"DAMMIT!"

It was like a roar, a throaty, guttural scream that jolted Aloy from her sleep. She'd been more tired than she thought, and sleep had come easily, but the shouting got her attention.

"HOW THE HELL?"

It was Skulldriver, that was certain. Aloy slowly arose from the bedroll that had made a better-than-expected sleeping arrangement. Lighting behind the hanging flap of animal hide didn't seem any different than when she fell asleep, so Aloy had no idea of the time. One thing had to be true, though: everyone in the Cradle had to be awake now. No one could sleep through the bellowing Bandit.

As she tried to straighten the shoddy Bandit clothing that hung clumsily over her frame, Aloy realized that maybe, perhaps, she should use that bucket… No, she decided she could wait just a bit longer. She straightened the scarf over her head, grabbed her pouch and weapons, and walked to the flap. Slowly, she pulled the flap back so she could peak at the events around her. Skulldriver was only feet away, his back to her, raising his arms high and swinging them down to his waist. Beyond were several of what appeared to be elite Bandit guards; beyond them, everyone else fought to escape up the single stairway.

"This MUST stop! Don't I have anyone competent enough to stop it?"

Skulldriver ceased his gyrations: the guards in front of him were all looking behind him, at the sleepy-eyed young woman emerging from the Bandit leader's private quarters. Skulldriver turned to face Aloy, and a menacing scowl and furrowed brows all seemed to soften just a bit.

Skulldriver stood straight, and Aloy suddenly realized not just how big he was, but how tall. He towered over Aloy, taller than any of the men and women standing behind him.

"Uh… your hair's showing," Skulldriver seemed to try to whisper, but with his raspy voice it sounded more like a growl. Aloy got the message, though, as she reached up to the front of the scarf and gave it a tug a bit more to the front of her head. Skulldriver nodded ever so slightly.

"What happened?" Aloy asked, sincerely concerned about whatever it was that had so upset her host. The scowl on his face returned immediately.

"What happened," Skulldriver began as he pivoted to face his Bandits once again, "was that these useless scum couldn't guard our orchard overnight, even after the rain stopped, and someone sneaked into our camp and destroyed a bunch of our trees!"

"You didn't want anyone out in the Rad storm, did you?" Aloy asked.

"That only makes it worse – that was just a regular winter rain, not a Rad rain. My whole camp's so spooked that everyone goes running for shelter at the first sign of rain."

"Isn't that the best thing to do? It isn't worth taking a chance that your people all get radiation sickness, is it?"

"You're new here, so you don't understand: winter rains are not Rad rains, and anyway, we had advance notice that it was okay, but no one told me until this morning.

"Then my farmers come to tell me a couple dozen of my precious nut trees have been hacked to pieces!"

"That seems strange, doesn't it?" Aloy asked. "Why would someone risk their life just to chop down some trees?"

"You don't understand that, either," Skulldriver growled. "We are trying to grow our own food. It's getting harder and harder to send out raid parties – there's nothing but the Rad City south of here and desert to the east, and we've hit just about everybody we can up north. So we do a little pilfering and a little pillaging, but we don't get enough to stay alive that way. So we grow a lot of our own fruit and vegetables, we've got our own cattle and goats and chickens, but DAMMIT! I love those nuts!

"We keep getting' hit, every time we look the other way, we lose trees or grapevines, sometimes it's a cow or two. Someone's tryin' to tear us apart."

"So you've had this problem for a while?"

"Two years now. And I know who's doing it. We had some traitors who tried to force me out and take over the camp. We chased 'em out, and now they come back to torture us. Torture ME."

"Can't your Bandits just track them down? They must leave some kind of a trail."

"Nah, they're good at hiding their tracks. We try, we always send Scouts out after 'em as soon as we get a chance but no one's been able to find 'em."

"Maybe I can help."

"You know something about trees?"

"No," Aloy chuckled, "I can't help you recover your trees. Maybe I can hunt them down for you."

"Uh… we better go somewhere else to talk." Skulldriver glanced behind him at the group of Bandits, all of them listening as intently as they could to the conversation.

"Maybe we can start at the scene of the crime," Aloy suggested.

"Good idea. Come on." Skulldriver motioned for the band of Bandits to part so the two could walk between them and up the stairs. It would have made an amusing sight for anyone with a sense of humor (something for which Bandits were distinctly not known), as the hulking monster of a man and the relatively slight young woman walked up the stairs, out of the Cradle, and into the bright morning sunlight.

They walked along a wide trail to the left of the orchard. The trees were uncovered, the tarps that had covered them rolled up in a line to one side. Aloy admired the beauty and symmetry of the orchard: the trees had small silvery leaves, were all of about the same height, were in even rows that went on as far as she could see. There were six rows of trees, trails on both sides, and here and there someone was tending to a tree.

"Our grapevines are on top of the hill," Skulldriver said, nodding his head slightly to his left to indicate the steep hill that followed alongside the orchard. "We store water up there too, catch it in troughs and test it for Rads. If it's good, we funnel it into water tanks, and if it's too radiated we pour it down the hill on the other side."

Aloy could see the first signs of the treachery that had so upset the Bandit leader: in the distance, people were carefully picking up strewn tree limbs and leaves, moving them to a pile at the end of the trail.

"Okay, my fire-haired witch, do your best!" Skulldriver stopped and motioned to the broken tree trunks that poked up at the end of the line. It looked as if three or four rows of trees – each row six deep – had been torn asunder by something very strong. "Oh, and when you're finished, you're getting a bath and some new clothes."

"Alright," Aloy responded as she reached – as surreptitiously as she could, given that there was a monster of a man and perhaps ten other people around her – into her waist pouch to retrieve her Focus. She casually reached to her right temple, as if to brush away hair (hair that, of course, was not there), and touched the Focus to her right temple. The Focus stayed as if glued to her head; she tapped it and the Focus began emitting a faint green glow. A glow not missed by Skulldriver.

"That… that thing you just stuck to your head! I know what that is… it's a Focus! We have a bunch of 'em."

Aloy deactivated her Focus and removed it from her temple. Holding the Focus tightly in her hand, she turned to face Skulldriver. "You do? You have working Focuses?"

"Yeah, how do you think we get early warnings of the Rad storms? We've got Scouts to the north, what amounts to a little Bandit camp all its own, and some more on an island out in the Great Waters to our south. If any of 'em detects rain, they'll use a Focus to call my Chief Scientist and let him know. Then he sounds the alarm.

"Doesn't your Focus let you talk to other people?"

"Well, not on purpose, no," Aloy responded as she tried to process what the Bandit leader had revealed: If these people have Focuses, can't they use them to identify tracks, spot enemies, find Machines… do all the things mine does? And do I tell this stranger the truth – that there once was a man who tapped into my Focus and used it to see what I saw, to talk to me? Aloy decided discretion was the best response for the moment. And a pretense of ignorance. "I don't use mine to talk to anyone, but it does help me find footprints and follow them."

Skulldriver looked incredulous. "No kidding! Ours don't do that, I don't think, they just let us talk over long distances. We found a box of 'em in the wreckage of our storm shelter, and it took a few years for my Chief Scientist to figure out how to use 'em. I guess, if you make it back alive, you'll want to talk with my Scientist."

Aloy was uncertain of her next move: reactivate her Focus and begin the search for the tree slayers, divulge more about the abilities of her Focus, or express her surprise that a Bandit camp even had someone with the title of "Chief Scientist." In all her travels, she'd never before come across anyone with that title. Definitely more to learn about this most unusual camp!

Deciding the best course was to follow up on her new errand, Aloy reattached the Focus on her temple, reactivated it, and looked around the area of broken trees. She discovered that there were actually a wealth of tracks to be followed, perhaps dozens, meandering through the fallen trees and off into the distance, up the side of the hill that lay before her. She gave a quick wave to Skulldriver and set about following the very clear trail of purple, glowing footprints.