“Well,” said Lette, “that went about as well as sticking your balls in a fire pit.”
Will hung his head. It struck him as a fairly accurate description. But… “You saw them,” he said. “What was I supposed to do? They’re at the point where if I shatter their dreams, they’ll shatter me right back.”
“You are being fucking deserving of it,” rumbled Balur.
They were still all gathered around Quirk’s thaumatic cart. The crowd had dispersed, small groups wandering off chatting among themselves. At least they all seemed happy for now. They’d probably go on being happy right up until a dragon shat all over their life expectancy.
“Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing.”
They all looked at Quirk. She shrugged. “I mean,” she said, “what harm can hope do?”
“Well,” said Lette, “I suppose it depends on how utterly futile it is, and how many dragons you have chasing you.”
“Imagine if it had worked,” Quirk said. “Imagine you managed to rip all their hope from them. How much would that really help?”
“Well,” Lette said, clearly deciding to ignore Quirk, “now we know that our options are to die at the hands of the dragons, or to die at the hands of an angry mob.”
“Dragons,” Balur said with a nod. Silence greeted this. Balur looked around, a slightly wounded expression on his face. “That was being the question, was it not?”
This wasn’t right. Will just wouldn’t accept it. They had killed Mattrax. They had the gold.
“There has to be another option,” Will said.
“Why?” Quirk looked genuinely interested.
“Because both of those options are shit.”
The smallest smile Lette could make ghosted across her lips. “The farm boy has a point.”
Will knew he did. He pressed it. “What could hide us? I mean truly hide us. Get us away from the crowd, the Consortium. Bury us where they would never look.”
Balur grunted. “Bury is not being the best word, I am thinking.”
“Shut up,” said Will, who was surprised by his own bravado. Balur must have been too, because instead of removing Will’s head from his spine, he did actually shut up.
Lette and Quirk regarded him in equal, skeptical silence.
“I’m serious,” he said.
Lette looked at the others, then back at him. She shrugged, quirked a half smile. “Money,” she said.
Will threw up his hands. “We have a whole truckload of money.”
“A rapidly diminishing truckload of money,” said Lette.
“How can we not have enough money?” asked Will. He peered over his shoulder back at the wagon, sack piled upon sack. It was, he felt, a more than legitimate question.
“I don’t think you fully conceive the Consortium’s resources.” Lette had a belligerent, lecturing tone. “You keep complaining that no one knows anything about Kondorra—well there’s one thing that everyone outside of Kondorra does know. It’s that the dragons are richer than the gods. That volcano you said they hang out in. I swear to you that it must be full to overflowing with gold. They can’t just track us to the end of the world. They can afford to build extra worlds to search on.”
“We are being so fucked.” Balur had apparently decided that it was time for more color commentary, “that a madam would be telling us that we had been earning out at her brothel.”
“I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world.” Lette’s face was as open and honest as he had ever seen it. “But if there is, then it’s about our only option. Buy ourselves a hole deep enough to hide in.” She shrugged sourly.
Silence fell on them. Because what else could you do when the future was that bleak.
And then, despite it all, Balur’s face split open with a wide grin. Sharp glinting tooth after sharp glinting tooth put on display in the dying afternoon light.
“What?” Lette asked him.
“More money, you are saying?” he said.
Lette looked at him curiously. “Yes.”
Balur’s grin widened even farther. He clapped his hands. “We,” he said, “are totally going to be killing us another dragon.”