“There you go, Whit.” I tighten the last strap on the little girl’s feet. The traveling boots I took off the bearded man in the stage are miles too big for her, but she’s outgrown her last pair of shoes and has been padding around with her toes sticking out. I’ve used leather thongs from an old bridle to cinch them to her feet. Not pretty, but it works.
She mumbles a thank you, the th sound distorted by her cleft lip, and shuffles away, leaving tracks in the dirt. I sit back on my heels and take off my broad-brimmed leather hat. The creases are lined with dust, and I beat it against my calf a few times. Nearby, Rat lifts his head at the noise, his bat ears perked up.
“Dust, dust, dust,” I say to him. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re all really purple or green underneath, but we’ve all turned the color of dust.”
He yawns and shakes his head, flapping his ears. A dirty cloud drifts from his fur.
Saiph emerges from the bushes, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, toweling himself off with a piece of sacking. “Seep’s free, Lark.”
“About time.” I get up and head through the scrub oak. Rat follows at my heels.
The seep sits against the wall of the canyon, deeper than a puddle but not enough to be a real pool. It’s born from our water pocket, the natural well in the rocks above that provides all our daily water. The pocket was how Rose and I first found our way into Three Lines Canyon, following the old three-lined petroglyph carved down near the mouth that proclaimed a source of water. The top of the pocket sits high up the canyon wall, and it takes a burning climb to get up to it, but in my four years holing up here, it’s never run dry. The water is cool and sweet, and as it trickles down the rock face, it leaves slick black streaks that attract clouds of yellow butterflies and dozens of sandy lizards that snap up flies.
The seep is low today, barely covering the pebbly bottom. It’s why we’ve designated this a washing day—if things dry up any more, all our water will have to be drawn and hauled down from the pocket, and after cooking and drinking there’ll be almost none to spare. Lila’s turn comes after mine today, and she’s pushy on washing days—there’s no time to waste. I start stripping off my clothes. Off comes my vest and dust-colored shirt. I kick off my boots—the only part of my wardrobe that’s really worth anything, as I lifted them off a well-dressed stage traveler a few months ago. After pulling off my trousers and holey stockings, I finally unhook my breast band and drape everything over a juniper bush.
The breeze is shearing up the canyon like it sometimes does, so I prop up the windbreak—a stiff old bison hide on a wooden frame—and settle down on the rocks lining the seep. I wiggle my feet through the grit and pebbles, letting them grind away the dirt creased between my toes. I bend forward, stretching out my neck, and untie the strip that holds my dreadlocks out of my face. My hair has been locked for as long as I can remember. I have vague memories of tangled curls, but whether my hair locked itself naturally or someone got it started back in Tellman’s Ditch, I was too young to remember. I have no desire to change it—I like how easy it is to keep up. No endless brushing, like Lila, to keep the knots and burrs out. No need to wrap it every night, like Rose, to keep it from drying out in the merciless desert heat.
I pinch a few of the locks in my fingers—I’m well past due for a wash, but our soap in camp is running low, and I’m almost entirely out of oil. It’s a shame—I found the bottle of high-end scalp oil by chance in a peddler’s trunk Pickle lifted in Bitter Springs. It’s perfumed, light and sweet—certainly the nicest-smelling thing I own, and I’ve been savoring it drop by drop for almost six months. Now it’s nearly gone, and I don’t have enough coin to justify buying another bottle, even the cheap stuff I can sometimes find in town. Sighing, I run my fingers through my hair, feeling the grit and grime along my scalp. No, I’ll have to wash today, oil or no, and bear the frizzing and dryness that will come along with it.
I cup handfuls of water and splash my arms and neck, leaving little tracks of slightly cleaner skin. I wipe at the dirt covering the tattoo on the inside of my right forearm, glad to see the ink isn’t bleeding. This tattoo—my longsword—and the other on my left forearm—my buckler—are two of my oldest. The point of the sword drives into the scarred concentric circle on my wrist, the brand all nonbonded laborers got in Tellman’s Ditch. I frown at the back of my hand, where the sun—my most recent tattoo—looks a little blurry near the ends of the rays. Ah, well. Rose told me the ink might not be as strong as it should be for that one.
The two words circling my wrists are clear, though. Strength on my right, my sword arm, and Perseverance on my left. I had to ask Saiph how to spell that word, and he stood over Rose’s shoulder as she worked, scratching out the letters in the dirt one by one so she got it right.
I twist to check the vaguely larkish bird on my right shoulder, and then lean back to check the coyote on my rib cage, its head thrown back in song like Rat sometimes does when he gets a wild hair about him. In this position, I see the six spots making an off-center circle around my navel. I rub at them. Sometimes what I think are marks are just flecks of stubborn dirt, but these have always been here. I think perhaps next I’ll have Rose connect them in a star. I saw the Alcoran flag once hanging on the wall of an outpost—a shiny white jewel surrounded by six-pointed stars. The idea of tattooing one of their national symbols onto my skin makes me smirk. It gives me the same satisfaction as naming my horse Jema after hearing about some famous old queen. Or young queen, or not-a-queen-anymore—I don’t know what the politics are. I just liked the idea of adding a fancy, stolen name to a fancy, stolen horse.
I splash my face and then crane my head to look at my last, and oldest tattoo. A river, starting at the top of my left shoulder and streaming down the outside of my arm. This is the only one Rose didn’t start, though she’s added to it over the years, making a sleeve. I got it started when I still worked in the rustlers’ camp. The big, dirty cowhand had just finished cutting a curvy lady into the big, dirty bicep of the cook when I sat down in front of him.
He had eyed me, scrawny and scratchy as a scrub oak, as I rolled up my dusty sleeve.
“What’cho want, Nit?” he had asked with some amusement.
“Water,” I said. “A whole bunch of water, like the South Burr.” That was the most water I’d ever seen in my life, a sluggish, dirt-colored channel, thick with the smell of cows.
He’d laughed. “S’gonna hurt some.”
“I’ll tell you if it hurts,” I said.
I watch a trickle run down the path of the river on my arm now. I’ve since seen bigger stretches of water—the river the South and North Burr run into, for one, and a reservoir a half mile wide. But it’s never enough. I have distant memories of the sea, which leads me to believe I started off somewhere in Paroa, or perhaps Cyprien, but these memories are laced with the taste of salt and a thirsty breeze, and they don’t entice me to seek out the coast. Fresh water, the most precious of all resources in the Ferinno, is what I constantly crave.
Thinking about the sea and tattoos and dirt and grime spurs a now-familiar memory that’s been dogging me for weeks—the voice of that bearded man with the ship tattoo in the stage outside Snaketown. His words have been nettling my thoughts since we wrecked his coach, usually at times like this, when I pause for breath between all the work around camp.
There are extremely influential people who are very interested in what you do. Life could be different for you and your fellows.
I close my eyes. Of course things could be different. But it’s easy for rich folk like that man to assume such a feat would be simple, because it all comes back to the system they’ve built, where they sit at the top and pretend not to notice what it is they’re sitting on. Who they’re sitting on. Rose, and Sedge, and Lila, and Saiph, and Andras, and little Whit—and all the uncounted scores of others who get eaten up by the bond labor system.
And we’re the lucky ones—the ones who got away. Rose had the shortest stint in the quarries of all of us—after her parents died, she entered herself into a three-year bond at the quarries down in Redalo, and when that was up she joined the cattle-rustling operation that found me. But Lila, the oldest among us, was trafficked her whole life, with no inkling of where she comes from beyond the evidence of her pale skin and dirty blond hair, which tells us she must be at least part Lumeni, a story she feeds with tales of shiny pearls and waterfalls she claims to half remember. But she’s not a full-blood—none of us are, except Rose and Andras, with their umber skin and curly black hair from the deep south of Cyprien.
Unlike Rose, though, Andras was stolen, and unlike Lila, he remembers his home and his parents. He’s my most recent rescue, and I’m working on finding a way to get him back into Cyprien without running up against the trafficking trade again. It’s tougher than the others I’ve managed to send back to their families in Moquoia and Alcoro—Cyprien is on the other side of Alcoro and is apparently half made of water, if tall tales can be believed, but I’ve never been anywhere near it and don’t have the first notion of how to get there.
Saiph is the only other one who recalls anything of his parents. His father was a drunk, he says, a failed trader from Moquoia who headed east into Alcoro to try his hand at cattle ranching. His mother worked for the Alcoran turquoise mines before they were all shut down with the opening of the fancy university. She gave him life and his Alcoran name, but she couldn’t give him much else, and after she died, his father handed him off to the first band of slavers for a sack full of drinking money. He, like me, didn’t have a bond and would have spent the rest of his life a slave if Rose and I hadn’t pulled him out of the wagon.
The rest of us are merely castoffs, with no history and no family. I scooped Pickle and little Whit up from the wagon train after bandits sold them to the slavers. Before them came Lila and Sedge, our big, sandy-haired probably Alcoran who still has the iron ring around his neck we found him with. On nights when there’s nothing else to do, we often take turns with our worn-out file, working on eventually cutting through the metal. We’ve got one full cut made, but it’s going to take two to get it off.
And then there are all the others who aren’t with us anymore—the ones I’ve managed to return back to their families. Bitty and Arana and Voss and half a dozen others, mostly little kids stolen from the desert towns and ranches. One or two had been sold by their families, and the best I could do for them was take them to a lodger in Teso’s Ford, where they had the chance of finding work. But doing that costs money—Teso’s Ford is a long way off, and the lodger won’t take anybody for free—and I can’t do it with the younger kids like Whit and Saiph. They’re stuck out here in this burned-out canyon until Rose and I can figure something out.
Rose has been with me longest—she and Cook found me half dead in the desert after I escaped the wagon. She’s the closest thing I can imagine to family. My skin is tawny brown to her deep umber, but it’s clear I’m part Cypri, like her. That’s my mother’s side in me—that I know from my hazy handful of bleak memories. Not that I remember her, per se, but I remember my father. Or at least, I remember his Alcoran name.
But I don’t like remembering. It’s a useless, painful pastime, and anyway, we have plenty of real-life problems to fret over instead. I flex my hands and splash water over my face again, trying to banish that sour feeling in my stomach. Droplets trickle over my lips, salty with my dried sweat.
In truth, we’re all a mess.
Rose’s false leg doesn’t fit her. Sedge fashioned it after seeing someone wearing one in Snaketown, but all the parts are random scraps—old leather saddle straps and a woolen shirt and buckles from who knows where. She walks with the stump end dragging in the dirt. Sedge is determined to make her a better one, but despite his capability with turning odds and ends into other odds and ends, a false leg is more complex than a slingshot. He tries, bless him, because he loves Rose with all his heart. I think if he could cut off his own leg and give it to her, he might just do it.
I might, too, for that matter.
She’s hardly the only one with something wrong—Pickle gets sores all over his lips that nothing seems to cure, adding to the old scars left over from a bout of childhood smallpox. Andras is always getting eye infections, pink and weeping. Lila doesn’t talk about it much, but I know she worries about her periods—they’re irregular and painful, sometimes just a few droplets, sometimes an intense flow that sees her puking for the better part of a week.
Whit worries me the most—her cleft lip affects her speech to the point that she often prefers to stay silent, but it’s not her only issue. Lately she seems to be disappearing bit by bit, her eyes sinking deeper into her paling skin. I wonder sometimes if she’s sick with some invisible disease. She needs to be seen by a healer, but the closest one is in Snaketown, a three-hour ride away—and besides, we don’t have the money to pay for that kind of medicine or surgery.
Sedge is probably the healthiest, or maybe Saiph—and I’m just waiting for the day one of them cracks their head open during a raid. Saiph, being the most educated among us, often has to serve as healer, despite him being younger than most of us and knowing practically nothing besides how to stanch blood flow.
And me. I suppose I’m healthy, too, unless you count a body that creaks and groans from constant abuse, a quarry cough that flares up now and then, and a gnawing anxiety that the bottom is about to drop out of everything. That someone will finally give in to one of the million things ready to kill us. That the posses from town will finally decide we’re a scab that needs to be picked and root out our camp hidden up in Three Lines Canyon. That Whit and Andras and Saiph and all the rest will go back in the wagons, their lives bought and sold and dragged to whatever labor industry needs an extra pair of hands.
That, ultimately, the same thing will happen to me.
I sink my hands under the shallow water and leave them there, letting the weight of my hair stretch out the rod of tension in my neck. This is why I hate slowing down—when I’m busy stocking camp and caring for my campmates, I don’t have time to dwell on all the trouble lurking just outside our fire ring. But thanks to that jumped-up bearded stage traveler, all the little anxieties keep finding their way into the rare quiet moments.
Life could be different.
I frown, balling my fists under the water. I would love for things to be different. Pickle could get the right medicine for his skin. Whit could get real food and real care. Andras could go back to his family in Cyprien. Rose could get a false leg that fits, not one that blisters her thigh or slides off when she rides. Sedge could get a paying job, Lila could creep back to Lumen Lake to figure out if that’s really where she comes from. Saiph could go to school.
But rich folk like the man in the stage—folk who have never been on the slimy fringes of society—don’t understand the risk those things cost. If I walk into the nearest town with sickly little Whit, or chapped Pickle, or wayward Andras, what happens next? There’s no scenario I can think of—no plausible scenario, anyway—where someone doesn’t end up on the side of the road, or in prison, or back in the slavers’ wagons.
There’s a clatter of rocks from beyond the windbreak.
“Lark, are you done?”
Lila. I flip my locks back behind my head and look over the hide. She’s standing expectantly by the tiny creek that flows away from the seep, already unbraiding her dark blond hair.
“No,” I reply.
She huffs. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“So?”
“So it’ll get cold, and don’t tell me to get the fire pit going, because then there’ll be smoke, and the whole reason for wash day is to not smell like smoke for a few hours.”
I sigh, splashing a last few handfuls of water under my arms and behind my neck. I could point out that the smoke keeps the flies from biting, but the truth is, I don’t want her starting the fire—over the years, we’ve picked Three Lines so clean of easy firewood that we have to ration it for the cookfire. Lighting a fire just for bathing would be a stupid waste of fuel.
“Fine,” I call. “The seep is yours.” I try to keep the irritation out of my voice—Lila can be annoying, but if she’s vain about her appearance now, it’s only because she finally has the freedom to be that way. I slick some of the water from my skin and stand from the rocks. The breeze up the canyon slices over the water left on my skin.
Lila already has half her clothes off and is standing expectantly at the edge of the seep. I pick my way out of the water, and she instantly takes my place. I collect my clothes from the juniper bush and make my way down the little creek, shivering in the breeze. She was right—the sun is edging toward the canyon rim, and the air is cooling quickly. I push through the willow shrubs along the creek until I get to a good flat rock that’s still in full sun, and I settle down onto it, my feet in the creek. I’m not quite ready to leave the water, as little as there may be.
Rat snoots around in the water, pawing at the rocks and then sneezing when he splashes his nose. In the distance, a pack of coyotes takes up an early-evening chorus, a rattling of yips and long, high howls. Rat lifts his head, looking up at the canyon wall.
“You’re a mutt like the rest of us,” I say, rubbing a shred of sacking over my skin. “Don’t belong here, don’t belong there. Who was the coyote? Your ma or your pa? Or do you know at all?”
He looks back at me, one ear still cocked backward at the carefree singing of his half siblings. His name is like most of ours, too—made up. When I found him as a pup, he had mange so fierce he looked like a drowned rat, his tail bald as a whip. Now his coat is thick and coarse and studded with burrs.
I reach out and scratch his ears, his fur sticking to my wet skin. He half closes his eyes lazily.
“You’ve got it the best of us, though,” I say. “At least you can survive on mice and carrion.”
He licks a patch of sweat I missed on my arm. The cool air sweeps across my bare back, stealing away the last of the water from the seep.
Through the bushes comes Rose’s telltale step-drag. I straighten as she approaches, her own sack towel draped over her shoulder.
“Is the seep free?”
“Lila beat you to it.”
She swears mildly, setting her sack down. “So it’ll be a while.”
“Probably.” I dig among my clothes for my precious sliver of soap as she eases herself down on a rock by the creek. As I pour a few handfuls of water over my head, she unfastens the straps on her false leg, sighing as she slides the cuff off her knee.
“Are the new buckles helping?” I ask, rubbing the scrap of soap into the barest lather.
“No. They’re stronger, but now they blister.” She hisses as she rolls back her pant leg, revealing a neat line of welts along her knee. “Don’t tell Sedge.”
I massage the soap into my scalp. “Maybe you need something quilted to line the cuff, like one of those fancy saddle blankets. They sell them in Snaketown.”
“And what will we buy one with? Our good looks?”
“We’ve got the coins from that old man’s purse. There are a couple of silver keys, at least.”
She snorts, dabbing a few of her blisters with creek water. “I’m not wasting a key on a blanket, not when we’re running out of cornmeal and you’re handling your soap like it’s a biscuit hot off the griddle.”
“If it keeps the stupid thing from hurting, Rose . . .”
“No. I’ll get a blanket somewhere else. Use the money on Whit, or Andras.” She pauses for a moment, examining the ragged scar above her knee, the only other remnant of the goring from the out-of-control bull, crazed by branding, that claimed her calf. “Speaking of which, have you . . . noticed anything about Andras?”
I let out a sigh. I’d been wondering if I was going to have to bring up the subject with her. “I noticed he missed the grab on a bucket handle last week. It was sitting there plain as day.”
She nods. “This morning he poured a stream of coffee straight past the cup and onto the ground.”
I dip my head forward and pour another few handfuls of water over it, watching it wash the precious suds downstream. I stay that way, leaning over my knees, my locks hanging down around my face. They form a curtain—I can almost imagine the whole world consists just of this little patch of running water between my feet, clear and cold.
“He needs medicine,” Rose continues. “Something for his eyes, before it’s too late.”
“He needs to get back to Cyprien,” I say. “Back to his family.”
“And how is that supposed to happen? He can’t make that trip. He’d be snapped up by the slavers again, or robbed . . . blind.” The last word trips out almost by accident.
“I’ll take him.”
“And how will you make the trip? I know you can survive on sand fleas and good luck, but he’s just a little kid, and that kind of travel costs money—for food, at the very least, if not lodging and supplies. Our couple of keys would barely get you to Teso’s Ford.”
I take one of my locks and roll it between my palm. The damp hair curls up by my scalp. “I’m working on it. If we save some of the coin we have now, all we need is another good hit or two on the stages.”
She goes quiet for a moment. “So that’s our long-term plan, is it? Just keep turning over stages?”
“What other option is there, Rose?”
“One of us could get a job.”
I twist another lock and then start on the next. “Yeah, taking up space in the town prison. Who’s going to hire us?”
“I believe the Alcoran Senate has expressed interest more than once.”
“I’m not turning myself in to them.”
“I didn’t say you had to. I could.”
I twist my next lock with vigor. “So they can give you a badge and push you back out in the desert to take all the same risks as before, only for their benefit?”
“At least there’d be money,” she shoots back. “There’d be food, and blankets, and medicine. Whit and Andras could be taken care of.”
“In an overcrowded public orphanage, if they’re lucky—more likely prison, just like Voss. The same goes for the rest of us.”
“It’s worth a shot.”
“It’s just a different form of slavery!” I yank my next lock a bit too vigorously. “They’ll own you again, only with papers this time.”
“What do you suggest?” she asks sharply. “Holing away out here in Three Lines for all eternity, while we all drop off like flies? The little ones can’t survive like this forever, Lark. We’re playing a dangerous enough game as it is. When you and I found this place four years ago, neither of us thought it was a permanent home, just a place to hide from the rustlers.”
“And then we found the water pocket and turned over our first coach,” I remind her. “And we realized it’s as good a home as we’re ever going to get. I’m not taking the others in to town. I’m not putting them at the mercy of a bunch of lawkeepers who wouldn’t care one scratch if we all went back into the wagons.” I roll another lock. “I’m not letting us all get scattered—you really want them to take little Whit or Andras away?”
“Are you scared about what will happen to them without you, or are you scared about what will happen to you without them?”
“I’m not scared.” I spit the words out and they hang between us. My scalp stings where I overtwisted my hair.
I’m not scared.
I’m terrified.
For all of us.
Rose sighs. She heaves herself off the rock and gives a little hop on her good leg so she can settle down behind me. She threads her fingers through my locks and rolls one in her palms, twisting more gently than me.
“I know you’re not scared,” she says. “The Sunshield Bandit isn’t scared of anything. But you are worried. You’d be stupid not to be. I’m just trying to consider all our options. We owe it to the little ones.”
I blow out my breath. “I know. And I’m going to make it better for them, starting with Andras. I’ll figure out a way to get him back to Cyprien. But don’t run off and turn yourself in to the Alcorans yet. Give me some time. I’ll figure it out.”
She snorts softly. “I’m sure you will.”
“I’m serious.”
“I am, too. Your life is one long I’ll figure it out. And you usually do.” She smooths a few of my locks down my back. “Just . . . remember that all that figuring doesn’t have to happen by yourself.”
I sigh and close my eyes. She’s probably right, but I can’t help but want to keep us all tucked up in the relatively safe haven of Three Lines Canyon.
The fewer of us actively battling against the Ferinno, the fewer it can claim.