Nigella Vibra crouched behind a rusted camper and counted the raiders on the ridge. She counted nine. Nine armed men held the only road out of Shiver Valley, and Nigella had three days to reach the far city-state before its council voted to break the peace accord for good. She was an android built for talk, not gunfire. Her whole reason for being was stitching the last three city-states of the scorched frontier back together, and she could not stitch anything from the wrong side of a blockade. The camper belonged to Duncan McCoy. He sat in the driver's seat in his kilt and hockey mask, hands folded on the wheel like a man waiting for a bus. In the back, packed in straw, sat forty tubs of hand-churned ice cream. Duncan had agreed to drive her as far as the next city-state in exchange for a stall permit in its market. He wanted to open a shop. Nigella wanted to stop a war. Both plans died on this road. "They'll take the tubs," Duncan said through the mask. His Scottish voice was soft. "And they'll take you apart for parts, lass." Nigella watched the raiders through the cracked windshield. They had set up beside a squat icehouse painted pink and orange, its eaves dripping meltwater into the sand. She thought about the ice inside. She thought about the tubs in the back. She thought about the heat. "Duncan," she said. "How much of your stock can you spare?" "All of it, if we live." She climbed out with her hands up and walked the road alone. The raiders raised rifles. Their leader, a woman with a sun-bleached scarf, told her to stop. Nigella stopped. She said she was an android, worth nothing broken and less as scrap. She said the man in the truck made ice cream. She said the icehouse behind them was empty and their water skins were flat, and she had watched them pour the last of a canteen an hour ago. She said she could trade. Forty tubs. Safe passage. One trip. The leader lowered the rifle a finger's width and asked what flavors. Duncan served them off the tailgate. The raiders ate standing, rifles slung, jaws working. The leader tasted a spoon of something pink and closed her eyes. She told her people to let the camper through. She told Nigella that the deal was for today only, and that the next android who tried this road would be shot on sight. Nigella said that was fair. Duncan handed over the last tub and climbed back behind the wheel. They rolled past the icehouse with an empty truck bed and a full tank. Duncan asked what she would sell at the next checkpoint. Nigella watched the road unspool through the cracked glass and did not answer. She had bought one day. She had nothing left to trade, and two city-states still to reach.

The road out of Shiver Valley opened into flat red pan, and Duncan drove with the empty truck bed rattling behind them. Nigella watched the second city-state rise on the horizon by dusk. Its towers caught the low sun and threw it back in blue and gold. She had bought one day with ice cream. Now she needed a way through a gate with nothing in her hands. They stopped a mile out. The gate was a slit between two mirrored spires, and a line of carts waited in the sand. Nigella walked the line and listened. Every envoy showed something at the gate: a crate, a sealed letter, a pouch. Guards turned away anyone who came empty. One woman argued for ten minutes and was walked back at rifle point. Duncan leaned on the camper and said what Nigella already knew. They would not be let in. A figure sat apart from the line on an overturned crate. Older woman, grey hair cropped short, red leggings, black corset stiff with road dust. She was eating a strip of dried meat and watching the gate the way a card player watches a table. Nigella sat down beside her. The woman did not look over. She said her name was Mea Ivory and asked what an android wanted with a city that ate androids for parts. Nigella told her the truth in three sentences. Peace council. Two more stops. Nothing to trade. Mea chewed and looked at the spires. She said she had files. Papers she had carried out of a place that would kill to get them back. She said one page named a council member of this very city as a paid asset of a foreign power. She said the council would pay to bury it, or the rival faction inside the walls would pay to wave it. "Why give it to me," Nigella said. "I need to disappear. You need a door." Mea pulled a thin envelope from inside the corset and set it on her knee. "One page. Not the stack. You walk it to the gate captain and ask for an audience. You do not say my name. Ever." She looked at Nigella for the first time. "The person who helped me get these is dead. I will not add you to that list if you keep your mouth shut." Nigella took the envelope. She walked to the gate alone and handed it to the captain. The captain read two lines, went pale, and waved her through without a word. Duncan followed with the camper. Inside the walls a runner met them and led them to a side hall of the great spire, where a nervous aide poured water and asked what the envoy wanted. Nigella asked for a signature on the accord and a sealed letter of passage to the third city-state. She got both before midnight. She also got a quiet instruction, delivered by the same aide at the servant's door: leave before dawn, and never come back through this gate. Nigella folded the letter into her chest plate. She had bought the second city. She had made an enemy of the first.

Duncan drove out the servant's gate before the sky turned grey. Nigella sat with the sealed letter against her chest plate and watched the mirrored spires shrink behind them. The letter named the gatekeeper of the third city-state. It did not say where in the sprawl to find them. The third city was a week of desert and a maze of shanties around a walled core. Ask the wrong door and the letter would be taken from her hands. "We need someone who knows the sprawl," Nigella said. Duncan grunted and turned the wheel toward a plume of smoke on the flats. A salvaged airbase sat under it, all tarnished metal and salvaged tech, antennae leaning off a control tower. Traders parked in its shadow. Pilots drank in its bays. If anyone sold routes into the third city, they would be here. Inside the main bay, a woman in camo pants and a black tank was arguing with a mechanic over the price of a wing repair. Braid down her back, goggles on her forehead, scars on one arm. She spoke in short, hard sentences. The mechanic backed down. Nigella waited until the woman turned, then stepped in. "I need a guide into the third city," Nigella said. "Someone who can put me in front of a specific gatekeeper without a crowd hearing the name." Lara Sandstorm looked her over once. "I don't guide. I escort. Price is water, fuel, and half up front." Nigella opened her empty palms. Lara snorted and turned back to the glider parked in the bay, a sleek thing with folded solar panels catching the bay lights. Nigella spoke to her back. She said she had a signature on the peace accord from the second city and a sealed letter to the third. She said if the accord failed, the sprawl went first. Raiders. Bubblegum-painted tanks running the outer lanes. Lara had seen one last month, she guessed. Lara stopped walking. "You're the android everyone's whispering about," Lara said. She came back and stood close. "I don't take pay I can't spend. But my sister lives in that sprawl. If your paper keeps the councils talking, she keeps her roof." She tapped the glider's nose. "Two seats. We fly at dusk. I know the gatekeeper you want. Ex-quartermaster. Drinks at a stone tower on the sprawl's east edge, old robot outpost with a pirate flag. I can put you across a table from her by tomorrow night." Nigella looked at Duncan. Duncan nodded once and said he would drive the camper the long way and meet her at the wall. Nigella climbed into the glider. The panels unfolded and hummed. Lara ran the checks without a wasted motion. At dusk they lifted off the cracked apron and banked east. Nigella had a name in an envelope and, for the first time on this run, a hand pointing exactly where to take it.