Reina: The Fractured Rider
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Book Two of Ten
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A Dustland Survival Odyssey Set in the Age of Unbinding
The Dustlands are cruel, but Reina Valdez is stronger than anything that wants her dead.
Once a scout carving freedom from the bones of the desert sands, Reina rides west once again with a haunted mind and a gunfighter’s resolve. Her dreams have turned prophetic, filled with storms that twist time and ghosts she cannot outrun. Aric, the runaway engineer reshaping fate with every step, and Lucien, the memory-thief who can rewrite a life with a whisper, rely on her strength. But destiny makes no promises about mercy.
Pursued by raiders and driven across lands where past and future collapse into each other, the trio reaches the fractured heart of what remains: Las Vegas. A city reborn atop temporal chaos. A gambling empire where cowboys and automatons share narrow streets with Vikings, samurai, and astronauts torn from different centuries. Magic and machinery exist by a fragile pact, and every debt comes with a knife.
To protect her newfound allies, Reina must steal from the city’s most dangerous factions and unravel conspiracies threatening to tear the Strip apart. But every choice leads further into a Pattern she can never escape, and every thread seems to tie back to Aric. Destiny has already chosen him for something vast. Something terrifying.
Old debts rise from the grave. Love swallowed by the storm returns wearing scars. And beneath the neon glare, the Dustlands hunger for heroes bold enough to defy what the future claims as its own.
Where do you run when the future is already hunting you?
Prologue
Reina rode through a storm that didn’t understand time. Lightning broke in crooked lines above her, rippling from blue to sepia to a sickly green as if the sky were trying on different eras. The ground beneath her mare flickered between dust and grass and cracked asphalt. Hoofbeats landed out of sequence, echoing before they struck, rhythm stumbling like a drunk trying to lead a dance. She tightened her grip on the reins, but the leather felt older than her, dry and brittle as old myths. Ahead, the figure of a man took shape in the chaos.
The rancher from the foothills, the one who had traded horses for tech and offered a name for every ridge they crossed, stood planted in the shifting plain, stubborn as barbed wire. His mouth hung open in a silent scream and his eyes bulged with a terror she didn’t recognize.
He lifted a shaky hand toward her, whether to warn her or condemn her she couldn’t tell. The storm peeled seconds off him like strips of weathered paint. One heartbeat he was a man, the next he was a fading photograph curling at the edges. Reina tried to call out, tried to ask what he’d seen, but the air swallowed her voice. A surge of unreal wind tore through the scene and the rancher shattered into motes of dust, leaving her alone again in the roaring quiet of a world losing its grip on itself.
The landscape lurched and folded into itself, and suddenly she was no longer alone. A warm weight slumped in her arms; a woman whose laughter once made the world feel kind despite everything it demanded. Seraphine’s dark hair, always smelling faintly of cedar and rain, paled to white in a single trembling breath. Her cheek hollowed under Reina’s fingertips, soft youth eroding as wrinkles carved themselves deep and merciless. Eyes that once gleamed like starlight on a midnight river dulled as time devoured her from the inside out.
Reina held her tighter, whispering comfort she no longer believed. Seraphine’s breath escaped in a final sigh that tasted of endings, and then her skin cracked, flaked, and scattered into dust against Reina’s chest. Reina screamed her name into the roar of the storm. “Seraphine!” The wind swallowed the sound, and her hands closed around emptiness. The grief was a blade that refused to stop cutting, even here, where nothing was supposed to be real.
A voice cut through the storm, desperate and familiar. Her sister. Calling her name with the fear of someone reaching for a hand already slipping beneath the waves. Reina twisted in the saddle, tried to track the direction of the sound, but the air itself spun into false echoes. The horizon split like a broken mirror, reflections of roads they had never taken dancing like taunts. She shouted back, but her voice tangled in the wind and returned to her sounding like someone else.
The storm’s colors deepened into rust and black. Out of the swirling chaos a face emerged, sculpted from grit and malice, the grit flowing like smoke through the hollow places where eyes should have been. Calder Voss hovered there, his features sharp and cutting as glass shards. He watched her with the cool examination of a man who already judged her and found her lacking. Sand formed his mouth, shifting as though struggling to speak a verdict she refused to hear.
A violent gust tore through the illusion, scattering his face into a thousand glittering grains. He vanished as though he had never been there at all, leaving the storm free to rage unchecked and Reina fighting to remember what was real before the dream devoured everything.
The storm twisted again, folding possibilities into impossible shapes. Through the churning haze she saw another figure, one that didn’t sway with the violence of time. Aric stood as a single fixed point in a world that refused stability. His outline glowed with a faint corona of Aether, strands of it curling around him like living light. It shielded him from the pull of the storm, as if the laws that hunted everyone else dared not lay a hand on him. Reina reached toward him, but the distance stretched like taffy, thinning and lengthening every time she spurred her horse forward. The harder she tried to close the gap, the further away he became, the universe rewriting the rules underneath her feet.
A flash of red swept across her vision. She turned and found Lucien in a pool of shifting shadows, his smile too wide, too satisfied. A corpse lay at his boots, the man’s face twisted in disbelief that death had come for him. Lucien’s eyes glinted with amusement as he placed his heel on the fallen throat. Reina called out to him, the storm ripping the words into tatters. His grin didn’t fade. It only stretched into something knowing and cruel. Before she could reach him, the corpse dissolved into drifting bone ash and Lucien faded with it, leaving only that smile stamped into the air like a brand.
The thunder of collapsing time hit her at once. The storm buckled inward and swallowed everything. She gasped and her eyes snapped open.
Canvas tent walls pressed around her. The dry scent of sand and dust filled her lungs. The campfire outside had burned to embers, their faint glow seeping beneath the tent flap. Her hand had already found the grip of her revolver, knuckles white with remembered terror. Her heartbeat drummed against her ribs as if trying to escape. Dawn was only beginning to stretch its first pale light across the Dustlands, painting the world in silver and quiet.
Aric slept nearby, turned away from her, his breath steady. Lucien lay on his back with one arm flung over his eyes, peaceful in the early stillness. Reina let her grip loosen on the gun but didn’t release it entirely. She sat, spine stiff, watching the horizon shift colors as it welcomed the day, trying to steady her breathing. The dream clung to her like a second skin. The storm. The dust. The dead. The feeling that fate was already waiting for them somewhere ahead, patient and hungry.
She swallowed the fear rising in her throat. The sun was coming. There would be miles to travel. And whatever that vision meant, she would face it upright, awake, and ready.
Copyright © 2025 Brad Slade
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.