Her name is Pegasus

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Her name is Pegasus.

Her favorite place in the citadel is the gardens. Not Immortan Joe's immaculately tended gardens full of bright green shoots and red fruits, spaced evenly in sawed open pipes and fed by water leaking out from rubber hoses like blood from a bullet wound. No, she spends her time on top of the towering spur of the towers where pale yellow stems and brown roots spider out across the rock, searching for purchase and protection from the sandstorms while lifting their pious green hands to the sky, begging for the water so vital to all life.

There is no order to those gardens, only life where life is strong enough to find a way to survive, all prickly stems and insects that crawl among the plants while war pup runts scurry through them, climbing over rocks and tiptoeing around little sprouts to crawl across the pipes to the Immortan's citadel and back, loaded down with buckets of water to carefully measure out, spoonful by spoonful, across the brown spotted leaves. They are the most beautiful things she has ever seen.

She sits at the edge of the pipes, watching an especially small pup crawl back across the pipes, water sloshing over the edge of his bucket to fall down and down, where the wretched below follow his shadow across the valley and wait, their hands like the leaves up-stretched to catch the precious few drops that come. She would have liked to be a gardener, but by the time she had been tossed below, the pipe bridge between the two towers would never have held her weight.

Sometimes she tells the runts stories about the waste, sometimes she brings them back tiny shoots and moss, carefully collected in hubcaps and boots and shielded from the harsh sun until they can be passed into tiny salt-whitened hands and dug back down into the sand and earth. She sees the sparkle in their eyes, hears the way they hold their breath as she mimics the shifting of gears and spin of the tires, and knows they dream of someday riding through the fire to the afterdeath with an imperator at the wheel.

She tells them that she has witnessed so many boys, her skin is forever darkened by the soot that extinguishes their half lives, and they touch her arms in awe, inspecting their salt fingers for any bit of the soot that might have rubbed off. She tells them her stories, but she does not tell them they are too small, that no imperator would risk letting a runt of the litter on to their rig, not even as a sacrificial lancer. She doesn't tell them of the days she spends out in the waste without water, and only her boys and the unrelenting sun for company. They set the buckets of water down and dip their fingers in to drink, and she doesn't tell them they are the lucky ones.

She tells the same stories to the war boys below, thin gaunt figures hunched in on themselves as they listen, whispering back the rhetoric and propaganda she quotes word for word from the Immortan. Some of the boys will survive the waste and grow to be dogs of war, inducted into the Immortan's personal guard, relieved of the salt stain that marks them for death. She will never join them. She made her choice thousands of days ago, cutting open her body and painting her defiance in blood across the immortan's vault. She would be no breeder, she would bring no more wretched into this world. The Immortan had thrown her to the blackthumbs like meat, having no purpose for one who could bear neither milk nor child. By all rights she should have died.

But she had always had her will. And as she carved out her body, so did she carve out her place in the caves. On scraps of metal she drew hands, palms together and spread like wings, welding them to hoods and doors, scrawling them in chrome paint across guzzoline tanks and glass. She asked the war boys if they knew the story of the Pegasus, the winged horsepower that was her namesake. She drew them in with stories of rigs with sharp metal feathers flaring out in wings from either side, ready to take to the sky at a moments notice and challenge the sun. She found the ones who were broken and cast aside, and she lifted them up, repaired them, whispered stories of warrior angels who stood at the gates of valhalla, and slowly she built her fleet.

When she was raised to imperator and the watching crowd of war boys below raised their hands in salute, among the interlaced fingers proclaiming glory to the V8 were hands held palms up, fingers spread like wings, and she knew that it was not out of trust or in gratitude for service to the Immortan that was was raised, but as a warning and truce, an offering of freedom and power given so that she would not challenge him for more. She knelt to him then, and salutes him now each time her rig goes roaring out into the waste, war boys crouched on the back, eyes closed and arms spread to catch the wind. Chrome and grease hand prints shine on their shoulder blades, and they are her flock. They are the most beautiful things she has ever seen.

She chooses a path through the dunes where she thinks the Barkskin clan will be. A war boy beside her lays sprawled out in the cab, breath wheezing past tumors and cancers as he fights to stay alive long enough to die. His skin is pale and gaunt and he needs no salt stain to look like a corpse. The chrome hand prints on his chest barely rise and fall as his lungs rattle and struggle. She lays a hand on his forehead and his eyes open, unfocused at first, and then lit with a determination and desperate plea acknowledged by a whooping call from the angel on top of the cab. She smiles and nods, her skull painted face twisting as she sets the wheel and helps the corpse stand and crawl up and out of the window. His boot slips on the frame, but then her angels have him, are arming him with lance heads and are pointing out the cloud of dust and sand that marks their target.

She watches his death without blinking, searing it into her memory. When she tells the runts back at the tower, she will say that he made a brave leap, arms outstretched and voice raised in exaltation. She will not tell them how he needed help to stand, how his jump was more of a thrown tumble, or how his weak hands fumbled the lance heads and his eyes were already closing, blood staining the corners of his smiling mouth long before the fireball erupted and his life was consumed. She counts her inhaled breath to eight, holding it and releasing it as she spins the wheel and guns the engine, spiraling out away from the fireball, allowing the rest of the clan to rescue their driver and flee before her rig swoops back and comes to rest beside the wreckage. She wonders if carrion crows think they are angels too.

The angels pull the remains of a rusting car onto the back of her rig, and she continues to count her breath to eight, watching her boys work in the mirror. They do not need her help, she trusts them to do what they were born to do. She doesn't want to see the body they pull into the back, discarded by its soul and now to be returned to the gardens that new life might grow from it. When a metal hand slaps the go-ahead on the top of her cab, she revs the engine again, roaring back out across the waste, letting the wind carry the war boys' jubilation away from her ears.

The chains she wears wrapped around her wrists feel heavy, but then they always do. Each death weighs on her until some days she sits alone in the darkest places of the tower, arms wrapped around herself to keep her body from shaking itself apart and she is sure she will be crushed by the weight of it all. It is hard for her to pretend she likes what she does. But she will pretend, when she returns to the citadel. She will parade her spoils of war in front of the wretched and thank the Immortan for the opportunity to serve him. She will frenzy with her boys in the tower, drumming out the heart beats of life as the adrenaline the hunt has left them with winds down. She will embellish her story until the corpse of a war boy is a kamicrazy banshee who single-handedly took out the entire clan with his one life. But when the night turns cold and the war boys exhaust themselves and slump into sleeping piles in the corners, she will find her way down into the belly of the tower, back down to where she was left for dead those thousands of days ago.

The blood stain on the floor is gone, but sometimes in the shadows she swears she can still see it. She lights a welding torch and finds the scrap metal pile, cutting a length of thick wire the length of her finger. She bends it carefully, a well practiced ritual, and steps around the spot on the floor unconsciously. The length of chain around her forearm is tied together with a thin thread to keep it from unwinding and catching on anything, but she unties it now, adding the new link to the chain and welding it shut. As she waits for the metal to cool, she touches each link in the chain with one thin finger, reciting names to herself in a whispered voice.

Each name comes with vivid recollection, each little metal loop a physical reminder of a half life she helped to end. She touches them and shivers, although the night's cold hasn't yet permeated this far down. The Immortan tells the war boys that there is no greater glory than death in war, and she repeats those words to them because she has to. She tells herself that nobody wants to watch themselves waste away as their blood betrays them or suffocate on their own tumorous windpipe, and that each boy that rides with her does only on their own request. But it hardly helps. Each link she touches sears into her mind anew the memories of innocent boys with so much potential, eyes bright and wide, driven to cut short their lives by only the promise of an afterdeath she doesn't herself believe in. Thirty seven deaths, immortalized in metal and by her unwavering witness. Each death is the most terrible thing she has ever seen.