There were three Librarians, including Bet and Leda. The third Librarian was named Cye.
Cye was small and wide-hipped, with rough-hewn features, a crooked nose that looked ready for a fight, and large brown eyes that looked startled no matter what they were pointed at.
Cye wasn’t pleased to see Esther at all.
“We can’t afford to put her up,” Cye said, favoring Esther with a lazy, disdainful stare. “This next pickup will stretch us as thin as we can go. We should just turn her loose and let her make friends with the scrub spiders.”
Esther thought that she managed not to make a face at the mention of scrub spiders, whatever those were, but Cye laughed as if she had flinched. It was not a kind laugh.
“We can’t afford to lose time taking her back, and we can’t afford to go through the Phoenix checkpoint again,” Bet said easily, her hands still in her pockets. “Besides, she’ll earn her keep. You’ll make sure of it.” She smiled at Cye, who spat in the dust. “Esther, stick with my Apprentice Librarian here. Cye, show Esther the ropes.”
Bet made as if to leave, but Cye made a low noise, something between a growl and a cough. Bet turned back, eyebrows raised, looking something less than patient. “What’s got your gullet, Cye?”
“What’s the plan here?” Cye asked, widening those big eyes even more. “We’re gonna bring her with us to collect our parcel?” At the word her, Cye hooked a thumb toward Esther, who stood with her arms crossed, trying hard not to take up too much space.
“Yep,” Bet replied. She and Cye stared at each other, exchanging the kind of silent negotiation that’s based on a thick stack of old arguments. After a moment, Bet sighed. “Yes, Cye. The plan is, we take this one”—another thumb aimed at Esther—“to pick up the parcel. When we deliver it, we’ll deliver her, too. She needs to get where that package is going. This isn’t up for discussion,” she added, and Cye bit off whatever retort had been just under that itching trigger finger.
“Um,” Esther said, and although she was quiet about it, Cye and Bet both turned to look at her, sharp as heel spurs. “Where am I going?”
Cye spat again, eye-rolling and knuckle-cracking. Bet shook her head and turned to walk away, aiming her feet at a patch of scrub. She called the answer over her shoulder.
“You’re going to Utah, runaway.”
Esther blinked at Bet’s receding figure. “Utah? That’s—that can’t be right. That’s where the insurrectionists live. Isn’t it?” She said isn’t it as if she wasn’t sure, but of course she knew she was right. Everyone knew. Utah, Florida, and Maine—those were the three insurrectionist strongholds, the most dangerous places in the country. Places where the rule of law didn’t matter.
“Sure is,” Cye growled, glaring hard at Esther. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to take you there. I think you’ll just cause trouble, and trouble’s the last thing the safe zone needs. But if Bet says you’re going, then you’re going. And if she says we’re getting you there, then you’re my problem.”
Esther crossed her arms and looked Cye over, the same narrow-eyed up-and-down she’d given Beatriz a hundred times. Beatriz had always described it as her Spoilin’ Face, “because that’s how I can tell you’re spoilin’ for a fight.” And, Esther reflected, Beatriz wasn’t wrong—a fight sounded like just the thing Esther needed. A fight to make her feel less like a fumbling stowaway. A fight to remind her of how brave she was being, running off with the Librarians, leaving behind everything she’d ever known. “Yeah,” she said to Cye. “I suppose I am your problem.”
Before she’d finished pressing her lips closed around the m in problem, Cye was right under her nose, a head shorter than she was and a bushel madder. “Then we’re going to get a few things straight,” Cye said, raising a finger. “You do what Bet and Leda tell you, and you’ll get to Utah in one piece.” Another finger. “You do what I tell you and you might manage to be something better than deadweight.” Another finger. “I’m they on the road and she in town. You can take time getting used to they on the road, but if you forget about she when we’re in town, you’ll have to learn how to think around a bullet.”
Esther swallowed hard but didn’t blink. She’d kept her poker face on even when she could hear the sound of Beatriz crying under a burlap sack on the gallows. She could keep a poker face now.
And besides—Cye’s words sounded angry, but none of them were cruel. Everything they’d said was factual, helpful. “Am I allowed to ask questions?”
Cye crossed their arms. “You’d better. If you pretend you understand when you don’t, you’ll sink us for sure.”
Esther thought she’d gambled right. “Why are you different in town than on the road? Why not just be one thing?”
“Did you ever meet anyone who used they instead of she or he? Or did you only ever read about that in stories?” Cye paused, but not long enough for Esther to reply. “That’s what I thought. It’s not safe to be they in town, no more than it’s safe for Bet and Leda to be anything but Librarians who happen to ride together. When there’s people around who we don’t trust, we let them think we’re the kinds of people who are allowed to exist. And the only kind of Librarian that’s allowed to exist is one who answers to she.”
All the fight had gone out of Esther, dried up so fast that she wasn’t sure if it had ever been there at all. “I think I understand,” she said. “I mean … it’s not the same. But I had to pretend too.” She looked away from Cye, not wanting to see the contempt in those wide brown eyes.
But when she looked back, Cye didn’t seem disdainful. They didn’t seem as angry as they had before, either. They looked thoughtful. After a moment, they nodded slowly. “Yeah,” they said. “I suppose you did.”
The silence between them was so uncomfortable as to be painful. Cye wanting to know but not wanting to have to find out. Esther desperate to talk about it but also desperate to never have to talk about it again. Their eyes met, matched, and something grew up between them fast as thunder rolling across horizon-wide miles of sand and scrub—something Esther didn’t want to feel ever again. That freckle on Cye’s lower lip put a hunger in her, and those rough calluses on Cye’s hands put a need in her, and there was nothing for it, and she couldn’t look away, couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe even, until, mercifully, Leda’s voice cut right between them like a hatchet cleaving the arm off a cactus.
“Roll up, roll out!” she called from behind the wagons.
Cye turned their head to one side, not taking their eyes off Esther’s, not letting the storm break. “Roll up, roll out!” they called back. “Come on,” they said to Esther, their voice soft. “That means it’s time for you to get useful.”
Esther did everything Cye told her to do. She was good at doing what she was told, at being the person she was told to be, and Cye’s guidance was easy to follow. Esther thought she wasn’t doing too badly, for the most part, although she did use some of the horses’ water to douse the coals from the campfire. This earned her an impatient explanation of the ready abundance of sand but nothing worse than that—not the anger she’d been ready to stand up to, not the violence she’d anticipated flinching away from. “We can’t go throwing water away,” Cye said, rolling up a blanket into a tight coil and strapping it to the side of a saddle. “We smother fire with sand and we wash our dishes with it, too, and we also—you know what?” Cye shook their head. “Just don’t do a damn thing with water unless I tell you to do it.”
It took an hour to pack up the camp and tack up the horses. It would have taken longer than that without Esther’s help. Esther quickly realized that Cye was performing every task with slow, exaggerated movements so she could watch and follow along. They moved economically, their hips square to whatever they were focused on the same way a horse points its ears wherever its eyes are looking. The bones of their wrists were wide and angular, and their forearms were roped with muscle. Esther kept getting distracted by the way the light glinted off the fine hairs on those strong arms. She kept losing herself in the way Cye’s fingers worked at knots with quick, clever tenderness, until they gave in at last and came loose.
They were a good teacher, narrating as they worked, telling Esther the names of things and the reasons for them. Esther tightened the girth on Leda’s squat black horse’s belly as Cye did the same to a leggy chestnut horse that kept reaching back to lip their hair.
“Cinch her up slow,” Cye said. “If you go too fast, she’ll tense up her belly and you won’t be able to get the girth tight enough.”
“I read once that you’re supposed to smack their bellies to make them exhale, right?” Esther tentatively tapped her mare on the flank, garnering no response whatsoever.
Cye snorted. “You believe everything you read?”
Esther shook her head reflexively, then considered the question. “I guess I do,” she said. “I don’t read anything that’s Unapproved, and I don’t think the State would send Approved materials with outright lies in them. I don’t mean fiction,” she quickly added, seeing the way Cye’s face tightened. “I love fiction, but that’s not the same as lies. The book I’m thinking of, it was about cars, from back when everyone used to have them. I used to love cars when I was little, and I had this book about them, and—”
“Yeah, I get it,” Cye interrupted. “You’re bought-in.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I was bought-in,” Esther snapped. “l would be sewing a quilt for my hope chest if I was bought-in.”
Cye shook their head. “Sure,” they said. “You’re your own person, an independent spirit, a true outlier. Fine.”
They checked Esther’s horse over in silence, testing the tension on various straps and buckles. After a few minutes, the tension between them dissolved, and Cye started showing Esther how to braid the horses’ manes to keep them from tangling. They demonstrated the braids, explained why they left the tails and forelocks loose, to prevent the horses from getting sunburnt. They left Esther to finish the job of combing and re-braiding all of the horses, imploring her to try to remember anything about them—their names, their breeds, anything—by the time she was finished.
But as soon as Cye walked away, everything fell out of Esther’s mind save for the repetitive movement of the braiding and the question Cye had left her with. Not the question Cye had asked—do you believe everything you read?—but the question they hadn’t asked: why do you believe everything you read?
Riding wasn’t as bad as Esther had feared, once she got the hang of how to settle her bones into the saddle. Her body ached, but in a numb, distant way.
She was riding a horse with the Librarians of the Southwest Territory. She was riding a horse she’d saddled herself, a brown-and-black one that Cye had told her was called a bay.
She was far from Silas Whitmour, far from her father and his constant recitation of the things that were wrong with the world. She was far from memories of Beatriz.
That last part, that was for the best. She hadn’t saved anything, hadn’t kept a single trophy to remember her by. Not a letter scored with creases, not the locket Beatriz had worn for years and years, not a ticket stub from a show they’d seen together—nothing. She’d left it all behind, and nothing about the scrub or the sand or the gravel or the wheeling hawks overhead did a single thing to remind Esther of their time together. The lizards that sunned themselves on every other stone along the road didn’t know about the way Beatriz had chewed on the pad of her thumb when she was thinking. The horse hadn’t a single memory of the time Beatriz’s parents had gone to another territory for a whole weekend. The desert crows had never heard Beatriz breathing softly in her sleep.
Beatriz was in the past. And maybe, Esther thought, if she was lucky, the things she’d felt for her could be in the past too.
There was, of course, the problem of Leda and Bet. They were clearly together—a couple, and a long-standing one at that. Seeing them together, as comfortable as they were, made it feel almost as though a relationship like theirs might be possible. They had each other, had found each other, and they seemed to love each other relentlessly and fearlessly. It was almost enough to make Esther feel like she and Beatriz could have found the same kind of life if they’d only tried hard enough, only known it was possible, only wanted it enough.
But that was a fool’s errand. Esther knew it. She’d seen it for herself when the rope that kept Beatriz from hitting the ground snapped taut.
Esther shook her head and forced herself to concentrate on Cye, who was whispering something to their horse. They leaned in, conspiratorial, and their lips moved in an unknowable rhythm—the horse’s ear twitched at the secret, and Esther couldn’t help wishing those lips were next to her own ear instead. Cye patted the horse on the shoulder with an open palm as they glanced over their shoulder, their eyes meeting Esther’s for a moment.
Those eyes.
Esther shook herself. This was not the time, the place, or the attitude. She dug her heels into her horse’s flanks, pulling up next to Cye. Their horse was golden-blond, the same color as Esther’s own hair. It was a color Cye had described as palomino, and from the glint in their eye when they explained it to her, Esther had a feeling that it was only a matter of time before she had a new nickname.
She was going to force herself to face those glinting eyes, one way or another. She was going to find a way to look at them without a flush rising in her cheeks, without her hands going clumsy. She had to, she knew she had to—before the broken thing inside of her got out of control and feelings turned into feelings.
“Where are we going?” Esther asked, a little breathless from riding. Only from riding, she assured herself. Not from anything—or anyone—else.
“Pickup,” Cye answered curtly.
“Where’s the pickup?”
Cye laughed. “Honestly, if you are a spy for the State, you’re fucking terrible at it. You’re supposed to, you know…” Their brow wrinkled as they searched for the right words. “You’re supposed to manipulate us into telling you things. You shouldn’t just up and ask.”
“I’m not a spy,” Esther said. “I’m just trying to find out where I’m going.”
“We’re going to the pickup,” Cye said. Then, after a moment, they grimaced and added, “I don’t know where it is. Only Bet knows where it is. So I’m following her, and you’re following me. We’ve got a town in the meantime—maybe instead of worrying about the pickup, you should worry about how you’ll make yourself useful while we’re there.”
“Do you know how far it is?” Esther asked, and Cye shook their head.
“We ride until we stop,” they said. “It’ll come before the Sedona checkpoint.”
“That’s a ways off,” Esther ventured.
“Sure would be nice to have cars to get there with, wouldn’t it?” Cye said, their eyes cutting sideways at her. Esther couldn’t tell if she was in on the joke or not.
“Cars wouldn’t do much good without fuel to make them go,” she said slowly.
“Mm. Well, tell you what,” Cye said, and their face softened with private mirth. “While we’re in town, you ride on into the Central Corridor and ask the troops if you can have some diesel, and then I’ll meet you back here with a car, and then we’ll be all set.”
Esther laughed. “I don’t think they’ve got it to spare,” she said.
Cye nodded. “Sure,” they said, their voice cool. “They need all they’ve got. Can’t power tanks with hopes and dreams, now can they?” Esther could tell she’d said something wrong, but before she could ask what it was, Cye gave her a nod. “We’ll be at the pickup soon enough, don’t you worry. No detours to the Corridor required. Now go on and ride behind the wagons, make sure we don’t get any more hopalongs.”
After a minute of uncomfortable silence, Esther let her horse slow down enough to fall back behind Cye again. That put her in front of the two mules that were pulling the hitched-together wagons—one of them the wagon where she’d hidden—and behind everyone else. She watched Cye on their palomino, their pace steady enough to lead the two other horses behind them.
The horses Cye had hitched to their own saddle horn by long leads were gray and dappled. Esther had asked what kinds of horses they were, back at camp when she was trying to get everything right. Cye had said “fleabitten,” and it had taken Esther a long time to figure out that the answer wasn’t a joke. She hadn’t figured out that “fleabitten” was a real way to describe a horse until the third time Cye gave her the same answer, with considerably less patience and at a higher volume than the first two times they’d given it.
Esther let herself fall back more, until she was behind the wagons. Now, she thought, we’re all in order of importance. Leda and Bet in the front, and then Cye and those fleabitten horses, and then the mules, and then the wagons, and then me.
The wagon in front held clothes, food, and supplies—that was the one Esther had hidden herself away in those two sweltering days. The back wagon was the more important one, the one with all of the Approved Materials the Librarians were tasked with distributing: books, pamphlets, music, films, and magazines that had been vetted already by the State. The Approved Materials were considered educational and entertaining, honest and inspiring. These were the materials that shaped the nation. They made sure that everyone had the same information, the same stories and the same songs to share, the same videos to watch. They united the entire country, reinforcing the values of the citizens.
Esther had always loved it when the Librarians came to town, because it meant new Approved Materials. Her father was important enough that she got first pick of the things that came off the wagon. She’d never once lacked for new things to read, but she’d still reread the same few titles over and over again: The Odd Girl, Fifth-Story Woman, The Lily Path. She watched the back of the Approved Materials wagon, and she wondered if those stories were in there. Maybe, under that canvas, there were new tales—tales of women who left their husbands, who found forbidden love for a few short days before dying or going insane.
She watched the wagon, and she wondered, wondered hard—until the wagon stopped moving. At the sound of Bet’s sharp, two-tone whistle, the mare beneath Esther stopped walking.
Esther waited to be told what to do, why they were stopping. Her eyes were on the back of that wagon, and she wanted to see what was happening, but she’d been told to stay put. Hadn’t she? She was so tired from riding in the heat, and she felt sure that Cye had told her to stay where she was. She listened to the distant rhythm of Bet and Leda’s voices as they talked to whoever it was they were greeting. The strip of scrubland where they’d stopped didn’t look different from the landscape they’d been riding through—that same endless stretch of brown with intermittent patches of green and gray.
Finally, Esther clucked at her horse and leaned hard to one side, trying to peer around the wagon.
There was a shack. It didn’t look like a place where a person would live—didn’t look big enough to sleep in, even—but it was shade, at least, and Esther couldn’t help but long for the cool dark of the interior. Two young girls were crowded together in the doorway, clinging to each other. One of them had the tip of a long braid in her mouth; her eyes were fixed tight on Bet’s horse, urgent longing plain in her gaze.
In front of the shack, Bet and Leda were on foot, talking to a man who might have been twenty-five as easily as he might have been sixty. He squinted in the sunlight, his worn face creasing tight around his hard, glinting eyes. He gripped a rifle in one hand. After a few moments of conversation that Esther couldn’t quite make out, he let out a loud laugh, his head tipping back to reveal the dark spaces where several of his teeth had once been.
Cye interrupted Esther’s view, their horse’s hooves crunching in the rough sand. They didn’t say anything until they were close enough to touch—close enough to speak without being overheard by any unwelcome ears. They’d changed into a long, dark skirt similar to Bet’s, although Esther couldn’t fathom when they’d found the time to do it without dismounting. She could feel the heat of their horse’s flank against her leg, could hear the creak of leather under Cye’s hands as they fidgeted with the reins.
“You’re a bookbinder,” they said.
At first, Esther thought she’d misheard. “I’m a what? What is this place?”
“Town,” Cye replied simply.
“Does it have a name?”
“This is Town,” they said again. “You’ll see—it’s not big enough to have a real name, and that means it’s small enough that everyone in it remembers every one of us. We don’t need any questions, so Bet and Leda just told the mayor that you’re our new bookbinder. If anyone asks, that’s who you are. Understand?”
“I … what?” Esther said, feeling stupid. “I make books?”
“You fix them,” Cye answered. “Supplies are in the Materials wagon, so if anyone asks you any questions, you can just hide in there. You ought to be good at that, oughtn’t you?” They started to turn away, as though what they’d said hadn’t been made to sting Esther in a tender spot. Then they stopped and turned back, meeting Esther’s eyes with a sharp, urgent stare. “And don’t forget. While we’re in Town, you call me a woman.”
Esther swallowed hard, nodding. “Sure,” she said. “Yes, I mean. I understand.”
They were interrupted by another whistle, although Esther wasn’t sure there was much left to say anyway. At the sharp sound, Cye wheeled around and trotted their horse up to the front of the convoy as the wagons started to move again. They stopped so soon that Esther thought they’d forgotten something—but then she realized that this was it.
This was Town.
It was a fistful of dugout houses clenched around a well, everything shored up with corrugated tin and brown brick. There was a hitching post next to the well. Cye and Esther watered the horses there, and before too long, the children of the town had gathered around them. The kids whispered to each other, their eyes fixed on the drinking horses, shy as rock squirrels until Cye invited the girl with the braid in her mouth to come pet one. Once her hand found the horse’s flank, the safety was off; the children swarmed Cye, flinging a thousand questions about what the horses ate and what were their names and were they friends with each other and did they have best friends.
Esther watched as Cye hauled a little boy up onto the back of the patient mare she’d been riding just a few minutes before, showing him how to grip the saddle horn so he wouldn’t fall. They tipped their head back, grinning at the boy, telling him he looked like a real Librarian up there.
“I ain’t!” he cried. “Librarians is ladies. I’m a soldier!”
Cye’s mouth twitched down at the corner, but they didn’t argue with the boy. “A soldier you are, then,” they said. The boy let out a whoop and leaned forward in the saddle. That mare wasn’t about to budge, but Esther could see it plain on his face—he thought he could feel the wind in his hair. He thought he could smell a battle on that nonexistent breeze, and he wanted to go there more than anything.
He wanted to be a soldier for his country. He wanted a chance at a fight.
He wanted a chance to die.
Cye and Esther set up camp a quarter of a mile away from the northmost shack along the road as the Head Librarian and her Assistant went door to door, delivering updated Approved Materials and collecting returns. Town was small enough that Bet and Leda finished off the Librarians’ deliveries well before nightfall; the cookfire was hardly built by the time they returned to the wagons. Both of them carried satchels that hung heavy from their shoulders.
“Doesn’t look like you unloaded a single thing from that bag,” Esther said. As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them—she was sure that she’d said something rude, that Bet and Leda would hear her words as a criticism. But Leda laughed as loud as the mayor of the town had laughed at their arrival.
“We unloaded all of it,” she said, taking the satchel off and dropping it at Esther’s feet. “This is what we took back. Go on,” she added, nudging the satchel with her foot. “Take a look.”
Esther opened the satchel. There was food inside—jarred preserves, and a cloth bundle that was almost certainly bread, and a glass bottle filled with clear liquid that could only be some kind of homemade liquor. There were also books and pamphlets, all of them crumpled and dirty and as beat-up as a cheating gambler.
“What are these?” Esther asked as Bet dropped her satchel next to Leda’s. Cye squatted next to the two bags and started pulling out the food, stacking jars and parcels on the ground.
“Food. They like to thank us, even if we tell them they don’t have to. And kindling,” they said, pulling out fistfuls of crumpled pamphlets. There were instructions from the State in there, instructions on useful things like first aid and home remedies and how to defend your household from dangerous ideologies. When they were fresh, those pamphlets were folded into booklets and bound with twine, but now they were worn-out, outdated, little more than trash. The twine was long gone, Esther knew from her own town—pulled apart to use for thread, or wound together to use for rope, or any of a hundred things in between. “We have to take them back, or else these folks would take the paper to insulate their walls and shoes and what-haves,” Cye said.
They finished pulling out the pamphlets and the food. Esther stooped to pick up some of the fabric bundles, planning to carry them to the supply wagon, but Cye stopped her. “No, ma’am,” they said. The dark fabric of their skirt fluttered as they shoved a satchel with their boot, harder than Leda had nudged it earlier. “You’ve got work enough in here.”
Esther opened the satchel again, realizing that it wasn’t empty. There were several tattered books inside, the spines busted and the covers hanging on by threads. “What am I supposed to do with these?” Esther asked, pulling out a book only to have half the pages fall out at her feet.
“You’re the bookbinder,” Bet said, laying out her bedroll. Behind her, Leda snorted. “So … I suppose you’ll just have to bind them.”
An hour later, Leda poked her head into the back of the Materials wagon, climbing up onto the running board to lean past the canvas. “Now, listen here,” she said, her voice as stern as the set of her mouth. “You’ll have to take to teasing a little better if you want—what in the wide Hell are you doing?”
Esther looked up from her work, her hand frozen in mid-stitch. She held a long, wickedly curved needle between her fingers; a half-dead book on the history of the State was in her lap, the loose pages half-held to the leather cover by a series of narrow stitches. “I’m stitching the pages in,” Esther said. “The spine looks like it’s been pasted together too many times, and I don’t think the paste will hold, so I thought…” She trailed off at the incredulous look on Leda’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I ruin it?” She held the book up, trying to see what she’d done wrong. If she’d screwed this one up, she figured she’d have to redo the three books she’d already repaired. Her eyes were tired and her fingers were sore, and she dreaded having to repeat her last hour of work.
Leda shook her head slowly. “You—Hopalong,” she sighed. “We were only bustin’ your britches. We didn’t think you’d actually try to fix anything up on your own.” She took one of the books from between Esther’s feet, turning it over in her hands. “What’d you do to this one?”
Esther chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment before answering, trying to decide if she was in trouble or not. “I thinned out some paste and used it to stiff up the fabric inside the cover,” she said. “So that crease in the cover won’t keep bending and wind up torn. And I patched some of the pages where they were worn thin enough to see through,” she added, pointing at the places where pages had been turned again and again, where rough fingers had rubbed away the fibers of the paper.
“Where’d you learn to do this?” Leda asked softly, turning the patched pages and inspecting Esther’s work.
Esther shrugged. “I didn’t,” she said. “I just figured it out. It’s not so different from any other kind of mending.”
“This is good work,” Leda said, putting the repaired book back with its fellows. “Stop for now, though. Cye should show you how a few things are done, so you don’t do anything that’ll hurt the paper in the long run.” She shook her head, hopping off the running board. “Here we all thought you just had to take yourself off to have a tantrum about Cye calling you a bookbinder.”
She said it offhandedly, but the comment stung the same way it’d stung when Cye had said that hiding was what Esther was good at. “I’m not useless, you know,” Esther muttered, climbing out of the wagon. Close by, the cookfire was starting to gain heat, and she flexed her sore fingers, trying to stretch them out before picking up a knife to prepare dinner.
“Sure,” Leda said, not breaking stride. “But you’re not a Librarian, either.”
Esther didn’t reply. She didn’t have to, because the only thing that mattered was the word Leda hadn’t said.
Yet, Esther thought fiercely. I’m not a Librarian yet.
Cye woke Esther when there were still stars scattered throughout the dark sky. “Get up, Hopalong,” they hissed, shaking Esther’s shoulder.
Esther asked what was going on, but no explanation was forthcoming. They broke camp in silence, Bet and Leda nowhere to be found, and it was only when Cye pulled Esther’s horse alongside theirs that Esther came fully awake.
“Cye,” she whispered, “is something wrong?”
Cye shook their head, barely visible in the thin light of the oncoming morning. “Pickup,” they whispered back.
A few miles past Town, just as a finger of sunlight shot over the horizon, Esther spotted them: six figures by the side of the road, all of them wearing skirts and hats, one of them holding on to a horse. Even from a distance, she recognized two of them as Bet and Leda. They stood in a huddle with four other women, two of them pale and two of them dark. As Cye and Esther drew closer, the horses and wagons behind them, the women turned silently as one to watch their approach.
None of them were holding a package, not that Esther could see. The smaller of the two black women had lush black curls and narrow shoulders; she gripped the reins of a sleek horse that was white with brown patches—a paint, Esther thought, although she wasn’t sure if that was a real kind of a horse or just one she’d made up in her head. The woman slipped up into the saddle like a bead of quicksilver sliding across a pane of glass.
Leda held up a hand, still silent. Cye walked the two fleabitten horses over and helped their riders mount them. In all that quiet, the sounds of the horses shifting their weight and blowing at each other seemed like the loudest noises in the world.
The taller of the two black women, the one still on the ground, gripped Bet in a tight embrace. Then, too soon for Esther to decide a single thing about what she’d seen, Bet was on her horse, Leda’s fist was lifted high into the air, and they were moving again. The second black woman stayed behind. When she saw Esther looking at her, she made a sharp shooing motion with her hands. Esther realized that she was going to be left behind if she sat around, waiting for answers.
She pushed her horse into a trot—at least, what she thought was a trot, something faster than a walk that bounced her painfully in the saddle. She caught up to Cye and stared ahead at the three new members of their party. The woman on the paint rode between Leda and Bet, her back straight and her carriage easy. Behind her, the two other women—a willowy brunette and a redhead with the extravagant curves of a bull fiddle—rode side by side, their legs stiff in their stirrups.
“What about the package?” Esther finally asked. “Are we still delivering it to Utah?”
“We got the package,” Cye hissed at her. “We’re going to Utah right now.”
“But there’s no package,” Esther pressed.
“Is too.” Cye lifted their chin toward the five women riding in front of them. “You’re looking at it.”
Esther peered at the women, trying to see what they might be carrying.
Cye snorted. “You must be as simple as you are pretty. They’re the package, Esther.” They grinned, the corners of their eyes crinkling with a wicked kind of mirth. “We’re delivering them.”