Iron-Vein City falls away behind us and the air changes.
The chemical smog thins. The yellow haze goes gray, then almost clear. I stand at the engine cab window and breathe air that doesn't taste like poison for the first time in days.
It's bitterly cold and it smells like dust and nothing. It's perfect.
The Ash-Plains are flat and red and go on forever. Dead cattle ribs poke out of the dunes like organic sculpture. The sky is the color of dirty pewter.
I like it. It's honest. Everything is exactly as ugly as it looks.
Clementine leans on the window frame beside me. Her brass eye clicks in the low light.
"You keep checking your arm," she says.
"Habit."
"You pull your sleeve up when you think nobody's looking. You read something. Then you put it back down." She watches my face. "What's it saying?"
I'm quiet for a moment.
"That I've got seven days," I say.
"Before what?"
I look at her.
"Before the Blight finishes what it started," I say. "Unless I hunt."
She processes that. I watch her doing it, the brass eye clicking softly.
"So every bounty is buying time," she says. "Literal time."
"Hours. Sometimes days. Depends on the target."
"And the other thing. The modifications." She's not asking whether they exist. She's asking about the mechanism. "What is it? The system."
"The Hellfire Ledger," I say. "It brands the targets into my arm. Pays in hours of life. Secondary currency pays for the biological upgrades." I roll my sleeve up and show her the brand. Orange text shifting under the skin like something alive. "I don't choose the targets. It chooses them."
She looks at the brand for a long time.
"That's a trap," she says.
"Yeah."
"You can't stop hunting. Because stopping hunting means dying. And every upgrade makes the next hunt easier. And the system knows that." She looks up. "It's designed to keep you moving. Keep you spending."
"I know."
"Does knowing help?"
"Not much," I admit.
She looks back at the plains.
"Tell Harrow," she says. "He's building the diagnosis in that little journal. He'll land on it eventually and he'll be angrier if you made him figure it out than if you just said it."
"He ask you to tell me that?"
"He didn't have to."
Green light flickers on the horizon.
Low and spreading, wrong color for lightning, wrong shape for fire.
I straighten.
"Clementine."
"I see it," she says, voice going flat.
The Witherlord's Vanguard fills the tracks ahead.