The boy ran.

  Dust jumped under his bare feet, puffing up in little clouds that clung to his ankles. Sunlight hit his eyes and turned the world into a white blur with shapes in it—doorways, barrels, the dark square of the stable mouth, the bright flash of glass in the general store window. His arm burned where the tin can dug into it, the rim cutting through his thin shirt. Metal rattled against bone with every stride.

  Lily’s hand was a hot, bone-small thing in his other hand. She stumbled once and he jerked her forward without thinking, keeping her on her feet, keeping her moving.

  “Faster,” he hissed.

  “I am,” she puffed.

  Behind them, Mr. Cobb’s voice rolled down the street.

  “You little thieves! Get back here!”

  Boards banged as Cobb came off his porch at a run. The boy heard the clatter of loose nails, the jangle of the bell on the door still swinging.

  He did not look back. He knew exactly what Cobb’s face would look like: red as sunburned clay, beard bristling, sweat shining on his brow. He had seen that face turned toward him enough times to carry it without looking.

  He cut left, pulling Lily with him, skimming the edge of the watering trough and slipping into the narrow alley between the smithy and the livery stable. The space narrowed down to barely more than the width of his shoulders. Old barrels leaned against one wall; the other was the stable’s rough plank side, bleeding heat and horse smell.

  “Watch your toes,” he grunted, ducking under the sawed-off end of a beam that jutted from the smithy wall.

  Lily’s breath hitched, quick little gasps. He felt her drag for half a heartbeat and adjusted his grip, shifting the can tighter into his side. He could have dropped it. That would have made running easier, lighter. Hunger had a sound, though—a deep, hollow sound behind the ribs—and he could hear it in Lily’s silence. He kept the can.

  Boots pounded into the mouth of the alley behind them.

  “I see you!” Cobb bellowed. “I see you, you rats!”

  The boy swung right at the end of the alley, sliding sideways through the gap where someone had stacked firewood too close to the wall, then burst out onto the cross street. Sunlight hit him full in the face. For a heartbeat his vision went white.

  When it cleared, the sheriff was standing in front of him.

  He stood in the center of the street as if he’d been planted there, legs set wide, one hand resting on the butt of the pistol at his hip, the other hanging loose. Dust marked the knees of his trousers, and there was sweat darkening the band of his hat. The brass star on his vest caught the light.

  The boy’s feet skidded. Lily collided with him, the can slamming between them hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs.

  He looked once, quickly, for a way past—a gap between the sheriff and the water barrel, a shadow he could slip through. There was room enough for him, maybe. Not for Lily.

  He did not let go of her hand.

  The sheriff’s fingers closed around his upper arm. They were calloused and strong. He could have wrenched away. He knew how.

  Lily’s hand tightened on his. He stayed.

  “Easy now,” the sheriff said. His voice was low and even. “Where you two headed in such a hurry?”

  The boy pressed his lips together.

  Cobb barreled out of the alley behind them, puffing like a bellows. His boots skidded as he took in the scene: the sheriff, the children, the can glinting in the boy’s arm.

  “There!” he panted, jabbing a finger. “Caught ‘em, Sheriff. Right off my shelf, that was. Didn’t even try to ask.”

  The sheriff’s eyes went from the boy’s face to the can and back. They were a faded blue, soft around the edges but with a hard bit in the middle, like creek water that looked shallow and turned deep.

  “Is that so?” he said.

  The boy kept his gaze on the dust by the sheriff’s boot. There were little half-moon shapes pressed in the dirt there where someone’s horse had pawed earlier.

  “We’re hungry,” he said. His voice came out rough. He swallowed and felt it scrape his throat.

  “Hear that?” Cobb demanded. “Always hungry, these two. Every day they steal a little more off my shelves. Beans today, flour tomorrow, ‘fore you know it they’re carryin’ off my barrels. I can’t run a business if every stray—”

  “Amos.” The sheriff didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. Cobb’s words trailed off.

  “They got to learn,” Cobb muttered, but quieter.

  The sheriff’s grip on the boy’s arm eased. His thumb shifted, not quite a pat.

  “You steal this?” he asked. He sounded like a man asking about the weather, or about whether a fence post was straight.

  The boy thought about lying. Lies were just other paths through the same woods. Sometimes they got you where you needed to go quicker. He could say he’d found the can in the dust behind the store. He could say Mrs. Hanley had sent him.

  Lily was shaking.

  “Didn’t have coin,” he finally said. “She’s hungry.”

  He tilted his head toward Lily. “So I took it.”

  Lily flinched at his bluntness.

  Cobb spluttered. “You see? Bold as brass. He’s proud of it. If you don’t lock ‘em up, I will. Sheriff, I swear—”

  “How much is it, Amos?” the sheriff interrupted. His eyes didn’t leave the boy’s face.

  “Ten cents,” Cobb said instantly.

  The sheriff’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “Ten, is it? Thought you told me last week they were six.”

  “Price went up,” Cobb said. “Shipping, you know. Hard to get proper goods out here. I’m takin’ a loss as it is.”

  “Hm.” The sheriff finally looked at him. “I’ll give you six.”

  “Eight,” Cobb said. “Can’t keep the place open at six. Not with you givin’ away my stock to—”

  “Six,” the sheriff repeated. His voice had the same iron in it as gunmetal. “Or I can ask to see your books and see how much that thumb of yours weighs these days. How much extra flour you been measurin’ for yourself.”

  Cobb’s jaw clenched. Color rose under the sweat on his neck.

  “Fine,” he snapped. “Six.”

  The sheriff let go of the boy and reached into his pocket. Coins clicked against each other, bright and small. He counted six into Cobb’s outstretched palm.

  “There,” he said. “Paid. For the beans and for the trouble of you runnin’ down half the street.”

  Cobb closed his fingers around the money like it might try to escape.

  “This can’t keep on,” he grumbled. “He’ll think you’re his own personal charity.”

  “He’ll think I’m the law,” the sheriff said. “Which I am.”

  His tone didn’t change. “You got your pay, Amos. Go mind your store.”

  Cobb muttered something under his breath that might have been an insult or might have been a prayer, then turned and stomped away, shaking his head hard enough that sweat flew from his beard. The bell above his door jangled as he went in.

  The street felt wider with him gone. The sound of the blacksmith’s hammer came faintly from down the way. A horse snorted in one of the hitching posts and scraped a hoof.

  The boy shifted his weight. His arm where the sheriff had held him tingled.

  “You can give it back,” the boy said, nodding toward the can. “If you want. We’ll… figure something.”

  He tried to make his voice casual. It wasn’t. If the sheriff took the can, Lily would look at him with those big eyes and say she was fine, and then she’d cough midway through the night with a hollowness that scared him more than any shout.

  The sheriff looked at the can, at the boy, at Lily’s thin wrist where her hand vanished into his.

  “You keep it,” he said.

  Lily’s head snapped up.

  “Really?” she breathed.

  “Really.” The corner of the sheriff’s mouth bent, not quite a smile. “Would be a shame to spend honest money on food and then take it away before it does its work.”

  Lily’s fingers tightened.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was small but clear.

  The sheriff’s gaze softened when it rested on her.

  “You say your thanks to the Man Upstairs,” he said. “And maybe visit Mrs. Hanley later, see if she needs wood chopped. She’s been complainin’ about her back.”

  “We do work,” the boy said. He couldn’t help it. The words slipped out. “We haul water. Split kindling. Folks toss us crusts if they remember. Ain’t enough.”

  The sheriff didn’t argue.

  “I know,” he said quietly. “I see you runnin’ errands ‘til dark. I see you on the pump when most boys your age are throwin’ stones at frogs.”

  He paused, shifting his weight, as if deciding something.

  “I knew your pa,” he said. “And your ma. Back when this place was mostly tents and foolish dreams.”

  The boy stared at his own dusty toes.

  “Everyone says that,” he muttered.

  “Doesn’t make it a lie,” the sheriff said. He tilted his head, looking past the boy at something the boy couldn’t see. “Your pa once tried to knock Cobb’s teeth out for cheatin’ him a pound on flour. Your ma made him carry the flour back and apologize, after she was done darning Cobb’s thumb ‘cause he’d slammed it in his own till.”

  Lily swallowed a giggle, then smothered it when she saw the boy’s face.

  “They were good folk,” the sheriff said. “Hard. Fair. You two got the same look in you sometimes.”

  The boy did not remember their faces. People’s stories of them felt like tales about weather a few years back—maybe true, maybe not, and what did it matter now? But the words still went somewhere inside him and sat there, heavy.

  “You ain’t them,” the sheriff went on. “You’re you. But I’ll give you the same warning I would’ve given him.”

  His gaze sharpened. “Hunger makes people do stupid things. Stupid gets you dead out here. If it gets bad, you come to me first. Understand?”

  The boy’s jaw clenched.

  He had gone to people before, hands empty, and been told there wasn’t enough to go around. He had heard the way their voices slid around the truth, oily and smooth. The sheriff’s promise felt like something you didn’t put weight on. Still. If he said no, Lily would be angry later, or sad. Both sat on him like stones.

  He nodded, once.

  “Yes, Sheriff,” Lily whispered. She bobbed an awkward little curtsey.

  “Good.” The sheriff stepped aside. “Now get gone ‘fore Cobb looks up and remembers he wanted me to crack your skulls.”

  The boy didn’t wait. He tugged Lily’s hand and walked, not ran, down the street. Walking felt like a rule now, like breaking into a run would make the sheriff change his mind.

  They kept to the side, out of the way of a wagon rattling past—barrels in the back, a man with his hat over his eyes on the seat. A dog watched them from under the saloon porch, ribs showing through its coat.

  “Sheriff’s nice,” Lily said quietly. “He’s always nice.”

  “Sheriff’s bored,” the boy said. “Gives him something to do, scarin’ us.”

  “He paid,” she insisted. “With his own money.”

  The boy didn’t answer. He heard the ring of the coins when the sheriff counted them out and knew what six cents could buy: bread, salt, three nails, one candle if you haggled. It was easier to think the sheriff a fool than a saint.

  Their house leaned at the edge of town where the buildings thinned out. It had been built mean and quick: two rooms, roof sagging a little, boards not quite meeting where they should. Grass had given up near it, replaced by hard-packed earth and scattered trash. Someone had painted the door once. The color had given up too.

  He liked it. It had walls that held. A door that could bar. Places to hide things.

  Inside, the light thinned down to strips where it slipped between warped boards. The air was cooler. Their pallet in the corner looked like a heap of rags from this angle; the hearth was just stones and soot.

  “Shut it,” he told Lily. She pushed the door until the swollen wood bit into the frame and set the bar across it—a scrap of plank with a nail driven in one end to give it a hook.

  He crouched by the hearth. Last night’s ashes lay in a gray drift, but when he pushed them aside with a stick, a dull red glow breathed out. He leaned close, cupping his hand, felt a faint lick of heat.

  “Still alive,” he murmured.

  He fed the coals slivers of wood, bits of bark, careful not to smother them. Flame caught slowly, licking around the kindling with a stubborn orange tongue.

  From the crack between two floorboards he drew the knife.

  It was the nicest thing he owned, which wasn’t saying much. The blade was narrow, a bit longer than his hand, worn pale at the edge. The handle was horn, dark and smooth where fingers had held it for years before his.

  He had watched a traveling merchant set it on the wagon tail once to cut himself a slice of cheese. A week in town, the man had bragged. A week of telling stories about far places and making bargains and watching his own hands too closely and his own shadow not at all.

  The boy had seen the moment. The knife resting, the merchant arguing over a bolt of cloth inside, Cobb’s attention fixed on the coin. The boy’s fingers had twitched all on their own.

  He’d walked past, hand bumping the wagon, and when he’d moved away the knife was gone. Easy as breathing.

  “Brother?” Lily’s voice tugged him back. “You starin’ at it again.”

  She smiled at him, eyes briefly bright. “You look at that knife like other folks look at cakes.”

  “It listens,” he said. It was the best way he could put it. When he asked it to cut, it did. When he pushed it into something, it went where he wanted. People didn’t always do that.

  He set the point against the can’s lid and worked it around, levering the metal up. It screeched softly. The lid folded back in ragged curls.

  The smell hit them.

  Thick, salty, rich in a way bread never was. Beans sat packed in brown sauce, shiny, soft. His stomach cramped. His tongue felt too big in his mouth.

  Lily made a small sound.

  “Put it there,” he said. His voice seemed to come from somewhere else, thin and far away. He picked the can up with the knife tip tucked under the folded lid and set it near the fire, on a bed of ash where it would warm without tipping.

  They sat close. The boy wrapped his arms around his knees, chin resting on them, watching tiny bubbles begin to rise at the edges where the beans met metal.

  Lily leaned against his shoulder. He could feel the sharp line of her bones through her dress.

  “Remember when Ma made beans with bacon?” she said dreamily.

  “No,” he said. He remembered being full once, three days running, after a wagon train passed through and the cook took pity on them. He didn’t remember his mother cooking. He remembered her hands pushing him toward a door, her voice telling him to run, and after that a lot of noise and a roof falling.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Other people remembered different bits. They gave him those memories like scraps from their own plates. He had never been sure which ones fit.

  Lily frowned, thinking. “Maybe I dreamed it. They smelled like this, though. Only… more.”

  He didn’t answer. The can ticked as it heated. The beans began to bubble in earnest.

  He pulled it back with a rag when the sauce at the edges had gone thick and the smell had grown almost unbearable.

  “No bowls,” he said. They never had bowls. They had one spoon and two hands. It was enough.

  He scooped the first spoonful and held it out toward Lily.

  “You,” he said.

  Her gaze flicked from the spoon to his face. She saw the hollowness there; he knew she did. She always did.

  “Together,” she bargained.

  “After,” he said. “Eat.”

  She obeyed. Her lips closed around the spoon. For a moment her eyes rolled back in her head and she made a small, almost obscene noise.

  “It’s hot,” she gasped around her grin.

  He took the second spoonful, more out of rule than desire. The beans burned his tongue, slid heavy down his throat, and hit his stomach like a stone that somehow made the emptiness less.

  He counted without thinking. She had three, he had one. She had five, he had two. He kept the difference in his head and let it climb.

  When she paused and tried to hand him the spoon halfway down the can, he pushed it back gently.

  “Not hungry,” he said.

  “You’re lying,” she answered. “You always say that when you ain’t.”

  “Then it won’t hurt me none to miss,” he said. “Eat.”

  She scowled but did as he told her. When the can was almost empty, when only a few beans clung to the sides, he scraped them loose and took them for himself.

  Warmth crawled through him. It was not enough. It never was. But it was something.

  They sat there after, backs to the wall, bellies holding more than air. Outside, the afternoon light slanted, turning the dust in the cracks to dull gold.

  The boy listened to the town—voices, a cart rattling past, someone swearing faintly as they dropped a crate. Ordinary sounds. Even the ordinary sounded a little strange, like a song slightly off-key.

  “I’ll go see to the traps,” he said. “Might be a rabbit. We’ll have meat tonight.”

  Lily brightened. “Can I—”

  He shook his head. “Stay. Lock the door. If Mrs. Hanley comes, tell her I’m at the pump.”

  “That’s lying,” she said.

  “That’s keepin’ her from fussing,” he replied. It was a different thing in his mind. Fussing never put food in the pot.

  She wrinkled her nose at him but went to the door after he stepped out and slid the bar back into place.

  The sun lay lower now, taking some of the sting out but none of the brightness. The air tasted of dust and iron and faintly of smoke from the blacksmith’s chimney.

  His snares waited where they always did, along the brush-choked wash and out by the low fence beyond Cobb’s store, small loops of wire in the right places. He had walked that path so many times that his feet knew every dip and stone.

  The first snare hung empty. The second had been tripped and the loop lay in the dust, bent wide, a tuft of fur caught in it. Something had gotten away.

  At the third, the branch was pulled down, wire taut.

  A hare hung upside down from its hind leg, turning slowly in a breath of wind.

  Its chest moved in quick, tight jerks. Its eyes rolled, showing white. Its fur looked soft—white along the belly, gray-brown along the back where it matched the dust and grass.

  “Easy,” the boy said. He did not say it for the hare. He said it for his own hands.

  He caught the rabbit’s body, cradling its frantic kicks, and slid his other hand up behind its head. A twist, a sharp pull. The motion was imprecise the first time he ever killed anything. Now the movement lived in his own fingers.

  There was a soft crack. The hare’s body shuddered once and went slack.

  He loosened the wire and let the branch spring back, the twigs whispering against one another.

  He could carry it home whole, but Lily’s face went pinched when she saw blood. Better to do the worst of it here.

  He knelt by a flat rock and laid the hare on it. He cut just behind the foreleg, slipping the knife in shallow so he didn’t pierce the guts. Warm fluid spilled over his fingers, thick and slick. The smell rose, copper and wild.

  He worked the blade down, opening the belly in a neat line. Steam drifted up into the air. Inside, the organs were pale and shining and all arranged in their proper places, each thing doing what it was meant to do until his knife had said otherwise. He had always thought that was odd, that something so important could be stopped by something so small.

  His fingers slid in, careful, scooping the warm viscera free.

  The ground moved.

  He froze, hand buried to the wrist in the rabbit.

  It was not a jolt so much as a slow heave, a shift in the packed dirt under his knees, like the earth drawing a breath. The rock under his hands shivered. A few loose pebbles rattled together, ticking.

  He jerked his hand back and clamped it on the knife hilt, heart thudding.

  Nothing split. No crack yawned open. The scrub around him just trembled a little, leaves shivering.

  He had felt the ground move only once before, years ago, when dishes had rattled and old Mrs. Hanley had said the Lord was shaking His finger at them. This felt different. Deeper, somehow. Wider.

  It passed, leaving the hare’s open body steaming quietly on the rock.

  He wiped his bloody fingers on his trousers and looked toward the town.

  For a moment all he saw was the same dusty roofs, the same low plume of smoke from the chinmeys. Then he caught a flicker of movement, a strange ripple at the far end of the main street.

  The bell on the church began to ring wildly.

  Someone shouted. Then another voice, higher, sharper. The words blurred, ripped apart by distance and the dry air.

  Comanche

  The boy’s stomach tightened.

  He scooped the innards into the brush for the foxes and wrapped the hare hastily in a scrap of cloth. His knife slid back into its place at his belt by habit. He didn’t think about leaving it. That would have been like leaving a hand.

  He ran.

  He cut across the back lots between sheds and patchy gardens, past Mrs. Hanley’s chicken yard where the birds whirled and flapped in wild panic, feathers drifting over the fence like torn snow. The ground shivered again under his soles, you could feel it more than see it, like the memory of the first tremor answering itself.

  By the time he reached their house, people were in the street.

  A woman ran past him, hair half-out of its braid, a baby clutched to her chest so tight the child wailed. Old Werrin from the well stood in his doorway, mouth open, bucket dangling forgotten from his hand. A boy younger than himself sat in the dirt crying, one shoe off, one shoe on.

  “Brother!”

  Lily’s face peered from their doorway, eyes huge.

  He grabbed her hand without stopping. “Come.”

  “What—”

  “Raiders,” he spat. “Comanche.”

  He had never seen them, only heard about them. Men in the saloon spoke of them like weather; Mrs. Hanley spoke of them like the Devil. They all used the same word for what they left behind.

  He didn’t know if this was raiders or something else, but he knew better than to wait and see.

  He dragged Lily along the back wall, around the lean-to where someone’s goat had been tied the week before, toward the lane that ran behind the main row of buildings. The air had changed. There was a sharpness in it—fear, sweat, the rising edge of smoke.

  They reached the gap behind Cobb’s store.

  The general store itself sat firm on its stone foundation. The front was all glass and shelves and neat barrels. The back was just stone and wood and the mess people didn’t see: broken crates, old tarps, a tipped barrel that had leaked flour into the dirt weeks ago, now a gray crust.

  Between two barrels, the canvas sagged a little.

  Lily knew what lay beneath. They’d crawled there before, when thunderheads rolled in and lightning clawed at the sky, when Cobb got angrier than was safe. The boy had dug that hollow slowly, stealing handfuls of earth at a time, hiding it the way he hid everything else. A room in the ground just big enough for the two of them.

  “Look,” Lily whispered, catching his sleeve, and looked toward the street.

  He followed her gaze.

  They saw the riders come.

  They poured down the main road like dark water. Horses’ hooves threw up dust. Men leaned low in saddles, bodies a part of the animals beneath them.

  Some wore shirts, some leather vests, some rode bare-chested, skin painted in stripes and handprints, red and black and ochre. Feathers flicked from their braids. Metal flashed—knives, the long shapes of old muskets, pistols tucked in belts. Bows curved in their hands, strings taut as the fear climbing through the town.

  They did not move in even lines. They wove, split, came together again, like a hunting pack.

  The first shots from the townsfolk cracked out sharp and flat. A man with a shotgun fired from the saloon porch; another braced his rifle in the window of the boarding house. One of the riders flinched and slid from his horse, dust puffing when he hit. The rest did not slow.

  “They’re here,” Lily breathed. The words barely made sound.

  “Don’t look,” the boy said. He couldn’t take his own advice.

  He saw a rider snatch a man off his feet by his hair, saw another lean from his saddle and slash with a long knife, saw someone’s hat go flying like a bird with no body. He saw a woman in a blue dress go down under hooves, legs kicking once before a horse’s belly hid her entirely.

  He had thought fear would make things sharp. It didn’t. The edges blurred. Only certain things stood out: the way one rider’s braid swung, heavy with beads; the way dust streaked the sheriff’s cheek as he ran into the street, rifle in his hands, shouting.

  The boy pulled Lily.

  “Now,” he said. “Run.”

  They ran for the shadow behind the store.

  Hooves thundered on the packed earth, so close he could feel it through his teeth. Someone laughed, high and wild. The smell of black powder hit like metal on the tongue.

  A horse cut across their path.

  It came from the side, out of the mouth of the side street, one rider spear in hand. The boy saw a flash of painted face, a line of white across the man’s cheek, hair streaming. The horse veered, trained to the man’s knees, blocking the alley like a wall of muscle.

  The boy almost didn’t stop in time. He jerked Lily so hard she yelped, stumbling.

  The rider’s eyes found them. For a heartbeat they were the only two things in his world.

  The man leaned down, spear swinging.

  The boy shoved Lily behind him and brought the knife up.

  He might as well have been holding a twig.

  The spearpoint came at him, then checked, the rider adjusting in mid-strike with the easy grace of long practice. The shaft came instead, lower, hooking. It snagged the boy’s shirt, pulling him off his feet. His toes left the ground. Dust rushed up.

  A gunshot cracked so loud it punched in his ears.

  The rider’s chest jerked. Blood blossomed on his ribs. His mouth opened, teeth bared, but no sound came. He let go of the spear, fingers clawing at the air.

  The boy fell, tumbling into the dirt. The world rolled. The spear slipped from his shirt and clattered away.

  When his sight settled, he saw the man who had shot.

  The sheriff stood in the open, rifle braced to his shoulder, smoke curling from the barrel. He’d fired from the doorway of the barber’s shop and now stepped fully into the street. His hat was gone. His hair stuck to his forehead in damp strands. His star caught the light like a little sun.

  “Run!” he shouted at them. His voice cut through the noise like a whip. “Go!”

  Another rider wheeled his horse, bow in hand. He pulled to his cheek in one smooth motion and let the arrow fly.

  The boy saw the shaft in the air. It looked slow, almost lazy, no faster than a thrown stick.

  It hit the sheriff high in the chest.

  The sheriff rocked back a step. His eyes went wide, as if someone had thrown cold water in his face. His hand went to the arrow’s shaft, fingers wrapping around it like he meant to pluck it out.

  Another arrow came. Then a third.

  They found him—shoulder, side. His body jerked with each impact. His rifle slipped from his fingers and hit the ground, falling soundlessly in all that noise.

  He looked toward the boy once more, as if making sure.

  His lips moved. The boy couldn’t hear the word, but he thought he knew it anyway.

  Go.

  Then the sheriff fell.

  The boy didn’t watch him hit. Lily’s nails dug into his hand. He pulled her the last few yards to the gap between the barrels.

  He dropped to his knees, tore the tarp back. Cool dirt smell rushed up, carrying with it a faint whiff of old flour and damp.

  “In,” he said. “Headfirst.”

  Lily looked at the dark hole. For a heartbeat she froze.

  Hooves drummed the ground behind them. Someone shouted in that other tongue, sharp and short.

  “Now,” the boy snarled, and shoved.

  She wriggled forward, panic making her fast. Her shoulders scraped the edges of the hole. For a moment he feared she would stick. Then she slipped through, her legs vanishing into the dark.

  He pushed the wrapped hare after her, not wanting to leave it where someone might kick it away. Then he crawled in himself, feet digging furrows in the dust, elbows pulling.

  The space was close, low enough that his back brushed the underside of the floorboards and his chest pressed against the packed earth. Roots poked his ribs. A nail snagged his shirt.

  He got his hips past the lip and reached back, fingers fumbling for the tarp. He managed to pull it down over the opening, leaving only a thin crack of light that quickly dimmed as dust settled.

  Darkness closed in.

  Lily’s breath came quick and shallow beside him. She’d curled up as far back as the space allowed, her knees pressed to his stomach, her forehead stuffed against his collarbone. He smelled sweat and fear on her, and under that the ghost of beans on her breath.

  Above them, the world roared.

  Hooves struck the ground so near the foundation that the vibrations ran through the stone and into his bones. Men shouted. The sound was muffled by boards and earth but still sharp enough to make his muscles jump. Something heavy toppled in the store above—barrels or shelves—landing with a crash that sent dust trickling down like gray snow.

  He heard English, twisted and scared: “Get down! Get—” cut off.

  He heard the Comanche calls, rough and high, yips and cries that rose and fell like some fierce bird’s call. Once, a horse screamed, a horrible, tearing sound that made Lily flinch so hard she hit her head against the floor above.

  He tightened his arms around her.

  “Don’t make a sound,” he breathed into her hair.

  “I can’t,” she whispered back. Her voice shook. “Brother, I can’t—”

  “You can,” he said. “You have to. We’re not here. We’re dirt. We’re stone. That’s all.”

  She made a small noise but clamped her teeth together.

  Smoke wormed its way into their hiding place a few minutes later, thin fingers of it slipping through cracks where plank met plank. It carried the smell of burning wood, pitch from wagon wheels, something else underneath he didn’t want to name.

  “Are we gonna burn?” Lily’s whisper scraped his ear.

  His mind ran over the layout above them: wood floor, crates, sacks of flour that would go like tinder if fire reached them. The foundation here was stone but the front of the store was not.

  “Don’t know,” he said. He didn’t see the use in lying about that. “If it gets bad, we run. ‘Til then, we stay.”

  “Run where?” she asked. “They’re everywhere.”

  He had no answer. He tucked her closer and listened to his own heart race.

  “Sing,” she begged suddenly. The word surprised him.

  “What?”

  “Sing the song.” Her fingers dug into his side, desperate. “Please. The one you do when it storms.”

  He didn’t know when he’d started singing to her during storms. Maybe it had been his mother first. He couldn’t remember her voice clearly, only the feeling of it—warm, low, humming through his bones like a cat’s purr.

  The song had no proper name. It was just notes that seemed to know how to follow each other. The words were half real, half nonsense, made up and forgotten between one verse and the next.

  His throat felt dry. Smoke scratched at it. His tongue tasted of metal and old beans.

  Still, he opened his mouth.

  “Down where the river runs slow and deep,” he murmured, barely sound at all. “Down where the willows bend to sleep…”

  The melody stumbled. He picked it up again, patched it with whatever came.

  “…little one, little one, close your eyes tight… I’ll hold you through the longest night…”

  His voice wasn’t good. It cracked on the higher parts. It didn’t matter. Lily pressed her face into his chest and breathed in time with it.

  The sounds above faded and swelled around the song—shouting, a woman wailing, the wild rise of a Comanche war cry, a man’s voice begging and then not. The fire crackled louder. Somewhere close, something heavy split with a bang.

  Then, underneath it all, the ground moved again.

  This time it wasn’t the quick shake of hooves or the sharp crack of a building giving way. It was slow and deep, like the earth taking another breath that did not belong to it.

  The stones of the foundation hummed against his spine. Dust sifted down more thickly. His teeth buzzed. Lily whimpered and clapped her hands over her ears.

  The sound wasn’t exactly in his ears. It was in his head. A pressure, building.

  The song died in his throat.

  For a moment, everything else seemed to go distant—the screams, the gunfire, the yips. The tremor rose, peaked, and then what came was not sound but a voice.

  It spoke in his mind.

  Welcome to the System.

  The words were clear, bright as bells, though they were in no tongue he knew. His thoughts simply made sense of them without his permission.

  His breath hitched. He didn't know if his eyes were open or shut; there was nothing to see either way. He felt Lily clutch at him like she’d been dropped.

  “Brother,” she whispered. “Who said that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  More words came, unasked.

  Name: —

  Age: 13

  Level: 1

  Race: Human

  Strength: 4

  Dexterity: 7

  Vitality: 6

  Magic: 5

  They weren’t written anywhere. Not really. But he saw them as if they hung in the dark, lines of pale fire. He felt them settle inside his skull like pebbles dropped into water.

  He could count. Four. Seven. Six. Five. Numbers were not the strange part. The strange part was that some deep piece of him agreed. Yes, it said. That’s you. That’s how much there is of you.

  Strength. His arms, thin as they were, burning from digging and carrying. Four felt small. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.

  Dexterity. Seven. That was his feet finding paths before his eyes did, his hands catching things before they fell.

  Vitality. Six. The stubborn beat of his heart even when he’d gone a day without food, the way he kept walking when others sat down and cried.

  Magic. Five.

  He had no weight to hang on that word. Magic was a thing from Lily’s stories, of witches in the woods and saints with shining hands. He could not hold it in his head alongside beans and knives and the way the sheriff had fallen.

  Beside him, Lily made a soft sound.

  “It’s tellin’ me numbers,” she whispered. “Inside. I don’t… I don’t like it.”

  He would have covered her ears if that would help. It wouldn’t. The voice wasn’t in the air.

  Another line wrote itself across that un-place in his mind.

  Status: Unnamed.

  Something in him flinched.

  Of course he was unnamed. He knew that in the same dull way he knew he was poor. People called him “boy,” “kid,” “you there.” Mrs. Hanley had used a name for a while but it had never caught inside him, had never felt like his. It slid off him the way rain slid off tarps.

  To see it written there—or feel it there—made it sharper.

  Soul-pattern: incomplete.

  He didn’t understand that at all. Soul was a word from church. Pattern was the way beans spilled or tracks laid in dust. The two together just felt… wrong.

  Another line came, brighter than the rest.

  Unique Perk acquired: [The Hollow]

  The words vibrated in him. Hollow.

  He knew hollow. He knew bowls left empty and bellies like caves. He knew the way his chest sometimes felt like someone had dug out a piece and forgotten to fill it.

  Details, the voice said, without speaking. The sense of it brushed his mind like a hand offering something.

  He did not say yes. He didn’t know how. He only wondered, What? and that was enough.

  The answer poured in.

  [The Hollow] - Your soul carries no name. The world does not know where to place you. When life leaves the body, a mark remains. You may consume the fading echo of a soul within one hour of its parting. On consuming a soul, you gain a small portion of its attributes. Limits apply.

  His stomach rolled.

  Consume. Eat. The words were cousins.

  Images flashed behind his eyes—not from his own life. Men he had never seen slumping to the ground. A woman’s hand uncurling from a ladle. A dog lying still, flies already gathering. Something invisible rose from them like breath on a cold morning, like smoke.

  He saw himself open his mouth and draw that smoke in.

  His gorge rose. He swallowed it back.

  Lily whimpered. “Brother… it’s sayin’ awful things.”

  “It’s not real,” he said quickly. He didn’t know if that was true. “It’s a dream. Just a dream ‘cause we’re scared.”

  The voice didn’t feel like fear. It felt like a well dug deep into the earth, lined with stones too smooth to have been laid by hand.

  Outside, the sounds of the raid leaked back in at the edges of his awareness, louder now that whatever had spoken seemed content with what it had done. Screams had faded to occasional cries. The sharp crack of gunfire grew rarer. The crackle of flames had grown larger, a steady, greedy noise.

  The lines in his head began to dim, though he still felt them there, humming.

  “That word,” Lily whispered. “System. What’s a system?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He thought of the pump and how the handle went up and down and the water came, the way gears turned in the mill. Things connected, one piece making another move. Maybe it was something like that, only bigger. Maybe it was something else. “Be quiet.”

  He lay there in the dark, his arms around his sister, the new weight of numbers and the strange taste of the word Hollow sitting inside him like a second heart, beating time with the first.

  Above them, their town burned and bled.

  Inside him, something had opened its eyes.

  He did not understand any of it.

  Not yet.