Slaver's Bay

Silver stopped dead in the road. Jake felt it through his legs before he knew what she was doing. One breath she was picking her way over the cracked blacktop, slow and sure, hooves soft in the dark. Next breath all four feet were set and her ears were flat. The road ahead was empty.

That didn't mean much. Jake lifted one hand. Robin drew up behind him without a word. Her horse gave a low snort and stamped once, not liking the stop any better than Jake did. Sound went far this early. Too far. Not far enough. The dark had started to thin. There was enough gray to see the road and the wash on both sides. Not enough to trust either one.

Wind pushed dust over the old asphalt. Dead scrub crowded close. Somewhere behind them were two towns with no smoke, no light, and no good reason to go back. Silver twitched one ear. Jake heard it then. High up. A cry tore across the morning.

Scree. Robin slid the Mithril double-barrel from the saddle scabbard. Slow. No scrape. No hurry. The thing gave no shine yet.

"One?" she asked.

Jake looked up. Black wings against the gray. Long head. Bent neck. It circled wide over the road and kept out of range.

"One we can see."

"That ain't an answer."

"Best I got."

The Scree came around again. Lower. Still not diving. Watching. Silver shifted under him. She wanted off the road. She weren't scared dumb. That counted for plenty. Jake loosened the right-hand revolver. Silver snapped her head left.

Then the smell hit. Hot guts. Burnt hair. Something sharp under it, like a match held too long. Robin made a little sound.

"Drake," Jake said. "Road or wash?"

The sound come next. Hooves. Horse hooves had a way to them. These didn't. They struck hard and wrong, heavy enough Jake felt them up through Silver and into his bad knee afore the thing showed itself. Brush broke in the wash. The drake came out low and fast.

It was young, if a thing could be young with a head big as a keg. Not the beast from under Diablo Hill. That one had filled the tunnel, horn and hoof and hot breath, with no room to get around it and no air worth having. This one was leaner. Narrower. Still big enough. Black horns set back from the skull. Foreclaws bright where they cut sparks out of the road. Its head swung toward Silver.

Silver moved before Jake touched rein. Good girl. Robin fired. The double-barrel cracked hard. Blue-white light snapped across the road. The shot missed the drake's hindquarter and blew out the asphalt behind it. Black chunks jumped up. The drake stumbled, caught itself, and screamed.

"Nice shot," Jake called.

"I was aiming for it. You're a horse's ass, Dollop."

"Been called worse."

The Scree shrieked overhead. Blood and noise had a way of calling company. Jake had Silver moving right before he looked for Robin. She was already cutting left. No words. No plan. She took the drake's eye. Jake went for the back leg. Silver kept him out from under the hooves when his own fool head got too busy.

The drake went after Robin. Her horse stretched out down the wash, neck long, ears pinned, white at the bit. Still running straight. Robin bent low with one hand on the reins and the double-barrel tucked close. The drake followed, claws throwing sparks, hooves breaking old tar. Jake put Silver across its rear quarter. His new hat pulled at his head. Dark felt. Wide brim. Fit wrong. The old one had fit. Course, the old one had an arrow hole through it now. Hard to wear a thing with daylight through the crown.

The drake's tail snapped back. Silver dropped. The tail cut over Jake's head and took air with it. Jake came up half out of the saddle, one boot loose, right hand on the cantle, left hand drawing iron. He fired twice. Both rounds hit.

Neither done enough. The drake kicked back. Its rear joint opened for half a second. There was smart choices in the world. This weren't one. Jake drove his heel down.

The spring in his boot snapped. The spike punched out. He threw himself sideways from the saddle and drove the little blade into the drake's rear joint. It bit. The leg folded. The drake screamed and went sideways. Jake went with it. Something hard caught him in the ribs and sent him into a rusted guardrail.

Air left him. All of it. He lay on his back with the sky over him.

"Get up," he told himself.

Nothing.

"Any time."

Still nothing. The drake dragged itself around on three legs. Its bad leg scraped behind it. Its eyes found Jake. Gold. Wet. Hurt. Jake's finger found the trigger and stopped there. Only for a breath. Then the thing lowered its head.

Jake's hand closed around the gun. His fingers didn't want to. His ribs had a say in the matter. So did the ground. So did Saint Pete, likely, but Saint Pete could wait his turn. The drake charged. Robin crossed behind it at twenty yards. She stood in the stirrups and threw the knife. The Mithril blade turned once. Pale blue on the edge. White at the point. It caught between two bones at the base of the drake's skull and sank in.

The drake's front legs quit. Its chin hit asphalt. The body rolled and slid. It stopped close enough Jake could smell the inside of it. Hot. Rotten. Sharp. Bad. The Scree cried once above.

Jake looked up. The bird wheeled south. No dive. No fight. It saw the dead drake, saw the two riders, saw maybe something else it didn't like, and went on.

"Smart," Jake said.

He remembered another patch of ground. Blood in his eyes. Quincy Campbell weeping over a dead woman nearby. Two Scree coming in hard. Two shots each. Five seconds, maybe less. Folks said nobody killed Scree. Folks said a lot. Jake pushed himself upright. His side went white and mean.

"Well," he said.

Robin rode over, swung down, and walked past him to the drake. She set one boot on its neck and worked the knife free. Green ichor hung to the rose-carved steel in strings.

"You're bleeding."

Jake looked down. Coat torn. Shirt dark under it.

"Yep."

Robin wiped the knife on her pants. They stood there while dust settled. Silver came over in her own time and nosed Jake's shoulder. Hard enough to make his ribs bark.

"Morning to you too."

Silver blew warm air against his cheek.

Robin glanced at the mare. "She's kinder than you."

"Had practice."

"With you? Reckon she has."

Jake got to his feet slow. His left knee didn't care for it. His ribs cared less. The boot-spike slid back in with a gritty click when he shifted his heel. Robin heard it. She heard near everything a man wished she wouldn't.

"That thing ever stick?"

"Only when I need it."

She shook her head and went to catch her horse. Robin could leave a question laying in the road and make a man trip over it later. Neat trick. Mean one. Her horse came back with foam at the bit and blood on one foreleg that weren't its own. Robin took the bridle and spoke low. Too low for Jake to hear. The animal settled by pieces. First the eyes. Then the ears. Then the shaking hide.

Jake watched and made out like he weren't. Silver bumped him again.

"Quit mothering."

She did not. The road behind the drake still smoked where Robin's shot had torn it open. One chunk of asphalt had gone through the old sign and bent the metal out. Jake looked at the hole. Then at the double-barrel.

"You ever hit what you're aiming at with that cannon?"

Robin snapped the barrels open. Two spent shells dropped smoking into her palm.

"You ever shut up when a woman saves your life?"

"Ain't had occasion."

She loaded fresh shells. One Mithril load left after that. Maybe two if the loop on her belt hadn't torn. Ammunition was always less than a man wanted and more than he deserved. Jake checked his own rounds. Two spent. Ten between both guns before reload. More in the saddlebag. Saddlebag bullets didn't help much when a drake had its mouth open.

He spat blood into the dust. Robin saw.

Robin checked the blood at his mouth, then looked him over for worse damage.

"Cheek. Ribs are still there," Jake said.

"Did you hit your head?"

"Which time?"

She almost smiled. Then the Scree cried again far south and it was gone. Jake looked that way and saw nothing but gray sky and long empty. No sense worrying over a bird that had already left. Plenty else on the ground to kill a man. He limped to the drake. Dead was dead. Waste was waste. Meat was meat if a man knew where to cut and how long to boil it before it killed him. The drake smoked a little when he opened the shoulder. Heat trapped in ugly flesh. Nothing more.

He took what he could. Robin worked the other side. Quick and clean. They wrapped strips in oiled cloth and salted what little salt they could spare. Once, maybe, a man killed a thing like this and made a story of it. Now Jake cut breakfast off it and hoped it didn't foul the pot.

The hide was tough in patches and soft in others. Young, then. Pale seams under the plates along the ribs. Give it a year and it might have got big as the one under Diablo Hill. Good they met now. Jake set the Bowie deep. His hands knew work even when the rest of him complained. Muscle peeled back red-black. Steam lifted. The smell got into his beard and behind his teeth.

Robin passed him a strip of cloth. He bound the cut in his side. The cloth went red before the knot was tight.

"Needs cleaning," she said. "With water that ain't been through a dead lizard."

"Drake."

"Didn't ask its papers."

He cinched the knot and breathed through his teeth. There weren't no good way to hurt your ribs. Every breath pulled a bill due. Guardrail had done the collecting. Robin finished along the neck. She stayed clear of the knife wound. Mithril had left blue-white crust around the hole. The meat there had gone gray.

"Still strange," Jake said.

"That it works?"

"That anything does."

She pulled the knife free of the last clinging string. No shine. No fine show. Just cold metal with green muck sliding off it.

"My father said Mithril don't care what a thing wants to be," she said. "Only what it is."

Jake waited. There weren't more. Robin sheathed the knife and looked away like she'd said too much. Jake let it lie. No sense prying at a thing right after it bit.

"Silver still don't like that bird," Robin said.

"Smart girl."

"You saying I ain't?"

"You fired at a drake's ass and hit the road."

She laughed once. Short. Then stopped. Jake looked up. She had one hand under the drake's belly, pulling at something half buried under the weight of the body. Leather. Worked leather. Dark with road dirt and ichor. A saddlebag strap. Not theirs.

Both of them went quiet. Quiet had weight out here. Right kind kept a man alive. Wrong kind meant something already had teeth in him. Jake drew and checked the road both ways. Nothing moved but dust. Robin cut the strap free and dragged the bag clear. It came loose wet.

"Could be old," she said. "Could be somebody got ate. Could be a trap."

"Everything is, if your luck's bad enough."

She opened it. Inside was a crusted canteen, two steel coins stuck together with dried blood, a twist of tobacco, and folded paper sealed in oilcloth. The oilcloth was fresh. Jake knew afore he touched it. There was degrees to rot. A man who lived long enough learned them. The bag had been under the drake a day. Two maybe. The paper hadn't belonged to nobody dead long enough to become scenery.

Robin handed it over. The paper cracked when Jake opened it. It weren't a bounty poster. Weren't a handbill neither. Commercial marks. Shipping script. Half the page torn off. Lower corner burned. Names cut through the middle. Some careful bastard had ruined the useful part and left enough to hurt. Jake read the brand at the top.

A P inside a chain link. His throat closed. He had seen that mark two weeks back at a ruined market square west of Apex. Burned into a slaver's tack box. Half scratched off a post where men had been sold. The man Jake asked about it had gone pale and found business elsewhere.

Before that, a drunk in a rain-broke church said he saw the mark on a wagon under moonlight. Six boys chained inside. One girl screaming herself hoarse. Before him, a one-eyed woman with a sack of hinges spat in the dirt when Jake drew the shape with a burnt stick. Before her, nothing. Weeks of nothing.

Jake had been asking careful. Careful took longer than a gun and weren't half so satisfying. He did not say Billy's name when he asked. Did not say son. Kept it to paper and marks and business. Folks answered business quicker. Bring grief to a trade and all you got was pity, dear prices, and eyes on your hands.

His hands had shook enough. Jake read the line beneath the brand. Saltgrave, port of origin. Below that, in clean black hand: The Preacher's Chain.

He read it once. Then again. Then a third time, because maybe the guardrail had knocked reading clean out of him. There were other marks. Numbers down the side. Weight marks. A line for cargo type where the ink had run and left only three letters: liv. Could have meant livestock if a man wanted to sleep. Could have meant living if he was done lying.

The bottom edge carried salt. Not road dust. Salt. Jake rubbed it between finger and thumb. White grit stuck in the lines of his skin. He tasted it because sometimes a man did stupid things to be sure. Brine. Rust.

Saltgrave. His hand tightened on the paper. Not much. Just enough the old crease folded wrong and put a white split through the ink near the chain mark. Jake smoothed it flat on his thigh. Too quick.

Robin saw. Course she saw. She had eyes for owed things and bleeding things both. Bad mix for a man with debts and holes in him. He made his fingers open. Read it again. Saltgrave, port of origin. The Preacher's Chain.

There had to be a hundred Saltgraves in a man's life. Places somebody heard of. Places somebody swore by. Places somebody said not to go unless you had business, a gun, and a second gun for when the first got lonely. But this one had salt on the paper. This one had the mark. This one had liv where cargo ought to have been.

He bit the inside of his cheek. Old cut opened. Copper filled his mouth. Good. Pain had manners. It stayed where a man put it. He checked the torn corner again.

Nothing useful there. Just burnt edge and a smear of old thumb grease. Whoever had tore it knew what to take. Names, mostly. Count maybe. Destination after Saltgrave if there was one. Left a man enough to move and not enough to know where his foot would land.

The script down the left side had little boxes beside it. Three checked. Two empty. One line blotted black. He turned the paper toward the light. No good. Ink had soaked through. Still, the paper had weight to it. Good rag stock. Not some camp printer's soft pulp. This come from a place with ledgers and desks and men who washed their hands before selling other folks. He knew that kind of man.

Not by name. By smell. Soap over rot. After all that dust and lying and dead ends, there was a road under him now. A road.

Damn it. Robin watched him without looking square at him. She was good at that. Got folks killed if they forgot.

"That it?"

Jake folded the fragment along the old crease.

"Saltgrave." She turned the word over. "You know it?"

"Of it."

"That ain't knowing."

"Safer."

He tucked the paper inside his coat, into the inner pocket. His fingers brushed Tilan's three stones. Smooth. Quiet. Waiting. He hadn't thought on them in weeks. Lie. He hadn't let himself think on them. Robin cleaned the steel coins on her sleeve, decided blood weren't worth the trouble, and dropped them back in the bag. She kept the tobacco.

Waste not. Die later. Jake went to Silver. The mare leaned toward him before he reached her. Just a little. Enough most folks would miss. Enough Robin didn't. Jake put one hand on Silver's neck. Warm hide. Strong pulse.

Good girl. Better than most people. Silver huffed and bumped his chest.

Robin was still watching. He took his hand away.

"We ride."

"Ribs?"

"Still got 'em. Popular morning for that."

They broke the little not-camp around the carcass. Robin tied off the meat. Jake checked the horses' legs, then the sky, then the road. The Scree was gone. That meant gone for now. The sun came up thin and mean. The road west looked the same. It weren't. They rode single file for the first mile. Jake ahead where the road narrowed between two washes. Robin let him have that, then passed without comment and took point for the next stretch.

That was how they done it now. One ahead. One watching back trail. Switch without talking. Eat what could be chewed. Sleep light. Talk when talking helped and shut up when it didn't. Other rules too. Nobody wrote them down. If Robin touched the brim of her hat twice, Jake looked left. If Jake rolled his right shoulder, Robin checked high ground. If Silver stopped, both of them stopped. No arguing with the horse. Silver had earned that.

They shared water by need, not manners. Robin got first pour when she had taken point through bad ground. Jake got it when his hands shook too much to pretend. Silver got more than both if the day ran hot. A man could limp and curse his way to shade. A horse could not.

At night, Robin slept with the double-barrel within reach and her revolver under her coat. Jake slept with one hand near the Bowie and the amulet cold under his shirt. Most nights one woke before the other had to. Most mornings neither mentioned it. Folks afore the fall had soft beds, likely. Doors that shut. Locks that weren't rust and prayer. Jake had a woman who could put a knife through a drake's neck at twenty yards and a mare who smelled trouble early.

He'd had worse. He'd had less. Two months of that. Two months of the new hat tugging wrong at his head. Two months of Robin keeping her hair tucked low under the brim, always the same side, always the same little move when the wind came up.

Two months of that rose-carved knife riding at her belt and the Mithril chain cold under Jake's shirt. Two months since Rattlesnake City fell behind them in smoke. Two months since Jake learned his boy had been sold. Time done what sand done. Covered bones. Didn't make them less bones. Jake still saw Billy in things that weren't Billy.

A boy's boot print near a dry well. A scrap of shirt on thorn brush. The back of some skinny kid's head at a trader camp before the kid turned and weren't him. Every time, something in Jake rose stupid and bright. Every time, he put it down.

Hope was worse than whiskey. At least whiskey burned going down. The manifest sat in his coat. Saltgrave. The Preacher's Chain. He didn't like the first word. Liked the second less. Preachers cost a man money, blood, and Sunday mornings. Chains was worse. Put them together and there weren't much good coming.

Robin rode ahead, hat brim low, hair tucked to shadow her face. She fixed it that way every morning since the cairns under Rattlesnake City. Jake had noticed the habit and not the why. He didn't like that. He didn't like seeing a thing late when it had been right there. Silver picked around a sinkhole where the road had fallen into old drainage. Pale weeds grew inside. A rusted sign leaned near it. The letters had blistered off. Could have said STOP. Could have said GOD HELP YOU. Same thing, depending on speed.

They passed a rusted ambulance on its side, half buried in sand. The red cross had bleached pink. Somebody had stripped the wheels, doors, glass, and seats. Jake checked the cab anyway. Found cracked mirror, brown-edged gauze, and a tiny bottle with no readable label. He uncorked it.

Robin leaned over his shoulder. "Medicine?"

Jake sniffed. The fumes burned his nose.

"Bad."

"Useful?"

"Could make a man forget why he drank it."

He kept the gauze and left the bottle. Poison was easy to come by. At the next bend, fence posts stood with no fence between them. Strips of cloth tied near the tops. Sun-faded. Weather-cut. Red, blue, one yellow still showing color. Prayer flags maybe. Warning maybe. Jake weren't inclined toward either, but he watched the ground closer after that.

Robin noticed him watching the ground. No tracks. No bodies yet.

She smiled without looking back. They rode another hour. Heat came off the road and bent distance. Scrub looked like crouched men. A crooked sign looked like a rifle. A broken mile marker looked for half a breath like a boy carrying too much. Jake blinked and it was stone again. His mouth tasted of old blood where he had bitten the inside of his cheek during the fight. He hadn't noticed doing it. A man found things out after trouble passed and the blood was already there.

Robin dropped back beside him near noon.

"You been quiet."

"You counting?"

"Hard not to. Usually you got something ignorant to say every five minutes."

"Saving up."

"For Saltgrave?"

He looked at her. She kept her eyes on the road. Didn't push. Made it worse, somehow.

"Maybe," Jake said.

"That's getting to be your favorite word."

He almost smiled. "So am I."

She looked at him then. Robin didn't do soft unless a body was bleeding from enough places to make objections rude. But there was something there that hadn't been there two months ago. Or maybe it had and he'd been too busy dying to see it. He hated getting there late in his own head.

Silver chose then to swing her head around and nip his boot.

"Ow."

Robin almost smiled. "Even the horse thinks you're full of shit."

"She's been listening to you. Yep."

The little smile went out of Robin's face quick as it came.

"You don't have to tell me," she said.

Jake waited.

"About Saltgrave. About that paper. Whatever it is you're folding up in there. But if it gets me killed, I'm haunting you."

"You don't believe in that."

"I didn't use to believe in half the things tried to eat us. And if I'm haunting you, I ain't doing helpful haunting. No warnings. No wisdom. I'm moving your hat every morning and ruining your coffee."

"I'll get creative."

Jake looked out over the wastes so she wouldn't see his face try to do something foolish. That ought to have been nothing. Folks had promised worse. Folks had done worse. Still caught him under the ribs, right where the guardrail had already been.

"Noted."

Robin nodded once and moved ahead. They crested a low ridge near midafternoon. Below sat what was left of a trading post. The roof had been torn off. One wall stood. The rest lay scattered across the flats. Scree work. High gouges in stone. Roof beams pulled upward instead of burned or smashed.

"Fresh?" Robin asked.

Jake studied it. No smoke. No birds. No bodies he could see. Wind sat wrong, so smell weren't telling all of it.

"Fresh enough."

"We need supplies."

"We need not dying more."

"Those two things are kin."

She had him there. They rode down slow. Slow was the only way to approach a place that looked empty. Empty places out here had a habit of being full of things that didn't need food regular. Ghosts. Dead men. Men who weren't dead yet but was practicing. Jake watched the windows first. Three. All broken. Nothing behind the glass. No face. No barrel. No pale hand pressed to the frame. A strip of cloth hung from one nail inside and moved when wind got through.

He watched the roof next. What roof remained had been peeled back, boards pointing up. Scree did that. Talons under the edges and pull. A man took buildings apart sideways or with fire. There was a wagon in the yard. The wagon weren't old. That was the problem.

One wheel had snapped off. The axle lay in dirt. The box had split down the middle. Three crates sat scattered around it. One had burst open, gray turnips spilled across the ground, skins split from freeze and thaw.

"Travelers," Robin said.

"Or traders."

"Difference?"

"Prices."

She looked at him.

"Bleak, even for you."

"Got depths."

The trading post had been built from salvaged stone and old vehicle panels hammered flat. Its sign hung from one chain over the doorframe, creaking in the wind. Paint had been red once. Rust had it now. Jake dismounted outside the yard and handed Silver's reins to Robin.

"I'll clear."

"Naturally."

"You got objections?"

"Several. None new."

He went in. Doorway. Near wall. Far wall. Corners. Above. Always above now. Scree taught a man that, if he got lucky enough to be taught only once.

The front room stank of spilled mash, old grease, and fear gone sour. Shelves had been stripped or smashed. A barrel lay split across the floor, dry beans scattered in dust. Blood sprayed the back wall high. No body. Dragged off or carried up. Either way, not here. Jake checked the counter, storage nook, and little back room where a trader might sleep with a shotgun across his knees.

Nothing living. Nothing dead enough to argue. He stepped outside.

"Clear."

Robin tied the horses to a bent rail and came in with a sack. They found three tins of peaches under a fallen shelf, one cracked jar of salt, nine cartridges in a drawer, and a pair of socks so stiff they near stood on their own.

"Riches," Robin said.

"Don't spend it all in one place."

Robin snorted. Jake took one tin of peaches and turned it in his hand. Label showed a smiling woman with a basket. Yellow dress. Nobody wore yellow like that anymore unless they were rich, crazy, or dead recent. He put the tin in the sack. Outside, Silver stamped. Jake froze.

Robin froze with him. Wind pushed through the broken wall. Nothing came. Silver stamped again, then lowered her head and tore at a gray weed by the rail. Jake let out the breath he hadn't meant to hold.

"She does that on purpose," Robin said.

"Takes after you."

"I'm pleasant."

"Like lockjaw."

They worked the post ten more minutes. Nothing worth more than the time. No maps. No water. No fresh tracks besides theirs and the panic-scramble from when the Scree came down.

Jake was fixing to call it when Robin said, "Dollop."

She stood by the one remaining outside wall. Something was nailed to it. Paper. Fresh paper. Ink hadn't faded. Corners clean. Nail head shone where it had been hammered in recent.

Jake walked over slow. His own face stared back. The sketch was better than the one from Black Mesa. It had the dead eye right. The stubble. The scars near his neck. The hat was wrong, but the face under it was close enough to get him shot. WANTED. JAKE DOLLOP.

The charges were familiar. Horse thievery. Defrauding an innkeeper. Murder of one Quincy Campbell. That last one was wrong in the way the law was often wrong. Quincy had already been dead, then not dead enough, then something worse, then a gem, then a problem for whoever had picked him up. The reward had gone up.

Considerable. Robin came to stand beside him.

"That's a better likeness. Makes you look mean."

"Poster got one thing right."

"And ugly."

"Two things."

She reached for the paper. Jake caught her wrist before she tore it down. She looked at his hand, then at him. He let go.

"Leave it."

"Why?"

"Anybody behind us sees it gone, they know I saw it."

"Anybody sees it here, they know you're west."

"They knew that when they nailed it."

Robin considered. Then she stepped back. The poster snapped in the wind. Paper against stone. Soft sound. Bad sound. Jake looked west. Broken road. Dead brush. Saltgrave folded in his coat.

The morning had started with Silver stopping in the dark. It ended with his face on a wall. Bad news at both ends. Nice and tidy if a man liked being kicked square. Jake read the reward twice. He didn't need to. Numbers told truth folks lied around. Low bounty meant insult or trouble. High bounty meant somebody wanted a man found bad enough to make strangers brave.

This one had crossed from brave into stupid. Stupid men were dangerous. Smart men could be reasoned with, tricked, bought, scared, or at least understood. Stupid men saw a number and went reaching for a gun. The poster named places too. Black Mesa. Rattlesnake City.

Apex. That last one had no business there unless somebody had been gathering talk from folks who survived too near the fire. Jake didn't care for that. Rumor was bad enough when it wandered drunk. This had a hand behind it. Robin's eyes moved over the same lines.

"They're stitching your road together. Somebody's paying attention."

"I hate being noticed."

"This ain't funny."

The word came out flat. Robin turned her head a little. Her hand started toward the poster again, then stopped. She looked west instead. Good woman. Mean woman. Same thing some days.

Jake stepped close. Good paper. Costly paper. The sketch had been done by somebody with an eye, then copied by somebody with a decent press. Money, then. Reach. The bounty had got past one little-town wall. Thumb smudges marked the lower corner. Fresh. More than one. Men had stopped here and read it. Maybe laughed. Maybe whistled low at the number. Maybe looked west and figured a man with that much price on him couldn't be far.

Jake touched the edge. Dry. New. The reward line was darker than the rest, stamped after first printing. Extra money added late. Fresh bait. No saloons now. No easy wells. No riding through a gate with his face turned up to the light. No asking after a chain mark unless he wanted every hungry bastard in earshot doing sums in his head.

This one would put hands on guns. He looked at the nail. New iron. Hammered in straight. Whoever put it up hadn't been rushed.

That bothered him worst. Robin went to the horses. Checked cinches. Adjusted one strap. Tied the sack of supplies behind her saddle. She didn't ask if he was all right. They'd both been alive long enough to know that question mostly made liars out of folks. Jake stood a moment longer in front of the poster.

The man on the paper looked back. Ugly son of a bitch.

"Saltgrave," Robin said from behind him.

She weren't asking. Jake touched the folded manifest through his coat. The paper crinkled under his fingers.

"Saltgrave."

"You gonna tell me what you ain't telling me?"

"Eventually. Been a morning."

She swung into the saddle. "You keep getting smarter, I might get worried."

"Don't. That's how disappointment gets hooks."

Jake mounted slow. His ribs had stiffened. They would get worse before better, if they got better and didn't take up preaching. Silver turned west before he touched the reins. Of course she did. The horse had a name now. That meant something had changed, whether Jake liked it or not.

They left the poster on the wall and the trading post behind them. The road dropped into a long shallow grade, cracked asphalt fading under sand, westward toward country that smelled faintly of salt. Behind them, the wind kept worrying at the paper. Jake didn't look back for the first quarter mile. Then he did, because he was a fool but not the kind that pretended he weren't.

The wall was small above the flats. The poster was too far to read. Didn't help. A bullet didn't have to be close neither, right up until it was. Robin rode ahead with her shoulders loose and her head turned enough to watch side ground. She looked easy in the saddle. She weren't easy. She had the stillness of somebody who knew how quick things went bad.

Silver kept a steady pace under him. Jake leaned forward and rubbed the side of her neck.

"Don't get proud."

The mare flicked one ear back.

"Yeah, yeah."

His ribs pulsed. His side had dried sticky under his shirt. Every breath pulled at something raw. He'd been hurt worse. That weren't comfort. A man could drown in three feet of water just as dead as thirty. The salt smell got stronger by inches. Jake had never seen a real ocean. He had heard fools describe one in saloons. This weren't that. This was brine left too long in a dead pan, rusted through with old blood and something sweet under it that had no right being sweet.

Saltgrave. He worked his jaw and tasted salt. The road had narrowed without moving. Couldn't ride open. Couldn't ask casual.

Couldn't stop at the next place with his face uncovered and his name sitting behind him on a wall. Behind him, paper snapped in the wind. Ahead, somewhere beyond the brown ridges and dead flats, a port town waited with a brand stamped on its work and chains in its name. Jake rode toward it.

He didn't say Billy's name. He didn't have to.

The pump worked. That was the first bad sign. Jake stood in the courtyard with one hand on the iron handle and the other near his gun. Brown water coughed into the trough. Came hard at first. Spit and rust. Then cleaner. Not clean. Nothing out here was clean unless it had just been born or just been buried, and even then a man ought to check.

But it was water. Silver knew it too. Her head came up. Ears forward. Nostrils wide. She took one step, then stopped because Jake hadn't told her different. Good mare.

"Well?" Robin asked.

Jake pumped again. The handle screamed. Water slapped the trough and ran over the cracked wood.

"It's wet. Ain't dead yet," Jake said. "You drinking first?"

"Was thinking you could."

Robin made a sound that might've been a laugh if a body was feeling generous. She weren't. Neither was he. The waystation sat low against a stretch of hardpan where the old road widened and forgot what it was for. Adobe walls, mostly standing. Roof fallen in over the east side. Courtyard open to sun. A sign hung over the gate on one chain, turned backward by weather. Silver letters on the far side maybe. No telling what it had said back when words still mattered to travelers.

Jake looked at the pump. Then the walls. Then the windows. No movement. No flies neither.

That part sat wrong. They had not seen smoke since the trading post. Had not seen a friendly roof since before the drake, and friendly was lying hard in that sentence. The road had run empty all morning. Empty road. Empty washes. Empty cars with their doors gone and their bellies full of sand. Once they passed a child's shoe sitting upright on the shoulder like somebody had set it there careful and walked off one-footed into the wastes.

Robin saw it. Jake saw her see it. Neither one stopped. Stopping for every sad little thing was how the wastes filled up with more sad little things. By the time the waystation rose out of the heat, Silver's head had dropped and Jake's tongue felt too big for his mouth. Even Robin had quit making comments. That was how a man knew the day had got personal.

Robin swung down from her horse and kept the reins looped in one hand. Her hat brim sat low. Hair tucked forward over the same side of her forehead like always. Wind pulled at it and she fixed it without looking, fingers quick. Jake saw it this time. Didn't say a thing. Silver huffed.

"Yeah," Jake told her. "I know."

The mare stepped toward the trough again.

"Hold."

She held. Didn't like it. Held anyway. Jake dipped two fingers in the water, rubbed them together, smelled them. Rust. Old wood. Dirt. No bitter burn. No rot-sweetness. No green shine. He put one drop to his tongue. Robin watched him.

"If you die, can I have your boots?"

"Won't fit."

"I'll make them fit."

"That's a bad thought."

He waited. No cold hand in the gut. No fire in the throat. No sudden need to confess sins to a fence post.

"Not from this."

"High standard."

He stepped back and clicked his tongue. Silver came in fast enough to splash water over the trough edge. She drank like she'd been dreaming of it. Long pulls. Throat working. Water running dark down her chin. Jake let her have it. A man could ration himself all noble and dead if he wanted. Horse couldn't. Horse went down, everything got heavier and farther away.

And Silver had earned first drink besides. She had carried him clear of the drake's tail that morning, had stopped on bad road before Jake's ears found danger, had kept moving when his ribs wanted to turn every mile into a funeral complaint. A horse did not understand debts the way men did. That made horses smarter.

Robin led her horse in beside Silver, but kept enough distance to avoid teeth. Her animal drank too, not as greedy but close. Jake took the courtyard again with his eyes. There were old wagon ruts by the gate. Some wind-filled. Some newer. A burned place near the north wall where somebody had made a cookfire in the last few weeks. Broken bottle glass under the arch. One strip of blue cloth caught on a nail, snapping soft. Too many places for a man to hide if he had no respect for another man's afternoon.

"I'll clear," Jake said.

"Your ribs say otherwise."

"My ribs can write a letter."

"They literate?"

Robin handed him one of the water skins. "Drink first."

He drank. Not much. Enough to wet his mouth and make his stomach remember it was a thing with wants. The water hit low and sat there heavy. Then he went in. Doorway. Near wall. Far wall.

Corners. Above. Always above. The front room was half store, half ruin. Shelves sagged along one wall. Empty hooks. Old price tags gone yellow. A cracked counter leaned left where the floor had sunk. Sun came through roof gaps in hard white lines. Dust turned in them, slow and lazy. Nothing living.

Jake stepped around a pile of broken roof tile and checked behind the counter. One dead rat. Dry as string. No bullet holes. No blood. No track fresh enough to matter. Back wall had two doors. One open into a little sleeping room with a cot frame, three mouse nests, and a pre-collapse calendar showing a woman in a red dress leaning on a car nobody could drive anymore. The other door was shut.

That was rude. Jake put his back to the wall and opened it with the toe of his boot. Storeroom. Dim. Close. Smelled of clay, old cloth, and something mineral. He waited.

Nothing breathed back. He checked the corners, then the ceiling beams, then the floor. No trap he could see. No body. No person with more hope than sense.

"Clear," he called.

Robin came in with the sack over one shoulder and both horses tied loose enough to pull free if screaming started. Sensible.

"Anything?"

"Dust. Rat. Bad taste in calendars."

They searched. The front room gave them three cracked cartridges. Two worth keeping. One with a split case. Robin found a tin cup with a hole in it and kept it anyway. Jake found a drawer full of pre-collapse paper money and left it there for the next optimist. In the sleeping room he found a needle stuck in the mattress ticking and a little roll of thread gone brittle but maybe still good enough to close cloth.

"Food?" Robin asked from the front.

"If you like paper."

Silver snorted outside. Jake paused. One snort. No stamp. No warning. Just horse opinion. He moved on. By the time he came back out, Robin had found a sack of hard beans under a fallen shelf and half a twist of salt wrapped in waxed cloth. She held the salt up like it was gold.

It near was.

"Rich woman," Jake said.

"Don't get ideas."

"Too tired for ideas."

"That'll be the day."

He took the salt, checked the wrapping, then tucked it away. They made a pile near the courtyard shade. Beans. Salt. Two cartridges that might fire if treated polite. Thread. One bent spoon. A cracked tin of lamp oil that smelled too sharp but still burned when Jake touched a match to the lid. Half a square of canvas stiff with old dust. Useless for comfort. Useful for keeping rain off a saddle if the weather remembered rain was a thing.

Robin found a little packet of dried apple slices in the wall behind the counter, hidden in a mouse hole no mouse had got to. She held one up between two fingers.

"Deadly?"

Jake took it, sniffed, broke it in half, and handed the smaller half back.

"Only if hope kills."

"Does it?"

"Regular."

She ate her half anyway. So did he. It tasted like leather that had once heard tell of fruit. Sweet hit after. Thin, but there. For a second neither one spoke. Some good things were too small to joke over right off.

Then Robin said, "Still deadly?"

"We'll carry the rest for medicine."

"For who?"

"Me."

She tucked the packet into her saddlebag. Jake let her. The water skins made a better sound as they filled. Heavy slosh instead of dry flap. They had been one bad afternoon from choosing between themselves and Silver, and that was no choice at all. Folks liked to talk honor when bellies were full and wells were deep. Out here, honor got measured in mouthfuls and what a man would leave for his horse.

Jake pumped until his shoulder ached. Robin capped skins, checked seams, set one aside with a little strip of cloth tied around the neck.

"Bad one," she said.

"Leaking?"

"Slow."

He near asked her then. About Saltgrave. About why she kept touching her hat. About whether she had slept any better than him, which was a poor question because he had been sleeping in broken scraps, waking with his hand on the manifest and his teeth locked around nothing. He did not ask. The silence between them had got bigger since the poster. Bigger, not louder. Like a room with the furniture moved out and a stain on the floor everybody was pretending didn't look like blood.

Jake worked the pump. Water came up. That was enough for now. His ribs had stiffened during the search. Every bend pulled mean. The cut in his side itched under the cloth. He wanted to sit. So he didn't.

Robin saw that too. She didn't say it. That was the good and bad of her. Jake went back to the pump and worked the handle. Water came easier now. Clearer. Robin filled skins while he pumped. The handle wore at his palm. Rust flaked off under his fingers. Silver drank again.

"Easy," Jake told her. "You bloat, I'm leaving you here."

Silver kept drinking.

"She knows you're lying," Robin said.

"Everybody's a scholar today."

"Except your ribs."

"They're writing slow."

Robin tied off a water skin and carried it to the shade. Her movements had a hitch in them. Small. Not leg. Not ribs. Something higher. She rolled one shoulder like she meant to loosen it and put her free hand near her hat brim. Jake watched the pump. Let her have the kindness of not being seen straight on.

Then she went into the storeroom. The day went still. The wrong kind. Jake worked the pump twice more. Metal clattered on stone inside.

Not loud. Loud enough. Jake had his gun out before the echo died.

"Robin."

No answer. He crossed the room fast, shoulder brushing the counter, boots grinding grit.

"Robin."

"Don't."

The word came from the storeroom. Small. Hard. Not scared. Worse. Jake stopped in the doorway. Robin stood with her back to the adobe wall. Her hat lay on the floor. One hand pressed to her forehead. Her hair had fallen away from the place she always kept covered. The wound was still there. No.

Not still. Worse. It cut a crooked line above her brow where the cairn stone had marked her under Rattlesnake City. The skin around it weren't red. Weren't swollen. Weren't infected proper. It looked tight and pale, like old wax pulled over a coal. A thin thread of white-blue light pushed at the edge of her fingers.

No bandage smell. No rot. No honest heat. That was the part that made Jake's stomach go mean. A wound ought to pick a side. Heal or sour. This one had done neither. It had sat under her hat for two months and kept its own counsel like a gambler with better cards than God.

Jake's gun lowered an inch. Not all the way. There was a crate at her feet. Scavenged odds inside. Old tools. A cracked lantern. Strips of wire. A tin of nails rusted into one lump. On the floor, near her boot, lay a chunk of rough metal no bigger than a fist. Blue at one edge.

Faint. Enough. Mithril. Robin's breath came through her teeth. She kept her hand hard against the wound, like she could shove whatever was happening back into her skull by force.

"Don't," she said again.

Jake put the revolver away. Slow. Both hands where she could see them.

"Okay."

The word felt too small for the room. He crouched and picked up the metal with the edge of his coat wrapped around his fingers. It was heavier than it looked. Cold too. Worse than winter. Clean in a way cold had no business being clean. The blue tinge flared. Robin's knees bent. Jake set the ore on the crate fast.

"Easy."

"Don't," she said.

"I ain't."

"Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're counting wounds."

That one hit. Jake looked at the wall instead. Cracked adobe. Old spiderweb. Nail hole. Better things to look at. Less likely to make a man stupid. Robin slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. Her hat stayed where it had fallen. She took her hand away from her forehead. The light went thin but didn't vanish.

It sat under the skin wrong. Like light caught in meat. Trying to get out. Jake kept his hands still.

"It ain't healing right," she said.

That was all. Four words. Plenty, if a man had been looking at her every day for two months and not seeing what sat right there under her hat. Jake swallowed. His mouth had gone dry despite the well outside.

"How long?"

Robin laughed once. No humor in it. Barely sound.

"Since the cairns."

Two months. Two months of riding beside her. Two months of watching back trail and high ground and her hands on weapons. Two months of noticing the hat and not the why. Two months of being clever as a dead mule. He had counted cartridges. Counted water. Counted how many times Silver favored her left foreleg after hard ground. Counted every stranger's hands from Black Mesa west.

Had not counted the woman beside him hurting. Jake reached for the ore, then stopped before touching it.

"Does it do that every time?"

Robin looked at him. Wrong question. Too much question. He shut his mouth. Good trick. Should try it more.

She pulled her hat across the floor and put it on. Her fingers shook once getting the brim low. Once. Then steady.

"I said what I'm saying."

"Okay."

He meant it. She looked like she didn't know what to do with that. Jake picked up the ore again with the coat between it and his skin. It hummed faintly. Not a sound. A feel in the bones of his fingers. His amulet, tucked under his shirt, went cold against his chest. That was new.

Or maybe it weren't and he had been too busy being blind. He set the ore back on the crate. They both looked at it. Ugly little rock. Worth more than gold. Worth more than water some days. Worth more than most men if the dead got involved. A piece of it had just put Robin on the floor without asking leave.

"Miner's cache," Jake said. "Long left."

She wasn't looking at the ore anymore. She was looking at his boots. Good enough. The floor around the crate had scrape marks. Old ones. A box dragged from wall to wall. Dust thick everywhere but under the crate legs. Somebody had moved it not too long ago and put it back wrong. There was a tobacco ash smear by the threshold. Not Robin's. Not his. Somebody had been in here, found enough to hide, and either missed the Mithril or had sense enough not to touch it.

Jake wished he belonged to the second sort.

"You feel it afore?" he asked.

Robin's jaw tightened. Too much. He lifted one hand, palm out.

"Forget it."

She breathed through her nose. Slow. Rough at the end.

"It ain't always like that."

More than she meant to say. Jake held still. Stillness was cheaper than apology and more useful.

Robin looked toward the doorway. "Sometimes it's just pressure."

"Pressure."

"In my head."

"Like weather?"

"Like a nail."

That made his fingers curl. He opened them before she looked back.

Jake let the question die. Listening was harder than asking.

That got near a smile. The wound stole too much room from her face for more. She bent and picked up the cracked lantern from the crate, not the ore. Her hand avoided the wrapped blue chunk by enough inches to say she knew exactly where it sat without looking.

Robin set the cracked lantern aside. "Dollop. Don't make this into one of your chores."

He looked at her then. She had the hat in one hand and bloodless light still tucked under her skin. No blood. That part kept catching him. A wound ought to bleed. Ought to scab. Ought to stink if it went bad. This had done none of the decent things a wound was supposed to do.

"Ain't a chore," he said.

"You know what I mean."

He did. That was the problem.

"I know."

She put the hat back on. Conversation over. Door shut. Lock maybe broken, but shut all the same. Jake took a square of cloth from his pocket and wrapped the chunk tight. Then another. Then tied the bundle with brittle thread from the sleeping room. Robin watched his hands.

"You're keeping it."

"Leaving Mithril is a sin in most churches."

"You go to church now?"

"Only when chased."

He put the wrapped ore in his coat pocket. Away from Tilan's stones. No sense letting strange things get acquainted without a man watching. Robin pushed herself up. He did not help. She noticed. That mattered more than helping would have.

Outside, Silver stamped. This time it was not horse opinion. Jake turned. The courtyard had gone too quiet. He stepped through the front room and out into sun, letting his eyes adjust before his body cleared the door.

Dust lay near the gate. Hoofprints cut through it. Fresh. Two horses. Measured spacing. No running. No wandering. Coming from the south at an angle, then slowing before the gate. Riders who knew how to approach a place without getting shot for rudeness.

Jake crouched. One horse shod better than the other. One rider heavier or carrying more gear. Both sets angled toward the well, then away, then back. They had circled once before coming in. Men with practice. Hell.

"Company," Robin said behind him.

Her voice was steady. Hat low. Hair fixed. Wound gone from the world, far as a stranger could tell. Jake stood. His ribs objected. Nobody asked them.

"Two," Jake said. "Too neat for bandits. Law's the same answer."

Silver lifted her head and looked south. Jake followed her eyes. Two riders came over the low rise beyond the road, slow enough to show hands, straight enough to show they weren't lost. The front rider sat tall in the saddle. Dark coat. Weathered hat. Rifle butt showing from a scabbard but no hand near it. Woman, by the set of her shoulders and the braid down her back.

The second rode half a length behind and to her right. Younger man. Narrow face. Eyes moving too much and not enough. Trying to see everything without showing he was trying. Bounty hunters, then. Or folks practicing. Jake wiped his right hand on his coat and reached for a name. Nothing came.

Jimmy Watson came, but that name had done enough haunting for three lifetimes. The riders stopped outside the gate. The woman lifted two fingers from the reins.

"Afternoon," she called.

Polite. That was never free.

"Afternoon," Jake said.

"Well yours?"

"Was here when we came."

"Mind sharing?"

Jake looked at Robin. She had moved near Silver, loose and easy, one hand close to her revolver without making it a song. The brim hid her forehead. Her mouth looked normal if a man didn't know how hard normal could be.

"Water's water," Jake said.

"Kind of you."

"Ain't that."

"Usually ain't," the woman said.

She did not come in right away. That told him plenty. Bandits rushed because hunger and stupidity both liked speed. Lawmen came in loud because badges made men confuse noise for courage. These two waited outside the gate until the silence had shown all its teeth. The woman looked at the roofline, then the windows, then the trough. The young one looked at Jake first.

Wrong order. He knew it too, because his eyes moved off quick and found the doorway like they should have done to start. Learning, then. Not green. Not ripe neither.

She asked about the dead. Jake told her there were no people inside, only an old rat.

She considered that and then swung down. No hurry. No flourish. Boots hit dust soft. She kept her right hand away from her gun and close enough to matter. The younger man copied half a beat late. Robin shifted beside Silver. No back. No forward. Just enough to put the mare between her and a straight shot from Moss without making it look like a move.

Carver saw that too. Of course she did. The woman smiled a little. Not friendly. Like she had found a nail hammered straight.

"Carver," she said.

Jake waited. The younger man shifted.

"Moss," he said, because silence must have scratched him.

Jake nodded once. Carver looked at him. No push. No show. Just taking count. Hat. Face. Coat. Gun hand. Blood dark at his side. Silver's tack. Robin's weapons. The well. The door. The exits. Her eyes stopped on Jake's face a hair too long. Name.

Needed one. Now. Names were cheap until a man needed one honest enough to fool a stranger and false enough not to hang him. Then they cost. He had used names before. Most men had, if they lived under wanted paper or bad memory. Jake had been James, Jacob, John, and once, through a bad misunderstanding with whiskey, Mrs. Abel Tuck's missing nephew Samuel. None of those came.

Only one did. Jimmy Watson. Dead man's name. Bad name. Name with teeth still in it. His tongue wanted no part of that.

"Nathan," Jake said.

Robin's gaze moved to him. He should have stopped there. He did not.

"Nathan Cole."

The name hit the dirt between them and lay there bad. Jake's face didn't move. Inside, some old door opened and slammed shut.

Carver swung down from her horse. "Mr. Cole."

Moss dismounted after her. "Ma'am."

He said it to Robin. Robin gave him nothing but a nod. They led their horses to the trough. Slow. Hands visible. Carver let her horse drink last, after Moss's, after watching Silver decide whether she cared. Silver cared, but not enough to bite. Sensible beast. Jake took the tin cup with the hole in it and filled another without a hole. He drank because his face needed business.

Water tasted like rust and a bad choice.

Carver leaned one shoulder against the pump frame, not resting so much as occupying a place. "Road west bad?"

"Road west is road west."

"Scree?"

"Some."

Moss looked toward the ruined roof. "Seen sign a few miles back. Big wings."

"Keep your hat tied."

Moss touched his brim before he could stop himself. Carver saw. Didn't comment. Robin did not smile. That took effort. Jake respected it.

"You folks headed far?" Carver asked.

"Far enough."

Carver's horse drank in small pulls, lifting its head between each to listen. Good animal. Scar under one eye, old saddle rub near the withers, shoes worn but set proper. Moss's horse was younger and fidgeted at the flies. Good feed on both. Good tack. Not rich. Kept. That meant steady work. Steady work meant either hauling, hunting, or law.

They weren't hauling. Jake wished for hauling. The pump creaked as Moss worked it. Water splashed. His gun sat high on his hip, tied down. Clean weapon. Not show clean. Use clean. His boots were dusty but cared for. Carver's boots were worse, which made Jake like her less. Folks with worn boots and steady eyes had generally earned both.

Carver looked at Robin. "You?"

"Same direction as him."

"That wise?"

"Rarely."

Jake drank again. Moss laughed once, then stopped when nobody joined him. Carver's eyes moved to the double-barrel by Robin's saddle. Not long. Long enough.

"Fine piece," she said.

Robin's hand did not move. "It works."

"Most fine pieces do, right until they don't."

"Then they become clubs."

"Practical."

"Necessary."

Carver nodded like the answer had weight. Moss looked at the weapon too and had sense enough not to ask about it. Maybe he learned quick when fear helped. Sun slipped lower. The courtyard went gold around the broken edges. Shadows from the adobe wall stretched long and thin. Plenty of room for bullets in that light. Too much room.

Carver took off one glove and flexed her fingers.

"Heard about a bounty going around," Moss said.

He said it casual. Too casual. Jake kept the cup at his mouth. Robin went still by a hair. Not enough for Moss. Enough for Carver, maybe.

"Outlaw from Rattlesnake City," Moss went on. "Couple months back. Some job went sideways and he got clean away. Good money in him."

"Lots of good money in dead men," Jake said.

"This one's living."

"Then he ain't worth as much as folks think."

Moss grinned. "Poster says different."

Carver was not looking at Moss. She was looking at Jake. Jake swallowed water. Slow. Let it work down.

"Posters say what they're paid to say."

"You seen it?" Moss asked.

"Seen plenty."

Moss laughed again. Easier this time. Carver's mouth did not move. Jake set the cup down careful. Too careful maybe. He picked it up again, because leaving a thing wrong was how a man got noticed.

Moss leaned one elbow on the pump handle. "Reward's high enough a fellow might quit honest work."

"You do honest work?"

"Now and again."

"Don't strain nothing."

Moss smiled. "You always this friendly, Mr. Cole?"

"Only at wells."

"What's wrong with wells?"

"People stop at them."

Carver looked at the cup in Jake's hand. Then his side. Then his face.

"You hurt bad?"

"No."

"Didn't ask if you were proud."

Robin almost smiled. She covered it by checking Silver's rein. Jake liked Carver a little right then. Bad habit.

Jake blamed the rail. Moss kept at it until road trouble became hooves.

Moss's grin thinned. "Drake?"

"Young."

"You killed a drake?"

"Wasn't by request."

Moss looked at Robin's knife then. First real smart thing he had done since riding in. Robin let him look. Carver noticed where he looked and then did not look there herself. Smarter. Robin shifted her weight. Her hand brushed Silver's neck, then rested there. Calm for the horse. Calm for herself. Maybe calm for Jake too, if a man had a mind to get stupid in front of bounty hunters.

Jake did not. Carver took the cup Moss offered and drank. She wiped the rim with her thumb first. Practical woman.

"You hear about trouble in Rattlesnake?" she asked.

"Heard there was some."

"Quite a bit more than some."

"Marshal dead. Politician dead. Ghost stories walking around with their boots on. Half the road saying a drifter did it. Other half saying he saved the city."

She set the cup down on the trough edge.

"Roads west are quieter since. Safer in places. Assuming you stay out of Saltgrave."

Jake let the silence take one breath.

"Why's that?"

Carver looked toward the west like she could see the salt from here.

"Bone Baron runs things there."

The courtyard seemed to narrow. Moss had stopped pumping. Robin's hand stayed on Silver.

Carver went on. "Cole. Ezra Cole. Man ain't friendly to drifters passing through without purpose."

Jake's face stayed where he put it. His right hand didn't. Fingers curled once against his thigh. Slow. Then opened.

That was all the name got from him. It deserved more. A flinch. A curse. A bullet through the pump handle maybe. Old names had a way of asking for ceremony. Jake gave it one curled hand and no other funeral. Robin saw. Carver maybe did too. Her eyes flicked down and back up. The name sat in the courtyard with the water and dust.

Ezra Cole. Not dead, then. Or not buried deep enough to stay decent. Something old shifted under Jake's ribs. Under the guardrail hurt. Deeper. Meaner. No.

Not here. He put the cup to his mouth. Empty. Good. Nothing to spill.

Jake picked up the cup again. Empty. That was useful. Gave a man something to look at.

"Lot of men ain't friendly," he said.

"This one owns docks."

"Docks?"

"Saltgrave's a port."

"Heard of it."

"Then you heard enough to avoid it."

"Avoiding don't always pay."

"Most times it costs less than going."

Carver put her glove back on. Moss looked from her to Jake and found nothing he knew how to use. Good. Let him stay young a while.

"You two bounty hunters?" Robin asked.

Carver looked at her then. Properly.

"When there's bounty."

"And when there ain't?"

"Depends who asks."

"I'm asking."

"Then no."

Robin nodded like that answered something. It didn't. That was the point.

Moss tightened his saddle cinch. "You folks got names besides Nathan Cole?"

"She does," Jake said.

Robin gave him a look sharp enough to shave with.

"Marian," she said.

Jake looked at her. Marian. Sure. Why not. The world had room for lies. It was built on them half the time.

Carver gave that small straight-nail smile again. "Mr. Cole. Miss Marian."

"Just Marian," Robin said.

"Just Carver."

There it was. Two women with knives still in leather. Moss missed it entire. Jake envied him. Carver mounted first. Moss followed. They had watered, watched, and asked just enough to leave more behind than they took. That was a clean sort of theft.

"South road any good?" Jake asked.

Carver gathered her reins. "Depends how much you enjoy dust."

"That's all roads."

"South-southwest is passable for another day. After that, washes cut deep. If you're heading west, keep to the broken blacktop till the salt smell gets too strong, then don't."

She tipped her hat. Moss did the same a beat late. They rode out before dark, not west, not south proper. South-southwest. A line that could loop wide or vanish, depending what they wanted and how much patience they had. Jake watched until the dust took them. Then he watched after.

Dust lied. It could hide a rider who had turned off. Could make two look like four if the wind got clever. Could make a man think he was alone until a rifle cracked and proved him a fool. Carver did not look back. Moss did once. Young enough for curiosity. Old enough to pretend he had meant to check the trail.

They vanished behind the low rise. Still Jake waited. Robin let him. The well handle ticked in the cooling air. Somewhere in the broken roof, a bit of tile shifted and fell. Silver lifted her head, listened, then went back to worrying the end of a rein. No shot.

No riders circling.

No sudden call of "Mr. Dollop" from the hill.

Not yet. Robin waited longer than she had to.

Then, "Nathan Cole?"

"Shut up."

"You picked that name on purpose."

"I really didn't."

"That might be worse."

She turned to him. The lowering sun caught the edge of her hat. Her face was in shade. Good. His was too, mostly. Some talk needed poor light.

"You know him."

Jake looked at the road where Carver and Moss had gone.

"I know of him."

"That answer's worn thin."

"Still fits."

"Barely."

He said nothing. Robin let it sit. Mean trick. Neat one. She had learned that from him, maybe.

That made it worse. Jake went inside and took the wrapped Mithril ore from his coat. The cloth had gone cold around it. He unwrapped one corner. Blue showed faint in the dim. His amulet chilled under his shirt. Robin stayed in the doorway.

"You going to carry that thing? After what it did?"

"Because of what it did."

"That's a bad answer."

"Only kind left."

He wrapped it again. Tight. Put it back in his coat, far from the stones. Cole. Ezra Cole. Bone Baron. Nathan Cole.

No sense in that. No good sense. Names didn't jump into a man's mouth by accident, except they did. And when they did, it usually meant the floor had gone rotten under him some time back and he was only now hearing boards crack. Outside, Silver nosed at the saddle blanket. Jake tucked the ore away and went to her.

"We're moving tonight," he said.

Robin didn't argue. That was how he knew it was bad.

Night made the road look kinder. That was how Jake knew it was lying. The broken blacktop ran pale under the moon, all the cracks silvered over and the bad holes gone soft at the edges. Scrub stood black on both sides. Dead grass moved when the wind told it to. Far off, something cried once and then thought better of making a habit of it.

Silver picked her way west with her head low. Good girl. Jake rode easy as he could and still felt every mile in his ribs. The guardrail hurt had settled into him proper now. Not sharp all the time. Worse than that. Patient. It waited until he breathed wrong or shifted in the saddle or thought maybe he was getting used to it.

Then it collected. Robin rode behind him, a little left. Close enough to speak. Far enough to watch the back trail. That was how they had done it before. It weren't how they were doing it now. Now there was a name between them.

Cole. Nathan Cole, because Jake had opened his fool mouth at the waystation and let the worst sort of lie fall out. Ezra Cole, because Carver had said it like any road name. Bone Baron. Saltgrave man. Docks owner. A man ain't friendly to drifters passing through without purpose. Jake had purpose. That was part of the trouble.

The wrapped Mithril ore sat in his coat pocket, cold against his side even through cloth. Every so often the amulet under his shirt answered it. A little chill. A small tooth of cold laid right at his breastbone. No good in strange things talking to strange things. No way to stop them, neither. The salt smell had got stronger since dusk. Salt, rust, old water. Something sweet under it. Not flower sweet. Meat sweet. A sweetness that had laid out in the sun and learned patience.

Silver blew through her nose.

Jake patted her neck once. "Ain't just you."

"You talking to me or the horse?" Robin asked.

"Horse listens better."

"Horse ain't heard your aliases."

There it was.

Jake kept his eyes on the road. "One bad name."

"Two bad names."

"Nathan's harmless."

"Nathan Cole?"

"Less harmless."

Robin's horse snorted like it had an opinion.

"Don't you start," Jake said.

Robin let the hooves fill the space for a while. Good of her. Mean, too. Silence could work on a man same as a file on iron, slow and steady until something gave.

"Carver said Ezra Cole," she said.

"She did."

"You knew it."

"Heard of him."

"Don't."

One word. Flat. Jake's fingers tightened on the reins. Silver's ear turned back.

"You don't get to `heard of him' me twice," Robin said.

The road bent around a sagging signpost. Nothing left on it but three bolts and a strip of metal clicking in the wind. Jake watched it until they passed.

"Used to ride with men I knew," he said.

Robin waited. That was all he had meant to give. It weren't enough and they both knew it.

"Long time ago," he said.

"Everybody's dead if you say long enough."

"Some folks work at staying otherwise."

"Cole?"

Jake did not answer. The amulet went cold again. Or maybe that was him.

Robin shifted in her saddle. Leather creaked. "You going to tell me before he shoots at us or after?"

"Ain't decided if there'll be a before."

"You think that's funny."

"No."

That one come out true enough she left it alone. For ten breaths. Maybe twelve. They rode past a half-buried bus with no wheels and a prayer nailed to the side of it. Paper had gone black at the edges. Words mostly sanded off. Somebody had drawn an eye above the prayer in charcoal, then scratched it out hard enough to tear through.

Jake did not stop. Robin did not ask. The new road rules had got made fast and ugly after the waystation. No fire. No open ridge riding if the moon was high. No stopping at any ruin that had a straight line of sight from the south road. No using Jake's name, which was a rule Jake liked better before he had to think on what name would come instead.

Nathan Cole. Fool thing. The name sat behind his teeth like a stone. He had been plenty of men before. James when folks looked for Jake. Jacob when folks looked for James. J.D. when nobody had time for whole names. Once Samuel, which had been nobody's fault but whiskey's and a widow with a bad memory.

Those names had been coats. Bad-fitting maybe, but coats. Cole was a grave with the dirt kicked in. The road gave a long dip where rain had eaten under it years back. Silver stepped around the weak place without being told. Robin's horse tried to follow too close and got a hunk of asphalt sliding under one hoof. Robin pulled it right without cursing.

That told Jake plenty. Robin only saved curse words when she was hurting. He looked back. Her brim was low. Hair forward. The same little lie she had worn for two months. Only now he could see the work in it. The angle. The way she kept her head turned when moonlight came from the wrong side. The way her left hand rose and stopped before touching the wound.

He had missed it every day. Every damn day. He faced front again. No sense whipping a dead horse unless it got up and asked. Behind them, the waystation was gone into dark. Carver and Moss were somewhere south-southwest, or maybe not. Bounty hunters had a way of becoming where you hoped they weren't. Harlan Voss and his wreck were still ahead, though Jake did not know the name yet.

The world knew. World liked that kind of joke.

"You knew him personal."

Jake looked out over the right-hand flats. The moon laid white on dead sand. Here and there old fence posts leaned with no fence between them. Like broken teeth in a mouth too tired to bite.

"A man can know a rattlesnake personal," he said. "Don't make them friends."

"He leave you that scar?"

Jake almost asked which one. Didn't. Silver stopped. Dead still. Jake's right hand went to the revolver before his thoughts caught up.

Robin drew up behind him. No words now. Silver stood with her ears forward, not pinned. Listening. Her whole body held between go and don't. Jake listened with her. Wind.

Grass. Far metal ticking somewhere ahead. Then a horse coughed down in the wash. Low. Wrong place for it.

Jake eased down from Silver and caught his ribs with his teeth before the sound got out. Robin had already dismounted. She looped her reins over a dead post and touched Silver's neck once. Silver did not like being left. Good. Meant she had sense.

The road fell away on the left into a dry wash cut deep by water that had not come through in years. Moonlight showed the lip and some of the bottom. Not all. A broken culvert stuck out from the far wall, concrete teeth around a black hole. Mesquite grew down there, gray and mean. Jake crouched at the edge.

Tracks. Wagon. Small. Two horses. One had come down too fast and slid. One rider had taken the slope on purpose. Another had not. The dirt was cut fresh and sharp. Blood marked a stone. No flies yet. Fresh, then.

Robin came beside him with the double-barrel low in both hands.

"How many?"

"Two riders. One cart. Maybe cargo."

"Cargo."

"Ain't my word."

He moved along the rim before going down. Thirty yards west, the slope showed a second set of marks. A horse climbing out, then stopping, then circling back halfway. The rider had thought about running and decided against it. Or tried and fell. Hard to tell in moonlight. Jake found a strip of leather caught on thorn brush.

Stamped mark. Chain link. Little P inside. He held it out. Robin looked once.

"Saltgrave?"

"Looks that way."

"This close?"

"Roads go both directions."

Something moved below. Then came a sound that had been a scream until a hand or cloth got over it. Muffled. Short. Done.

Jake looked at Robin. Her face was mostly shadow under the brim. The wound was hid. That didn't mean it was quiet.

"Stay high," he whispered.

"No."

No sense arguing. No time neither. Jake slid down into the wash. The dirt gave under his boots. His ribs barked once and then he was at the bottom with one knee in sand and his revolver up. Robin came after, lighter and meaner about it. The wash stank of broken wood, blood, and old cold.

Old cold weren't natural. Cold should move with wind and shade. This sat low to the ground in patches, like spilled water no sun could take. Jake stepped around one patch. His amulet chilled hard.

"Careful."

"Saw it."

Course she had. The cart had hit the culvert sideways and broken its front axle. One wheel lay fifteen feet off, still turning a little in the wind. A horse was down beyond it, neck wrong. The other had torn free and stood shaking under a mesquite, reins tangled in brush. Not Silver-stupid. Scared-stupid. A man lay face down near the culvert, coat torn up the back. Saltgrave leather. Good boots. Better belt. His head had hit stone or stone had hit his head. Dead either way.

Dead was dead. Beside the cart, a boy was chained to the frame. No. Not Billy. Jake knew it in the first breath and hated himself for needing the knowing.

This boy was older maybe. Fifteen. Sixteen. Thin as a shovel handle. Hair shaved close on one side, long on the other where somebody had not cared to finish the work. A collar circled his neck. Iron black in the moon. Pale line through it, or something near enough to pale to catch light wrong. His hands were bound in front of him. One wrist hung at a bad angle. Blood bubbled at his mouth when he breathed.

Robin moved toward him.

"Wait."

She stopped, but only because she heard something Jake did. A click. Jake turned. Under the cart, a second man lay pinned from the waist down by the broken axle and half the frame. His face was white with dust. Hat gone. Beard cut neat. A pistol lay a foot beyond his reaching fingers. His hand was still trying.

Jake stepped on the pistol. The man looked up.

"Now that ain't neighborly," he said.

"Road's short on neighbors."

"Help me out from under this and I can be one."

"You start by shutting up."

The man smiled through blood. One front tooth gone fresh. "I can do shutting up. For a price."

Jake kicked the pistol back behind him. Robin caught it without looking away from the boy. Good woman. Mean woman. Busy woman.

The pinned man saw the double-barrel and swallowed. "You ain't road trash."

"You disappointed?" Jake asked.

"Might be."

"Name."

"Harlan."

"Last."

"Depends who's asking."

Jake crouched. Slow, because his ribs had got opinions and because a man under an axle could still keep surprises. The leather cuff on Harlan's left wrist bore a stamped mark. A P inside a chain link. Jake pulled the manifest fragment from his inner pocket and held it where Harlan could see. Harlan's eyes moved once.

There.

"That's yours," Jake said.

"Lots of men got paper."

"Lots of men got chain marks?"

"You a buyer?"

Jake said nothing. Harlan looked at Robin. Then at the boy. Then back to Jake.

"Thief, then."

"Worse."

"Law?"

"Worse."

That made Harlan think. Thinking hurt him. Good.

"If you're after toll," Harlan said, "there's no toll due on a broken cart."

"Didn't ask toll."

"Then you're after goods."

"You keep calling him goods, I start taking fingers."

Harlan's mouth shut. For a second.

"He signed," Harlan said.

Jake looked at the chained boy. The boy's eyes were half-open and not seeing much of anything now.

"Him?"

"Paper says so."

"Paper lies better than men."

"Paper gets paid better too."

Jake reached into the cart box with his free hand and pulled out a flat board clamped over several sheets. Names. Marks. Thumbprints in brown ink. Some clean. Some smeared. A child's handprint near the bottom, too small for the line it had been forced onto. Jake held the board close enough to read.

Half the words were shipping words. Cargo class. Road fee. Saltgrave intake. Contract length. Contract length was marked in numbers that did not mean years so much as meant forever if a man had ever seen a ledger used as a knife. No Billy. No name he knew. That helped none.

"Contracts," Harlan said, trying for dignity from under a cart. "Legal."

Robin made a sound. Small. Bad. Jake set the board down careful. Too careful. Then he put his boot on it and cracked it in half.

"Oops," he said.

Harlan's face tightened. "That costs."

"Bill me."

Robin knelt near the chained boy. She did not touch the collar. Smart. She put two fingers against his throat, then her hand near his nose. The boy's eyes opened. Not much. Enough to see her.

"Easy," she said.

He tried to flinch and couldn't.

"Don't," he whispered.

Robin's jaw tightened. Jake heard that word from the waystation. Heard it in the storeroom. Same shape. Different mouth.

"Ain't here for that," she said.

The boy's eyes slid toward Harlan.

Harlan laughed once. Pain made it small. "He's past use."

Jake hit him. Not hard as he wanted. Hard enough. Harlan's head snapped sideways against the dirt and came back slower.

"Talk less," Jake said.

"That's funny from a man asking questions."

Jake put the barrel of his revolver against Harlan's cheek. Harlan stopped smiling.

"Better," Jake said.

Robin leaned closer to the boy. "Who did this?"

The boy worked his mouth. Blood slicked his teeth.

"Chain," he said.

"What chain?"

"Preacher's."

The wash went colder. Jake felt it in his knees before his head found sense.

The boy coughed. Something wet moved in him. "Preacher bought us."

Us. Jake's hand tightened on the gun.

"How many?" Robin asked.

The boy's eyes rolled.

"How many?"

"Cart..." His breath scraped. "Cart broke. Jory run. He shot Jory. I pulled..."

His gaze went to the dead man near the culvert. Good boy. Brave boy. Dead boy, near enough. Jake looked at the collar.

No lock he could see. No hinge. It sat complete around the throat, black iron and pale line, too tight for comfort and too smooth for a roadside smith. There were marks scratched into it. Not letters. Not numbers. Little cuts like a drunk spider had tried to write scripture. The Mithril ore in Jake's coat went cold.

The collar answered. A thin snap ran through the air. Robin jerked back, one hand going to her hat brim. Her other hand opened and closed twice, like she had dropped something hot though there weren't nothing in it. She put her boot behind her and caught herself before she sat down in the dirt.

The boy arched once. Not much. No strength for more.

"Move away," Jake said.

Robin did, breathing through her teeth. The brim hid the wound. Her body did not. Shoulders too tight. Chin tucked. One hand pressed hard at the side of her head where she could pretend it was only her hat. The collar clicked. The boy's eyes went wide. For half a breath Jake saw something behind them.

Not a face. Not a ghost proper. A pressure. A pale shape pressed up against the inside of the boy's skin and then gone. The boy sagged. Robin put her fingers to his throat again.

Waited. Too long. She took her hand away. No prayer. No words.

Words wouldn't have fit.

Harlan spat red into the dirt. "Dead ones are less trouble."

Jake stood. Robin looked up at him. Jake's boot moved close to Harlan's throat. Close enough. Harlan saw the sole. Saw Jake thinking. Saw Robin not stopping it.

That scared him better than the gun had. Jake set his foot down beside Harlan's ear.

"You got one chance," Jake said. "Use it."

"You're making a mistake."

"Had practice."

"Preacher don't like mistakes."

The word sat there. Preacher. Jake tasted blood. He had bit his cheek again and not noticed. Old habit. Bad habit. Useful habit, some days.

"Who?" Jake asked.

Harlan blinked.

"Say the name."

Harlan's smile tried to come back. Couldn't find room. "You carrying his paper and don't know him?"

Jake pressed the barrel into the man's cheek until the skin dented.

"Name."

"Ezra Cole."

Robin went still behind him. Jake did not move. That took work. Harlan saw the work and liked it. Men like him always liked finding a sore place.

"You do know him."

"What is he moving?"

"Goods."

Jake cocked the hammer.

"People," Harlan said fast. "Workers. Contracts. Same as every port from here to the dead sea."

"Children?"

Harlan's eyes moved. Wrong way. Jake's chest went tight.

"Boys," Jake said.

"Some."

"How old?"

"Old enough to stand. Young enough to train. I don't keep the book."

Jake hit him again. This time harder. Pain flared in Jake's ribs from the motion. Fair trade.

Harlan coughed and laughed in the same ugly breath. "Ask at the payment house if you're so keen. They'll have your numbers."

"Where?"

"West road. Signal mast afore the flats. Payment house under it. You can't miss it unless you're dead, and if you're dead they still might bill you."

"Signal how?"

Harlan said nothing. Jake looked at the dead outrider's belt, then at the cart box. He stood, went to the box, and found a brass tube under the broken driver's bench. Short. Capped at both ends. One end packed with red powder and a cord. Signal flare. He held it up. Harlan closed his eyes.

"One fired when you left?" Jake asked.

"No."

"One due when you reach?"

No answer. Jake put the flare on the ground and crushed the cord under his heel.

"Answer."

"Due at dawn," Harlan said. "If the mast don't see red from the road, they send riders."

"How many?"

"Enough."

Jake leaned over him.

"Numbers."

"Four. Maybe six. Depends who's awake and whose palm needs filling."

Robin moved around the cart and found a second tube in a side box. She held it up, then tucked it into her saddlebag without asking.

"Shipment?" Jake asked.

"Which one?"

Jake's hand shook once. Once only. Robin saw. Course she saw. Harlan saw too, because God had made the world crooked and men worse.

"You looking for somebody," Harlan said.

Jake put the gun under his chin. Harlan shut up. Smart came late, but it came.

"Recent boys," Jake said. "Sold through Saltgrave. One from east. Brown hair. Scar on his left hand maybe. Name might not be his own anymore."

Billy had cut that hand on a bent nail behind the livery when he was small. Jake had not been there for it. Had heard after. Remembered anyway, because guilt kept a better ledger than banks. Harlan breathed shallow.

"Could be fifty."

"Could be one."

He looked at the sky. New Earth hung red and distant past a thin run of cloud. Jake wanted to shoot him for looking. Didn't. Information first.

Killing after, if there was time.

"What does Cole do with boys?" Robin asked.

Her voice had gone quiet. Harlan looked at her and maybe saw a safer mouth to answer. Fool.

"Same as any," he said. "Strong backs, small hands. Dock lines. Salt works. House service if they look clean enough."

"And chains?"

He glanced at the dead boy's collar.

"Above my pay."

Jake almost smiled. No humor in it. Just teeth.

Jake kept the gun under Harlan's chin until the answers stopped dodging: the road ran to Saltgrave, for Cole and the Preacher's Chain.

Harlan swallowed.

"Don't call it that in town."

"Why?"

"He don't care for old names."

Jake leaned closer. His ribs hated it. Good. Let them.

"Why's it old?"

Harlan's gaze darted to Robin again, then back. "You really don't know?"

Jake said nothing.

Harlan licked blood from his lip. "Story goes he was preacher to a crew once. Before Saltgrave. Outlaws. Robbers. Men with no graves waiting on them. He read scripture before jobs and counted shares after. Then something went wrong in a canyon and everybody died but him."

The wash tilted a little. No. It did not. Jake's body only thought it did. The moon was still where it had been. The dead horse still stank. The boy was still dead. Robin was still behind him with a gun in her hand and too much seeing in her eyes.

Jake had been in a canyon once. More than once. But one mattered. Red rock. A payroll wagon busted sideways.

Smoke from a wheel hub. Horses screaming. Black wings coming down. Ezra Cole on the best horse left, coat flapping, one hand raised like blessing or goodbye. Jake on the ground with blood in his mouth and his gun empty.

Men shouting his name. Then not. Harlan kept talking because fear made fools generous.

"Folks say he walked out with silver, guns, and the strong horses. Left the rest for Scree. Came west after. Built himself clean. Bone Baron now. Ain't nobody laughs at preacher now."

Jake heard the Scree again. Not in the wash. In his teeth. High and hungry. Robin said his name.

Not Dollop. Jake. That brought him back meaner than a slap.

Harlan stared at him. "You were there."

Jake hit him with the gun. Harlan went slack but not dead. Dead would have been easy. Easy things had got suspicious lately.

Robin stepped closer. "Jake."

"Don't."

"I didn't ask yet."

"Still."

She looked at Harlan, then the dead boy, then Jake.

"You knew Cole."

Jake wiped blood off the gun barrel on Harlan's coat. His hand was steady now. That was bad in its own way.

"First crew," he said.

Robin waited. No pushing. No softness neither.

"He called himself preacher," Jake said. "Read from a little black Bible afore jobs. Said it settled men. Mostly it made them quiet, which ain't the same."

The words scraped coming up. Better scraped than pretty.

"He left us in a canyon when Scree came down. Took the horses. Took the strong guns. Took the money."

"Left you?"

"Left everybody."

"You thought he died."

"I hoped."

That was all. Not the whole canyon. Not the names. Not the sound of men who had trusted him calling for help until there weren't throats left to call with. Not how Jake had crawled under a dead horse and stayed there while wings tore flesh ten feet off. Not how he had lived by being still while better men died loud.

No room for all that. No time. Harlan groaned.

Robin looked down. "What do we do with him?"

Jake holstered his gun and took Harlan's belt knife. Then his boot knife. Then the little derringer tucked in his sleeve because men who smiled under axles tended to have more than one bad idea on them. Harlan blinked awake halfway through and cursed.

"Save your breath," Jake said. "You ain't got spare."

"You leave me here, I'm dead."

"Maybe."

"That's murder."

Robin did not laugh. Neither did Jake. He cut lengths from the cart harness and bound Harlan's wrists behind the axle where he could not reach knots or weapons. Not cruel knots. Good knots. Practical ones. He dragged a water skin from the wreck, sniffed it, then set it near enough Harlan could drink if he worked for it.

Not enough to run. Enough to live a while. That was mercy out here. Mean mercy, but mercy all the same.

"Carver and Moss might come this road," Robin said.

"Might."

"Road scavengers might too."

"Yep."

Harlan looked between them. "You can't."

Jake took Harlan's leather cuff and cut it free. The chain mark showed dark in the moon.

"Turns out I can."

"Cole will skin you."

Jake tucked the cuff into his coat.

"He had his chance."

Harlan's face changed. There. He had heard it too. The old thing in Jake's voice.

"Who are you?" Harlan asked.

Jake looked down at him. For a breath he almost said it. Jake Dollop. Let the name ride ahead of him like a fired shot. No.

No sense making the road worse for pride.

"Nathan Cole," Robin said.

Jake looked at her. She did not look sorry.

Harlan's eyes narrowed. "Cole?"

"Common name," Jake said.

"Like hell."

"Hell's common too."

Robin went to the dead boy. She stood over him a moment, then took off her coat and laid it across his face and chest. No prayer. Still no words. Better that way. Words was for the living, mostly, and even then they failed their jobs more often than not. Jake wanted to tell her not to waste the coat.

He did not. He went to the dead outrider and searched him. Two cartridges. One small tin of axle grease. A route chit made of stamped brass, punched with three holes and the chain-P mark. A folded paper that had gone wet with blood and would need drying before it told anything useful. He searched the cart.

Found a short chain. Two collars, open and empty. A coil of wire. Hard bread wrapped in cloth. A flask that smelled of corn liquor and fear sweat. Another pistol under the driver's bench. Robin saw the collars. So did Jake. No one touched them barehanded. The ore in his coat had gone quiet.

That worried him more. The collars were not alike. That sat wrong. One was black iron all around, crude at the hinge and rubbed raw inside where it had been worn too long. The other had the pale line through it like the dead boy's, thin and smooth, with little cut marks near the back. Better made. Meaner made. A thing a man built after the first bad thing worked and he wanted a finer bad thing next.

Jake used Harlan's knife to lift the pale-lined collar. Cold ran up the blade. Robin stepped back before Jake said a word. Her hand went to her hat brim. The collar swung from the knife point and clicked once against the cart side.

One click. The dead boy's collar clicked back. Not loud. Not possible, likely. Still happened.

Harlan whispered something. Jake looked at him.

"Speak up."

"Don't ring them."

"Why?"

Harlan's eyes had gone too white around the edges. "They hear."

"Who?"

"The house."

Jake held the collar very still. Robin's breathing had gone thin. There was a cold spot between them now. Not big. Knee-high. It moved like a thing sniffing along the dirt. Jake lowered the collar into the cart box and stepped away. The cold spot stopped.

Then thinned. Then was only wash air again.

"Above your pay," Jake said.

Harlan did not answer. Some lies got too heavy to lift twice. Silver whickered from above. One soft call. Warning, not panic.

Jake climbed the wash wall enough to see the road. Nothing. No riders yet. Dawn had started gathering itself in the east. The dark thinning to gray. Bad time. Shapes lied best then. They needed gone.

Jake slid back down and regretted it all the way through his ribs.

Robin got the rest from him: the payment house sat under the west-road signal mast, riders came if he failed to report, and they were due by dawn.

Robin looked east.

"That's soon."

"Usually is."

They took what they could and left what would slow them. Water. Cartridges. Route chit. Cuff. Wet paper. A little food. The second horse, once Robin got it loose and quieted down enough to lead. Harlan watched that part with real hurt.

"That's my horse."

"Was," Jake said.

"You thieving son of a bitch."

"Finally found common ground."

The horse was not much to look at. Bay. Scar on the flank. Skittish as a gambler with borrowed money. But it could carry supplies, and supplies meant miles. Miles mattered. Robin kept her face turned from the dead boy as they climbed out. Jake noticed. Made himself notice.

That was the trouble with knowing a thing now. Could not unknow it. Could not pretend the hat brim was just habit or the hand to the forehead was nothing. Could not pretend she was fine because she had the decency to bleed strange where he could not see. At the top of the wash, Robin stopped.

Her hand went to the saddle horn. Jake saw the tremor before she killed it.

Jake's eyes went to her wound. "Can you ride?"

She looked at him. Gray dawn under her brim. Hard eyes. Pale mouth. A woman with pain in her head and a gun at her side and no patience for being made small by either.

"I can ride. That all? Learning looks ugly on you."

"Feels worse."

She almost smiled. Almost was what they had. They mounted as the first light found the road. Dawn found them with blood on their hands and no fire to warm it. Jake looked west.

The land dropped by inches toward the flats. Beyond them, salt haze blurred the world. In that haze stood a black line too straight to be a tree. Mast. Signal mast, if Harlan had told truth. If he had lied, it was still trouble. Trouble had many names and most of them fit.

Robin rode up beside him instead of behind.

"Say it," she said.

Jake looked at her.

"If we're riding at him, say his name proper."

The road ahead shivered in the dawn heat that wasn't heat yet. Jake worked his jaw. Tasted old blood. New blood. Salt.

"Ezra Cole."

The name did not kill him. Shame. Robin nodded once.

"If you decide this being personal means you leave me out of it," she said, "I'll shoot you somewhere painful and ride on while you're explaining yourself to the dirt."

"That's your comfort speech?"

"That's me being kind."

"Needs polish."

She took that in and looked west.

"He left you in that canyon?"

Jake gathered Silver's reins.

"Yep."

"And now he's got Billy somewhere ahead."

There it was. Billy. Spoken out in the cold morning like a thing with weight. Jake's throat tried to close around it. He did not let it.

"Maybe."

"Jake."

"Yes."

No joke that time. Robin heard the difference. Silver stepped once, eager to move or eager to be gone from the blood smell. Both was fine. Jake looked back down into the wash. Harlan lay under the cart wreck, bound and cursing weak enough the words did not climb. The dead boy lay under Robin's coat. The dead outrider stared into the culvert. The collars sat in the cart box, dark and quiet.

Quiet was never the same as harmless. Jake turned west. The payment house waited somewhere under that mast. Saltgrave waited beyond. Ezra Cole waited inside it, breathing air Jake had spent decades hoping he did not have. A dead man who had not stayed dead. World was full of those lately.

Jake touched the cuff in his coat, then the manifest, then the wrapped ore. Leather. Paper. Stone. Proof, proof, and trouble.

"We ride," he said.

Robin clicked her tongue to the new horse and fell in beside him. Not behind. Beside. After a hundred yards, the stolen bay tried to stop and look back. Robin pulled it on.

"Don't blame you," she told it. "Still going."

Jake liked the horse a little for looking. A creature ought to know when it had left a bad place. Ought to take count of it. Men did not always. Men walked out of blood and called it road. Called it business. Called it settled. Then years later some old name rose up under them and proved nothing had been settled at all. The bay came on, head low.

Silver kept the lead without asking. The mast grew by inches. Nothing about it hurried. That was the bad of fixed things. A rider could wear out horseflesh and lungs and hope, and the thing waiting ahead did not have to spend nothing at all. The signal mast stood black ahead, nailed to the morning and waiting there for him.

Jake rode toward it with Ezra Cole's name in his mouth and Saltgrave's mark in his coat.

The signal mast stood where Harlan said it would. That proved the liar had saved truth for the worst parts. It rose black out of the morning haze, tall and ugly, made from old pipe and bolted rail and things that had once belonged to cleaner machines. A bell hung near the top. Not church-big. Work-big. The kind that called men to gates, fire, or killing.

Below it sat a low payment house made of stone and hammered truck panels. One window. One door. One porch roof with two men under it and two horses tied in shade that weren't shade so much as less sun. No flag. No sign. Didn't need one.

There was a board beside the door with hooks on it. Four hooks empty. Two with little brass chits hanging from twine. Beside that, a pane of old glass had been set into a wooden frame and angled toward the road. Signal glass. Sun-catcher. A man could flash warning farther than a voice could carry, if he had sun and no shame about making life worse for strangers.

One porch man had a rifle across his knees. Not pointed. Not resting neither. His thumb moved along the stock, wearing at some old place already worn smooth. The other man came out with a ledger under one arm and a cup in the other hand. He set the cup down, opened the ledger on a barrel, and looked east again. Waiting.

Men waiting for a thing were worse than men surprised by one. Surprise made folks generous with mistakes. Waiting gave them time to become careful. The bell rope ran down the mast and through a pulley to the porch. Clean rope. Newer than the mast. Somebody cared enough to replace what mattered. Saltgrave cared about messages.

That was good to know and bad to learn. The road itself bent toward the place like a dog called by a mean master. Jake lay on his belly behind a saltbush and hated near everything in view. Salt got in his beard. Salt got under his tongue. Salt got into the cut at his side and made it sing small, hateful hymns.

Robin crouched beside him. No coat now. Hat brim low. Shirt sleeves rolled to the wrist even with the heat because the sun out here bit different. Her hand rested near the double-barrel. Not on it. Silver waited behind the rise with the other horses. The stolen bay had stopped looking back. That made Jake trust it less.

They counted two men, one window, and a bell.

"You thinking of walking down there with that route chit and your pretty new name?"

"Was."

Jake pulled Harlan's brass route chit from his pocket. Three holes. Chain mark. Heavy enough to matter to men who liked little pieces of metal more than sense. He imagined walking down there in Harlan's dust with the chit held loose and his hat low. Nathan Cole on his tongue. Harlan's cuff on his wrist maybe. A limp in his step, which he had natural enough without acting. Robin behind him under a false name and a lower brim.

It might work. Right up until it did not. The window glass would show his face. The ledger man would ask where Harlan was. The rifle man would look at Robin too long. Somebody would ask why a road scout's horse was carrying extra packs and why the bay had fresh terror still steaming off it.

Then the bell. Then rifles. Then Saltgrave knowing exactly where to look. No. No good road through men who counted for a living.

The mast men were not lounging. That was the trouble. One leaned on the porch post and watched east, back along the road toward the wash. The other kept going in and out of the payment house. Not nervous. Working. Checking something. A ledger maybe. A signal board. A gun. Too much order. Order killed as sure as chaos, only it made you fill out papers first.

"They're waiting on red," Robin said.

Jake looked at her.

She nodded toward the mast. "No cloth up. Bell quiet. If Harlan was due at dawn, they ain't got what they wanted."

"You learned signal work from your father too?"

Her mouth tightened. There. Too much question.

"Road work," she said. "Everybody knows a little. Dollop."

"Leaving it."

He did, though it scraped. The signal flare lay wrapped in saddlecloth beside him. Red powder packed in a brass tube, cord cut short where he had crushed the first one and saved this second. He had no love for using a thing he did not understand. But, love had not been much use lately.

"We light it down-road," he said.

"They ride to it."

"Maybe."

"Maybe they send one and keep one."

Robin looked out over the flats south of the road. The Saltmaw waited that way, or what used to be water enough to earn a name. Now it was white glare and rust flats and low dead mist that sat in hollows even when the day warmed.

They argued south against the watched road until Jake pointed out men could miss and Robin reminded him Scree could too.

Jake slid backward down the rise, keeping low until the mast dropped out of sight. His ribs did not care for belly work. His side cared less. Nobody asked them. Robin followed. They led the horses east a short way, then cut north behind a line of broken concrete slabs that might have been a truck stop once. Might have been a school. Might have been a place where people ate breakfast and complained about eggs. Hard to tell after the world got done chewing.

Jake set the flare in a crack between two slabs and packed dry scrub around it. He tied Harlan's cuff to a bit of wire and hung it where a rider'd see the chain mark if he come looking.

"You want them to find that?" Robin asked.

"Want them to find it fast."

"And think?"

"That Harlan sent late and moved on wounded."

"You think they know Harlan well enough to believe that?"

"I think men believe what lets them chase."

He struck a match. Wind took the first one. The second flared blue at the head, then yellow. Jake touched it to the cord. The flare caught with a hiss. Red smoke spat up hard, thick and ugly. It rose in a dirty column and bent west with the wind.

Jake and Robin were already moving. No running. Running showed guilt. Also it hurt. They reached the horses as the payment-house bell began to ring. Once. Twice.

Then hard and fast.

"Quicker than hoped," Robin said.

"Hope's a drunk."

They mounted. From the rise, a man shouted. Another answered. Hooves hit road. Jake did not look back until Silver had carried him and the others down into a shallow cut south of the blacktop. Then he turned enough to see two riders heading toward the red smoke.

Both riders. Good. Bad. Good meant the payment house stood empty. Bad meant somebody had trusted their legs more than their post, which meant either fools or confidence. Jake disliked both.

"Now?" Robin asked.

"Now we leave the road."

Silver picked her way down through salt grass and broken stone. Robin followed with her horse and the bay tied behind. The bay did not like the salt flats. The bay had sense. Behind them the bell stopped. That was worse than ringing. Men had found something. Or had not.

Either way, silence meant thinking. Jake hated thinking men. The Saltmaw did not look like water. It looked like the world had dried wrong. White flats ran west and south under a hard blue sky, crusted salt broken by rust-colored pools and black seams where old mud had cracked open. Dead reeds stuck up in clumps. Here and there old docks stood nowhere near any water, their pilings sunk in salt crust and their ladders hanging into air.

The smell came in layers. Salt first. Then rot. Then metal. Then something sweet under it, the same wrong sweetness that had been growing for days. Silver hated it. She kept tossing her head and stepping high, ears busy.

"Easy," Jake told her.

She flicked one ear back. Not agreement. Opinion. The sun climbed. Robin rode with her shoulders square and her face hid under the brim. No coat. Sun on her arms. Wind cutting through the sweat. She had put up no complaint about leaving the coat over the dead boy.

Course not. Complaint would have made it smaller. Jake looked at the supplies on the bay. Water skins. Hard bread. Beans. One coil of wire. A little lamp oil. Harlan's wet paper now drying between two bits of cloth. Their riches. Every mile made riches lighter. The salt crust took hoofprints clear as a ledger. Jake hated that too. He angled them across harder ground when he could, over broken slabs and old tire beds where prints got confused. Still left sign. Everything left sign if a man knew how to read.

By midmorning, the payment mast was a black tooth behind them. Then the bell rang again. Faint. Carried by wind. One long.

Two short. Robin turned in the saddle.

"That for us?"

"If we're lucky."

"And if we ain't?"

"Also for us."

She almost smiled and then did not. Ahead, a marker stuck out of the salt. Stone, not road metal. Half buried. Three short lines had been cut into it, crossed by a hook-shaped slash. Old work. Deep work. The cuts had gathered salt in the grooves until they shone white. Robin saw it. Stopped. Jake saw that.

Silver saw the marker and went still. The wrapped Mithril ore in Jake's coat went cold. Not hard like the collars. Nearer to a finger touching the back of his neck. Robin's hand rose toward her hat, then dropped to the saddle horn instead.

"Know that mark?" Jake asked.

"No."

Too fast. Bad lie. He looked at the marker. Then at her.

"All right."

That bothered her more than pressing would have. Good. Maybe not good. He was still learning where mercy ended and meanness started. Hard line to see in salt glare. They rode another quarter mile before Robin spoke.

"My father used to cut marks."

Jake kept his eyes ahead. "Road marks?"

"Some."

"That one?"

"Maybe."

Maybe had got popular as a hiding place. He let it sit. The bay stumbled and recovered. Robin tugged its lead rope and swore under her breath. There was the curse word. Pain then.

Or fear. Or both, because the world liked doubling a bill.

"He taught me when I was little," she said. "Three cuts meant family passed. Hook meant don't dig."

"Don't dig."

"That's what I said."

"What's under it?"

Her jaw set. Too far. Jake looked away.

"Leaving it."

"You ain't good at that."

"Doing it anyway."

The mark passed behind them. Jake felt the ore warm again, or maybe only stop being cold. The amulet under his shirt stayed quiet.

Robin wiped sweat from her upper lip with the back of her hand. "There were other marks. For water. For shelter. For where to leave metal alone."

Jake guessed prospector, then miner, then bandit. Robin stopped him at the third. "He made knives."

"That ain't all."

She looked west. The flats shimmered. For a second the whole world looked like it had been laid under bad glass.

"No," she said. "That ain't all."

She rubbed her thumb against her forefinger, like feeling for a knife edge that weren't there.

"He used to make me find them blind," she said.

Jake said nothing.

"Marks," she said, irritated like he had asked. "He'd put a rag over my eyes and walk me out behind the shop. Stone wall. Old fence. Dead stove. Anywhere he could cut shallow and not be seen. Then he'd turn me around till I was half sick and tell me to find family."

"Sounds warm."

"He weren't a warm man."

"Most fathers ain't, far as I can tell."

She looked at him then. Fair. Jake had earned that look and worse.

Robin faced forward again. "If I found the wrong mark, he made me start over. If I touched one with the hook, he slapped my hand."

"Hard?"

"Hard enough."

"You know why?"

Her hand went near the brim and stopped short.

"Because some places don't forgive touching."

That was all she gave. It was more than nothing. More than she liked. It cost her to say even that. Jake could hear the scrape. So he let it be.

For once. Then a shadow slid over the salt. No sound. Just dark crossing white. Jake looked up.

Scree. One high. Then another. Then a third shape farther back, larger or lower, hard to tell with the sun chewing at his eyes.

"Robin."

"Saw."

The first Scree circled west of them, keeping the sun behind it. Smart bastard. The second crossed south and dipped. Silver pinned her ears. The salt crust ahead shivered. Not wind.

Jake felt it through Silver's legs.

"Ground," he said.

Robin looked down. A crack ran through the white crust twenty yards ahead. Slow at first. Then faster. It split with a dry pop, and dark mud showed underneath. Something moved below. Not up. Along.

Big.

"Nope," Jake said.

"That's your plan?"

"Strong start."

Silver was already turning east, away from the crack. Then she stopped. Refused. The second Scree dropped lower on that side, wings bent, head down. Herding.

Jake hated smart creatures. Scree especially. A dumb monster killed you honest. A smart one made you participate.

"Ruin," Robin said.

Southwest, past a low run of salt grass and rusted pipe, a building hunched at the edge of the flats. Pumping station maybe. Or a chapel for men who prayed machinery would keep working. Half the roof gone. One tower fallen. Walls thick enough to matter. The larger dark shape moved under the crust between them and the open road.

No road then. No time.

"Go."

Silver lunged. Robin brought her horse alongside and snapped the bay's lead rope hard enough to get the animal moving. Hooves cracked salt. The Scree above shrieked. There was the sound. High. Mean. Happy. Jake drew with his right hand and fired once at the first diving shape.

Missed. The shot turned it. Good enough. The ground broke behind them. Mud and salt jumped. Something dark shouldered under the crust, not quite surfacing. Jake saw a ridge like bone under wet hide. Then it dropped again and the crust fell in behind it. The smell hit a breath later.

Wet rot. Old shell. Hot iron under mud. Silver did not need telling. She cut away from it so hard Jake lost one stirrup and found it again by luck and spite. A line of salt broke open where she had been. Something pale showed under the crust. Not bone maybe. Too smooth for rock. Too curved for pipe.

Then gone. The flats shut over it. Like a mouth.

"Faster," Robin shouted.

"Tell the horse."

The bay screamed and nearly dragged Robin's arm out. She held. Her horse kept straight. Silver ran with her neck stretched and ears flat, all grace gone to survival. The ruin got bigger too slow. The bay hit a soft patch and went to its knees. Robin's lead rope snapped tight. Her horse checked.

Too much. Too slow. Jake fired past the bay's head into the salt beside it. The shot cracked the crust. The bay screamed up onto its feet, madder than scared now, and lunged forward with both packs swinging.

"You shot at my horse," Robin yelled.

"Motivated it."

"I'll motivate you!"

"After the birds."

Scree shadows crossed them again. One dove for the bay. Robin let go the lead rope, stood in her stirrups, and swung the double-barrel up.

"Down!"

Jake ducked against Silver's neck. The Mithril shot cracked blue-white across the salt. The Scree screamed and folded sideways, not hit clean but close enough to lose its mind about the matter. It struck the ground wing-first and rolled. Salt flew. The bay bolted toward the ruin, which was maybe the smartest thing it had done since being stolen.

The shot hit the ruin roof behind the bird. Old beams gave. Stone dust puffed up.

"You hit the building," Jake called.

"I was aiming for the bird."

"Tradition then."

"Keep talking and I'll reload slow."

The first Scree came around again. The ground thing hit the salt crust to their right. The world bucked. Silver stumbled, caught herself, and Jake's ribs became a whole church bell of pain. He saw a doorway ahead.

Big one. Obvious one. Wide enough for horses. Dark enough to hide a whole sermon of trouble.

Then Robin shouted, "Left!"

There was a narrower opening in a side wall, half hidden by fallen pipe and salt grass. Three cuts in the stone beside it. Hook mark below. Marked. Family passed. Don't dig. Or maybe don't die.

Silver chose before Jake did. Trust the horse. She cut left hard. Jake went with her because arguing with a horse at speed was how fools learned air. Robin followed. The bay almost took the wider door, then saw Silver and corrected late, slamming one pack against the wall and tearing loose a water skin.

It burst. Water darkened the salt. Gone. No stopping. They plunged through the narrow opening into shadow.

The first Scree hit the wall outside. Stone cracked. The bay screamed again. The ground thing struck the open yard where they had been. The whole ruin jumped.

Dust came down in sheets. Jake hauled Silver deeper in and swung out of the saddle because if the roof was coming down, being mounted only meant falling farther. His boots hit stone. His ribs lit white. Robin dragged the bay clear of the entrance. Her hat had slipped back. The wound showed for half a breath.

White-blue under skin. Ugly. Alive. She shoved the hat down before he could look too long.

"Door," she said.

"Ain't one."

"Then make one."

Jake looked around. Interior room. Pump station. Old machinery in the middle, big iron wheels and pipes thick as barrels. Salt crust on everything. A chapel bell on the floor near the far wall, cracked and green. Benches shoved against one side. Not a chapel then. Or not only. Folks before had a talent for making one building do three jobs and fail at all of them.

Light came through roof gaps. Too much light. Scree could get through if they wanted bad enough. The narrow entry behind them had half collapsed from the hit. No easy way out. Forward, a low arch opened into deeper dark.

Above it, cut into the stone, were more marks. Three lines. Hook. Then a shape like a knife laid over a vein. Robin saw it.

She went still. Not battle still. Old still.

"Your father's?" Jake asked.

"No."

Another fast lie. Then she breathed once.

"Maybe his father's. Or before."

That was more than he expected. Less than he wanted. Good enough. Something scraped outside. Claws on stone. The Scree hissed through the broken entry.

Jake pulled the flare from his saddlebag.

"Still got that lamp oil?"

Robin tossed him the cracked tin.

"Plan?"

"Make church."

"That ain't a plan."

"It's got fire in it."

He poured oil across the fallen benches and up along the broken entry stones. Not all. Enough. Lamp oil stank sharp and mean. The Scree hissed louder, head pushing into the gap, eyes black and wet. Jake lit the flare. Red light filled the room. The marks over the arch seemed to deepen. Robin made a small sound and pressed one hand to her forehead.

Jake saw. Did not move toward her. Good trick. Hard trick. He threw the flare into the oiled wood. Fire ran.

The Scree shrieked and pulled back, wings beating stone. Smoke hit the ceiling and rolled low. Horses fought the reins. Silver tried to back into Jake. He put a hand on her neck and held.

"Easy."

She was not easy. Neither was he. The second Scree tried the roof. Robin fired the other barrel through a gap in the boards. Blue-white light snapped up into daylight.

Something screamed and hit the roof, then slid off. More boards broke. More dust fell. No bird came through.

"That's both," Jake said.

"I can count."

"Reload?"

"One shell left."

Bad math. The ground thing hit outside again. Not the wall this time. The yard. The old pump machinery groaned. Deep inside the ruin, something answered.

Not alive. Metal. A long sleeping wheel turned a quarter inch with a sound like a throat clearing after a hundred years. The floor trembled under Jake's boots. Then water moved somewhere below.

Or not water. Something wet and heavy. The ground thing outside went still. Jake listened. Robin listened.

Even the horses listened, eyes rolling white. The thing under the salt moved away. Slow. Dragging. Jake did not breathe proper until the tremor faded.

"What was that?" Robin asked.

"Old pump."

"I know noises that ain't teeth."

Smoke thickened. No way back through the entry unless they wanted fire and Scree. The arch ahead waited dark under the family marks. Jake looked at Robin. She was still holding one hand near her forehead. Not touching. Near. Her mouth had gone bloodless.

"Can you ride?"

"Can you ask different questions?"

"No."

"Then yes."

He nodded toward the arch. "Those marks say family passed?"

"Yes."

"Hook?"

"Don't dig."

"Knife and vein?"

She did not answer. The fire popped behind them.

"Robin."

"It meant metal below."

The wrapped ore in Jake's coat chilled. The amulet answered. Robin shut her eyes. Only a blink too long.

"Metal like Mithril," Jake said.

"I didn't say that."

"Didn't have to."

She opened her eyes and looked at him like she might shoot him for being right.

Robin said her father had made her learn the marks because his father had done the same. People who didn't learn died.

There it was. Plain enough. Jake let it stand. The arch tunnel sloped down. Salt crust lined the walls. Old pipes ran overhead, bundled like dead snakes. The floor had rails set into it, narrow ones for carts. Not train rails. Mine rails, maybe. Pump rails. Work rails. The horses hated it.

That made four of them. Jake led Silver. Robin took her horse and the bay. Smoke followed at their backs for twenty yards, then thinned. The tunnel bent left and the outside sounds dropped away. No Scree. No bell. No riders.

Just hoof clop, breathing, and the tiny drip of water somewhere stone had no right having water. The marks continued along the wall every thirty steps. Three lines. Hook. Knife-vein. Sometimes an arrow scratched low near the floor. Sometimes old initials. L.L. E.L. R.L. Robin brushed salt from one set with her thumb.

Then wished she had not. The wound under her hat pulsed bright enough Jake saw it through the brim shadow. She took her hand away fast.

"Don't touch them," he said.

"Had that thought."

She leaned against the wall for one breath. One only. Then straightened. Jake reached into his coat and took out the wrapped ore. It was cold in his palm.

Robin saw and took half a step back.

"Put it away."

"I can throw it in a hole."

"We need it."

"For what?"

Her throat moved.

"I don't know yet."

"But you know."

"I know enough."

That line had weight under it. Old weight. Father weight. Grave weight. Jake wrapped the ore tighter and put it away.

"All right."

Robin looked at him then.

"That's new."

"Don't get fond."

"Wasn't planning."

The tunnel opened into a pump room. Low ceiling. Thick pillars. A dry channel cut through the floor where water had once run. On the far wall, someone had scratched a map into the salt-white plaster. Not a good map. A desperate one. Lines. Marks. Little squares. A mast symbol behind them. A crooked path under the flats. An arrow toward a cluster of boxes and one tall shape.

Saltgrave. Or near enough. Jake held the lantern up. Robin came beside him. No one spoke for a time.

The scratched path began with the same mark over the arch. Family passed. Don't dig. Metal below. Then it went under the public road and came out near a set of old culverts west of the payment house.

"Can you read it?" Jake asked.

"Some."

"Enough?"

"Maybe."

Fair.

Jake traced the line without touching the wall. "This gets us around the mast."

"If it's still open."

"If it ain't full of water."

The joke landed different in the pump room. Not soft. Not funny exactly. But it stood.

Robin looked at the marks again. "My father never wanted me near places like this."

"But taught you how to use them."

"He taught me how to leave them."

"Same thing some days."

She shook her head. "No. It ain't."

Jake waited. The pump room dripped. Outside, far and muffled, a Scree cried once. Angry. Denied. Good.

"He spent his whole life running from folks who wanted what he could find," Robin said.

Jake let the words sit. Could find. Not could make. Not could buy. Find.

Mithril cold in his coat. Robin's wound alive under her hat. Old marks saying metal below. No need to be smart to count that high.

"And you?" he asked.

She looked at him. Wrong question. Maybe right one. Still wrong.

"I said what I'm saying."

Jake nodded.

"Okay."

She stared a second longer, like waiting for the hook under it. There weren't one. He was proud of that and ashamed of being proud. The fire behind them had burned lower by then. Smoke no longer chased the tunnel. The Scree did not try the roof again. The ground thing stayed gone, or quiet, which was near enough if a man did not plan on sleeping.

Jake checked the horses. Silver had a shallow cut above one fetlock from the salt crust. Robin's horse had dust in its eyes and bad temper in its teeth. The bay had lost a water skin and most of Jake's good opinion. Still alive, all of them. Riches. They drank one careful mouthful each and gave the horses more. Not much. Enough. Never enough.

Then they moved. The marked tunnel ran west by crooked stages. Sometimes it opened to broken grates where daylight came down in thin white bars. Sometimes it narrowed until Jake had to turn sideways and lead Silver one step at a time. Once they crossed under the road and heard riders above, hooves ringing on old asphalt.

Three riders. Maybe four. Going hard east. Toward the false flare. Toward Harlan.

Jake stood in the dark with Silver's breath warm on his neck and Robin close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. Nobody moved. Dust sifted down. One rider shouted something. The words did not come through clear.

Cole did. That one did. Jake's hand closed. Robin put two fingers on his wrist. Not soft.

Warning. He opened his hand. The riders passed. After, neither of them talked for a long time. The tunnel gave them other things to hear.

Old boards shifting where there weren't no wind. Water dripping somewhere below the rails. A small scrape in the wall that might have been rats if rats had learned patience and kept even pace with horses. Jake stopped twice and listened. Nothing showed. Nothing breathed. That did not mean nothing was there.

The second stop, Robin held up one hand and pointed to the wall. Another mark. Not the three lines. Not the hook. This one was a small circle cut around a chip of darker stone. It sat low, near knee height, where a child might see it before a grown man did.

"That one?" Jake asked.

Robin swallowed.

"Quiet place."

"Quiet hidden."

She touched the air beside the mark, not the mark itself. Close enough her fingers trembled. Far enough the wound did not flare.

"My father said if I ever saw that mark and heard men behind me, I was to go in and not come out till morning."

Jake looked at the wall. There was a seam there. Fine. Nearly lost under salt. Door, maybe. Or tomb.

"You ever use one?"

Her face shut down. There was answer enough. Jake nodded and moved on. Behind them, the hidden seam stayed shut. Some doors a man did not open just because he had found them.

The tunnel climbed near dusk. Jake felt the rise in his knees before he saw light. The air changed too. Less salt cellar. More smoke. More rot. More people. People had a smell when they gathered scared and dirty under rules they did not make. The tunnel ended at a rusted grate half buried behind a stand of dead reeds and collapsed culvert pipe. Beyond it lay a shallow drainage ditch, then brown flats, then low smoke under a copper sky.

Saltgrave's first smoke. Not town proper. Not yet. Outskirts. Black shapes stood in the haze. Masts maybe. Derricks. Dock arms. Hard to tell. New Earth hung pale red above it all, not bright yet but there. Watching.

Jake crouched at the grate and looked. No riders close. No Scree in the sky. No good reason to believe either would last. Robin crouched beside him. Her face was gray with salt dust and old pain. The hat brim hid the wound again, but Jake did not need sight now. He knew where it sat. Knew it in the way she held her jaw. Knew it in the way she kept away from the wall when marks showed.

"Can open it?" she asked.

Jake tested the grate. Rust held. He smiled without meaning it.

"Finally. Something honest."

He worked the Bowie into the hinge and leaned. Pain went white through his ribs. The hinge gave. Jake did not. Second hinge screamed.

Robin caught the grate before it fell and made noise enough to wake the dead, which out here was not a phrase a man used careless. They eased it down. One by one, they led the horses out into the ditch. The sky had gone orange in the west. Smoke lay low ahead. The public road was north of them now, cut off by distance, salt haze, and whatever old family route had just carried them under Saltgrave's first teeth.

Behind them, somewhere far back, the bell rang again. Faint. Angry. Late. Jake looked at Robin.

"Your father's marks saved us."

She looked toward the smoke. "They saved him first."

"From who?"

"People who wanted what he could find."

"You said that."

"Still true."

No more. Door shut. Jake let it stay shut. That was getting easier. No.

That was a lie. It was only getting more necessary. Silver stepped out of the ditch and stood with her head toward Saltgrave. Ears forward. Body still. Not scared. Listening.

Jake touched the manifest in his coat. Then Harlan's cuff. Then the wrapped ore. Manifest. Cuff. Ore. All of it heavy. None of it kind. He let his hand fall away.

Robin mounted without waiting for his hand. Good. He would not have known what to do with offering one. The bay pulled at its lead rope.

"Don't start," Jake told it.

The horse started anyway. Some creatures had learned him quick. They rode west along the ditch line as dusk came down. Not on the road now. Not under the mast. Not seen yet, far as Jake could tell. Ahead, Saltgrave smoked low and mean against the dead sea. The old marks had carried them this far.

That meant Robin's dead had hands on the road now too. Behind, the bell kept ringing until the wind swallowed it. The old marks did not answer. They only pointed on into worse country ahead now.

Saltgrave announced itself by sound before sight. Iron first. A long scrape of it. Chain on wheel, maybe. Gate on stone. Something heavy dragged by men who did not have the strength for it and did not get asked if they did. Then came bells. Not church bells. Work bells. Sharp little things that counted time for folks who did not own any.

Then voices. Too many. Jake crouched in the drainage ditch with salt mud under one knee and one hand on Silver's nose to keep her quiet. The mare did not like Saltgrave. That made two of them, and she had better instincts.

Smoke lay low ahead, caught in the ditch grass and dead reeds. It smelled of coal, fish rot, hot grease, and people. People had a smell when penned together. Sweat and fear and old clothes and too little water. Jake had smelled it in jails, camps, and once in a church basement after a bad winter. He had not liked it any of those times.

Robin eased down beside him. Her hat brim was low. No coat. The sleeve of her shirt had torn at one elbow during the tunnel crawl, and salt dust had got in the tear. She had said nothing about it. Course she hadn't. She looked toward the smoke.

"Close," she said. "Too close for horses. You got another word?"

"Nope."

That earned him almost a look. The ditch widened under a collapsed culvert where three concrete pipes had broken and settled into the mud. Dead reeds grew thick around it. Old trash had washed in years ago and stayed: tire strips, wire, a door from something too small to be a house, bones not worth naming.

Shelter, then. Bad shelter. Only kind left. They led the horses in one at a time. Silver first, because if she refused there was no sense asking the others. She ducked under a leaning slab and stepped into the dark pocket with her ears flat but her feet sure. Robin's horse followed. The bay tried to bite Jake and got its nose shoved aside for the trouble.

"I miss when we didn't own him," Jake said.

"We stole him."

"Feels owned when he annoys me."

"That's most things."

They stripped the packs quiet. Water skins. Hard bread. Beans. Rope. One blanket. The wet paper from Harlan's cart, dry now but still stiff with blood. The route chit. The cuff. The wrapped Mithril ore. Not enough. That was the first count. Two full skins. One half. One with a slow leak Robin had tied with cloth and spite. Beans for maybe two days if a man liked being hungry and alive. Hard bread enough to make teeth regret loyalty. The double-barrel had one Mithril shell left.

One. That number sat ugly. Jake checked it anyway, because a bad number counted twice if a man was too scared to look at it. Robin watched him thumb the shell loop.

"Still one," she said.

"Was hoping it bred."

"Shy thing."

"Or smart."

The culvert pocket had old scratch marks inside it. Not Robin's family marks. These were newer. Names maybe. Or tally marks. Or a man counting days until he stopped. Jake did not look long. Some marks asked to be read and paid nothing for the favor. He cleared a place behind the broken pipe and pushed the beans under a slab. Then the blanket. Then the paper. He kept the route chit, cuff, and one coil of rope. Took six extra rounds from the pack and split them with Robin.

"You giving me charity?" she asked.

"Insurance."

"Against what?"

"Me missing."

She tucked the rounds away. The horses shifted in the close dark. Silver kept putting her nose toward the west slit, smelling the town. Robin's horse stood with its eyes half shut, worn down past complaint. The bay chewed at a reed, spit it out, then chewed it again like maybe the first time had lied.

No feed worth the word. No room. No time. The horses could stay hidden till morning maybe. Less if patrols came through. Less if the bay decided noise was its life's work. Jake took a length of rope and rigged each lead to break if pulled hard. He hated tying animals where trouble could find them, hated leaving them looser worse.

Mercy was mostly choosing which way a thing might die. He did not say that. Robin would hear it anyway. Jake tucked the ore deeper in his coat. It was not cold now.

That bothered him. Cold meant it was doing something he could feel. Quiet meant it might be doing something he couldn't. Robin watched his hand.

"Still got it?"

"Still stupid."

She nodded once. The horses got a little water. Not enough. Never enough. Silver pushed her nose into Jake's shoulder after and breathed warm through the cloth.

"Don't start," he told her.

She bumped him harder.

"I said don't."

Robin tied the bay back from the other two. "She's telling you to be less of an ass."

"Everybody's got hobbies."

"Hers is honest."

Jake checked the culvert pocket again. Two ways out if a body counted crawling. One narrow break in the pipe behind them. One low slit under reed roots facing west. No fire. No good rest. No room to run a horse fast if riders found them. It would do for a few hours. After that, it would become a grave with shade.

"You stay," he said.

Robin looked at him. No anger first. That was how he knew he had made a real mistake.

"With the horses," he added, because a man already falling might as well wave at the ground.

"No."

"You ain't got a coat, your head's been trying to split open since the pump house, and if Saltgrave sees that wound glow⁠—"

"No."

There weren't no give in it. Jake rubbed his mouth. Salt grit scratched his lip.

"Fine."

That surprised her. Good. Let the world have one small miracle.

"Fine?" she asked.

"You heard me."

"You fevered? You ain't going to argue?"

They left the horses in the culvert dark with water close, reins tied loose enough to pull free if panic came. Jake cached the heavier supplies under a slab and marked the place with three stones in a line. Robin saw the stones.

"That a mark?"

"Mine."

"What's it mean?"

"Don't steal my beans."

They took revolvers, knives, one water skin, the route chit, and Harlan's cuff. Robin carried the double-barrel with one Mithril shell left and one standard load she did not trust much. Jake carried the wrapped ore because leaving it with horses seemed unwise and throwing it away seemed dumber. No good choice. Plenty bad ones standing in line.

They crawled out through the reed slit and moved west along the ditch. Saltgrave rose by pieces. First came the outer fence. Not one fence. Three. Old chain-link patched with bed frames and wagon ribs. Barbed wire along the top where there was wire to spare. Bone strung in places where there wasn't. Not human mostly. Mostly.

Then guard towers. Short ones. Practical. Roofed in tin, with lanterns hung under the lip and rifle rests cut into the sides. Men inside. Two visible. Maybe more behind the slats. Then the yards. Jake stopped behind a cracked refinery tank and forgot to breathe. Saltgrave did not look like a town. It looked like a wound with walls.

The dead sea lay beyond it, black and silver under the rising moon. Docks reached into the Saltmaw on long legs, though water lapped only at the far ends. Between shore and dock sat mud, salt, wreckage, and work platforms lit by red lanterns. Smoke crawled from stacks. Cables ran overhead. Bells swung from frames. Men moved in lines. Captives moved in longer ones. Too many.

That was the first count Jake's mind could make. Too many. He had seen chain gangs. He had seen debtor pens. He had seen men marched after losing a fight they should not have picked. This was not that. This had order.

Order again. The outer yard had lanes cut into it with rope and chain and old painted boards. One lane for road intake. One for dock labor. One for salt works. One narrow lane with a canvas flap at the end and two guards posted outside, both with clubs wrapped in wire. Above each lane hung a board with numbers chalked white.

No names. Never names. Numbers behaved better for men with books. A tally house sat near the middle like a squat toad. Lanterns burned inside. Clerks moved behind the open shutters. Clean shirts. Rolled sleeves. Ink on fingers. One clerk rang a little desk bell every time a line moved from one yard to another.

Bell. Step. Bell. Step. It got into Jake's teeth.

Past the tally house stood pens. Long rectangles made from pipe and sheet metal, roofed in wire mesh. Men in one. Women in another. Children and smaller bodies in a third pen nearer the warehouse, where the lantern light was kept lower. Jake's eyes went there and stayed too long. Robin's hand found his sleeve again.

He did not shake it off. The children's pen was too far for faces. Too full for counting. Small shapes on benches. Some standing. Some lying down. A guard walked the outside with a lantern held high, looking in like a man checking hens.

The pen had three sections. Tall ones in back. Smaller ones in front. Sick ones, maybe, behind a canvas screen where a lamp burned low and green. A board hung on the fence with chalk marks in columns. Jake could not read the words from there, but he could read the shape of a count. Lines struck through. Lines added. Numbers circled. One column had smaller marks beside it, like someone had counted teeth or hands or whatever else made a child worth more or less to a man with a board.

Worth. There was a word that deserved hanging. A guard opened the front gate and shoved two new children in. One fell. The other helped him up before the guard could swing. Both wore collars too large for their necks, padded with rags so they would not slide off. Jake's vision narrowed. Robin's grip tightened.

"Breathe," she whispered.

He did. Because she said it. Because not breathing did not kill the guard. Because the hill was still too far from the fence. Jake's breath stopped in his throat.

Could be. Any one could be. None could be. That was a special kind of hell. Wide open and no door. He made himself look away before looking became running.

Beyond the pens, the docks worked. Cranes made from old truck frames and ship bones swung slow over the mud. Men hauled crates up ramps. Others turned capstans. A team of six captives dragged a loaded sled over greased planks while a guard beat time on a barrel with a stick. Not hard. Not angry.

Just time. That was worse. Anger spent itself. Work rhythm kept going. The red ship waited above it all. The thing sat in a launch cradle built from black iron and old concrete. Not boat. Not wagon. Not train. A belly, a tower, fins, chains, rivets. Red lamps along its side. Its lower hatch stood open, and men carried cargo up into it under a painted sign Jake could not read at this distance.

He did not need to read it. The red moon over the docks did the reading for him. New Earth. Rich folk in the sky, buying backs and hands and years. Jake spat into the dirt.

No spit came. Mouth too dry. Lines of captives moved from one yard to another under lantern light. Each line had ten or twelve people, sometimes more. Men. Women. Children. Old enough to walk, young enough to be carried and not worth the trouble if they fell. Collars at every throat. Dark iron with pale cuts. Some had little bells. Some had chain between wrists. Some had nothing but the collar, which was worse somehow.

Guards walked beside them with hooked poles and ledgers. Ledgers. Hell had books here. Robin crouched beside him, still as cut stone. Jake heard her breathing change.

Not louder. Thinner. The wrapped ore went cold in his coat. Robin's hand moved to her hat brim.

"Back?" he whispered.

"No."

"That wasn't pride asking."

"Wasn't pride answering."

Fair enough. He looked back down. A trolley track ran from the intake yard to a long warehouse near the docks. Men pushed carts along it. The carts carried sacks, boxes, and once, three boys sitting shoulder to shoulder with their hands tied in their laps. Jake leaned forward. Robin caught his sleeve.

Hard. He stopped. The boys were too far. Faces turned away. One had dark hair. One was too small. One coughed into his chest and got a guard's pole shoved against his shoulder for it. Not Billy. Maybe not Billy.

No way to know. No way to not look.

"Don't," Robin said.

One word. Quiet. He hated it. Needed it. Jake settled back.

The boys vanished under the warehouse awning. Something in his mouth tasted copper. He had bit his cheek again. At the docks, a vessel sat in a cradle of iron struts. Not a ship the way old books meant ship. Not sails. Not steam. A black-bellied thing with red lamps along its ribs and a narrow tower rising from the middle like a throat. Cables tied it to three gantries. Men worked under it with long tools. Chains hung from its lower deck. A painted crescent marked one side, red against black.

New Earth hung above it in the sky, the same dull red. One looking at the other. Jake had always hated rich folks. He liked having reason.

"That goes up?" Robin asked.

"Looks like it means to."

"With them?"

Jake looked at the slave lines.

"Yep."

No more words for a while. The red ship hummed. Not loud. A deep sound in the ribs. The kind a man felt before he heard. It made the amulet under Jake's shirt go cold and then warm. Cold and warm. Like standing too close to a boiler that had learned hate. Down in the nearest yard, a gate opened.

A horn spoke. Not a man's horn. Old speaker. Crackling. Mounted on a pole and tied with wire. The voice that came out had music under it. Gospel tune maybe, if gospel had been fed nails and taught book-keeping.

"Evening count," the voice said.

Not shouted. Pleasant. That made it worse.

"All road intake to west yard. All dock labor to chain two. All house lots to remain for inspection. Seven days to ascent. Seven days to grace. Seven days till paid passage."

Paid passage. Jake's fingers dug into dirt.

"Seven," Robin said.

"Heard."

"Jake."

"Heard."

The speaker crackled again.

"By order of the Saltgrave Company and under license of Baron Ezra Cole, all contract souls assigned to current shipment will be tallied by number, mark, and condition. Names are not required for ascent."

Names are not required. The horn clicked. Then music came through it. Thin music. Tinny. Some old hymn tune played too slow, the notes bending where the speaker wire was bad. It drifted over the yard while guards moved people between pens. A woman in a gray apron walked behind the line and tied colored cloth to collar rings. Red for dock. Blue for house. Yellow for salt works. White for ascent.

White cloth got tied to too many throats. Jake counted twenty before he stopped. Counting did not help. Counting was only another way of watching. A clerk at the tally house called out numbers in a voice that carried well. Three digits, sometimes four. No names. Never names. A guard repeated each one and shoved the person forward. If the collar clicked, the clerk made one mark. If it did not, another.

Condition. That was the word from the horn. Condition meant whether a body could walk. Condition meant whether a child still had all his fingers. Condition meant whether a man dropped when the collar told him to drop.

Jake had known men who used soft words for hard things. Bankers. Judges. Preachers. Cole had learned that trade early and got rich in it late. The hymn played on. Down below, nobody sang. Jake stared down at the yards. No names.

Numbers. Marks. Condition. Billy had a name. His son had a name.

The dirt under Jake's hand crumbled because he was squeezing it too hard. Robin's fingers touched his wrist. Not soft. Warning again. He opened his hand.

The count began. Guards called numbers from boards. Captives stepped forward. Some limped. Some were dragged. A woman fell to her knees and got hauled up by two others before the guard could reach her. A child cried once and then stopped so fast Jake knew somebody had taught him how. The collars gave off little breaths of cold. Jake could see it in the air, pale wisps even in the warm night.

Robin saw it too. Her wound answered. The light under her skin showed through the hat shadow, thin and wrong. She turned her face away from the yard. Jake pretended he did not see.

That was getting to be his one good trick. A man in a red sash walked along the nearest line with a rod in one hand and a ledger in the other. Not a guard exactly. Too clean. Boots polished above the salt line. Hair oiled. Face bored. One captive, a big man with one ear gone, did not step when called.

The red-sash man stopped. The yard went quiet by pieces. No one told it to. It knew. The big man stood with his fists closed and his head down. His collar had no bell. Pale cuts along its side glowed like banked coals.

The red-sash man said something Jake could not hear. The big man spat. Good for him. Bad for him. The red-sash man tapped the collar with the rod.

Cold hit the yard. Jake felt it up on the hill. The big man dropped like his bones had been cut out. No scream first. Scream after.

Short. Then none. Every collar in the line clicked once. Robin made a sound through her teeth. The ore in Jake's coat burned cold.

His amulet answered hard enough he flinched. The red-sash man marked the ledger. The line moved. That was all. That was the lesson.

No one ran to the fallen man. No guard bent down. No captive stepped out of line. Two men with a handcart came from the side of the yard. They wore gray aprons and no guns. Their faces had the flat look of men who had done one job too many times and saved nothing by counting. One took the fallen man under the arms. The other took his ankles. They lifted him onto the cart and rolled him toward a shed marked with a white stripe.

The line filled the gap he left. That fast. A life made into a space, then the space closed. Jake's hand found the dirt again. He counted.

Fence. Forty yards. Open ground. No cover but two barrel stacks and a dead cart. Nearest guard, thirty yards. Rifle. Second guard, tower. Better angle. Third at the gate. Shotgun or scattergun. Hard to see.

Dogs on every third patrol. Collars on every throat. No locks where a knife could find them. No chain to cut and call done. He thought of the dead boy in the wash. Collar clicking. Eyes wide. Something pale trying to push through skin.

He thought of Billy with iron at his throat. His stomach turned hard. Grab him and run. That had been the shape in Jake's head since Rattlesnake City. It had not been a plan exactly. More a fever. Find the boy. Shoot the men. Cut the rope. Ride. There weren't no rope.

There weren't no clean cut. There weren't no boy standing alone under a lantern waiting for his sorry father to finally show up and be useful. There was a machine. Big. Ugly. Fed. Watched. And Billy was somewhere in it, if he was there at all.

Jake's mind tried to build a road. Down the hill. Across the ditch. Through the fence. Shoot the red sash. Cut the lock. Grab a boy. Grab any boy. Grab all of them. Burn the ship. Kill every man with a book. No cover. Too many guards. Too many collars. No lock he could trust.

No way to cut one wrong and call it rescue. No way. No way. No way. The words did not make him calm.

They made him still. Still was what he had instead of calm. Robin's hand stayed on his wrist until he stopped leaning forward.

"Not tonight," she said.

It was not a question.

He hated knowing. The horn spoke again.

"Shipment manifest closes at dawn seventh day. Late contracts incur dock fee. Damaged contracts incur adjustment. Unsigned bodies remain property of road master pending review."

"Bodies," Robin said.

One word. Flat enough to cut. Jake looked toward the warehouse where the boys had gone.

"You see a way in?"

"Not through there."

"Didn't ask that."

She pointed low, not toward the main gate but behind the intake yard. "Drainage. Same old pipe line maybe. See that grate?"

He followed her finger. Behind a stack of salt barrels and under a crooked run of stairs, a dark rectangle sat in the wall of the intake yard. Grate. Half covered by weeds and trash. Big enough for a man on his belly. Maybe two if one was dead or patient.

"Comes from our ditch?" he asked.

"Maybe."

"You and that word."

"You got a better one?"

The guard rhythm changed after count. Two men left the west tower and crossed toward the docks. One went to piss behind a boiler. Three moved from the intake yard to the tally house. Every seven minutes, the red lantern at the main gate swung as a patrol passed. Every third patrol had a dog. Not dog maybe.

Dog-shaped. Jake did not like its gait. He counted anyway. Robin counted with him. That was comfort of a kind. Ugly comfort. Useful.

The intake yard had its own smaller gate, half hid behind stacked barrels and a run of hanging canvas. Guards used it more than captives did. A clerk came through twice with papers tucked under one arm. A woman in a gray apron carried a bucket out and came back with it empty. Once, a small cart went in with collars piled in it like horseshoes. Jake marked the time between each pass.

Not regular. Close to regular. Close enough to kill a man who trusted it too much. The drainage grate behind the salt barrels sat lower than the yard floor. Water stained the wall beneath it, black and green. A rat came out once, stopped, then went back in like it had seen what waited outside and voted no.

"There," Robin whispered.

"Saw."

"It lines with the old tunnel."

She shifted, careful not to slide loose gravel down the hill. "If the pipe's open, it puts us behind intake."

"And if it ain't?"

"Then we crawl into a hole and feel foolish."

"Been worse places."

It was a bad joke. It steadied his hands anyway. Below, the gray-apron woman came out again and dumped water into a gutter. The water steamed faintly in the cooler air. Something in it shone pale for a second, then went dark. Robin saw it. Her fingers dug into the dirt.

"What?" Jake asked.

"Nothing."

"That word's getting crowded."

"Then stop chasing it."

He let it go. For now. They stayed until the moon cleared the smoke. By then Jake had three ways in and no good way out. A man liked having both. A fool took one and pretended the other would appear from kindness. Kindness was scarce as water.

They backed off the overlook slow. Getting away from Saltgrave was harder than getting near it. The ditch line behind them had changed while they watched. Lanterns moved along the outer cuts. Patrols. Searching or just being busy. Hard to tell. Busy men killed you same as searching men if you happened to be where their work was.

Jake and Robin slid down the back of the refinery hill and crawled through broken pipe until the ground dropped into their drainage run. A patrol crossed above them before they reached the reed cover. Three men. One dog-thing. The dog-thing stopped.

Jake stopped breathing. It had too many teeth for the mouth it owned. Its nose split at the end like a wound. It sniffed the air and whined. Robin's hand went to the double-barrel. Jake shook his head once. No shot.

No noise. No room. The wrapped ore in his coat went cold. The dog-thing snarled. Then a bell rang from the east, sharp and sudden.

The patrol leader cursed. "Road crew found Voss."

Voss. Harlan. Fast then. Faster than Jake liked.

"Alive?" another man asked.

"If you can call it that. Baron wants report afore midnight."

"What about the red?"

"False."

"You sure?"

"You want to tell the mast captain he chased smoke because you ain't sure?"

No answer. Smart man. Boots shifted overhead. Gravel rolled down the side of the ditch and landed near Jake's hand. He did not move.

"Search cuts and drains," the patrol leader said. "Anything with reeds. Anything with fresh hoof sign. Road says two riders and three horses, maybe four."

Jake felt Robin go still beside him. Three horses. Maybe four. Close count. Too close.

"Bounty riders? Road thieves? Runaways?" another man asked.

The leader spat. "Runaways don't fake road signals and leave Voss breathing. This is somebody with a head."

"Then why leave him breathing?"

"Maybe wanted him to hurt."

Jake could not argue. The dog-thing sniffed again. Closer. Its nails clicked on stone above them. One more step and it would be over the lip. Robin's thumb eased back the hammer on her revolver.

Small sound. Too loud in Jake's skull. He touched her wrist with two fingers. Wait. The ore in his coat went colder.

The dog-thing whined. Then sneezed. It backed up, shaking its head, and gave a low growl toward the east.

The patrol leader cursed again. "Take it to Voss's blood then. If it don't catch there, we sweep west."

The dog-thing pulled toward the sound. The men went with it. Jake waited until their footsteps died. Then waited longer. Robin breathed out slow.

"That was close."

"Close is when they miss."

"What is that?"

"Successful, so far."

They moved. At the culvert pocket, Silver was awake and angry quiet. The bay had tangled its lead rope and chewed halfway through a reed bundle. Robin's horse stood with its head low. No rest there. The patrols were too near. Jake checked the supplies by feel. Still there. Beans. Water. Rope. Bedroll. Harlan's paper. He had never loved beans before. Might start.

Robin sat down hard on a concrete lip and pressed one hand to her hat.

"Don't," she said before he spoke.

"Wasn't."

"You were breathing like a question."

"Ain't my fault you're literate in stupid."

The wound glowed under her fingers. Dim. White-blue. Mean as a small star. Cold seeped from the drainage pipe behind them. Not night cold. Collar cold. Jake looked toward the direction of the yard.

"That pipe runs under them."

"Feels like it."

"Can you walk?"

"Can you stop asking?"

He crouched in front of her, not touching. "We ain't going in after him tonight."

The words hurt to say. Him. Not Billy. Still hurt. Robin lowered her hand enough to look at him.

"Those collars drop folks wrong."

"I saw."

"Grab one and run, might kill him."

"I saw that too."

Jake nodded. His throat felt full of salt.

"Seven days," he said.

"Six and change by now."

She leaned back against the concrete and shut her eyes. Only for a breath. Then open again.

"We need inside the intake yard," she said.

"Through the grate."

"Before dawn?"

"Before they put more men in the ditches."

Jake looked toward the slit where the ditch ran west. The grate would be narrow. Wet, likely. Full of rusted teeth and old wire and whatever Saltgrave washed out when it did not want a thing seen in daylight. It might open behind the intake yard like Robin thought. It might end in bars too tight for shoulders. It might run under the collar pens, where the cold had already found them once.

It might be the only door they had. That was how doors worked in bad places. They did not look like doors. They looked like drains, holes, broken promises, and other ways a man could die folded up.

"If we go in," Jake said, "we don't come out loud."

"Wasn't planning a parade."

"No shooting unless there's no other thing."

"You giving me rules?"

She glanced toward the red glow over the docks. "If we see him?"

Him. There it was again, kindly not named and cruel all the same. Jake's mouth went dry.

"We look," he said.

"That's all?"

"That's all we can do tonight."

The words tasted like rust. Robin nodded once. No comfort. No pity. Good woman. Mean woman.

Right woman, damn her.

"And if looking ain't enough?" she asked.

Jake checked the revolver at his hip. Habit, not answer.

"Then we find what is."

Above them, another horn sounded from the yard. Short. Two notes. The dog-thing barked somewhere east, farther now but not far enough. Time had teeth. Jake looked at the horses. Horses meant noise. Horses meant tracks. Horses meant leaving something alive behind and hoping the world did not eat it before he got back. No good way.

No clean way. He moved Silver's reins deeper under the culvert and tied them to a pipe that would break if she panicked hard enough. Same with Robin's horse. Same with the bay, though he considered tying that one to a prayer and letting God sort it. He did not. Bare mercy. Robin stood.

Not steady. Steady enough. They took less this time. Guns. Knives. One water skin. Rope. Harlan's route chit. No bedroll. No beans. No hope that weighed more than a bullet. Jake paused at the culvert mouth and looked back toward the red light over the docks. The ship sat above Saltgrave like a coal in a dead man's pipe.

Men moved under it still. Little black shapes against red lamps. Carrying. Counting. Lifting. None of them stopping because the night had got late or because a man had dropped in the yard or because children slept behind wire with rags under their collars. Work went on. That was the worst of it. Not the cruelty alone. Cruelty could flare and spend itself. Work kept a schedule.

A crane swung slow over the launch cradle. Chain rattled. The sound crossed the yards, crossed the ditch, crawled right into Jake's ribs and found the sore places there. The ship's red lamps blinked once, then held steady. New Earth hung above, dull and patient, the same color as the lamps. Above and below. Buyer and bought road.

Jake had spent most of his life hating men within shooting distance. This was harder. The ones who wanted those bodies were up there, past bullet and prayer, while Cole stood down here making himself useful to them. Useful men were the worst kind when they picked the wrong master. Seven days, the horn had said.

Seven days to ascent. Seven days to grace. Seven days till paid passage. Wasn't grace. Wasn't passage.

It was a fuse. And somebody had already lit it. Jake put one hand to the dirt. Cold came up through it from the buried pipe. Not winter cold.

Collar cold. Yard cold. The kind that meant a man could be close to his son and still have the whole world between them. He took his hand away and went into the dark ahead with Robin beside him again.