She sank once more into the darkness, hearing in the distance the hundreds of voices that had brought her to this world. That red desert stretched across the blackness, where the cacti had taken the shape of hundreds of shadowy hands reaching for the sky.
And there she was, in the middle of it all—standing still, simply watching the crimson sun rise along the horizon.
This time there was no "Devil," and the real Bonnie wasn't there either. Just the desert, the sun, and loneliness itself.
'All of this must mean something—otherwise, why would I be seeing something this… unsettling?'
She raised her hand and covered the sun with her fingers. She thought about everything she would have to do starting tomorrow, which was no small thing. She was just a girl in a world this dangerous—and that was going to be incredibly hard. On top of that, there was this place.
There was far too much left to uncover.
"I have to find answers. I have to…"
She tightened her hand into a fist, resolved to see through what had barely even begun.
Then came small, quiet knocks against wood—and Bonnie looked back on pure instinct. She blinked a couple of times, and the next moment her eyes were open in that same room.
'What was that?'
It sounded like someone scraping along the walls and walking across the creaking wooden floor.
'Could it be the shotgun boy?'
Maybe. He was the so-called security stationed at the door with his shotgun—though he'd been sleeping soundly the whole time, completely unbothered. Even the old woman seemed like a better guard than him.
Just in case, she got up and raised the revolver in both hands. She positioned herself behind the door to listen—but the sound had come from outside rather than the hallway. Something scraping against the outer wall, with a brief whisper along with it.
She turned and aimed. A pair of scarlet eyes looked in through the window. A person—who quickly ducked below the window frame to get out of the revolver's line of sight. That threw Bonnie off. She walked toward the window.
She looked through the wooden bars. Her eyebrows rose, puzzled.
She could barely make out anything in the dark, but she managed to catch the silhouette of a woman dragging herself along the wall and into the alley.
Bonnie didn't lower her guard. She slipped out of her room and moved quietly down the hallway toward the far end, which conveniently had a small window along the side past the other bedroom doors.
Glancing back at the entrance to confirm the shotgun boy was still asleep, she considered whether that scarlet-eyed figure might be someone from the Devil's Cult—because someone with such an ominous appearance in the dead of night had to be part of that group of lunatics. But she had no proof.
She looked through the small window.
Banging against wooden crates and the sound of a woman groaning echoed below.
There, Bonnie finally saw who it was. She kept her aim as she squinted.
Collapsed between some crates with four bullet wounds across her white shirt, the woman's silhouette was lit up by the faint light from the house next door. She gripped her hat with difficulty while trying to push herself upright—but she coughed up blood and her forehead dropped forward.
'She's… hurt…'
She didn't look like one of those cult fanatics, and she didn't look like a woman working for the Sheriff either. Besides, the Warlock County Sheriff had no jurisdiction in this town—so it made no sense for anyone to have been sent to catch Bonnie here.
If anything, she looked like an outlaw. Those bullet wounds only confirmed it.
Bonnie hesitated. The woman was probably dying, and there was no one around to help except her.
It was at that moment that the real Bonnie's emotions overwhelmed Samuel—he felt that foolish, impossible-to-ignore urge to help. Not that he was a bad person, but under these circumstances, helping a stranger wasn't a real option.
'Come on, Bonnie. Dangerous people are looking for you—feeling guilty about leaving someone you don't even know to die shouldn't be getting to you like this.'
Except of course it was, and of course it was dangerous—but neither Samuel nor Bonnie were truly bad people. They'd just had the rotten luck of stumbling into a life of crime without ever getting a real chance to find their footing.
So she hesitated, deeply. She felt sorry for the possible outlaw; her hands trembled with the revolver still raised, and her breath came out uneven with the weight of it.
'Damn it!' she thought, leaning toward the window.
"Hey… are you okay?"
What a stupid question.
The woman laughed. Her voice was remarkably smooth and composed, somehow.
"Does it look like I'm okay, sweetheart?" she said, dragging herself across the ground until her back was resting against the wall just below the window. "Please—I've been in similar situations before, and this one is far from the worst."
A snore sounded. Bonnie glanced back at the shotgun boy. Still asleep.
She turned her eyes back to the woman, who was smiling up at her.
"I'm truly sorry if I woke you from your beauty sleep. I tend to get a little noisy when I'm hurt."
It took Bonnie a moment to absorb just how remarkably friendly this dying woman was being. She was so quiet that the woman's smile slowly softened into a look of mild confusion.
After a few seconds, without lowering her aim, she asked:
"How did you end up like this?"
"Well… grown-up business, sweetheart. I don't think it's something you'd quite understand. Though I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't just go ahead and ask—do you have any bandages and whiskey you could spare?"
'Bandages and whiskey? She clearly wants to treat her wounds—but at this point, how is she even still alive with that many bullet holes in her? No ordinary person would be… There's something about all of this I don't like.'
And that suspicion was reasonable. Even though she was leaning toward helping, she couldn't afford to let her guard down—which meant she needed more information first.
"Tell me your name first, and how you ended up this badly hurt."
The woman sighed.
"You're ruthless, little girl. I'm dying, you know? Can't you at least wait a little?"
Bonnie didn't answer. The woman relented.
"Fine, fine. My name is Evelyn Crowley, and I got separated from my gang during a fight with some idiots. One of those bastards managed to shoot me, and I've been running from him for half a day. Happy now? Stop frowning like that or you'll ruin that pretty face of yours."
It took her a few seconds of looking Evelyn in the eyes to decide whether to believe the story—but eventually, Bonnie accepted it.
"I don't have whiskey, but I do have medical-grade alcohol."
"That sounds even better," said the outlaw. "Help me with that, and I'll help you with whatever you need. I've got the best advice for winning over any man you fancy, and I've also got money."
The first thing didn't interest Bonnie in the slightest—but the second… Now that was something.
She tightened her grip on the gun and said:
"I'll get you what you asked for. But don't move from where you are."
"There's nowhere else I could go, sweetheart."
It was done. No going back. Bonnie turned around to head back to her room—and nearly stumbled backward when she found the old woman standing right behind her, as if she'd been there the whole time. In the darkness, that wrinkled face and that permanent scowl were more frightening than the Devil himself.