Iona flinched. She could not help it. She had known Asa Whitcombe since she was six years old, and she had never once seen him strike anyone.
Nobody moved. The troopers by the gate had found that they could be unmoved by a great many things, but not by this. A horse stamped somewhere behind the wall. The scout, still on his knees, had stopped shouting.
Asa bent over him. He said something low that Iona did not hear, and the scout opened his bloody right hand and put something into Asa's palm. Then Asa straightened and turned to her and held his hand out flat.
On it lay a six-pointed star, brass gone brown and green at the points, a small ball at each tip, the words stamped around the center so worn she could read them only because she had read them so many times before: DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL. There was a dent near the top point. She knew that dent. Callum had dropped the star on the stone step of their mother's house in Zanesville the day it came in the post, and had laughed, and said now it was broken in.
There was blood on it. Not much. A smear across the center, already drying brown.
She stared at it. Her voice, when it came, seemed to come from some distance away.
"Is Callum dead?"
Asa did not answer. He was not looking at her. He was looking past her, over the top of the adobe wall, and she turned her head to follow his eyes.
West of the station the ground rose in a long broken ridge, and the sun sat on top of it, enormous and blazing, so bright it hurt. Against that brightness, small and black and perfectly still, was a man on a horse. He was too far away to have a face. He was only a shape cut out of the light. He did not wave and he did not ride closer. He simply sat there at the top of the world and watched them.
II.
"He was breathing when I left him."
It was the scout who said it. Iona turned back. He was trying to get up and not managing it, his good hand braced in the dirt, his braids hanging forward.
"Last night," he said. "Under the rocks at the seep. Breathing. Talking. He talks too much, your brother. I told him to stop and save his water."
Something in Iona's chest that had been clenched like a fist opened a little, enough to let air in. She closed her own fingers over the star.