Chapter 20 : The Network Expands
Toast's hand was calloused and dry in mine.
We stood in the workshop's back room—a storage space I'd converted into something private, away from the traffic of reconstruction work. The Dag sat cross-legged on a salvaged crate, her pregnant belly resting against her thighs. Nux hovered near the door, his chalk-white face uncertain.
"This is going to feel strange," I said. "There's no good way to prepare for it."
"Just do it." Toast's voice was steady. "I've felt stranger things than whatever this is."
I pushed.
The Network connection established with a sensation like a door opening inside my skull. Toast's mind rushed in—sharp, analytical, cataloguing the experience even as it happened. I felt her awareness probe the connection, testing boundaries, searching for the edges of what she could access.
What is this?
Her thought-voice was exactly like her spoken voice. Direct. Demanding.
Network, I responded. Shared consciousness. Limited—we can't read each other's minds, but we can share feelings, knowledge, impressions.
Toast was already experimenting. She reached for my engineering expertise—the knowledge that had let me fix pumps and diagnose fuel lines—and I felt her pull strands of it through the connection. Not the memories themselves, but the understanding beneath them. How systems worked. How to diagnose failures. How to improvise solutions from available materials.
This is useful, she sent, and the word carried undertones of satisfaction and hunger for more.
I turned to the Dag.
She didn't wait for instruction. Her hand found mine and her eyes closed, and when I pushed the connection open, she received it like rain falling into soil.
The Network changed.
The Dag's emotional sensitivity amplified everything. Toast's analytical sharpness, Nux's churning confusion, my own careful control—all of it fed through her and reflected back, magnified, resonating. For a heartbeat, all four of us felt the full weight of everyone else's feelings simultaneously.
Nux's grief for his dead brothers. Toast's fierce determination to understand. The Dag's bottomless well of empathy. My terror that they would find what I was hiding.
The headache hit like a hammer to the base of my skull.
I staggered, catching myself on the workbench. Three connections was more than I'd ever held simultaneously—the Network's edge, the limit of what Phase 1 could support. My vision blurred. My ears rang.
"Landon." Toast's hand on my shoulder, her concern flowing through the connection alongside the words. "What's wrong?"
"Too much." I pressed my palms against my temples. "Three connections is... it's hard. The bleedthrough is harder to control."
"Bleedthrough?"
"Emotions. Impressions. Dreams." I looked up at the Dag, who was watching me with those pale, knowing eyes. "We'll leak into each other. It won't always be voluntary."
"I know," she said. "I could feel you thinking about the city."
My blood went cold.
"The city with lights so bright they drown the stars," she continued. "With roads full of vehicles burning fuel just to move in circles. Where people throw away food that could feed the Wretched for a week."
Detroit. The I-94 interchange at night. The memory had leaked through before I'd even realized the connection was that deep.
"It's a dream," I said, forcing my voice steady. "Just a dream."
"It felt like a memory."
"Some dreams do."
The Dag accepted this—or at least set it aside for later examination. Toast filed it away with everything else she was cataloguing, another data point in her ongoing investigation.
The headache didn't fade. It settled into my skull like a new resident, constant and grinding.
This was the cost of three connections. This would be my life until I found a way to manage it.
The water project took two days.
With three Network members sharing knowledge, the work went faster than I'd imagined possible. Nux knew the Citadel's structure from a lifetime of War Boy service—every tunnel, every pipe, every hidden passage carved into the rock. Toast understood the practical limitations of improvised repair, the art of making broken things work. I provided the engineering theory that tied it all together.
We mapped secondary water sources within the rock itself—aquifer branches Joe had never exploited because controlling the main supply was enough for his purposes. We designed a gravity-fed distribution system that would reach the lower levels without the manual pump chain that had let Joe's people decide who drank and who thirsted.
The work was physical, exhausting, and deeply satisfying.
I crawled through tunnels barely wide enough for my shoulders, the Armor scraping against rock, my hands guiding pipes into positions I'd calculated in the workshop. Nux worked beside me, his War Boy strength driving bolts into stone, his face showing something I'd never seen on him before.
Purpose. Not chrome-addled devotion, but real purpose.
Toast coordinated from above, her Network connection feeding me updates on water pressure and flow rates, her analytical mind tracking every variable. The Dag sat in the main distribution chamber, her empathic presence smoothing conflicts between workers who still didn't trust each other.
By the end of the second day, water flowed to four levels that had never had direct access before.
The Wretched who lived in those tunnels—the poorest, the sickest, the ones Joe's people had ignored—watched the pipes with expressions I couldn't read. Some drank immediately, gulping water like they expected it to vanish. Others waited, suspicious, certain the gift would come with strings.
"It's real," I told a woman who stood apart from the others, her hollow eyes tracking the flow without reaching for it. "No one's going to take it back."
"Everything gets taken back," she said. "Eventually."
I didn't have an answer for that.
The headache woke me at 3 AM.
Not from my own dreams—from the Network. Nux was having nightmares again, screaming chrome-bright images of Valhalla gates that wouldn't open, and his distress bled through the connections into everyone else's sleep.
I found the Dag in the corridor outside my quarters, her hands pressed against her temples in a mirror of my own posture.
"You're hearing us," she said. "We're hearing you too."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize." She lowered her hands, studying me with those pale, penetrating eyes. "You dream about a city with so many lights they drown the stars. You dream about falling, and the sound of metal, and waking up in a body that wasn't yours."
My chest tightened.
"It's just dreams," I said.
"You keep saying that." The Dag's voice was soft, curious rather than accusatory. "But we've been sharing dreams for two nights now, and yours are the only ones that don't fit this world."
The Network pulsed between us—her empathy probing gently at the walls I'd built around my memories. She wasn't forcing anything. She was simply... present. Waiting.
"When I'm ready," I said. "When I understand it better myself. I'll tell you."
"I know." She touched my arm, and through the contact, I felt her acceptance—not blind trust, but patience. Willingness to wait. "But the longer you carry it alone, the heavier it gets."
She returned to her quarters, leaving me in the empty corridor with the weight of secrets I didn't know how to share.
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