She looked at him. You told me when you were sure. That's what matters. He held the door open. She went in.
He followed and stood there a moment in the dim interior of the cabin. The blue neckerchief folded in the drawer. Dy's old kit on the shelf. The two cups that had been sitting on the table for 11 days now, one on each side. We need to know what's in that order, Jack said.
What land? What arrangement? Who benefits? Voss, she said immediately. Voss gets the land, he nodded.
Fitch gets a promotion, Seiya said. A justified campaign. A successful operation. Her voice was very flat, very precise. That's all it is to him.
Jack looked at her. She looked back and Danny, he said quietly, found the paperwork. Something shifted in her expression. The order they wrote, the land grant, the arrangement between Voss and Fitch. He was young and he was curious and he was smarter than anyone gave him credit for, Jack said.
And he died for it. The cabin was very quiet. Then Saiia said, "Then we need what he found. " 2 days later, they got it. Not the way Jack would have planned, not the way anyone would have planned, but the desert had its own schedule, and it kept it regardless of what people preferred. Fitch came back on the third night.
He came with more men this time, not 6, 10. And he came in the dark, which meant this wasn't official business anymore. Official business happened in daylight. What happened in the dark had different paperwork. Jack heard them at the edge of the ridge.
The sound reaching him through the cabin wall. He'd been awake, which was becoming his permanent condition, and he had the rifle off the wall and sigh up from the cot in in 30 seconds. Backway, he said. How far? Canyon mouth.
Quarter mile. Go quiet. He grabbed the pack he'd half prepared since Fitch's visit. Water. The roll of oil cloth with the most important things inside it.
There's a hollow between the rocks past the first bend. Narrow gap. Horses won't fit through it. She was already moving. They went out the back of the cabin into the blue black desert night.
The stars were enormous overhead. No moon yet, which was good for them and not bad enough for the men coming. Jack heard Fitch's voice, distant, crisp, saying something he couldn't make out. Then the first shot, not aimed at them, ahead of them. A warning shot from someone who'd gone wide, gotten around the north side of the cabin, was trying to cut off the front exit without knowing they'd already taken the back.
Sia didn't flinch, didn't stop, just kept moving. Jack caught up with her, matched her pace. They went low across the flat land behind the cabin, running, not sprinting, controlled running, the kind that could be sustained. Seiya ran the way she moved through everything with purpose. Her feet finding the ground with each stride, not fighting the terrain.
He was watching her as much as watching where they were going. And somewhere in the back of his mind, even now, even with boots pounding the red earth and 10 cavalry men behind them, a corner of him noticed that she hadn't grabbed anything when they'd left. No extra blanket, no food, nothing he hadn't specifically put in the pack. Few trusted. She'd said that he'd thought of it.
He had he couldn't decide if that made him feel better or more terrified. The canyon entrance was ahead, a dark slash in the rock face, barely visible until you were 10 ft from it. Jack had found it 2 years ago on one of the long walks he took when the silence in the cabin got too loud. He'd never told anyone about it. He went in first.
The rock closed around them. Immediate. The sound of the valley muffled. The temperature dropped by what felt like 10° in 10 steps. Darkness close on both sides.
Seiya followed. The gap narrowed as they moved deeper. Shoulder width. Then narrower. Good.
Behind them. The sound of horses. Fitch's voice again louder now. And then frustration. The horses couldn't navigate the gap.
Men on foot could, but men on foot in the dark, unfamiliar, were slow. They had time, not a lot. Jack pressed back against the rock wall in the hollow. He'd found a small chamber, maybe 10 ft across, where the canyon wall had split, and the two faces had parted just enough for a person to breathe in. He crouched.
Seya crouched beside him. They didn't speak, listened. Fitch's men were at the canyon entrance. Voices. The sounds of men deciding whether to proceed on foot into a crack in the earth they couldn't see into.
The sound of men who were good at following orders but not at thinking without them. One of them started in, got maybe 30 feet, then stopped because the darkness in there was a different kind of darkness. And men, even soldiers, even men who'd been in worse places, had a response to the dark that wasn't entirely rational and wasn't always controllable. The man came back out, more voices, then silence. Jack and Saiia stayed still for a long time.
Long enough that the cramps in his legs became something he simply accepted and moved past. She was right beside him, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her arm against his in the narrow space. Her breathing was controlled steady. The same breathing she'd have sitting by the fire. He found that he didn't know what the word was.
Steadying. He found it steadying. An hour passed, maybe more. The voices outside diminished, moved away, came back once. He thought he heard Fitch specifically saying something sharp and dissatisfied.
Then nothing. They stayed anyway, another hour. When Jack finally moved, it was very slow. Very careful. He edged to the opening and looked out empty canyon.