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  Simon reached for his pistol, recalling as it settled against his palm that it was unloaded. He’d left the revolver in the wagon with the rest of their things. Apart from the empty pistol and the data stick, he had nothing but the clothes on his back. Way to be prepared, genius. He considered bluffing, even rehearsed a few tough-guy lines in his head—each spoken with a gruff, whiskey-tempered gravitas his actual vocal cords could never hope to emulate—before the carriage rolled off with Selena and Marcus inside. A curtain of dust dragged behind them.

  A dozen impulses pulled Simon in every direction at once. While he struggled, some deep-buried instinct kept him from crying out to her. This was very bad, but surely drawing attention to himself could only make things worse, so he stood and watched in mute agony as the carriage disappeared along the southerly road.

  When the carriage had faded from view, Simon’s paralysis left along with it. He scurried from the paddock, fleeing with only the vaguest intent of location or purpose. He ran simply to run, to be gone from the present before its jaws snapped shut around him. He was alone in a strange country with no map and little currency, helpless as a castaway adrift on a bit of wreckage, subject to the absent mercy of the sun and the sea.

  He climbed back in the wagon and the rock bottom to which his battered heart had plummeted gave out, plunging him, however impossibly, to lower depths.

  The bags were gone.

  6: The Uneasy Peace

  The darkness didn’t surprise Selena, but the noise did. Iron-shod rims crunched and scraped over hardpan while an ungreased axle whined in its socket. Every nick and bump in the road pummeled the carriage’s suspension and set its bones to groaning. The stink of rust and congealed oil rose from the floorboards, and light filtered through horizontal slits too narrow to be properly called windows, their slim apertures further blocked by grids of spun wire. Selena and Marcus sat opposite one another on benches suspended from the wall by diagonal lengths of chain. Her hands worked open and shut, by turns making fists and unmaking them in recognition of their futility.

  “Well, this sucks,” she said.

  Marcus accepted the statement with a grim nod. “I am sorry for this, ‘Lena. I will set things right.”

  “You might want to get started on that.”

  “I am afraid there is little I can do until we reach Juarez. Hector has overstepped, but a fiador is law beyond city limits. Delgado and Evangalista can hold him to task, but they are miles away.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Heads of the pandillas. Delgado leads Los Hombres Sencillos, Evangelista Las Dagas Negro. Together, they are two of La Trinidad. Thorin is the third.”

  “So what can the other guys do about it?”

  “Even debtors have rights in Juarez. Thorin can recall a debt and require payment in person, but he cannot restrict my movements.”

  “That Hector guy seems to think otherwise.”

  Marcus smiled without humor. “Men of the borders can sometimes forget the laws of their homeland. The trinity court will hear my case. Thorin’s judge will dismiss it, but the others will see justice done.”

  “But won’t Thorin just do what he wants anyway?”

  “Perhaps in some things, but not in this. The moneylender’s honor is the bedrock of the city. The other judges will hold firm, and to ignore their judgment would be to invite bloodshed. Such is how rests la paz inquieta—the uneasy peace.”

  Selena’s tailbone began to ache from the vibration of the bench. She shifted her weight to one side until the pressure abated. “I don’t know how much I’d trust a peace that’s got ‘uneasy’ right in the name.”

  “All peace is uneasy, Lena. It is better when both parties admit it, yes?”

  “Depends. It didn’t seem to do much good with Hector.”

  Marcus smoothed a wrinkle from his serape. “Hector is a bondsman. Such men have much power, but their lives are often short. There is no room for error. I expect he means for me to deliver my full payment to Thorin myself. That way if money should go missing, no blame can be laid at his feet.”

  “You could have told me that before I went in with you, you know.”

  Marcus studied his feet. Shame sat strangely on his face, as if wedged into a place where it didn’t quite fit. “I did not anticipate this. Perhaps I should have. For that, I am sorry.” He looked up, the ever-burning ember of humor in his eyes snuffed out. “When the matter is settled, I shall get you west. This I promise.”

  Part of her wanted to spit the comment back in his face. She didn’t doubt Marcus would make good on his word—her short but eventful tenure as his protégé showed her that the man, despite his faults, had a warped but solid core of integrity—but a man’s word mattered little if he lacked the capacity to carry it out. Even if he managed to resolve the situation promptly, the detour had cost them precious time.

  Swallowing her anger, she nodded once to Marcus and settled her head against the wall of the carriage. Her thoughts turned from her own predicament to Simon’s. The poor kid was on his own again, and this time he didn’t have a single person who even spoke his language. Her stomach clenched at the thought of how he might be feeling. Would he think she’d abandoned him?

  Of course not, she thought. He knows I’d never do that.

  Does he? Countered a sly voice somewhere in the deep folds of her mind. You’ve done it before, haven’t you?

  She thought of that night in Fallowfield, the shots from Bernard’s gun slashing through the rapeseed overhead. I didn’t have a choice then. Plus, I came back, didn’t I?

  Yes, she’d come back. But she’d also known where to find him when she did. There was no Manor Hill this time where she could trust to find him waiting. He was alone in a tiny pueblo with nothing but a few days’ supplies to his name. And it was her fault.

  With these unhappy thoughts swirling through her mind, she closed her eyes and did her best to make the minutes pass.

  7: Dust and Penury

  Simon knew the plan was doomed from the moment he passed through the store’s crumbling archway. He could see it in the sneer on the shopkeeper’s face, in his reflexive grasp for a cudgel near his forearm, in the empty spaces along his shelves where food and supplies should be. He pushed on anyway, driven by the momentum of his initial resolve, which had required several minutes of deep breaths to muster and couldn’t be easily dissipated.

  A stink of dust and penury choked the stale air. Ignoring it as best he could, Simon smiled and raised a hand in greeting. The shopkeeper’s heavy black eyebrows drew into an irritated point in the center of his forehead. Simon went to speak, but a sticky film glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He yanked it free with a clammy smack and swished a paltry dose of saliva about his mouth. The words came on his second effort.

  “Hi. Um, I’m wondering if you could help me.” He spoke slowly, over-enunciating each syllable in the vague hope it would make him more comprehensible.

  The shopkeeper continued to scowl but said nothing. Simon put even money on whether or not the man could understand him—and if he did, long odds on him liking what he heard. Still, there seemed little for it but to continue. At least he hasn’t clubbed me yet.

  “It’s just that I’m traveling west, and all my stuff’s been stolen. I can get by without a lot of it, but I’ll need some food and water for the trip. I don’t have any money, but I could trade you if you like.”

  Simon reached in his sweater and pulled out the pistol. He held it loosely by the butt and made sure to point the barrel at the floor, but he may as well have shoved it in the shopkeeper’s face for how he reacted. The vengeful point of his eyebrows crumbled to a nervous heap. His ruddy skin paled, putting the flecks of old acne scars in stark relief. His hands scurried away from the cudgel and shot upward, palms presented imploringly outward. Very slowly, he dropped one hand to a small drawer behind the counter and began removing fistfuls of coins and paper currency.

  “No
, wait,” Simon cried, raising his own hands. “That’s not what I meant. I want to trade. Trade.”

  The man set two handfuls on the counter and pushed them toward Simon, motioning at the pile with a shooing gesture. Simon nudged it back with his free hand. In response, the man angrily added another fistful of coins to the pile. Simon squeaked, a sound of mingled frustration and fear.

  “I don’t want to take your money. I just want some food and something to carry water. Food. Water.” He pointed as he spoke each word, first to a small bushel of mealy apples, then to a tin canteen. “If you give me those, I’ll give you the gun. It’s good, it works and everything. It just needs ammunition. Deal?”

  The shopkeeper’s eyes flicked to the cudgel and back. Simon swallowed. The man obviously had no idea what he’d intended with the exchange. If he put the gun down now, the guy would probably take it as Simon losing heart and surrendering. He might wind up getting his brains bashed in, or being frogmarched to some pueblo court where he would plead his case in a language no one else in town spoke.

  Doing his best to suppress his guilt, Simon found a burlap sack on the shelf and began stuffing it with whatever foods he could eat without preparation: apples, apricots, a few pears with nicked skins, mushy apricots, some dried wriggles of indeterminate meat, and a slab of cheese flecked with mold. He hefted the bag several times, replacing bits where he felt he’d taken too much and adding back when he felt he didn’t have enough. Eventually the second-guessing grew unbearable, and he forced himself to accept what he had, adding only the canteen.

  The shopkeeper watched the whole exchange, enraged and bemused with equal measure.

  Simon gave him a last apologetic look and backed out of the store. He stood outside the doorway for a panicked moment, waiting for the shopkeeper to shout out thief in his strange, sibilant tongue. The word didn’t come. Perhaps that shopkeeper feared retribution if he alerted the authorities too soon, or perhaps he thought his cries would be greeted with indifference. Either way, Simon couldn’t afford to speculate. He shoved the pistol in his pocket and made his way to the pueblo’s main road, glancing as inconspicuously as possible over one shoulder with every fifth step.

  8: A Jangling of Nails and Knives

  Selena was unsure whether she was awake or asleep. Tedium had fused the two into a misshapen whole, a state of semi-somnolence that lay before her like a featureless grey slate. Days and hours grew murky. Time beat instead in the shifting tempo at which her keepers brought her food and water, or changed the rancid bucket she and Marcus used as a chamber pot. She was thus unsure whether Marcus’s hand on her shoulder shook her awake, or whether he simply drew her attention from a haze of hibernation.

  “We are close, ‘Lena. Come.”

  He brought her to the window and pointed to a sign rising from the sand and scrub grass that had marked their surroundings since leaving the pueblo. It stood on a posted of rusty iron, a wooden plank on which some palsied calligrapher had painted the words Ciudad Nuevo Juarez in shaky red letters. Selena spoke little of the southwestern tongue, but she’d gleaned enough from her travels with Marcus to piece together its meaning.

  “If this is New Juarez, where’s Old Juarez?”

  “Some miles east and south, on the far side of the river. It burned in the Last War.”

  Beyond the sign, the ground rose and flattened into a plateau, where the road grew irregular slabs of flat stone and fed into a sprawling urban center. The place was big—the largest inhabited city she’d seen since leaving New Canaan. Like Fallowfield, it was a new city, its ground untroubled by relics from before the Last War, but where Fallowfield favored the ordered, bucolic simplicity of a farming community with its intersecting thoroughfares and gridded sub-streets, Nuevo Juarez sprawled like a thicket on a hillside. Adobe structures piled one atop another. Streets ran in kinks and curves, and alleys diverged at strange angles from the main roads, which swelled at varying intervals into cobbled plazas filled with market stalls. Narrow boardwalks lined the bigger thoroughfares, their dusty planks warbling with the clamber of crowds. Carts and wagons trundled along the streets, carrying loads of produce or mounds of clay or workers bundled tight as cords of wood.

  The vendors and merchants dressed in garbs of quiet prosperity, simple cotton shirts free of rips or wear, silk kerchiefs or wide-brimmed hats offering a bit of utilitarian ornamentation.

  The workers—those who hauled loads and drove wagons and mucked out stalls for livestock—were a haggard and sun-browned bunch, their bare arms blistered and blotchy and mapped with scars. Their chests and faces bloomed with tattooed symbols. The designs were crude, drawn by hands that were untrained or indifferent despite their focus on a few common motifs: a black triangle, tapering down to a fine point; a single drop of fluid, tinted red; and above all a green star. Selena saw the latter ten times on a short stretch of road. In a few cases, it looked clunky or misshapen, as if superimposed onto a previous image poorly excised.

  A fierce-looking man with a shaved head and iron studs in both nostrils bore the most arresting design: a corona of sleek red lines fanning outward from the nexus of his left eye. Arced lines connected each spoke at consistent latitudes, giving the design the appearance of a spider’s web.

  The carriage slowed its pace and lurched to a halt. A heavy bolt slid home, and the door swung open. Light toppled into the room. Selena squinted against its ruthless brightness. Hands grabbed her wrists and hauled her to her feet. Her fighter’s instincts longed to lash out with a right cross, but her muscles were cramped and rusty enough for her better angels—or her more sensible ones, at least—to wrest back control. She went willingly where the hands led her, her head downcast until an awning blunted the sunlight’s razor keenness.

  The hands—belonging, she now saw, to two of Hector’s men—led her through a pointed archway into a dim room with a marble floor, its exact dimensions masked by sultry drapes that hung from its high-domed ceiling. The midday heat vanished, replaced by a crisp, dry air scented with wisps of odd spices. Sticks of aromatic reeds unfurled strands of pale smoke, which mingled with thicker plumes from a fat cigarette dangling from the lips of the room’s central occupant.

  He sat atop a dais of dried clay painted gold, his chair a piece of pre-War salvage upholstered in various silken fabrics and adorned with jewels. He wore a velvet robe with a flared collar and silver hem, epaulets pluming chin-high from its crimpled shoulders. Rings glittered on every finger, and necklaces hung thick enough to form a sort of gaudy chainmail from collar to navel. He looked like an ignorant peasant boy’s idea of a king—an image capped, figuratively and literally, by the crown of polished black metal balanced on his head. Selena glanced at Marcus, wondering how best to react to this absurd man, but his face betrayed none of the sly humor she’d expected. She saw only hate there, buried under a slather of fear.

  The strange king eyed Marcus with a smile. “Marcus Ramirez. It’s been a long time. How nice of you to venture south.”

  “It was not my plan, but I am glad it pleases you, senador Thorin.”

  “Senador no longer. I am Jefe Thorin. I have a new role now, as you can see.” He motioned to his throne.

  “It suits you,” said Marcus.

  If Thorin noticed the implicit slight, he gave no sign. “Hector tells me you wish to make a payment against your debt to me.”

  “Just so. I have acquired every centavo I owe you, even to the expected interest. It was in Hector’s hands, last I saw it.”

  “And I delivered it as promised,” said Hector. He nodded stiffly to a sack near Thorin’s feet.

  Thorin motioned to one of his attendants, a wispy boy of fourteen or so with a green star tattooed on one cheek. The boy stepped forward, hand outstretched. Thorin snubbed out his cigarette into the boy’s cupped palm. The embers sizzled against his skin. The boy closed his eyes but seemed otherwise indifferent to any discomfort. His smoke extinguished, Thorin hefted the bag onto his lap and surv
eyed its contents.

  “It’s in Standard?”

  “Yes. Every penny, as they say.”

  “Something wrong with the peso?”

  Marcus shrugged. “Standard travels farther, yes? It has never been a problem before.”

  “Nor is it now. Your payment is accepted. It is not, however, sufficient.”

  Marcus’s mouth shrank into a narrow black line. “If you count it, you will see—”

  “I have counted it, Marcus. It is a large sum, to be sure. It makes me wonder where a barrendero like you scraped together such a fortune. But your debt was to be paid over many years, not in a big lump.” He dropped the bag onto the dais and kicked it. “Our schedule was agreed upon on both sides. There are penalties for broken oaths, Marcus.”

  “For late payment, yes. But who would begrudge being paid back early?”

  Thorin flashed his crooked teeth. “I would.”

  “You cannot refuse to relinquish a debt, Jefe.” Marcus spoke the word like a curse. “The trinity court will hear of it.”

  Thorin’s laughter hit Selena’s ears like ice water. There wasn’t a molecule of friendliness in it and only the sourest sort of joy. It was a sound that couldn’t be handled without inflicting injury, a jangling of nails and knives.

  “Very well. By all means, plead your case.”

  Thorin clapped his hands. A few moments later a gaunt man in ragged, grease-stained clothing shuffled from behind a velvet curtain. His skin had the loose saggy look of muscle gone slack. Stubble covered his chin in patches of black and grey, and a green star blazed on his right cheek, the skin around it inflamed. He looked at Marcus with eyes drowning in pouches of purple flesh. Marcus held his gaze, jaw slightly agape.