Endurance was easy to find, once Esther got her horse to the main road. She just had to follow the flags.
The highways had fallen into serious disrepair some time before, just like any other street. Esther knew that they’d been smooth as glass once, before the money to keep them that way got soaked up by the money-sponge that was War. Nowadays, the best roads were paved with pea gravel—smooth enough not to hurt a horse’s hooves, if it was unshod, and easy to rake even.
The worst ones, of course, were pocked with potholes, uneven and puddled. Those were horsebreak roads, roads where a patch of water might be an inch deep or a foot, roads that ruined ankles. Those roads needed to be busted up, but doing the work by hand was ruinously difficult, and doing the work with machines meant allocating diesel for the job. A pea-gravel highway was the sign of a very wealthy town, indeed—a town that had managed to stretch a road-breaking crew all the way outside of city limits, that kept the road raked and even, was a town that had either Defense money or a whole stash of diesel to use.
The roads in Valor had been a mixed bunch, always in progress, always the subject of fundraisers and hasty repairs and town-hall meetings. The road to Endurance, on the other hand, stretched ahead of Esther like a river of gray, very nearly gleaming in the thin light of the lightening sky. The road was straight, flanked on either side by a wide expanse of desert. Esther shivered atop her horse, listening to the nighttime sounds of the things that lived there in this unlivable place, and kept her eyes locked on the two bright flags that fluttered in the distance.
They were enormous. They were signal flags, flags to indicate that there was a city here and that the city was loyal to the State. Flags that would be visible from high up in the air, just in case someone flying overhead wasn’t sure whether Endurance was a haven or a target. Flags that everyone in the city would be able to see by sunlight during the day, by spotlight at night. Valor had the same flags, although they weren’t so large, and Esther’s city couldn’t afford the electricity to keep them lit up every night—just on holidays. They dominated the horizon. They would be, Esther knew, replicated in miniature throughout the city, in school classrooms and front porches and windows. Esther’s father had always said that the flags were supposed to be a reminder of what the citizens were fighting for, what they were sacrificing for. They were a reminder of what was most important: the State, and the War, and everyone working together to keep both of those things going strong.
It struck Esther, suddenly, that the Librarians didn’t seem to have a flag. There wasn’t one painted on either wagon, wasn’t one draped across the canvas of the wagon cover. She hadn’t recalled seeing one folded up in the supply wagon, either.
She made a mental note to raise the issue with Bet and Leda. Surely, it was dangerous to them, she thought, not having a flag. Surely, someone would ask why they didn’t have one, someday in town.
As she rode her horse toward those two massive flags, Esther tried hard not to chew on her loyalties and where they might lie. She was sure that she wanted to be a Librarian, that she wanted to find a life where she could be something other than a curse. And she was sure that the Librarians weren’t friends of the State—they couldn’t be, not the way they lived. Not the way they talked.
Esther shifted in the saddle, her soreness from the punching lesson of the night before stacking on top of the ache that came with days of riding. She watched the flags grow larger, and she tried not to ask herself what that meant about her. What it meant about who her enemies might be and who she might have to hate.
What it meant about who might already hate her.
“I’m not going to think about that right now,” she muttered aloud, hoping that hearing the words would make them true. Her horse’s ears twitched at the sound of her voice, and she tried again. “I’m not going to think about it,” she told it. She touched her shirt pocket with light fingers, feeling the crinkle of Cye’s stolen identity papers alongside the supply list she’d scribbled down by moonlight. “I’m going to get to town, and I’m going to get supplies and bring them back, and that’ll be all.” The horse snorted the exact same way it had throughout their ride, but Esther replied as though the sound was a unique one. “It’ll work,” she said without conviction. “And if it doesn’t, at least I’ll have fresh rags to sit on tomorrow. It’s not like they can hate me more.”
This time, the horse did not reply, and they spent the remainder of the ride in silence.
By the time they passed between those two enormous flags, dawn was creeping over the mountains that marked the horizon. The Librarians would be awake by now, Esther knew—she only had to hope that they would find the note she’d pinned to her bedroll, and that they would wait for her to return before packing up their camp and leaving for the day.
If they didn’t wait for her, she reminded herself, she would just be on the road without a plan. Again.
She’d done it before. It wasn’t so scary now as it had been then.
The flags flapped overhead, but they were high enough above Esther that she couldn’t hear them snapping, nor could she feel the wind that stirred them. Nevertheless, her horse shifted uneasily at the movement of the fabric and the sound of the halyard snapping against the flagpole.
“You’ll want to walk that horse in town instead of riding it,” the checkpoint guard below the flags said lazily as he scanned the identity papers Esther handed him—Cye’s identity papers. He spat a lipful of brown saliva into a small tin bucket on his desk, adjusted the woven blanket that rested across his shoulders to ward off the damp cold of the early morning. It was a chill that the three walls of the guardhouse didn’t do a thing to stave off, Esther was sure. “People in town don’t like to see a lady up top of them. Makes it hard to give her a proper howdy.”
He smiled, and Esther smiled back, because that smile meant he wasn’t going to question her identity. He wasn’t looking at it closely, was paying more attention to her. “Oh, sure,” she said, using the warm, quiet voice she’d always relied on to keep men happy. It was a tone that said she wasn’t a threat, wasn’t going to laugh at them, was maybe a little impressed by them for a reason she wouldn’t reveal. “Would you be willing to give me a hand down? I’m just about stuck up here, froze onto this darn saddle.” She gave a little shiver, and the checkpoint guard’s smile warmed just as she’d known it would.
“What’s his name?” the guard asked, easing his way over to her and bracing a hand on the horse’s shoulder.
Esther had no idea. She hadn’t retained the names of any of the horses, in spite of Cye’s best efforts to impress them upon her. She tried to think of one, a lie, and the only thing that came into her head was awful, but she didn’t figure as she had a choice, so she said it.
“Silas.” She forced her smile a notch brighter. “His name’s Silas.”
She’d never wanted to think of Silas Whitmour again, not after the last time she’d seen him. Not after the way he’d stared at her while Beatriz snapped at the end of a rope. He’d looked at her like she was something to own and use and break, and now, here she was, as far away from him as she could muster, using his name on a horse that deserved better.
“That’s a fine name for a horse,” the guard said agreeably, his eyes on Esther’s collarbone.
She let her hand linger on his shoulder for a moment as she dismounted, and she hated herself for it, for all of it. For charming him. She hated herself, because she didn’t rightly know why she was bothering to do it—she didn’t need anything from him other than safe and free passage in and out of Endurance. But she did it anyway, more of a compulsion than a reflex. Her speech drifted to the familiar, the ungrammatical, the helpless. She caught herself tucking her chin down, trying to make herself look just a little shy.
The guard handed her a daylong pass, one that marked her not as a citizen of Endurance but as a known quantity who could stay until sundown. He winked at her, and she was flooded again with that hateful relief: This man liked her. This man would be nice to her. This man hadn’t guessed any of her secrets. “Go on, then, and get what you need before the heat gets to suffering. You and Silas here’ll want to be back at wherever you’re camped before then.” Esther tucked the day pass into her shirt pocket alongside the rest of her stolen papers and thanked the guard—but before she could get more than a few steps away from him, he called out to her again. “Oh, hold a minute. Get back here, now.”
Esther’s gut clenched in a spasm of terror. She hadn’t planned for this part—she hadn’t planned for what would happen if she didn’t get through the checkpoint. Why hadn’t she planned for this? She was stricken by her own naivete, that she might think she could just wander into Endurance, blithe as a lizard sunning itself on the frame of a gallows.
She swallowed hard, her throat tight with fear, and turned to face the guard.
“I almost forgot,” he said, extending a hand toward her. The hand held a piece of paper, thin as newsprint, the size of a playing card. “I’m s’posed to hand these to anyone who’s leaving town, but you might want it now. If you’ve seen her on your travels, you stop at the police station and let them know right away. They’re right in the middle of town, in the Patriot Square Pavilion.” He grinned, his lower lip bulging with chaw. “You couldn’t miss it if you was a drunk mule with a blindfold on.”
Esther took the paper he was holding out to her, marveling at the steadiness of her hand. She pretended to look at it, then folded it in half and tucked it into her shirt pocket. “Thank you so much,” she said, her tongue thick and half-numb with a combination of relief and draining panic. “I’m sure I’ll see you again on my way out.”
“I’m sure you will,” he said, tipping his hat. With that, the guard stepped back behind his desk in the little open-walled guardhouse. Esther walked away, waiting to hear him calling out to her again, but he didn’t. Still, she couldn’t breathe quite right again until she was a few minutes’ walk into Endurance, when she was sure he wouldn’t come chasing after her.
The streets were empty—it was too early for anyone but the milkman to be out—but she couldn’t afford to look suspicious, just in case that milkman came walking by. She tied her horse to the first hitching post she found and braced her hands against the saddle, pretending to adjust a stirrup until she could stop shaking. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. It’s alright. You did it. Just get the supplies and get out. This was the whole point.”
The horse didn’t respond.
Esther reached into her shirt pocket to pull out the list of supplies, figuring she’d start at the grocery and then work her way around Endurance to get the bits and pieces she couldn’t find there. She grabbed Cye’s identity papers by mistake. She tucked them away again, not knowing whether they’d be checked at the various stores she needed to visit, and reached back into the pocket.
She didn’t come away with the list that time, either. Her fingers found that newsprint-thin paper instead. She didn’t remember putting it into her shirt pocket, didn’t even remember taking it from the guard—she only remembered watching his face for any sign that he was about to draw his revolver and finish their conversation with talking-iron.
She unfolded it now, with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking even though the danger had passed. What he’d handed her, she found, was a miniature version of the wanted posters that hung in every grocery store, post office, and town hall. WANTED Dead or Alive, it began in tall, bold letters—and then beneath those, a description of the crime. For the murder by Assassination of Mason Turlock, Vice-President of the Southwest Territory. Any information about this individual to be reported to authorities immediately. Unlawful withholding of information about wanted individuals is a State and Federal Crime, it continued.
Esther’s breath caught in her throat. She hadn’t heard about the assassination. Hell, she’d been away from cities for long enough that she hadn’t so much as seen a flag at half-mast the day it happened. But her surprise at the news wasn’t what made her breath catch.
It was the sketch below the description of the crime. That was what stuck Esther, hard as a cactus quill.
The sketch looked familiar, and the name below it, printed in the same tall, bold letters as the word WANTED—that name looked familiar, too.
BUSTER “AMITY” COLE, INSURRECTIONIST ASSASSIN
Esther stared at the sketch and the name for a long time, but being ink on paper, none of it changed. There could be no question about what she was seeing.
The woman on the page was Amity, and it seemed that she was going to be a sight more trouble than she’d let on.