settled into its nighttime routine—fires lit, voices dropping to murmurs, the endless coughing of the sick punctuating the silence. I waited until full dark before moving toward the Citadel's base.
The rock face was dotted with openings—some natural caves, others carved by tools. Most were occupied by War Boys or their equipment, but the lowest ones were accessible to anyone willing to risk the climb.
The Armor led me to a specific opening. Not the largest, not the most obvious. A crack in the stone barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through, positioned behind a outcropping that blocked it from casual view.
Here, it communicated. Down. Metal. Hungry.
I slipped inside.
The passage descended immediately, angling into the rock at a steep grade. No light reached beyond the first few meters; I navigated by touch, one hand on the wall, the other extended before me. The Armor helped—I could feel the metal nearby, sense its location like a blind man sensing heat.
Twenty meters down, the passage opened into a broader space. My eyes had adjusted enough to see shapes in the darkness—machinery, old and rusted, lining the walls. Pre-war technology, probably. Salvage that Joe's people had never bothered to strip.
The Armor pressed against the nearest machine and began to feed.
Good, it communicated. Yes. More.
I let it eat while I explored. The chamber was roughly circular, maybe ten meters across, with passages branching off in three directions. The air smelled of dust and oil and something else—something sharp and metallic, like the ozone before a storm.
One of the passages had been sealed. Crude masonry, mortared badly, blocking whatever lay beyond. The Armor's attention fixed on it immediately.
There, it said. The good metal. Behind.
"What's behind it?"
Don't know. Want it. Hungry for it.
I approached the sealed passage and pressed my palm against the stones. Something hummed on the other side—a vibration too low to hear, felt through the Armor's contact with the rock. Whatever was down there, it was different. Special. The film on my skin practically shuddered with desire.
A sound from above. Footsteps. Voices.
I killed my examination and pressed myself into a shadowed corner. Two figures descended into the chamber—War Boys, based on their silhouettes, carrying torches that cast dancing light across the walls.
"—told you, no one comes down here. Not since Joe—"
"I heard something. Metal on rock."
"Rats. This whole level is rats."
They swept the chamber with their torches. I held my breath, the Armor compressed flat against my skin to minimize reflection.
One of the torches passed within a meter of my position. The War Boy holding it paused.
"What's that smell?"
"Rust. Old oil. The usual."
A long moment. Then the torch moved on.
"Fine. But I'm reporting it. Something's off down here."
"Report what you want. Joe doesn't care about the lower levels anymore."
They climbed back up the passage, their voices fading. I waited ten minutes before moving, then waited ten more to be certain.
Danger? the Armor asked.
"Managed it."
I slipped back toward the entrance, but my attention stayed fixed on the sealed passage. Joe had opened it once, according to the War Boy. Opened it and come out screaming.
Whatever was behind that wall, it scared the man who controlled the Citadel. The man who bred women and enslaved armies and convinced dying boys that their deaths were glorious.
What could scare Immortan Joe?
The Armor pulsed against my ribs. Metal. Good metal. Ours.
"Not yet," I told it. "But soon."
I emerged from the lower levels into the night air and made my way back to the camp. The stars blazed overhead, indifferent to the suffering below, and somewhere in the Citadel's upper chambers, the War Rig was being loaded for tomorrow's supply run.
Furiosa would make her move. The chase would begin. And I would be there—positioned, ready, waiting for my chance to change everything or die trying.
The Armor settled against my skin, temporarily sated. In my chest, the single harvested Breath sat like a coal waiting to ignite.
One day, I calculated. Maybe two.
Then the road would open, and the fury would begin.
I found a sheltered spot between two tents and lay down on the hard ground. The Wretched breathed around me—some sleeping, some dying, all of them trapped in the shadow of a madman's fortress. Tomorrow I would watch. I would plan. I would feed the Armor and hide from the sleeper agents and try to understand the power that let me steal breath from the dying.
But tonight, I let my eyes close and dreamed of engines roaring across an endless desert.
When I woke, the War Rig was gone.
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