I was almost startled by Asha’s voice, pitched lower than usual, sounding matter-of-fact.
I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say, so I told the truth.
“I do.”
Asha gave a mirthless chuckle. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you with a Wastelander, much less be smitten with one. You really think that’s a good idea out here?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Wasteland’s a ruthless place,” she said. “Every bit the hellhole we were told about. Didn’t appreciate the warm bed and full belly I always had at the Cave, all because they matched me with someone I didn’t want.”
She shook her head. “Spent so much of my time whining about how tough we had it under tyranny, yet not a day’s gone by that I don’t wish I’d wake up in my bed back home. I’d marry that poor bastard a million times over again if I could just have that.”
When I’d first been cast into the Wasteland, I’d have agreed with her wholeheartedly. Now…I saw the Cave as the place I’d escaped. I saw my old life as a mundane, stifling straitjacket that I didn’t realize I’d been suffocating under until I had my first gasp of outside air.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I don’t know what must’ve happened to make you feel that way…but I’m sure it can’t have been easy.”
“You’re saying that you don’t agree,” she replied with another bitter laugh. “Come on, is Wild Man’s dick that good?”
I frowned. “John saved me, that day at the factory. From the cannibals. After you left me.”
There it was—the ugly thing between us. The fact that we’d been split up and as far as I could tell, she hadn’t come back for me or tried to help me. Asha seemed to bristle a little at my words.
“I didn’tleaveyou,” she shot back. “We got split up, and by the time I got back to where I last saw you, you were gone.”
I sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Fact is, he saved my life, and I’ve been with him since.”
“How noble of him, to rescue a helpless woman to rape.”
Anger rose inside me. “That’s not what happened.”
She gave me a skeptical look. “If he had, he’d be no different to any of the other Wastelander men I’ve met. Kinder, in fact, if he’d had the manners to ask first. They usually just take what they want—whatever they want.”
A shiver went down my spine. “Is that what happened to you, Asha?”
She shrugged and looked at the ground, which gave me my answer.
“It makes no difference what’s happened to me,” she said. “What gang are Wild Man and his sister part of? You’re headed back to their territory, right? In the city.”
“No,” I replied, my eyebrows raised. “They’re not part of any gang. We were headed up north before Kimmy got hurt. They have a farm there.”
Asha looked surprised for the first time and considered me for a moment, as though trying to decide if I was being truthful.
“I was in a gang,” she finally said. “Just two weeks ago.”
The story came out then. Asha had fled the factory, certain I was a goner with the cannibals, and wandered for another day in the wilderness. She’d walked until she collapsed with exhaustion and thirst.
“I expected to die. Then he came,” she said bitterly. “Angel.”
I opened my mouth to ask, but she kept talking in a steady stream. Angel—the name was clearly ironic—was the leader of a large gang that held territory by the river in the old capital. His men had discovered Asha wandering on her own and brought her home with them.
“There’s a rigid hierarchy,” Asha said, “and I was at the bottom, with the other new members. Food was a constant problem, because these were not the sort of people who had the patience or the tenacity to live off the land.”
They’d gotten food and supplies mostly through banditry—robbing people on the road and in the city itself. They were the sort of people John had warned me about since I first arrived in the Wasteland and had taken so many pains to avoid on more than one occasion. I felt sick that Asha had been mixed up with people like that.
“If you did their bidding, you ate. Otherwise, you starved. Simple as that. And I was an ideal initiate because I had no hope of surviving on my own.”
Asha took a deep breath. “Angel took me as his woman. I didn’t want him, but it didn’t matter. I followed his orders. And every so often, he beat the shit out of me so that I knew my place.”
