Smoke drifted from the mouth of the barrel after the shot, dissolving into the air like a gentle brush against reality. Blood had splattered across the walls and the white wooden door, and the lifeless body of Caleb Graves lay beside the bed and his hat, slowly bleeding out onto the rug over the hardwood floor.
Bonnie couldn't breathe. Her hands were raised, the golden revolver still pointing upward—the recoil from the second shot had thrown her arms back. She was frozen in that position, eyes wide open, processing what she had just done.
A dead silence fell over the room. Seconds stretched into eternity. The marks from Caleb's hand turned red across Bonnie's neck as she slowly lowered her arms onto the bed.
She breathed again. The silence broke with her cry of anguish.
Bonnie tightened her grip on the weapon—the full weight of what she'd done had finally landed on her. Her small, delicate hands had just taken the life of a man who mattered far too much on this side of the desert.
'No…'
Bonnie got to her feet. She looked at the gun in her hands, then looked back at the body.
'What have I done?!'
She had defended herself. It was self-defense—but in the eyes of everyone else, it would never look that way. A girl bitter about an arranged marriage murders her fiancé to get out of the wedding… That was the kind of story that would sell papers.
'What… have I done…?'
She let herself imagine the worst consequences of her actions, and her heart sank into despair. Tears soaked her face. Her hands kept trembling, still unable to let go of the gun.
In that moment, Bonnie Jones had no way out. And yet, strangely enough, Samuel Calloway was able to quiet those shattered emotions pushing Bonnie toward a complete breakdown—because the two of them were one; two sides of the same coin.
Even while she cried, even as she could already hear people running in a panic through the hallways and the neighboring rooms, she walked toward the body, unfastened the revolver belt from around Caleb's waist, and buckled it around her own, holstering the gun.
Once she had done that, she moved to the door, her dress picking up blood from the floor. She took hold of the brass knob, hesitated for just a second—then opened the door and ran like she had never run in her life.
The hallways were flooded with people rushing in every direction, terrified by the gunshots. The chaos that had spread through the building meant no one noticed that Bonnie was carrying the dead magnate's weapon, or that her dress was painted red, leaving a trail of blood across the wood.
Bonnie flew down the stairs and burst through the exit—but the woman dressed in black saw her come tearing out and noticed the blood staining her yellow dress. She immediately ran after her, but Bonnie had already turned the corner.
'I killed him… I just killed someone…' she told herself. 'But he attacked me! I was only defending myself!'
But would the Sheriff believe that, when every piece of evidence pointed the wrong way? Bonnie couldn't think straight—she was too terrified by what was happening. If it weren't for Samuel, she would have collapsed right there.
She needed to find a way to flee, or hide.
A couple of buildings down from the hotel sat the stable where the horses were kept. When she spotted the slightly rustic wooden structure against the backdrop of the more "elegant" buildings, Bonnie's mind immediately went to the one creature in this world that could help her—the only one who had been on her side from the very beginning.
"Capella…"
She heard a scream. A woman passing nearby with a man cried out at the sight of the blood on Bonnie's dress.
For a split second, Bonnie didn't know what to do. Every eye in the area turned toward her at once—but she spun around and bolted for the stable.
At the entrance, a boy with a ridiculous little hat was reading the newspaper. The headline read: "Red Johnny Strikes Again! Does Anyone Remember His Face?" He seemed thoroughly absorbed in the story. But the paper dropped from his hands before the desperate Bonnie brought the handle of the revolver down on his head.
The boy went down. Bonnie flinched in panic, convinced she had killed him too—but when she heard him groan in pain, she pressed forward into the stable. It didn't take long to find Capella, who whinnied anxiously, as though she could already feel her rider's emotions.
"My girl…"
Bonnie's voice trembled. She squeezed her eyes shut and cleared her mind. Then she grabbed the saddle from the side of the stable and the saddlebags hanging near the door, threw everything onto Capella's back, and climbed up.
"I'm so sorry, Capella," said Bonnie, stroking the horse's neck. "I know you must be tired—but you're going to have to run one more time. This time, run with everything you've got…"
Capella snorted. Bonnie exhaled, exhausted, and looked toward the stable exit.
Some of the other horses nearby were watching her with strange expressions—as if they, too, like Capella, could somehow sense what she was feeling.
She glanced at them, puzzled—but there was no time for that. She urged Capella forward and the mare moved out. Her hooves rang against the dirt floor before hitting the cobblestones of the street.
Fleeing down the road, drawing confused stares from the people of the city, Bonnie cast a look behind her. No one was following yet—which meant she had a little time to put as much distance between herself and Ironwood as possible.
Then four riders on horseback rounded the corner.
"There she is!" shouted one of Deputy Collins's men.
The man leading the deputies was Collins himself, expression hard but visibly confused. From Collins's perspective—from anyone's—Bonnie was just a girl. How could a girl kill a man?
'Damn it! Why are they here already?!'
Bonnie felt the walls closing in. Chased by the law this quickly, she turned her eyes forward, tightened her grip on the reins, and shouted:
"Run, Capella!"
Capella whinnied and surged forward with tremendous speed. Carriages, horses, and pedestrians all blocked the path ahead—but with a mysterious control over her mount that she had no business having, Bonnie weaved through all of it in sharp, zigzagging movements.
Deputy Collins was dumbfounded.
"Her too," he was heard to murmur, as though he knew something the others didn't.
Reluctantly, he drew his revolver while his men readied their ropes to lasso Bonnie.
"Bonnie Jones!" Collins shouted. "Stop in the name of the Sheriff or I will be forced to fire!"
Bonnie looked back at them for a second. They weren't bluffing. This was real. That crushed whatever hope she had left—four men against her alone was a fight she couldn't win.
'What do I do? Why is this happening to me? I never did anything wrong in my life. I was just too bored to ever bother becoming a better person—and now that I'm in Bonnie's body… She never did anything wrong either. It's just… why?'
This was, without a doubt, the worst way to kill the boredom.
The streets seemed to stretch on forever. With Capella running at full speed, she tried to think. They'd been at it for a while now and she still couldn't shake the riders closing in behind her. They were also aiming weapons at her. What if Collins shot?
'What do I do? How do I get out of this?'
Was this some kind of test from fate—a way of measuring her worth? Bonnie sat with that thought. And sitting with it, she came to a kind of resignation. She had already killed a man. She had committed an unforgivable crime, and even though she'd done it in self-defense, the man she had killed was the one who controlled an entire county. How do you escape something like that?
The answer wasn't encouraging.
Bonnie drew the golden revolver. She looked at the gun for a moment, then—with hollow eyes and an expression of quiet, painful resignation—she aimed at Collins.
Deputy Collins's eyes went wide in disbelief. He was going to fire first, but Bonnie was faster; she'd caught him off guard.
Bang! The bullet split the wind and tore through Collins's shoulder, sending him tumbling from his horse.
The people around them screamed and scrambled for cover. His deputies couldn't stop to help—they had to catch Bonnie no matter what.
'I did it… How? My aim isn't that good…'
Something was off, and Bonnie knew it. There was something driving her during this chase. Capella was proof of it. The mare was fast and strong, but she wasn't naturally agile enough to weave through a crowded city street like that.
It didn't make sense.
Before she knew it, Bonnie had broken out of the city. The sand beneath her horse's hooves kicked up violently from the force of the gallop, while the sky above began to darken. Thunder rolled in the distance, and one by one, small drops of water began to fall.
Bonnie glanced back at the riders. They were falling further behind.
A bolt of lightning struck nearby—and then something that almost never happened in the desert occurred.
A torrential rain came down like a bucket of cold water dumped over everything at once.
Seeing that they weren't catching up, one of the deputies coiled his rope and pulled out his revolver instead. He aimed for Bonnie's head and waited for his shot—but just as he squeezed the trigger, a bolt of lightning struck to his side, blinding him for an instant.
Bang!
The bullet grazed Bonnie's arm. Warm blood welled up from the wound and mixed with the rain.
Bonnie cried out in pain. She wanted to scream in terror at the blood pouring from her arm—but she forced herself silent, raised the revolver again, thumbed the hammer back, and fired.
The bullet struck one of the horses in the head, sending its rider crashing to the ground.
'Two shots left,' Bonnie thought, checking the cylinder.
Meanwhile, back in the empty theater where Bonnie and her father had sat that very morning, the same pale woman was practicing her singing. This time, the song was about a criminal who lost both their face and their name—but became a legend.
Her voice filled every wall of the hall as a dark shadow crept along the floor beneath her feet.
"She killed two men," the woman said.
She smiled, her voice rising.
"And broke from society in blood and gunpowder."
Bonnie took aim again. She fired—and this time the bullet found the chest of one of the remaining deputies. He dropped, and his partner pulled up short. The man watched Bonnie disappear into the distance with an expression of pure fury, because he couldn't do a thing against this girl.
She turned her eyes back to the road ahead. Blood ran steadily down her arm with a sharp, throbbing pain. She squeezed her eyes shut and gripped the reins tight.
The blood of several men was on her hands.
Every emotion she carried mixed itself into the rain.
'I didn't want this…'
Her voice broke—and then it burst out of her in a scream.
"I didn't want any of this!"
As the distant lightning swallowed every sound the desert could offer, she escaped from the main city of Warlock County. Her hands were stained with blood and sin.
Bonnie Jones was now an outlaw.