Three years of silence that apparently hadn't been enough. He thought about Danyy's last words, the words he'd heard but hadn't understood. He thought he might be starting to understand them now. He reached up, touched the collar of his shirt. The blue fabric of it, not that shirt, but this shirt, the one he always wore, the same color as the neckerchief folded in the drawer of the table that had been Dany's.
He'd taken to wearing this color without meaning to, without knowing why. Maybe the body remembered things the mind was still working through. Outside, the coyotes went quiet. The desert stayed exactly itself. Patient and enormous and unimpressed by any of it, Jack Marorrow sat in the dark of the cabin he'd built, with his own hands in a valley he'd chosen, because he thought it was far enough, and began slowly, carefully, like a man reading a map he'd thought he'd left behind.
To understand that it wasn't, that nothing was that. The only question left was what he intended to do about it. He picked up his rifle, checked the load, set it back within reach. Then he pulled his blanket up and lay down on the floor by the door and looked at the ceiling and waited for the kind of sleep that came when your body finally forced it. It took a while but eventually came.
Outside the stars turned slowly. The valley breathed and somewhere far in the dark, past the ridgeeline, past the canyon, past everything that had already happened and everything that was coming, something moved past, getting closer. The morning after Redstone, Jack woke up already knowing something had changed. Not in the cabin, not in the valley. In him, the knowing that was already there.
When he opened his eyes, solid, not new, just finally admitted. He lay on the floor for a moment, listening. The canvas at the window moved. Seiya's breathing across the room, steady and slow. The horse shifting in the corral outside.
Nothing else. Just the desert doing what the desert did, being enormous, being patient, being entirely unconcerned with what Jack Mororrow had figured out the night before. He got up, made the fire, put water on, stood at the window, and looked out at the valley while the light came up red and slow over the eastern ridge. Creed in Voss's backroom. Not a coincidence, not a social call, an arrangement, the kind made by men who needed each other for something specific and didn't particularly enjoy each other's company otherwise.
And somewhere behind both of them, an army man, an officer, a name Jack didn't have yet. He thought about that while the water heated, turned it over the way you turned over a stone to see what lived under it. Patient, methodical, the same way he used to read trail sign, not looking for what he expected, but for what was actually there. Seiya woke up before the water boiled. She sat up on the cot and pushed her hair back and looked around the room once.
That quick automatic assessment and then looked at him. You didn't sleep, she said. I slept how much? She made a sound that conveyed her opinion of that answer without requiring additional words. Then she stood up and crossed to the water barrel and splashed her face and stood there for a moment with her hands braced on the rim looking at the floor.
What do you know about the officer? Jack said. She turned around, dried her face with her sleeve. I told you. I didn't see him.
What did you hear? She was quiet for a moment, not reluctant, just precise. She did that. Gathered herself before speaking. Like words were currency, she didn't waste.
When Creed picked me up, she said slowly before we rode. He talked to the others. Said the captain was waiting. Said the captain wanted this done before the next patrol rotation, she paused. Said it had to look right.
Those were his words. Look right, Captain. Jack poured the water carefully. Set one cup near Seiya without comment. Captain, which meant a company commander at minimum, which meant someone with enough authority to deploy men without attracting attention, which meant Fort Bowie most likely, or one of the outposts running patrols through the San Pedro corridor.
He knew those outposts. He'd served under men who commanded them. One name had been sitting at the back of his biome since last night. Kept getting pushed aside because he hadn't wanted to look at it directly. The way you didn't look directly at things that were too obvious, because obvious things sometimes meant you were being led.
But Captain Harlon Fitch, 38 years old, methodical, ambitious in the quiet, patient way that was harder to see coming than the loud kind. Jack had ridden under his orders twice back in 75 and 76 before everything with Dany. He'd respected him once. Then he'd gone into a canyon in the autumn of 76 under Fitch's routing instructions with Fitch's map. Following Fitch's red of the territory and come out the other side carrying his brother, he set his cup down.
"Fitch," he said. Seya looked at him. "You know him? I knew him. " He picked the cup back up. Haven't seen him since I left the service.
But you think it's him? I think it fits. She nodded slowly. That careful nod she had. The one that didn't mean agreement.
Exactly. More like I'm holding that information. I'm turning it. If it's a captain, she said. Then it's not just about me.
No, it's about something bigger. Yeah. He looked at her steadily. I think you might be leverage for your father. Get AOTi to show himself, to move, and give someone the justification they need for something they've already decided to do.
Seiya's jaw tightened barely, but he could read her better than he'd read most people by now. He noticed. "My father doesn't move without reason," she said. "No, but if his daughter is in the hands of he would move," she said. "Quiet, final. " Yes.
The word sat between them like a stone. Outside the valley was full of morning light now, gold and hard and clean. The kind of morning that had nothing to do with what people were doing inside of it. They didn't talk about it again for 3 days. Not because they'd agreed to leave it alone, but because some things needed to sit before you could pick them back up without breaking something.
And because those threes were something else, something Jack didn't have a name for yet and wasn't sure he wanted one. Kia days, working days, he fixed the roof properly. Hauled timber from the canyon mouth the way he'd been meaning to for 6 months and hadn't had enough reason to bother. Seiya watched him work the first morning. Then the second morning, she just picked up the far end of the timber and helped carry it.
He didn't tell her. She didn't have to. She didn't ask if it was all right. They worked. She found uses for things he'd forgotten he had.
An old clay pot she turned into a cooking vessel of actual whole worth. A collection of dried herbs in Danyy's kit. She identified each one by smell, separated them, stored them properly. She made something with the wild onions growing near the creek bed that tasted better than anything Jack had made for himself in 3 years. And she made it without ceremony.