Watched how Jack moved through the cabin, which side of the table he favored, where he kept his bins, how he checked the door before sitting down. Watched the well, watched him. He pretended not to notice. He was good at pretending not to notice things. It didn't work on her.
On the third morning, she said without looking up from the strip of canvas she was mending. You go quiet right after dawn. Every day he was making coffee. Or what passed for coffee out here. Scorched grounds and creek water barely fit for it.
Do I? You stand by the window. Just stand there. 5 minutes, maybe 10. He didn't answer right away.
Just looking at the land. No. She did look up then. You're not looking at anything. You're somewhere else.
Jack poured the coffee, set one cup on the table, set one near her without comment. She picked it up. Neither of them said anything for a while. My brother died 3 years ago, he said finally. Not because she'd pushed him, not because she'd asked, just because the silence had the kind of weight that words could actually help with sometimes.
I had a habit of watching the dawn with him. Two of us. Before everyone else was up, he paused. Hard habit to break. So looked at him steadily.
What was his name? Dany. She nodded once, slow, then looked back at her work. She didn't say she was sorry. Didn't say any of the things people usually said.
Just let the name sit in the room like it deserved its own space. He found he preferred that. 5 days in, she was strong enough to want out of the cabin, not because she was restless. Jack could see the difference between restlessness and purpose, and what Sai had was purpleand. She walked the perimeter of his property in the early morning, moving with her feet placing carefully, the way someone moved when they were reading ground.
She checked the ridge line to the north, looked at the canyon mouth to the west. You've been out here 3 years," she said. That evening, they were sitting outside by the fire pit, the desert cooling slowly around them, the stars coming up. Same walls, same well. It suits, it hides.
She wasn't cruel about it, just precise. Jack poked the fire. Same thing sometimes. No, she said it's not. He looked at her.
She was watching the dark edge of the valley, her profile clean against the fire light, and something in her expression was older than 22 had any right to be. Like she knew things about hiding that she'd learned the hard way. Like she'd made decisions about it, real decisions, not just drifting. And what she'd decided was not to. My father says she said carefully like she was choosing the words from a larger set of possible words that a person who stops moving forward doesn't stand still.
They sink. Your father sounds like a man with opinions. He has many. Her voice shifted. Something complicated moving underneath it.
I don't know if he's alive. Jack looked at her properly then. She didn't look back. Just kept watching the dark. He was fighting, she said.
When I was taken, he sent me away with the others, the women, the children, away from the fighting. He thought it was safer, a beat. He was wrong or he was right about the fighting and Creed came from a different direction. She went quiet for a moment. Then, yes, maybe that.
The fire cracked between them. What's his name? Jack asked. She was quiet long enough that he thought she wasn't going to answer. Then a hoti something moved in the back of Jack's mind.
A recognition distant filed away from 3 years ago from a set of military maps he'd poured over in a commanding officer's tent while being briefed on territories, boundaries, agreements. He'd seen names on those maps, tribal leaders, designations. He'd seen that name. He didn't say anything yet. On the seventh day, Seiya said she was coming with him to Redstone.
Not asked. Stated. I need supplies, he said. I know. I'm coming.
He looked at her steadily. Red stone isn't easy for your people. Nowhere is easy for my people right now. She met his eyes. Level.
If I'm going to be in this valley with you, I need to know the ground. All of it. The town included. He thought about arguing. He thought about the 17 different reasons it was a bad idea and how he could list them.
But then he looked at her face at that particular quality she had of absolute quiet certainty, the kind that wasn't about stubbornness, but about having already thought through all the counterarguments and found them insufficient. And he picked up his hat. Stay close, he said. You stay close, she replied, and walked past him to the horse. Redstone in midsummer, a main street of packed red earth, six buildings that mattered and a collection of shacks that didn't, a livery, a general store, a saloon that smelled of sawdust and bad decisions, a telegraph office that telegraphed mostly rumors, and Elias Voss's trading post, which sat at the end of the street like the period at the end of a sentence.
The town noticed them immediately. It wasn't subtle. It never was. Conversations clipped off mid-word, faces turned. A man on the saloon porch stopped whittling and just held the knife still.
A woman pulling her child along the boardwalk saw Sia looked at Jack, looked at Sia again, and then moved her child to the other side of her body. Saiia didn't break stride. Head up. Back straight. Jack matched her pace.
They tied the horse outside the trading post. The bell above the door clanged when they pushed through that bright ridiculous sound too cheerful for the room it lived in. Inside it was dark and crowded with the smell of salt pork and gun oil and leather shelves floor to ceiling barrels along the wall and behind the long counter Elias Voss 55 years old. Heavy in the way men got heavy when they'd spent years not moving much. A face that had probably once been unremarkable and had since become the kind of face that made you vaguely uneasy without being able to say why.