In heist movies, the crew rode away laughing, splitting the score, with jazz playing.
This was not that movie.
The cart creaked, and the horses breathed hard through their noses, because they could smell what was on the men with them.
Nobody spoke.
It was the silence of an elevator after someone has done something unforgivable, where everyone knows and has to keep breathing anyway.
Through the sense, Hunter felt the three of them behind him.
Tao kept nodding off on the cart and jerking awake.
Xuan was humming something tuneless under his breath, over and over, that might once have been a lullaby.
Lex had the reins in a grip that would have strangled a smaller animal.
[LUNA] SO!
FIRST RAID!
PRETTY GOOD FOR A ROOKIE, APART FROM THE CRYING OVER THE—
Don’t.
It came out of him so hard that the horse flattened its ears.
Don’t you dare make that a joke.
He was a person.
He had a spear and a bucket and a jar behind the gatepost, and he stood in the gate because he wasn’t going to run, and I went through him like he was nothing.
You don’t get to do bits about him.
The text sat there.
He rode on.
The forest was very quiet around them.
There were no birds calling, and the small things in the undergrowth had gone still as the cart passed, and he couldn’t blame them.
It was two men now.
He counted them the way he used to count claims at the end of a bad week.
There was the leader on the hillside, whom he’d chosen, with the sword in both hands and his weight on the blade.
And there was the old man in the gate.
He’d told himself all the way home that it was physics, a man who wouldn’t move, but that wasn’t true.
There had been a half-second and a soft field to swerve into.
He hadn’t swerved.
Tao was in there, and swerving would have cost him the run.
He hadn’t meant to kill anyone.
He had decided not to stop.
In Boston, the worst thing he’d ever done was take a stapler home from the office.
He’d felt so guilty he brought it back on Monday and put it on the supply shelf when nobody was looking.
What am I doing?
[LUNA] SURVIVING
She’d come back carefully, he noticed, without a face on it.
That’s not an answer.
[LUNA] IT’S THE ONLY ONE THAT COUNTS.
YOU DIDN’T PICK THIS. New chapters come out on g.com first.
YOU’RE PICKING WHAT YOU CAN
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t tell her to go away either.
It was deep in the night when they came down through the last of the trees to the lake.
The two moons had come around overhead and laid two roads of light across the water, one white and one faintly violet.
The camp looked exactly as they’d left it, which was an insult.
He got off the horse badly, his legs locked from the ride, and caught himself on its neck.
The blood had dried stiff in his clothes.
It cracked when he moved.
“Go and wash, all of you,” he told the three of them.
“Then come back to the fire.”
They went down to the water without a word.
He waited until they were in, then went in himself, further along, in his clothes, and scrubbed until his knuckles bled.
He left the shirt on the bottom of the lake.
He didn’t want to see it again.
When he came back up, dressed in a stranger’s coat from the Clearwater sacks, they were sitting around the fire.
Clean and pale and not looking at one another.
The water had taken the blood.
It hadn’t done anything about their eyes.
He sat down across from them and reached inside the coat, and took out the spirit stone.