CHAPTER 37 : POWER STATE
The Citadel was quiet at dawn.
I stood in the center of my quarters with the stranger's jacket folded on the cot behind me and began the accounting. Systematic. Thorough. The way an engineer would inventory equipment before a project that might kill him.
The Armor first.
I held out my arms and let the plates shift into their natural configuration—dark, segmented, covering my torso, shoulders, and forearms in overlapping scales that caught the light like oil on water. Phase 2 evolution had been complete for weeks now. The Armor could generate basic weapons: arm blades that extended from my forearms, crude but functional. It could interface with vehicles in a rudimentary way, sense their metal, understand their structure. It could feed on scrap and machinery to maintain its reserves, which were currently at maximum capacity.
It could also seize for twelve seconds if exposed to lead. Four seconds for copper. An hour of violent purging if it tried to digest plastic.
I knew my weaknesses now. So did the people trying to kill me.
The Network next.
Four permanent connections: Nux, Toast, the Dag, Mors. Phase 1 maximum, according to the system's internal logic. I could feel them at the edges of my consciousness—Nux's guilt-tinged determination as he worked in the motor pool, Toast's focused calm as she calibrated equipment in her workshop, the Dag's green-tinged contentment as she tended the garden, Mors's steady devotion as he assembled components for the water distribution system.
I could share knowledge through those connections. Skills, muscle memory, emotional states. I could sever individual links manually if needed, though the effort cost headaches that lasted hours.
And apparently, I could leak fragments of my past life into their minds without knowing it.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
I pushed the thought away.
Breath reserves: twenty-two, roughly. Enough to Awaken small objects for limited periods—the pump experiment had confirmed three Breaths bought twenty minutes of independent operation. Larger Awakenings would cost proportionally more. The math was simple and brutal: I didn't have enough Breath to Awaken anything that would matter in a real fight.
Skills: Driving Tier 1, earned through the road war and Nux's instruction. Combat Tier 1, unlocked during the salvage ambush. Scavenging Tier 1, developed through pattern and practice. Armor Symbiosis Tier 1, the result of weeks of coexistence with the thing living on my skin. Mechanics Tier 0—I had the theoretical knowledge from my engineering degree, but not enough practice in this world's specific technologies to call it competence.
Mount System: dormant. Whatever that meant, it hadn't activated yet.
I was stronger than when I arrived. Fifty days ago, I'd been a dying man in a blood bag harness. Now I had armor that could stop bullets, connections that could share minds, and skills that might keep me alive in combat.
I was nowhere near strong enough.
The Citadel housed roughly twelve hundred people.
I walked through the levels as the sun climbed, taking stock of what we'd built. The water flowed—Toast's thermal gradient pump had increased efficiency by thirty percent, and three more regulators were being installed to control distribution across different zones. The garden produced three shoots, pale and tentative but growing, tended by the Dag and a rotating crew of volunteers who had never seen anything green that wasn't mold.
Toast's workshop generated forty-seven watts of electrical power under optimal wind conditions. Her radio system could reach settlements fifty kilometers away—or pick up broadcasts from the Bullet Farm's direction.
Fuel came from the People Eater's trade deal. We were dependent on Gas Town's generosity, and generosity in the wasteland was always a trap waiting to spring.
Defense was organized but inadequate. Maybe fifty combat-capable personnel, including the War Boy converts who had proven their loyalty. Furiosa had them running drills, establishing patrol routes, preparing positions. Good soldiers following good orders.
The Bullet Farmer had two hundred fighters and was building weapons specifically designed to kill me.
I found Toast in her workshop, bent over a circuit board with a soldering iron. The wind generator hummed on the ledge outside, and the radio equipment sat silent in its alcove, waiting for the next transmission from a world that wanted us dead.
"You're taking inventory," she said without looking up.
"How did you know?"
"You've been walking the same route for three hours. Systematic coverage of every functional system." She set down the soldering iron and turned to face me. "The way an engineer would assess a project."
I leaned against the workbench beside her. The wall behind it still displayed her equation from weeks ago: 3 Breaths = 20 minutes. The calculation that had proven my power's limitations.
Toast picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a new line underneath:
Landon = 1. Settlement = 1,200. Ratio matters.
"That's not reassuring," I said.
"It's not meant to be reassuring. It's meant to be accurate." She set down the chalk. "You're the only person in this place with powers that can change a battle. But you're also one person. If you die, or if you're incapacitated, those twelve hundred people lose their only asymmetric advantage against an army four times their size."
"You think I should stay out of the fighting."
"I think you should understand the math before you make that decision." She wiped chalk dust from her fingers. "One plus twelve hundred equals twelve hundred and one. One minus from twelve hundred and one equals twelve hundred. But if that one is the only variable that makes the equation survivable..."
The numbers didn't lie. I was the settlement's greatest asset and its single point of failure. Remove me from the equation, and the Citadel became a vulnerable target with no special defenses.
Keep me in the equation, and I became the target instead.
"The Bullet Farmer knows," I said.
"He knows you exist. He's learning your patterns. His probe raids have been mapping where you go, what you do, how you react." Toast's voice was flat, analytical. "He's not stupid. He's building a strategy around you specifically."
Through the workshop's open door, I could see the Citadel stretching below us—levels carved into rock, people moving through their daily routines, a fragile civilization trying to exist in the shadow of multiple threats.
The sealed door hummed somewhere in the depths, patient and hungry.
The Bullet Farmer assembled his army in the east.
The People Eater played economic games I could see but not counter.
And I stood at the center of it all, one man with growing powers, trying to balance an equation that didn't have a clean solution.
The radio crackled.
Toast was at the controls in three steps, adjusting frequencies, cleaning up the signal. A voice emerged from the static—distant, distorted, but clear enough to understand.
"—all settlements within range. This is a warning from those who remember what civilization means—"
The Bullet Farmer's voice. Broadcasting to anyone who could listen.
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