Chapter 19 : The People Eater's Offer
The Gas Town delegation wore their wealth like armor.
Three men in leather so clean it gleamed, their vehicles polished to mirrors, their fuel reserves displayed openly in chrome tanks mounted to running boards. They climbed the Citadel's lift with the casual confidence of people who had never worried about where their next meal would come from.
The throne room had been Joe's—a carved chamber deep in the rock where he'd held court from a platform that elevated him above supplicants. Furiosa had removed the throne itself, smashed it to splinters and burned it in the courtyard, but the chamber remained. Power needed a stage, even after the tyrant fell.
"Imperator Furiosa." The lead delegate offered a shallow bow. He was thin, bald, with the calculating eyes of an accountant. "The People Eater extends his congratulations on your victory and his condolences on the loss of Immortan Joe."
"Condolences." Furiosa's voice was flat as struck iron. "Joe kept your boss fed for twenty years. I killed him. Pick one sentiment."
The delegate's smile didn't waver. "My master is a practical man. Business continues regardless of who sits in power. Speaking of which—" He produced a scroll from his jacket, unrolling it on the empty platform where Joe's throne had stood. "Gas Town offers the Citadel continued fuel supply. Same rates as before. Same quantities. All we ask in return is continued water shipments at existing terms."
I stood at the chamber's edge, half-hidden behind a support pillar, watching the negotiation unfold.
Same rates. Same quantities. Generous terms from a faction that had just lost its closest ally and should be scrambling for leverage.
Too generous.
The delegate continued, outlining delivery schedules and quality guarantees, his tone smooth as polished chrome. Furiosa listened with the focused attention of someone who knew she was being offered poison but couldn't identify the taste.
Toast stood beside me, close enough that I could hear her breathing.
"What do you see?" she murmured.
I watched the delegate's hands—the way they moved across the scroll, pointing to specific clauses with practiced precision. "He's not negotiating. He's presenting. This deal was finalized before they left Gas Town."
"Is that bad?"
"It's not good." I kept my voice low. "When someone offers you exactly what you need without asking for anything extra, they're either stupid or playing a longer game. The People Eater isn't stupid."
The meeting lasted another hour. Terms were discussed, quantities confirmed, delivery routes established. Furiosa drove hard bargains on specific points—fuel quality guarantees, penalty clauses for late deliveries—but the fundamental structure remained unchanged.
Cheap fuel. Reliable supply. The Citadel's vehicles and generators would run. The cook fires would burn. Life would continue.
And the People Eater would have his hooks in every aspect of Citadel infrastructure before the year was out.
"He's not giving us a deal." I caught Furiosa in the corridor outside the throne room, the delegates already descending the lift. "He's making us dependent."
She stopped walking but didn't turn around. "I know."
"Then why accept?"
"Because the alternative is vehicles that don't move, generators that don't run, and a population that freezes when the cold season comes." She finally faced me, her eyes hard as flint. "Water doesn't burn. It doesn't power engines. The Citadel has exactly one resource that matters to the wider wasteland, and it's not enough to build fuel independence."
"There has to be another way. Solar collectors, wind turbines, something—"
"Show me." Her voice cut like a blade. "Show me the materials, the expertise, the time. Show me how we build fuel alternatives while also feeding ten thousand people, managing a War Boy population in crisis, and defending against whatever the Bullet Farmer is planning out there."
I didn't have an answer.
"I know what he's doing," Furiosa continued. "I've watched men like the People Eater my whole life. He's patient. He thinks in years, not days. And right now, I need those years to build something that can survive without him." She paused. "If you have a better idea, bring it to me. Until then, we accept the deal and plan for when it becomes a cage."
She walked away.
I stood in the empty corridor for a long time, running calculations in my head. Solar panels required silicon, rare earth metals, manufacturing capabilities the wasteland didn't have. Wind turbines needed precision engineering, consistent maintenance, replacement parts. Biofuel meant farmland, water diversion, years of agricultural development.
None of it was impossible. All of it was beyond immediate reach.
The People Eater had made his opening move, and we had no counter.
Toast found me in the workshop that evening.
She closed the door behind her, checked the corridor through the small window, then crossed to where I was sitting amid half-disassembled water pumps. Her hand emerged from her jacket holding a small, flat piece of metal.
The bullet. The one that had flattened against my chest during the canyon firefight, the one she'd picked from my armor and pocketed without a word.
She set it on the workbench between us.
"Metal doesn't flatten against skin," she said. "I've seen men take rounds at close range. I've seen what bullets do to bodies. They don't bounce off. They don't flatten like they hit tank steel."
I looked at the bullet. The deformed copper glinted in the workshop's dim light.
"Chains don't move by themselves," Toast continued. "I watched you grab that cargo strap during the road war. I saw it whip toward that War Boy like it was alive, wrap around his steering column, hold for thirty seconds, then go limp. Chains don't do that."
I didn't interrupt.
"And you fixed that fuel line—" She pointed at the pump I'd been working on. "—like you designed it. Like you'd built a hundred of them. Except you showed up at the Citadel base a week ago looking half-dead, and nobody from the Wretched camp knows that kind of engineering."
She leaned forward, her eyes fixed on mine.
"I'm not asking what you are. I'm asking: how much of what you can do haven't you shown us?"
The honest answer would take hours. The Armor, feeding and growing, now thick enough to turn aside bullets. The Breath, harvested from the dying, capable of animating metal into temporary servants. The Network, connecting minds, sharing knowledge and sensation across distances. The sealed door in the depths that made the Armor scream with recognition.
"Most of it," I said.
Toast sat back. Her expression didn't change, but something in her posture shifted—the tension of a question finally answered, even if the answer opened a hundred more.
"Why hide it?"
"Because I don't fully understand it yet." I picked up the bullet, turned it over in my fingers. "And because people fear what they don't understand. I'd rather be useful than feared."
"You're both," Toast said. "You've been both since you caught that spike during the Buzzard fight."
She was right. The Armor had revealed itself then—the chain animation, the bullet deflection—and I'd been running damage control ever since.
"How much do the others know?"
"The Dag saw you on the battlefield. Doing something to the dead. She said you were 'eating' them."
I closed my fist around the bullet. "Not eating. Collecting. There's energy in people—in the dying, the just-dead. I can... harvest it. Use it to animate things."
Toast processed this without visible reaction. "And the armor?"
"Symbiotic. It lives on me—in me—and protects me in exchange for feeding. Metal, fuel, radiation. It's getting stronger."
"Can it be removed?"
"No."
"Can it be killed?"
The question hit harder than I expected. "I don't know."
Toast stood. She retrieved the bullet from my palm and put it back in her pocket.
"I'm going to keep figuring you out," she said. "Whether you help me or not."
"I know."
"It'll go faster if you help."
I looked at her—the woman who had survived Joe's vault, who had watched her sisters die, who had fought her way across the wasteland and back again without breaking. Toast the Knowing, who catalogued everything and everyone around her because knowledge was the only weapon that couldn't be taken.
"Tomorrow," I said. "I'll show you something that'll answer more questions than words can."
She left without responding. The workshop felt emptier with her gone.
Half-truths had a shorter shelf life than lies. And mine was running out.
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