Gravity-defying sand boots screamed across the desert at double the speed they were intended to go, down one dune and up the next, leaving no tracks. The dozen or so fission powered bikes pursuing the owner of those boots tended to dash straight through the crests of many of the dunes, but were gaining anyway.

Ty Kegwen, the boy in those boots, started to seriously worry about their structural integrity. “The faster you go, the faster you can go, to an extent.” Doc Rhomb, the boots inventor, had told him, “Powered by your own movement and the potentiality in the sand. You can go down one dune and up another twice it’s size without trying.” That worked just fine, but apparently Doc hadn’t counted on using them as a means to flee for one’s life.

Looking down, Ty saw the slim, leather-wrapped gadgets strapped to his feet emit gouts of excess energy in the form of a sharp bolt of electricity into the sand – their increasingly sinister vibration told Ty that they didn’t agree with his present speed.

Testing new tech made by the Docs was Ty’s hobby and in many ways it was what kept him alive when others his age gave up and died early rather than face the world they were in and grow to adulthood. He wasn’t good at much, but he had guts and so the Docs gave Ty whatever top of the line gadget they’d made in exchange for the assurance that they wouldn’t explode randomly. All Ty had to lose was his life, but in the desert, risk was commonplace and most lives ended abruptly anyway.

Ty was moving fast enough that the wind whipped tears from his eyes even through his ventilated goggles; every errant grain of sand would cut a hairline fissure in his skin. He risked a look back to verify how dangerously well the pursuit was going. The squat, malevolent, mechanical-eyed bike riders were known to the sand scavengers as the Noses, agents of the cities that stood, as monolithic black glass pyramids, in the wasteland that the world had become. It was from one of these cities that Ty and all the other sand scavengers had fled.

The cities hated them for it, to whatever degree city dwellers of any kind were capable of hatred or any other emotion. The puppeteers of the cities taught the puppets that inside were safety, providence, and prosperity, and that outside was nothing but death.

The sand scavengers were living proof against this lie, and so posed a threat to the power of the puppeteers, stewing in their governmentally assured apartments in the highest tiers of the pyramid. So they sent the Noses. The cities employed powerful listening tech, picking out any rhythmic beat or electric hum – anything that might indicate life – and when they found it they sent the Noses. They considered lethal weaponry inhumane, and so the Noses would ride out and beat the sand scavenger’s heads into a bloody bone-shard ridden mash with clubs meant for stunning and call it an act of kindness. Ty had gotten careless while testing Doc Rhomb’s amazing and endlessly entertaining new boots, and so they had sent the Noses.

Another miniature thunderbolt rocked Ty’s boots. A wire tightened in his gut as he realized he couldn’t run much longer. He was still just a kid, barely old enough to shave, though he had no idea of his own age, and so he couldn’t help but be afraid of the plan that came to him now. Kicking the sand boots against the upslope of a dune to slow himself as he approached the crest, he drew his weapon with a quivering hand – a sword, the only weapon that was practical under the scouring listening devices of the cities. Metallurgy was one of the few arts that the Docs were left to practice day and night, and many did just that. Ty’s weapon was another product of Doc Rhomb’s, and an example of utter refinement – its blade was a severe and unearthly gloss of green, nearly four inches wide at the base. It was light enough to wield with one hand and long enough to take off a head without getting in arms reach. It was suicidally sharp, and would never lose its edge. Ty never liked swordsmanship, but he’d forced himself to learn what he could just to keep his limbs intact while wielding the work of art he’d been given.

Ty perched on the crest of the dune in a crouch, holding his blade perpendicular to his waist, silhouetting dramatically with the late afternoon sun at his back. The lead Nose was approaching him without slowing, apparently meaning to take his head off at an insane speed in order to add to the gruesome effect. Noses weren’t smart. No city dweller was. They weren’t permitted to be.

As the red and black fission bike barreled toward Ty, he snapped down the far side of the dune causing the Nose’s potentially fatal blow to swing wild over his head. Ty swung his sword with in a lightning fast arc that was part luck and part adrenaline, the faultless blade rang like an exquisite bell as it slit a fissure in the bike’s hastily assembled aluminum underside.

Streams of ultra-heated gas screamed out of the wounded bike as the suspending force of the engine, now broken free, ripped the bike into neat quarters, each trailing a limp ribbon of the former rider like a kite tail. Ty had learned at an early age that all city tech was designed under the assumption that the wielder was just one more mouth for the city to stuff with synthesized proteins.

Ty’s pursuers ground to a halt, as expected. They would not continue without a leader, but the replacement would arrive shortly. Sheathing his sword, Ty rocketed in a random direction, hoping to use the trackless boots to lose the Noses in the open desert. His receding adrenaline drove him on until even the minor effort of spurring the boots along had worn him out to the point of collapse.

Falling to his hands and knees, the sand was harder than he had expected and bit cruelly into his palms. The dunes were giving way to hardpan – this had been a lake, or a sea, when such things had existed. He realized then that he was hopelessly lost. None of the scavengers went very far from either a settlement or a ruin, and as far as he knew this area was totally uncharted. A quick check of the device on his wrist verified what he’d feared – he was far out of range of the Doc’s homing beacon. Worse still, he was exhausted and nearly out of water.