Chapter 23 : The First War Boy
His name was Mors.
I found him waiting outside the workshop at dawn, his hands trembling against his thighs, tumors bulging from the side of his neck like rotten fruit. Twenty years old, maybe. A year to live, probably less.
"You're the one with the metal skin," he said. His voice cracked on the words. "The one who makes things move."
"I am."
"They say you can share knowledge. Put things in people's heads." He swallowed hard, his throat clicking around the tumors. "I want to learn. Before I die. I want to know things."
The Network pulsed at the edge of my awareness—Toast's morning focus, the Dag's gentle dreams, Nux's lingering grief. Three connections already, and the headaches had become a constant companion.
"What do you want to know?" I asked.
"Everything." Mors's eyes were too bright, fever-hot with desperation. "I've been a mechanic my whole life. Fixing Joe's vehicles, maintaining his war machines. But I only know what I was taught, and I was taught just enough to be useful." His hands clenched. "I want to understand why things work. Not just how to bolt them together, but the physics underneath. The engineering."
I remembered the first time I'd connected with Nux—the terror on his face, the wall of chrome-bright conditioning I'd had to push through. Mors had none of that resistance. He was already broken open, cracked by disease and desperation into something that would accept whatever I offered.
"It's not just knowledge," I warned him. "You'll feel what I feel. You'll dream fragments of my dreams. The connection doesn't close."
"I don't care." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I'm dying anyway. Might as well die knowing something real."
I took his hand.
Four connections.
The Network screamed.
My vision whited out as the system overloaded. Three connections had been the edge—four was over it. Pain lanced through my skull like a spike driven through my temples. I heard Mors gasp somewhere in the static, his consciousness crashing into mine with all the subtlety of a vehicle collision.
Then it stabilized.
Mors collapsed onto his knees, tears streaming down his chalk-white face. Not from pain—from something else entirely.
He was sobbing.
Deep, wrenching sobs that shook his entire body, the kind of crying that comes from a place so buried you didn't know it existed. I felt it through the Network—the walls inside him crumbling, the realization flooding through him like water through a broken dam.
Someone cares if I live.
The thought wasn't mine. It was his. And it carried forty years of War Boy conditioning behind it—all the performative blessings, the chrome promises, the devotion to a god who had never once looked at him as anything but fuel. Joe had built an empire on young men who believed their only value was in dying spectacularly.
Mors had just discovered that wasn't true.
"I can feel you," he whispered between sobs. "I can feel that you actually... you actually..."
He couldn't finish the sentence.
I knelt beside him, one hand on his shoulder, the Network pulsing with shared grief. The headache was blinding now—four connections stretched Phase 1 past its limits—but I held the link steady.
"It's real," I said. "Whatever you're feeling. It's real."
Furiosa watched from the barracks doorway.
She didn't enter. Didn't speak. Just stood with her arms folded, her eyes tracking the scene—a hardened War Boy weeping on the floor while I knelt beside him with my hand on his shoulder.
The other Network members had gathered, drawn by the emotional tsunami that Mors's connection had sent rippling through all of us. Toast leaned against the wall, her analytical mind cataloguing everything. The Dag sat cross-legged nearby, tears running down her own face in empathic response. Nux had emerged from wherever he'd been hiding, and now he crossed to Mors and sat beside him.
One hand on Mors's other shoulder. One former War Boy to another.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The Network carried the message—the shared weight of learning your whole life was a lie, the strange relief of discovering it wasn't too late to become something else.
After a while, Furiosa turned and walked away.
I found her an hour later, standing at her window overlooking the workshop. Below, four Network-connected people moved in seamless coordination—passing tools, anticipating needs, sharing knowledge without words.
"That's the most dangerous thing you've shown me," she said without turning around. "More than the armor. More than the chains that move."
I stopped beside her, watching our people work.
"You saw what it did to him."
"I saw it break him open." Her voice was flat, controlled. "I saw decades of conditioning dissolve in thirty seconds. I saw a man who would have died for Joe learn to want something else." She finally turned to face me. "That kind of power doesn't just heal. It can reshape people. Remake them. And whoever holds it decides what they become."
"I'm not trying to remake anyone."
"Not yet." Her eyes were hard as flint. "Maybe you never will. Maybe you're exactly what you appear to be—a strange man with strange powers who wants to help." She paused. "Or maybe you're building something that will swallow everyone around you, and you don't even realize it."
"What do you want me to do? Disconnect them? Refuse to help?"
"I want you to understand what you are." She touched the knife at her belt—not threatening, just remembering. "The last person who built devotion in this place was Immortan Joe. He didn't think he was a monster either. He thought he was saving them. Giving them purpose. Making them strong." Her voice dropped. "And he was right. He made them strong. Strong enough to die screaming his name while chrome paint dried on their lips."
I didn't have an answer for that.
Furiosa returned to watching the workshop. Below, Mors had joined the work crew, his tears dried, his hands already learning new techniques through the Network's shared knowledge.
"I'm not going to stop you," she said finally. "The Citadel needs what you're building. But I'm watching. And the moment I see you become the thing I killed—" She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't need to.
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