CHAPTER 45 : SUPPLY LINES CUT
The salvage convoy limped back to the Citadel at noon, smoke still rising from the ruins they'd left behind.
Eight people had gone out that morning. Eight people walked through the gates now—none seriously wounded, none dead, but all of them carrying the particular hollowness of survivors who had watched everything they'd worked for burn.
"They hit us at the canyon narrows," the convoy leader reported. Furiosa had called an immediate briefing in the war room, and I stood against the wall as the survivors gave their account. "Six vehicles, maybe twenty fighters. Professional formation—blockers front and rear, assault vehicles in the middle."
"Bullet Farm colors?"
"Bullet Farm everything. Their armor, their vehicles, their weapons." The convoy leader swallowed. "They didn't try to capture our cargo. They destroyed it. Scattered the salvage into the sand, torched the vehicles, made sure nothing was recoverable."
"And then they let you go."
"One of them—officer, maybe, from the way the others treated him—walked up to me while my truck was burning. Said: 'Nothing moves east without the Bullet Farmer's permission. Walk back and tell your settlement.'"
The war room was silent.
"They could have killed us," the convoy leader continued. "They had the numbers, the position, the firepower. But they let us go. They wanted us to deliver the message."
Furiosa dismissed the survivors with instructions to report to Capable's clinic for evaluation—not for injuries, but for the psychological impact of watching an ambush unfold and being unable to stop it.
When they were gone, she turned to the map table.
"Show me," she said.
I stepped forward and began marking positions. The eastern salvage route—our primary source for scrap metal, vehicle parts, and the raw materials the Armor needed to maintain its reserves—ran through a series of canyons and passes that provided natural chokepoints. The Bullet Farmer's forces had positioned themselves at three of those chokepoints.
"He's not trying to take the Citadel," Furiosa said, studying the map. "He's trying to starve it."
"Same strategy Joe used on the Wretched." The parallel was obvious—controlling access to resources rather than conquering territory directly. "He's learned from history."
"Or he's smart enough to recognize that a direct assault on a fortified position is expensive." Furiosa traced the supply routes with her finger. "Eastern salvage: blocked. Southeastern vehicle graveyard: probably compromised—we haven't sent a convoy there in weeks, but if he's thinking strategically, he'll have forces positioned. Western approach to Gas Town: still open, but that's where the People Eater controls traffic."
"So our three main supply corridors are either blocked or monitored by potential enemies."
"Exactly." She looked up from the map. "He's not starving us of water or food—those we produce internally. He's starving us of scrap. Of ammunition. Of the materials your Armor needs to feed properly."
I felt the Armor shift against my skin—a subtle thinning that I'd noticed over the past few days. Without regular salvage runs, my reserves were slowly depleting. Not critically, not yet, but the trend was concerning.
"I could punch through," I said. "The Awakened truck capability—deploy a ghost fleet to break the blockade, run convoys under their protection."
"How many Breaths for each truck?"
"Sixteen for twenty minutes of operation."
Furiosa did the math instantly. "You have forty reserves. That's two and a half trucks for twenty minutes each. Not enough to maintain a supply line, and every truck you lose is Breaths you can't recover."
"If I harvested more aggressively—"
"You'd strip the settlement's dead faster than they die." Her voice was flat. "That's not a solution. That's a temporary measure that creates its own problems."
She was right. The Breath economy was brutal—I could spend faster than I could earn, and every expenditure was a gamble on whether the tactical benefit would outweigh the resource cost.
"So what do we do?"
"We adapt." Furiosa turned back to the map. "Alternative routes. Longer, more dangerous, but outside his established blockade positions. We stockpile what we have, reduce consumption where possible, and wait for him to overextend."
"Waiting is what he wants. He's betting we'll get desperate and make a mistake."
"Then we don't make a mistake." Her eyes met mine. "You wanted to know what leadership looks like? This is it. Patience when you want to act. Caution when you want to strike. Making the right decision even when it feels wrong."
I thought about the Awakened truck, the thrill of watching it follow my commands, the satisfaction of proving the Ghost Fleet concept. I wanted to deploy that capability, to demonstrate that the Bullet Farmer's blockade couldn't contain us.
But Furiosa was right. Spending Breaths now, when the war had barely begun, was exactly the kind of desperation the Bullet Farmer was counting on.
"We wait," I said.
"We wait intelligently." Furiosa began marking alternative routes on the map. "Send scouts to identify new salvage locations outside his patrol radius. Build up reserves of critical materials. Train more drivers, more mechanics, more people who can maintain convoys under pressure."
"And if he escalates?"
"He will escalate. That's the nature of blockades—they only work if they get tighter over time." She looked at me directly. "When he does, we'll have options. Right now, our best option is making sure we're still standing when those opportunities emerge."
The war room fell quiet. Outside, I could hear the normal sounds of the settlement—children in Cheedo's school, workers in Toast's workshop, the Dag's assistants tending the garden terraces. Twenty-four hundred people going about their lives while enemies positioned themselves to strangle everything they'd built.
"There's something else," Furiosa said.
"What?"
"The convoy leader mentioned the officer who delivered the message. The one who walked up while their truck was burning." She pulled a sketch from her pocket—rough, but recognizable. "One of the survivors drew this from memory."
The sketch showed a face I'd seen before. Scarred. Hard. Familiar.
Krill.
"He's not just providing intelligence anymore," Furiosa said. "He's commanding forces. The Bullet Farmer promoted him."
Krill. The War Boy who had rejected the Network, who had felt the connection and called it "Immortan's trick with different paint." He'd fled the Citadel three months ago, taking with him everything he knew about the settlement's defenses and the Network's capabilities.
Now he was leading Bullet Farm troops in operations against his former home.
"This is personal for him," I said.
"It's personal for a lot of people." Furiosa tucked the sketch away. "That's what makes this war dangerous. It's not just about territory or resources. It's about what we represent—a different way of living that threatens everything the old world believed in."
I left the war room and walked through the Citadel's corridors toward my quarters. The Armor was definitely thinner now—I could feel the difference against my forearms, the slight looseness where the plates had been snug before.
The salvage routes were cut. The blockade was tightening. And somewhere in the Bullet Farm's territory, Krill was planning his next move with the intimate knowledge of someone who had lived inside our walls.
The old hunger stirred in the Armor—not desperate, not yet, but present. A reminder that even the most powerful capabilities required fuel, and fuel required access to the resources being systematically denied.
Three days later, a motorcycle appeared on the southern road.
I was on the observation platform when the lookouts spotted it—a single rider, traveling fast, raising a dust trail that caught the afternoon light like a signal flare.
The motorcycle slowed as it approached the Citadel's lower gates. The rider dismounted, removed his helmet, and looked up at the rock face with the expression of someone returning to a place they'd hoped never to see again.
Max.
He was thinner than when he'd left, harder somehow, carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who had spent three months surviving alone in the wasteland. But he was alive. He was here.
And from the way he was scanning the settlement's defenses, the way his eyes tracked patrol routes and noted defensive positions, he hadn't come back for a social visit.
I started down the stairs toward the lower gates.
Whatever had brought Max back, it was important enough to overcome his instinct to keep moving. And in the middle of a supply war with the Bullet Farmer, anything that important was something I needed to know.
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