Mae Walker

The world ended slowly, and now, just as slowly, it is trying to remember itself.

Mae has been walking since Penrith's Drop. She doesn't stop long anywhere. She fixes what's broken, moves on, and doesn't ask what she's looking for. Then the data core she's been carrying for eighteen months begins to ping. It has a direction: southeast. It apparently has a destination.

Following a signal she can't explain, Mae moves south through a landscape in the first uncertain stages of its own recovery, green appearing at the edges of dry creek beds, bore sites beginning to run, something underground moving differently than it has for years. Along the way, she encounters a former Reaper trying to unlearn himself, a seven-year-old whose maps are better than anything the ESC ever made, and a fourteen-year-old at the edge of the desert who is holding an entire vanished people's knowledge alone.

The core keeps pointing. The land keeps answering. And Mae keeps moving, until she reaches the place the signal has been trying to show her, and has to decide whether she's ready to put something down.

A companion novella to Dust Walker. Set in the Australian Outback.