I was in a room somewhere, a hot, dark little place that swayed from side to side gently. I heard wood creaking and smelled an open flame. Candlelight flickered slowly into view as my eyes opened, dancing on the barren walls and floor of the tiny room. Color faded in and out, like a broken neon sign, flickering. My head hurt. No, scratch that, everything hurt. I groaned, trying to sit up, trying to remember who I was or where I was, but my body didn't move. I looked down and saw I was already standing, and I was holding out my hands. Blood trickled down my left arm, covering my left palm in a dark, sticky substance that refused to go away no matter how many times I tried to shake it off. It dripped in a steady stream onto the floor below me, pooling at my feet. Vaguely, I remembered something hitting me, and the sensation of fear coupled with a desperate urge to survive...I had been crawling somewhere, a remote, empty place, something I hadn't expected...but where was I now?

I looked up again, and gasped. Standing in front of me was a girl—no, a woman. She looked familiar somehow, as if I'd known her all my life but couldn't place her face. Feelings of warmth and goodness and something exciting I couldn't quite put a name to swirled inside me. "Who are you?" I asked, before I could stop myself. Her head tilted, making some of her short, red hair fall across her pretty blue eyes. She blinked at me, confused, and mouthed something I couldn't understand. Her head righted itself and she squinted at me, as if I was out of focus. I looked down at myself again. The pool of blood was getting bigger, but I looked solid enough. I looked at her again. "Please. Who are you?" I repeated.

I felt anger rising in me, following the fear, ready to push it aside. I opened my mouth again, entranced by the expression of happy expectation on her face. She was ready. She wanted me to say it. I had to say it. I was going to say it. "My name..." Her eyes widened. All I could see now was her face as the light around us dimmed, flickering once, twice, like lightning. I lost my nerve, found it again, opened my mouth for a final time.

Hands gripped me roughly by my undamaged arm and hoisted me up into the air. I blinked, finding myself not in a small, dark room with a beautiful woman, but alone in the same desert I'd blacked out in earlier. I remembered now. There had been shooting, and I had thrown myself through the Shield...everything came back to me in a rush, filling my head and exploding there, leaving me with a headache. I swooned a little, mostly out of shock, but the man in front of me just gripped harder and wouldn't let me fall.

The man in front of me grinned a little. "Put your peepers back in your head, boy, I ain't that pretty. What's a sissy City boy doing out here in the Waste, anyway? Don't tell me those fuckers actually let you go?"

He cocked his eyebrow at me. "Boy, friends don't let friends go into the Waste unprepared, and callin' you unprepared doesn't even begin to cover it. Where's your weapon? Food?" He lightly kicked my pack, which was lying on the ground next to my feet covered in dust and blood and he grunted disapprovingly. "Unless you're carrying some new kind of food and weapons I don't know about, that don't weigh nothin', you're up shit creek without a paddle, boy. Just how far did you expect to get out here, anyway?"

I blinked once, realizing all of a sudden that I hadn't expected to make it at all. If you'd asked me that same question while I'd been hovering at Ultrakeen's back door a few hours before, I would have said I planned to wander the Waste until I found the legendary tribes of free humans that supposedly wandered out here...but one look at the man in front of me suddenly brought me back to reality. I had no idea where I was, what I was doing...I'd been going on a suicide run from the very start.

Only, I wasn't dead. Three cheers for being a complete fuck-up, huh?

I was too shocked by the question to say anything, but the man just nodded, as if he understood. "We'll talk about it later, then. Can you walk?"

I glanced down at my arm. The sight of it made me nauseous, but not dizzy. "I think so."

The man's eyes followed mine, and quietly and quickly he drew a scrap of cloth out of his jacket and began wrapping it around my wound, pulling it so tight I nearly screamed. "Good. My camp ain't far from here, but that's for me. You look about as in shape as a pound o' wet leather, so we'll take it slow." Keeping on hand on my arm to steady me, the man stooped, picking up my pack and slinging it over his shoulder. "I'll carry this, what little there is. You need to stop, tell me. Try to keep some energy back in case we have to run."
I felt my heart skip a beat. "Run? From what? There aren't any vampires out here." Are there? Added a nasty voice in my head.

The man grinned a little, an ugly expression full of yellow teeth and coldness that made my stomach churn. "'course not. You don't have to worry about the vamps anymore. Rest of the world, though...oh, it's alive and kicking, and it's got lots o' pointy bits. Don't worry, though. Most things are busy hidin' from the storm at the moment."

I looked up. Above me, the sky was clear, only a few wispy clouds blocking the view of the stars above. It was beautiful, in a way, but also terrifying. Under the smog of the Cities and the purplish haze of the Shield, I'd never seen a night so clearly before. I felt like I was going to start falling upwards into the vastness of space, and it wasn't a pleasant sensation. "I don't see any storm clouds," I murmured, looking down again before I made myself sick. The man just chuckled.

The man chuckled a little. "What, you don't approve?"

Edge shot me a look. "Boy, I been out here in the Waste on my own for so long I can't even remember the last time I clapped eyes on another human. I left my real name behind me in the Cities, probably sometime around when you were still droolin' on yourself. I call myself Edge 'cause that's where I live: out here on the edge of nothin', surrounded by nothin', doing nothin' but survivin' any way I can. That, and I got a collection o' sharp things in my den that's like as to make a delicate lady such as yourself swoon. So my apologies if my name strikes you in a funny kind of way, but it's the only one I got."

He looked away again, apparently finished with his tirade, and I muttered a half-hearted apology. We stumbled along in silence for awhile as I struggled with my own mind. I was here. I was free. This was what I had wanted, wasn't it? And yet...Edge wasn't exactly an encouraging vision of my future. Was this it? Was I going to be stuck with him from now until doomsday, eking out a living in this forsaken hellhole? Was this really what Marta had died to give me? A hundred other questions spun in my brain, running each other in circles. I followed them for awhile as I got my bearings, trying to ignore the increasing pain in my arm, stumbling around in the dark with a mysterious man who scared the shit out of me, but was tame compared to the monsters I was used to dealing with. I thought back on the half-breeds with their "customers", and repressed a shudder. Even if this this endless sea of dust and scrub was my life now, it had to be better than what I'd left behind.

Edge was silent as we traveled, apparently content to let me think. To me, it seemed like we were wandering aimlessly through the dark like idiots, but he obviously knew where he was going, for after the better part of twenty minutes I began to see a dark shape forming on the horizon. Eventually my eyes adjusted, and I saw that it wasn't just a patch of darkened sky: it was a cliff face, steep and sharp and a shade of cool gray that blended far too well with the stars for my liking. Edge grinned a little once he realized I'd spotted it. "That's home,"

I glanced at him, beginning to question his sanity. "You're not serious." I said.

I thought back on the dingy, unkempt clubs and the abandoned office buildings that made up the Eastern Slums, the only home I had ever known. "Mansions, my ass," I muttered.

Edge shrugged. "Whatever you had, this is what you got now. Don't worry. It's dry, warm when it's cold and cool when it's warm. Only one way in and one way out too, which makes it easier keepin' the critters at bay."

I looked at him again. "Critters?"

I glanced up at the sky again, though it was still clear and dark. "Right. The storm. I almost forgot."

The rest of the trip passed in a haze of pain and dust for me. I remember losing my footing once as exhaustion began to set in again, apparently not satisfied by the short "nap" I'd had earlier. Edge supported me, bringing me back to life with one of his grotesque anecdotes. I let his words fade into the background, and by the time we reached his den, I barely remembered his name, much less his stories. We passed through a narrow opening in the rock face and followed a smooth, winding tunnel for awhile, Edge taking a moment every so many feet to light the torches and lamps he used to keep his home bright. Eventually, we reached a large inner cave, complete with a small stream cutting through one corner of it. Up above I saw the stars through holes that either Edge or the hand of time had cut in the stone over our heads, to let out the smoke and other fumes.

And next to the skin...I made a tiny choking sound when I saw it. Edge just grinned. "See boy? Told ya I had enough sharp'ns to make a lil' girly like you squeal." He gestured with a gnarled, dirty hand to the widest collection of sharp, metallic objects I'd ever seen. Calling them "knives" seemed too polite. Some of them were recognizable as daggers or cooking knives, but the rest were just bits of scrap metal, honed, sharpened, and twisted into every shape imaginable, of every conceivable size, mounted on the wall like trophies. Some were rusty, while others had bits of what looked like dried blood. I gaped at them, horrified, flashing back to the atrocities I had seen in Ultrakeen, and wondering suddenly if I would have been better off strapped to table twenty.

I nodded mutely.

Edge smiled with his wicked teeth. "Good boy. Now get some rest. When you wake up, it'll be dinner time. Go on now, don't make me conk ya on the head or nothin'. I got better things to do."

Anxiously I turned away, lying sideways on the makeshift bed and closing my eyes, pretending to sleep. Edge was silent for a long moment, presumably watching me, but then I heard him turn and begin rattling around in his makeshift kitchen, preparing our dinner. My arm throbbed and my head swam, and though part of me was still convinced Edge was dangerous, exhaustion crept up on me. My weariness dulled my mind, and before I could stop myself, I was drifting off into darkness once again, secretly hoping to find the gaze of a certain young woman...