BANG.
Adelia’s fingers were slipping.
“Let go!” Hero called up. The words echoed faintly. Adelia’s fingers reflexively clenched around the wood of the windowsill as another bang echoed from within the room. He was breaking down the door.
“Adelia,” Hero hissed again, “Let go, I’ll catch you! It’s not that far!”
The next bang was accompanied by a crunch and then a shout. Adelia felt one of her fingernails split as she dug it into the wood of the windowsill—she flinched as a splinter slid into her nail bed, and then the world spun, and then she was falling.
“Oof—ghhuuuuh—” Hero was staggering under her, and then she was on her feet, although she still felt like she was falling. A firm hand on her back, and normally she would flinch away but the hand was cold even through her damp, clinging, too-hot shirt. It felt nice, like cool water—and then the cool hand was pushing her, and then they were running as shouts drifted down from the open window like blossoms falling from a magnolia tree.
A hat settled onto Adelia’s head, and the cool hand was pushing her into an alley, and then Hero was beside her, breathing hard with their back pressed to wall and their face turned to the street.
“Fuck,” Hero panted, wiping their forehead and throat with their kerchief. “Fuck, that was close.”
“What happened?” Adelia’s voice was raspy, shaking, and she realized belatedly that she was shivering. Hero noticed and shucked off their coat. As they reached across her to pull it over her shoulders, their forearm brushed her left breast, and pain erupted all through her chest. Her vision tunneled.
“Whoa, there,” Hero said, catching Adelia before she could fall. “Whoa, now—”
And then Adelia was the one falling like a magnolia blossom; she watched the ground float up toward her, watched Hero’s hands flutter into her field of vision, watched a hat—her hat?—land in front of her. The world slid sideways, and then she was looking at the saddlebag that rested on the ground between Hero’s boots, and then she closed her eyes and slid into blessedly still darkness.
* * *
Adelia woke up drowning.
She sputtered, her arms spasming. She reached out and grasped at the first soft thing she found. Her fingers were weak, sore as hell from gripping the window, but she tightened her grip with a will when the subject of her grasp let out a high-pitched noise. With her other hand, she pushed her hair out of her stinging eyes, blinking away water mixed with what must have been either her own sweat or her own blood. She sat up as she did it, ignoring how the movement made her head spin.
“Let—go—”
Adelia blinked a few more times and a dark face came into focus, barely visible by the thin light of the clouded-over moon.
“Hero?” she asked, and then she realized with horror that her weak fingers were clutching at Hero’s throat. She pulled her hand away—god, no, for the second time in a day she’d almost—
“Lo siento,” she rasped, her voice hoarse. She felt as though she’d swallowed a bolt of burlap. Hero was coughing, tears streaming down their face, and Adelia felt a flush of shame fighting her urge to shiver. “Why am I wet? What happened?”
Hero was too busy gasping to answer, so Adelia looked around. She was sitting in reddish clay, in a puddle. There was an ewer knocked over next to Hero, and a puddle.
Not drowning, then. Revived.
Adelia pressed her hands to her face, ignoring the feeling of cool clay slipping between her fingers and her cheeks. She was exhausted, felt as though she’d just ridden Zahra a thousand miles overland while carrying Stasia on her shoulders. She took a deep, slow breath, and realized that she could smell her own sweat over the rich decomposition smell of clay.
A groan and a splash sounded from behind her, not close but not far either. She startled, looked—and there, nosing at the edge of the paddock, was Hero’s old hippo, Abigail.
“Hero,” Adelia breathed. “Hero—Hero!” She slapped at Hero’s arm, and they glared at her, rubbing their throat.
“Yeah, welcome back to life,” they snapped. “Carried your ass all the damn way here, and I don’t mind telling you that you haven’t hardly lost that baby weight enough for my scrawny self to—”
“Shut up,” Adelia said, grabbing Hero by the chin before they could flinch away. “Tell me later. Look.”
She directed Hero’s chin, and their features clenched with the unmistakable air of patience about to reach a breaking point—but then they saw Abigail, and their face went slack.
“It can’t be,” Hero breathed. They scrambled up, slipping in the wet clay, and ran to the edge of the paddock. They reached right through the half-rotted wood at the edge of the water and pressed both hands to the nose of the little Standard Grey hippo that was huffing bubbles into the water there.
“It had better be,” Adelia said, “or else you just grabbed a strange hippo by the face.”
But Hero didn’t hear her. They were weeping, their face pressed between Abigail’s nostrils. They hadn’t seen her since the night the Harriet fell, the night they had nearly died, two months before—a night that suddenly felt so, so far away.
While Hero sobbed all over Abigail, Adelia rested her head in her hands and tried to piece the night together. Her thoughts were disjointed and slow, and her left breast throbbed with a steady pain, as though a hot coal had been inserted behind her nipple by someone with a steady hand and an eye for detail.
It hadn’t hurt this badly when she’d expressed her milk back at the inn, while Hero was downstairs at the bar—but her breast had been hot and red, swollen-looking. Infection, she thought, remembering the sickly smell of the milk she’d washed out of her shirt when they’d first arrived at Port Rouge. It had hurt then, and the pain was even worse now.
She remembered going to sleep at Hero’s behest.
She remembered waking up to a pounding on the door, and the sound of Hero talking to the mousy little innkeeper. She remembered the murmured exchange, catching the words “U.S. marshal” in the instant before Hero tore the blankets from her and pulled her out of bed.
She remembered Hero urging her out the window as footsteps hammered down the hall outside their door. She remembered the sounds of the door being broken down.
So, Adelia thought. This was it. He’d found her. Gran Carter had tracked her down—and he wasn’t alone.
“Hero,” she said abruptly. “Hero, we need to talk.”
“In a minute,” Hero said.
“It’s important.”
Hero didn’t answer. Adelia looked up and saw that they were staring across the water at a patch of reeds that swayed gently in the cool night air. They were saying something that almost sounded like “Ruby.”
“Hero?” Adelia hauled herself upright and walked over to the paddock to stand next to Hero as they held up a hand for silence. Abigail huffed warm air over Adelia’s fingers, then dismissed her as having nothing to offer and returned her attention to Hero, who patted her nose absently. “What is it?” Adelia asked.
“I thought I saw something,” Hero murmured. Their eyes were fixed on the reeds, which had gone still. Across the water, a hippo muttered to itself or someone else, then let out a long bleating groan. Hero shook their head, then looked at Adelia. “You look better,” they said. “We should ride while your fever is down. I think it broke while I was carrying you here. At least, you were sweating like it had broken.” They grimaced, and Adelia gave them a sympathetic frown.
“Thank you,” Adelia finally managed, feeling awkward as she said it. “For saving me.”
Hero shrugged uncomfortably and began performing an unnecessarily thorough inspection of Abigail’s ears. “Wasn’t anything you wouldn’t have done for me,” they muttered, and Adelia felt tears spring to her eyes. That wasn’t something anyone had ever said about her before.
“Hero,” she began—but then Hero straightened, wiping their hands on their pants, and shook their head.
“We’ll talk about it later,” they said. “For now, we need to go. We can’t stay here.” They started walking toward the locked tack shed next to the paddock, and Abigail began hauling herself out of the water, following her hopper. The hippo lumbered over to Adelia, water streaming from her belly, and nosed at her shoulder.
“Hola, Abi,” Adelia whispered, wiping at her eyes. She gave the hippo’s shoulder a pat as Hero swore at the lock on the tack shed. They had their eyes right up next to it, straining to manipulate their lock picks by moonlight. “Your Hero over there is something else, eh? What do you think—would you trust them?” Abigail gave no reply, but continued to drip as Adelia rubbed her side. “I thought so,” Adelia murmured. “I thought you would say that.”
Hero returned a few minutes later, carrying Abigail’s riding saddle in their arms.
“I don’t know who found her,” they said, “but they’ve been taking good care of her. I thought this whole time that maybe—when the Harriet—” Their voice broke, and they didn’t continue. After a moment, they shook their head and made a noise like they were swallowing a piece of glass. “Never mind,” they muttered, and they saddled Abigail in silence.
The hippo entered the water with no great urgency, pausing frequently to flip her ears and duck her head. “No point rushing her,” Hero shrugged after Adelia’s third sidelong glance at them. “She likes to move at her own pace, Abigail does. Meantime, we should figure out where it is you want to go. Somewhere Carter won’t be able to find us, I should think.”
“Where I want to go is to a house in the country with a bathtub and a soft bed,” Adelia said. Abigail finished blowing bubbles in the water, and presented herself at the water’s edge. “Where I’m going to go? That should be obvious.”
“Where we’re going to go. Enlighten me,” Hero drawled, swinging themself into the saddle and holding out a hand to Adelia. There was just enough room on the saddle for both of them. Adelia gripped the webbing on Abigail’s harness and adjusted the grip of her thighs on the sides of the saddle.
“We’re going to visit Whelan Parrish,” Adelia replied. “We’re going to find out what the hell it is that he wants. And then we’re going to get Ysabel back.”
As Abigail set off, a splash sounded from behind them. Hero, who was bent forward and cooing into Abigail’s ear, didn’t seem to notice. Adelia looked over her shoulder and saw that the reeds were moving again. A bone-white nose stuck up out of the water for a moment before disappearing again below the surface.
“Did you say something?” Hero asked.
“No,” Adelia replied. “I thought I saw—no, never mind,” she said, shaking her head. “It was nothing.”
It had been nothing. A trick of the moonlight on the water. As they rode out of Port Rouge, Adelia began to shiver again. She told herself that it was just her fever, returning in earnest and making her see things. It’s only the fever, she told herself. Don’t tell Hero about your hallucinations. You’ll only reopen the wound. Her conscience twitched. Haven’t you hurt them enough?
* * *
“Adelia?”
Adelia startled awake. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d woken naturally. Whether she was startling awake because the baby was crying or because someone was trying to catch her or because she was dreaming about blood and death—it didn’t matter. She was always stuttering into consciousness, her breath in her throat and her heart pounding.
“What is—what?” she said, her voice rasping in her throat. Her mouth tasted like a dead thing. A canteen appeared before her, and she drained it before she could think to turn it away. You’re getting complacent, she scolded herself.
“Thought you might want to wake up,” Hero said mildly over their shoulder. “We’re getting into an iffy part of the water.”
Adelia blinked, took in her surroundings. It was bright out, startlingly bright, and the air over the surface of the water teemed with dragonflies. Abigail was pushing forward through a thicket of water hyacinth quickly enough that Adelia guessed the hippo had eaten her fill a ways back. But she could see what Hero was worried about: a few hundred feet ahead of them, the hyacinth started to thin, exposing the muddy waters of Thompson Creek.
“I’m awake,” Adelia said, and she reached instinctively for a weapon, any weapon. Her throwing knives were still strapped to her left arm, and the long, curved knife she kept strapped to her thigh was still there—but the rest of her weapons, she realized belatedly, were still back at the Hop’s Tusk.
Adelia suddenly felt very naked.
“Don’t be too nervous,” Hero said. “I don’t think any ferals will have made it this far up the creek. And if they did, they’ve probably been gorging themselves on whatever was living in here. So they shouldn’t be too hungry, I don’t think.”
“I’m not nervous,” Adelia snapped, scanning the surface of the water. It was still, save for the water bugs that skimmed back and forth, waiting to be eaten by enterprising fish.
“Sure,” Hero said. “Anyway, I’d say we’re just a few more hours away from the place Parrish told us to meet him. We’re not making bad time at all. Wondered if you might want to talk about what it is that we’re going to do when we get there?”
Adelia wanted so badly to growl that they’d kill Parrish on sight—but she knew that wouldn’t be the case, and she suspected that Hero would see right through her. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “I suppose we will have to wait and see.”
“He won’t have Ysabel anywhere we can get to her,” Hero said. “You know that, right?”
“I know,” Adelia murmured, hating that Hero was right. “We will have to figure it out when we arrive. I . . .” She faltered.
“You don’t want to guess,” Hero filled in. “You don’t want to try to make a plan that will inevitably turn out to be wrong.”
“Aren’t you the smart one? Why don’t you have a plan?” Adelia snapped.
“I was too busy saving your life to come up with one in the last hour,” Hero replied tartly.
Adelia didn’t say anything—Hero was right, and they knew that they were right, and they didn’t need her to tell them so. She bent slowly toward the water, pushing the thinning hyacinth aside to scoop up a hatful of relatively clear water. She poured it over herself, sluicing away fever-sweat. Abigail’s tail flicked behind her, and for a few minutes, the only sound was the splash of Adelia’s hat dipping into the water and tipping over her head.
Hero coughed. “Do you mind?” they said, and at first Adelia didn’t know what they meant—but then she realized that they were close enough together on the saddle that Hero’s back was soaked.
“Sorry, sorry,” Adelia laughed, combing her wet hair back from her face with her fingers before putting her hat back on. “I—I didn’t think—”
“It’s fine,” Hero grumbled, and the set of their shoulders was so offended that Adelia burst out laughing again.
“I really am very sorry, Hero,” she said. “I think the fever cooked my brain.”
“It’s alright,” Hero said with a glance over their shoulder. “It’s kind of nice. My back was getting mighty hot what with your feverish self trying hard to be a furnace back there. How are you feeling?”
“Like a trough of hop shit,” Adelia said.
Hero chuckled to themself. “So, a bit better, then?”
“A bit,” Adelia said, smiling. She tilted her head back and let the sun warm her damp face for a few minutes before returning her attention to the water. A ripple broke the surface, and she tensed, reaching for a blade to throw—but it was just a fish, reducing the number of water bugs on the creek by one.
“What about after?” Hero murmured, softly enough that Adelia wouldn’t have heard it if Abigail hadn’t stopped to investigate a toad in her path.
“What about it?” Adelia replied.
“What will you do, after we get Ysabel back?” Hero tugged on Abigail’s harness, and the hippo waded forward again, leaving the relieved toad behind. “Will you go back into the wilderness and hide?”
Adelia shifted in the saddle. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so.”
“Will you go back to work? What’s going to happen?” Hero sounded oddly agitated. Adelia felt a heat rise in her scalp, and took off her hat to fan herself with it.
“No,” she said, forcing her voice to be cold and flat so that she wouldn’t yell. “I will not be going ‘back to work.’ That—that will never happen.” Hero didn’t say anything, and Adelia found herself wanting to continue in spite of—because of?—the sudden flush of anger. “I have not ‘worked’ in nearly a year now, Hero, did you know that? Did you know that it’s been that long since I’ve taken a life?” She spat into the water. “A year. That’s the longest I’ve gone since the first time. A year.”
“I didn’t know that,” Hero murmured, their shoulders tense.
“I didn’t even kill Travers,” Adelia said, her pulse pounding in her ears. “I didn’t even kill you, Dios ayúdame. I am—do you understand me? I am finished with it.” Her fists were clenched tightly in her lap, and she could feel her fingernails driving crescents into her palms. “I am done with that.”
“Sure,” Hero said. “I hear you. You’ve retired.” They got quiet, spoke in the slow cadence of someone finally coming to understand. “You didn’t kill me.”
“I’ve retired,” Adelia repeated, flexing her fingers. “I am retired.”
“Give you some advice?” Hero asked, then continued without waiting for Adelia’s reply. “Find yourself something to do. Find a hobby. Otherwise . . . you get restless. Lonesome.”
“Lonesome?” Adelia asked, holding back a sharp, bitter laugh. “I have been alone all my life, Hero. I don’t think loneliness would be a problem for me.”
“Alone and lonely ain’t the same thing at all,” Hero said, shaking their head. Adelia couldn’t see their face, but it sounded as though the words hurt them. “You of all people should know that. And even if they were the same—you would think that being alone and retired would be no different from feeling alone in your job. But you’d be wrong.”
“You wouldn’t know a goddamn thing about it, Hero,” Adelia snapped. “You may not be as infamous as Archie, but you have your own reputation, sí? You always worked in a team. It’s why your hands have stayed so soft.” She regretted it the instant she said it, but they both knew it was true—Hero was a behind-the-scenes type, a tinkerer, a poisoner. They had fingers made for capping vials and twisting wires together. They didn’t have the knife scars ubiquitous to most hoppers, with one notable exception.
“Exactly,” Hero murmured. “I’ve been hearing that my whole life. It’s lonesome being a killer, Adelia. But it’s lonesome staying behind while the killers pour your poison into someone’s drink, too. It’s lonesome to be back at the ranch while someone else sets up the bombs you rigged. Don’t tell me I don’t know lonesome.” Their voice was soft, but not sad. Not even angry. Just . . . resigned.
Adelia chewed on it—the idea of Hero being lonely. The idea of their bright mind—always working—growing bored in their retirement. She chewed on it, and perhaps it was her fever making her bold, but she finally asked the question that she had known all along she was not supposed to ask.
“Why did you retire?” she said. “Why not just . . . roughen your hands a bit?”
“Same reason as you,” Hero said. “I got tired of killing people.” Adelia started to protest, but Hero held up a hand. “Don’t try to deny it. I heard you a minute ago—you’re finished with it. You’re done. I know how that is too.”
“Oh?”
Hero spat into the water, then reached down to run a hand across Abigail’s flank. “You kill the first one, and it’s not as bad as you thought it would be. You kill the second one, and it’s not better, not exactly. But it’s more not-so-bad. You kill the third one and you realize that you’re good at it.” They scooped up a handful of water and splashed it across the hippo’s shoulders, darkening her grey hide. “You start to get a reputation, and you realize that people think you’re great at it. You start to take real pride in your work. You start to make real damn money.” Another handful of water, this one across Abigail’s neck. The hippo grunted appreciatively, flapping her ears. “You dream about contracts and you start tasting your own poisons to get a feel for how they land in the gut, and you love it. And then you’re doing it because you love it, and you think you’ve really found your calling. You’re so fucking good at this.” They poured another handful of water between Abigail’s ears, rubbing it across her skin with a long-fingered hand. “So you keep on mixing poisons and blasting vault doors open until you could do it in your sleep. And then one day, some kid shows up at your door and says that they’ve heard you’re the best in the business, and you think—am I?”
Adelia didn’t say anything, even as Hero’s pause thickened.
“You realize,” Hero finally said softly, “that you’re only doing the job because you’re good at it. That you only love it because you’re good at it. You realize that somewhere along the way, you forgot that you’re killing people. You don’t feel a goddamn ounce of the remorse that your mother’s preacher said you’d feel if you ever took another life—you just feel bored.” Their voice dropped to a whisper. “You feel bored by the murders. And you wonder who you are, that you can say that about yourself—that you’re bored by the murders.”
Adelia swallowed hard, brushing away a mosquito that had come to investigate the tears that had traced trails to the hollow of her throat. She watched the sandy banks of Thompson Creek drift by—she spotted only a single feral sunning itself on the shore, so still that not even Abigail noticed it there. She lifted a fistful of muddy water to her face to wash away the salt and sweat that had accumulated. By the time her face was dry, Abigail was climbing up out of the creek and starting down the man-made stream that led to Whelan Parrish’s barge.