I'd seen transmissions seize up while cars were in motion, watched brittle suspensions fold and crack, listened to motors wheeze through cracked air intakes. Now I knew what it felt like.

Body burning. Hurt to breathe. Why did it hurt to breathe? Like somebody was stabbing me in the ribs, like that piece of metal was stuck in me all over again, dozens all over my body. My jaw clenched. Back arched. Shuddered. Grappled with the sickness, fought it off, weakening under its assault. So weak already. Hoped it would stop soon.

I knew there were people in here, and I knew they were talking about me, but I couldn't pull myself out of the spasms long enough to catch their full conversation. In rare moments of stillness, though, I heard snippets, and from those snippets I learned that the rust fever had caused several ribs to shatter under the rigid muscles they were attached to, and if the contractions couldn't be controlled… bad news. Downhill was the only direction from this point.

The medic was furrowing her brow at an old leather-bound journal whose spine was cracked in multiple places, and the weathered pages fell all over and fluttered in the breeze let in through the open window. I closed my eyes, focused on breathing. Heard her slap the cover shut, so I wrenched one eye open and saw that her face was hidden in her palms.

"So that's it?" Toast's voice, from the corner under the window. "You're giving up?"

Not me. It was getting harder to fight, but I wasn't giving up.

There wasn't anything left to do, if I understood the medic, who sighed, scrubbed at her face.

Furiosa's hip was pressed into the doorframe. Agitated. Could tell by the way her leg twitched against the ground, and the way her metal fingers rasped against each other.

The tranq was wearing off. It was like the rust ever was slowly becoming immune to it. That pissed me off. God, did my breathing sound that horrible, or was someone trying to turn over an engine that refused to catch? I felt the onset of another episode, so I clamped my jaw shut and told it to shove off before it took hold, but that took too much energy and I couldn't focus on breathing anymore, so I started to get dizzy, and then it passed and I collapsed again, panting like a dog. Cleared my nose with a huff of air. Heard myself moaning when my busted ribs tried to function normally. Someone pushed a hand to my shoulder, and at first I thought it was Furiosa, but when I dragged my eyes to the side I saw the slash of white that was the Dag's hair.

They were all talking over me, but I couldn't understand them, like I was trapped under a thick-walled bell jar. The ringing in my ears was deafening. Then, it let up, just long enough for me to catch a few scraps of conversation. I tried to sort them out. Made my head hurt, but I finally made some sense of it. Apparently, I needed something called antitoxin, and it would take a good two days' run to find it and return to the Citadel.

Silence blanketed the room for a long moment. Then, Furiosa shoved off the doorframe, her face hardened into that Imperator mask, and she declared, "I'm gonna go get it – and he's coming with me."


I was on the floor again, for the tenth time in two minutes, on the rickety splintering floorboards of the massive outdoor elevator swinging from heavy-duty pulley systems high above. We were on ground level. Saw sand through the cracks. Dying sunlight beat me in the face. "You've gotta get up, Max," said someone. Toast, maybe, or Capable. Couldn't tell. Maybe it was my car, the Interceptor. It was calling to me, anyway. I could hear it. The familiar click of the starter, followed by the chugging ignition switch, and then the throaty exhaust (who needs a muffler?) and the whining supercharger.

It watched me through those headlights, and I heard the questioning pitch to the engine when I fell into the passenger's side door rather than taking the wheel. The women had seen to it already; there was a thick wool blanket on the floor, and a pillow, and they sorted the fabrics out around me as I lay my aching body back against the floorboards. Busted ribs grated like porcelain in a bag of meat, but I found the right position, comforted by the familiar embrace of my beaten leather jacket and the thrumming vibrations of my car.

But who was driving?

A metal hand rested atop the shifter knob polished by the grip of my palm. The wheel was wrapped in a battle-scarred fist, and Furiosa looked at me with pain in her eyes. Pain, like she suffered in my place. Pain, like her glass bottle of emotions was threatening to shatter.

Pain, like she'd come to the same conclusion that I had.

They were all crying, the women were. Each leaned in through the open window to say goodbye, each lingered for a few seconds before tearing themselves away. Their lips formed words I never heard but understood all the same, and I did my best to acknowledge them. It was hard, though, when my body wasn't cooperating with me. Even a simple dip of my head cost precious energy, energy I knew I couldn't afford to waste.

Furiosa coaxed my car into motion. The clutch was touchy – I'd tuned it like that so I could shift with little more than a twitch of my ankle against the pedal. I was impressed, though, because I was expecting to hear the grind of a burning clutch, but the Imperator understood. She eased into the machine's rhythm. My car tugged at the bit as she guided it away from the spires, then shot forward when she eased the accelerator to the floor. I knew this car well, well enough that I could tell you what piece of the dashboard was rattling at what RPM, and I felt when it settled back on its haunches and awaited the command to run. Full tank of guzzoline. Heard it in the floorboards. What were we waiting for? Nighttime was sucking the light out of the landscape. Full moon tonight, though. Didn't even need headlights. Everything was blue, drawn in thick brushstrokes and outlined by moonlight.

So tired.

The slight sway of the car as it rode over the top layer of sand lulled me. Something deep inside me started to slip. My eyelids drifted, weighed down by fatigue, but shot open when Furiosa cued up the supercharger and loosened the Interceptor's reins, let it lunge forward with newfound power. The car settled into an easy run, and I tried to smile.

Furiosa's façade broke then.

Green eyes cut from the road to me. Tears glistened at the rims; one broke away and streaked down the side of her face and dripped off the edge of her jaw. She didn't swipe it away, but kept both hands on the car's controls, and slowly looked back to the road.

Vaguely, I knew that my body was seized up again. It was weaker, though, not as devastating as it had been before, many times before. The rust fever's attacks were softening. I sensed, though, that something was very, deeply wrong with me. Couldn't feel much of anything. Not the broken ribs, not the place where the metal shaft had rested inside of me, not my head, not my chest…

The blue lighting began to shift to red.

It wasn't a bad red, like a sandstorm – quieting, like the first whispers of sleep, lapping at me, toying with the edges of consciousness. Voices, ones that hadn't spoken in quite some time, began to murmur in a distant corner of my mind. No yelling like they usually did. Just a dull bubbling of unintelligible words. Good. Didn't feel like dealing with any of them right now.

The Interceptor began to slow. I knew, because the supercharger changed pitch and deepened into a mournful howl as Furiosa backed the gears down. She'd gone off-course.

She knew.

She knew even before we'd left. We were never going to reach that antitoxin, wherever it was.

The redness took a little more of me. I knew, too.

She eased my car to a halt, left it idling, twisted around to look at me all curled up on the floor where the passenger's seat should've been. (Tore it out years ago – I was a loner, after all, never drove anyone around.) I blinked, had a hard time pulling my eyes open again. My limbs were getting heavier like someone was dumping lead into my bloodstream. Wondered if that was the rust fever. It was getting into its final position now. I felt it.

Something inside me gave way, and I suddenly felt scared.

How many men had I driven to this exact point, to look Death in the face? I envied them: none had been given time to think about it, not like I did. Maybe I deserved this kind of end. Didn't make it easier, though – I didn't feel ready. No. I dragged in a breath. Distant pain. Very distant. There was a hand on me, then another, and I became aware of Furiosa right beside me, cross-legged in the back with me with her head bowed. It wasn't fair – I was the one suffering, why did she have to hurt from it, too? I couldn't stand the thought of being the cause of someone's heartbreak. I wasn't that important.

Was I?

The redness darkened, faded to black at the very edges.

"I'm so sorry, Max," she breathed, then murmured something about not being able to help me the same way I'd helped her. I was confused. Why was she apologizing? She hadn't been the one with the crossbow. She wasn't a Buzzard. Their fault. Not hers. She was next to me now, stretched on the floorboards, tears carving straits through the dirt and grease on her face. One hand behind my head, the other resting gently on my chest, like she could will my body back into working condition.

My car cried, too. The idling engine hitched once, twice, then carried on its uneasy rhythm.

So, so tired now. My eyelids dropped, narrowing my vision to slits. Furiosa's touch grazed my face. My lungs screamed. I was drowning, deprived of air, able to draw just enough in to make me crave more, nothing else. No relief…

The redness, though; it whispered promises of relief, and just to tease me it shoved numbness further into my consciousness, trying to pry mind away from body. I was so tempted to let it take me, but I kept shoving it back, fighting it, surfacing through the waves lapping at me. Furiosa watched with agony in her eyes.

I wasn't ready to leave her.

She shushed through her teeth, stroked a hand over my forehead, pushed it through the hair I never bothered to tame. There was an awful rasping sound – me? I couldn't pull air into my lungs. Each mockery of a breath was even shallower than the last, and my ribs were aching from the piston-like rapidity of it all. Muscles tight, spasms weakening, weakening but not relinquishing their hold on me… I wanted to keep fighting. I tried. I tried damn hard.

"You're okay, Max," she soothed, because she saw that I was struggling to hang on to the thread still left in me, but it was fraying, fraying fast. Some part of me knew exactly what was happening. The tetanus had finally turned my respiratory system on me, telling it to suffocate me inside my own body.

I couldn't do this to her.

I knew I would lose, but I fought on. Consciousness eluded me. Haze set in. Furiosa's face was all I saw, framed in my blackening vision. She was crying. Made my heart ache. I blinked, slowly. Heart pounded, my blood cells screamed out for oxygen. In the air, I smelled exhaust – the Interceptor's. Still heard the engine, comforting white noise.

"It's all right," Furiosa murmured.

I looked up at her. Vision narrowed. Fading slowly. Tired. So damn tired.

She blinked, face split by a sad sort of smile, both hands to my face. Held me like that for a second. Whispered something I'd never hear, never understand. Then she straightened up, eyes softened. I waited. Needed her words. This time, when I tried to breathe, I couldn't, not at all, but I held on, held on one last time for her.

Her breathing hitched, her shoulders jerked. Smiled again through her tears.

"Stop it." Her voice was low. "Don't worry about me."

She leaned forward until her face was close to mine, pressed her lips gently to my forehead, inhaled deeply. I managed to drag air into my lungs, but it felt like fire, but I held it in anyway, let it smolder inside my chest.

"Max," Furiosa whispered, hands finding my face, her metal fingers cool against my cheekbones. She looked up. Gathered her strength, even as mine faded. I looked to her, and waited.

She breathed, and her words were broken, and she dipped her head. "You don't have to suffer any more. It's okay, Max." She gently thumbed my face. "You can let go."

I stopped fighting.

-END-