Quibble_auk

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Songs:

-Where is your rider— Oh the hellos

-California dreamin’— The mamas & the papas

-Earth—Sleeping at Last

-Hello my old heart— Oh the hellos

-Yellow— Coldplay

-Rule #4 Fish in a birdcage— Fish in a Birdcage

-All this and heaven too— Florence + the Machine

-Hard Sell— The Crane Wives

-The Moon Will Sing— The Crane Wives

-How to Rest— The Crane Wives

-Not the Ghost— The Crane Wives

-Wedding Song—Hadestown: it’s him and Tanner

-Lemon Boy— Cavetown

-I don’t wanna love someone else— A great big world

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Spoof songs:

-Take this job and shove it— David Allan Coe: this just… he would sing this. And this song is so funny to me

————

Why are so many of these romance songs?? He’s so grumpy??

—

The cold morning air in the barn tasted of stale hay, damp leather, and the heavy, musky stench of the trikes. Up in the hayloft where Tanner kept his cot it had been warm, the fresh straw sweet and comforting, but below, the chill had crept in through an open door.

Tanner dragged his left foot forward, the thick heel of his boot scraping through the scattered straw. He paused, his breath hitching in his throat, and forced his head down to look, peeking over the bucket of water he was balancing against himself.

He had to look.

If he didn't, he had no idea where the left leg was in space.

Tanner leaned hard on the carved knob of his cane—a stunning piece of purpleheart wood that Milo had found for him years ago—his knuckles white against the aged, browning wood.

He readjusted his grip on the half full wooden bucket. It had been a slow, agonizing process trying to haul the water to the second trike’s stall. It had taken him seven attempts to get enough water to fill the first Trike’s trough, and now, he was on his third attempt at bringing water to the second, huffing beast.

The first try the bucket slipped out of his grip, the second time he only managed to get three quarters of water to the trough. And this was looking to be another pathetic mirror of his last attempt.

Tanner’s jaw tightened, throat clicking as swallowed, lifting his gaze to the stall. Ten more feet. That’s all he needed and then he could rest against the stall door.

He could feel a bead of sweat run down his spine and he drew in a deep breath and took another step forward with his right foot. He looked down again, watching his left foot follow clumsily behind the first. He tried to shift the weight of the bucket against his hip, raising it with one hand to press it more firmly against his chest.

The man moved his cane forward, leaning on his right with a soft grunt before he planted the brass nib into the ground and shifted his weight back into the stick. The second trike—a shady pine green Kosmoceratops cow with the Paxcolt crest branded into her flank—tossed her head impatiently, a low vibrating rumble resonating from her throat.

“Patience is a virtue you know,” Tanner hissed through gritted teeth to the beast, his voice strained and sharp, a dangerous pressure building in his chest, “I'm moving as fast as I can.”

The bucket was proving to be a ruthless adversary.

Every slight, unpredictable twitch of his hip threatened to send a small tidal wave over the edge, turning the dry floor into a hazard. Tanner locked his jaw, planted the brass nib of his cane firmly into the dirt, and watched as he forced his left leg forward once more.

Focus. Plant the heel, shift, step.

Eight feet left.

The green cow huffed again, a puff of warm, damp air blowing through the wooden slats of her stall, smelling faintly of fermented grain. She struck the dirt with a broad front foot, pressing her weight onto the side of the stall with a vocal grunt. The wood groaned under the weight, the sudden shift from the trike sending a mini quiver straight up Tanner’s cane mid step.

He wobbled.

Tanner’s knuckles turned stark white as he threw his full weight onto the handle. Water sloshed heavily over the rim, soaking through his trousers and landing with a cold, heavy splat on his boots.

He couldn't even feel the cold water against his skin—he just watched the dark stain spread across his right thigh.

“Unbelievable,” He scoffed, a laugh almost escaping his throat at the sheer, petty spite of a wooden pail.

“You're doing that on purpose,” he growled under his breath, giving the bucket an accusatory glare. His grip on the wood tightened, his nails digging into its worn edge. “I’m going to throw you in a bonfire after this.”

Tanner took another shaky step forward, looking up at the third empty stall—the trike there had been taken out by Jesse early in the morning—the pressure in his chest tightened and he sucked in another harsh breath. He shook his head, watching his left foot follow through, “Yeah, and then Jesse will get another excuse to run to the market. He’d love that.”

Jesse was gone.

Again.

For a week now—ever since Tanner had dragged himself back from the dead, eight years late—Jesse had found every possible reason to flee the farm before sunrise. Off to town, off to the far fences, going to help a neighbor, off hunting, anything to get away from the ghost that had dared to show up again.

And leaving Tanner alone with him.

Hoss.

Tanner’s expression twisted into a sneer, his jaw tight and brows furrowed as he narrowly kept himself from tripping over a pebble on the ground—nearly rolling his left foot out from under him. He huffed, muttering under his breath, “Bastard.”

Tanner caught his balance, the brace inside his left boot doing its job to keep his ankle from snapping outward. The bucket sloshed another cup of dirty water over the rim.

“The bucket’s too heavy for you, Tanner. Put it down before you hurt yourself.”

The voice came from the main barn doors. Tanner didn’t need to see to know who it was. The moment the rich, baritone voice registered something hot and mean swelled between his ribs.

Tanner didn't look up immediately. He locked his right knee, carefully dragging his left foot into position beneath his hip, adjusting his center of gravity like a man trying to stack uneven stones. Only when he was sure he wouldn't tip did he turn his head.

Hoss stood in the rectangle of morning light shining through the open doors, his broad shoulders framing the doorway. His arms were crossed casually over his chest, he looked like he’d been standing there for a while, just watching. Waiting.

Tanner’s lip curled into a cold, venomous sneer. He hated the sight of him, of Hoss. He hated the broad, thick shoulders, the patient, sorrowful hazel eyes, the smell of woodsmoke and saddle soap that belonged to a man who hadn't fallen off a canyon ledge and been torn apart by modern monsters.

Hoss was whole. Hoss was solid. Hoss was the man Jesse should have, a man who could actually carry a load on a farm without collapsing into the mud. The kind of man who could walk ten miles through a squall without thinking twice about where his heels landed.

Tanner hated him for it.

“Didn't ask for your opinion, Hoss,” Tanner snapped, hissing out the other man’s name like it was a slur. The strain was obvious—sweat was already plastering his loose brown curls to his forehead, his shoulders hunched tight under his duster. “Why don’t you go and find some widow to comfort, yeah?”

Hoss’s jaw tightened, the muscle ticking under his stubble, but he didn’t rise to the bait. He didn't step into the barn. He just stood there, his hand resting heavy across his broad chest, watching Tanner struggle with the bucket. He didn't reach down to take it. He’d learned over the past week that offering a hand to Tanner was like reaching out to pet a cornered theropod.

Silence settled over the barn for a moment, and Tanner took it as an opportunity to take the final few steps to the stall door. He set the pail down and leaned on the door for support, resting his cane on the wall beside the pail to take the strain of his aching shoulders. He wiped his damp brow with the back of his hand, deliberately ignoring Hoss’s presence.

He let himself catch his breath before he moved again. He carefully leaned down, still braced on the wall, and grabbed the handle of the bucket.

His gaze flickered to his left leg briefly—reminding himself that it did exist and could support him—before he pulled the bucket into his arms, his teeth gritting. He managed to straighten his back against the stall, but his left leg wobbled violently.

Tanner caught himself on the stall door with a sharp, ragged hitch of his breath, the bucket sloshing even more water over the toes of his boots. His face burned, his neck warm with a prickling heat as he finally risked a glance over to the barn doors.

Hoss was still just standing there, watching Tanner passively. Judging him.

Tanner leaned his weight against the stall door and rested the water bucket on his right knee. His brown eyes flickered up, his heart beating frantically against his ribs as he caught Hoss’s stubborn gaze. He could feel his ears get warm, a stubborn lump choking his throat. He ignored it, forcing his lip to curl into a sneer as he adjusted his grip on the bucket.

“Take a picture, why don’t you?” Tanner drawled, his voice sharp, rasping, and dripping with a cold fury. “It lasts longer.”

Hoss’s jaw tightened, but he didn't rise to the bait. He just pushed off the doorframe and took three slow, heavy steps into the barn. “Put the bucket down.”

“I was surviving while you were still trying to figure out which end of a bridle goes in the mouth, Hoss,” Tanner’s voice dropped into a cruel, jagged register. For a brief second, a cruel, boyish grin flashed over his face, though it quickly shifted to a defensive sneer. “I can water a dinosaur, I’m not helpless.”

The impairment trike rubbed its heavy side on the stall again, their nostrils flaring in a demanding snort. The beast tossed her head, her decorative crown hitting the door Tanner was bracing on. The wood creaked, hinges rattling as it shook violently.

Tanner grit his teeth, his breath hitching, his gaze dropping from the larger man to his own left foot, his heart leaping between his ribs at the sudden instability. The leg wobbled slightly and he shifted his stance, trying to regain his balance and keep the bucket from tipping. Despite his efforts, more of the precious, clean water sloshed over the edge of the rebellious bucket, taking another chunk of Tanner’s pride with it.

He didn’t look up at Hoss again, his breath coming in shallow, hitching pants, his eyes stinging as he stared down at the now half empty pail. The splinters along its edge seemed to glint mockingly in the slanting morning light. A heavy,, stupid chunk of wood and iron that existed for the sole purpose of proving he couldn’t do a simple, easy task without wasting half an hour and a gallon of sweat.

“Useless, stubborn piece of scrap,” Tanner snarled under his breath, his knuckles going stark white as he gripped the worn rib.

The bucket didn't care. It just wobbled slightly on his knee, the remaining water swirling with a complacent, lazy slosh that made the back of his skull itch.

Hoss finally pushed off of the door, walking towards Tanner with an outstretched arm aimed at the bucket clutched in his lap. His voice dipped into something more exhausted. Pitying. “I said leave it, Tanner. You're gonna spill the whole thing.”

Tanner could have sworn the whole world narrowed onto that hand, that tight, fiery, green eyed beast in his chest beating against his ribs.

“Touch it,” Tanner hissed, his voice dropping into a sharp, cruel rasp, “and I'll drive this cane through your front teeth, big country.”

Hoss froze. His jaw twitched, a muscle working tightly under his freckled skin. He pulled his hand back, but he didn't leave. He stood just a few feet away, his hazel eyes burning with a dark, controlled frustration. He was keeping his temper in check—he always did, the patient, saintly bastard—which only made Tanner want to bite him harder.

“You're a fool,” Hoss said softly, no anger in his tone, just an exhausting, heavy fatigue. “You can barely stand and you're out here playing the tough guy for no reason. Give it a rest.”

Tanner’s right thigh was already trembling from carrying the majority of his body weight for the last hour, a deep, dull ache settling into the small of his back. In the East, they’d rolled him around in sleek, padded chairs with chrome wheels. But the West demanded legs—real, working legs—and every yard he covered was a agonizing reminder that he was wearing a broken body.

He swallowed the growing lump in his throat, forcing his tone into something bitter and biting, “Quit telling me what to do, this ain’t your barn.”

Hoss had the audacity to straighten himself, his eyes narrowing slightly like he was a child inspecting a particularly interesting mossy stone, still unsure whether it would make for a good skipping stone.

“Jesse went to town,” Hoss said, his tone infuriatingly level. He didn't offer to help—Tanner had made it clear three days ago what would happen if he tried—but he didn't move away, either. He just hovered, a giant, patient sentinel. “He wanted me to keep an eye on you, he doesn’t want you straining yourself.”

Tanner froze for a fraction of a second. A flash of raw, naked hurt crossed his face before he managed to scowl it away. He shifted the bucket on his knee, his finger absently picking at a splinter, “Jesse needs to mind his own damn self.”

“He's tired, Tanner,” Hoss said carefully, stepping closer, his heavy footfalls deliberate. “He's been carrying this whole place on his back. And now he’s carrying you and me too.”

Tanner wasn’t a complete fool, he could read between the lines, he knew what Hoss was trying to say but his big, stupid heart wouldn’t let him. Jesse was carrying Tanner’s weight around. Not Hoss’s.

It was Tanner’s fault.

His anger flaring in his chest like a flame reaching a jug of oil. Tanner twisted around sharply—or tried to, his left leg catching awkwardly on the dirt floor. He caught himself on the stall before he could stumble, but the bucket he had been balancing on his knee finally tipped over, spilling onto the ground. “I didn’t—”

The bucket clattered to the dirt, rolling lazily until it hit Tanner’s dead left boot. It sat there, empty, battered, and utterly unharmed.

For a second, the only sound in the space was the heavy, ragged sound of Tanner’s breathing and the restless shifting of the trike in the stall.

The smaller man looked down at the empty wooden bucket lying on its side. His chest heaving with shallow, panting breaths as he swallowed hard. Tanner’s eyes flashed with a sudden, ugly heat, stinging with tears he blinked back frantically, his attention locked on the puddle at his feet.

He spilled it. Again.

The twenty minutes he’d spent hauling the pail was for nothing.

Tanner choked on a breath, his chest tightening before he slammed the side of his fist against the stall door. The green trike let out a startled, snorting huff at the sudden sound. The cow reared back slightly, her heavy crest hitting the other wall of the stall, causing the neighboring beast to grunt and huff.

“Damn it!” Tanner snarled, his voice cracking with a fierce, bitter desperation that filled the quiet barn. Sweat dripped off his chin, hitting the damp ground below. “Damn it all to hell!”

He glared at the fallen bucket as if it were a living enemy.

Then, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, he tore his eyes off the bucket and leveled them with Hoss’s gaze, their blistering heat matching the other man’s frigid stare, “I didn't ask him to carry me. I didn't ask you to hover over me like a buzzard waiting for a mule to drop! Now go do whatever it is you do when you're not stealing another man's life.”

“Nobody stole nothing,” Hoss said carefully, though an edge had dropped into his tone regardless, he took another step forward, crowding into Tanner’s space. “And I don’t plan on wasting my time watching you tear yourself up for no good reason. You’re going inside. Clara made breakfast.”

“I ain’t hungry,” Tanner spat, gripping the handle of his cane tightly, trying to hide the way his hands shook. “So how about you turn around and walk your fat ass back to the main house. I don't need a nursemaid.”

“I ain't your nursemaid,” Hoss replied, stepping closer, something dark flickering in his eyes as he watched Tanner keenly. “I'm keeping you from killing yourself on Jesse's time. He's got enough grief on his shoulders without having to bury you a second time because you were too proud to let someone carry a bucket.”

The words struck Tanner right in the sternum, sharp as an arrow. He flinched, though he masked it instantly with a sneer. Hoss was right. Jesse was avoiding them both because he was caught between a living legend he’d spent eight years mourning and the solid, safe man who had held him when he cried.

Tanner was an obstruction. A ruin.

He drew in a trembling breath, blinking harshly as he leaned his full weight into his cane, his fingers twitching against the carved purpleheart knob. Tanner was panting, his chest heaving under his vest, sweat stinging his eyes.

“Jesse doesn't want you, Hoss,” Tanner lied, stabbing the knife in just to see if the big man would bleed. “He's out there right now running from you just as much as he's running from me. You were second best when I was dead, and you're second best now.”

Hoss didn't flinch.

Tanner hated him, he hated him so much it made the marrow of his bones ache. He hated that Hoss didn’t bite, didn’t bleed, but refused to turn over belly up. That he could just stand there and look at Tanner—really look at him—with a terrifying, pitying clarity. “He loved you, Tanner. And maybe he still does. But you ain't the boy who left. You're bitter, and you're mean, and you're bleeding him dry just by standing here.”

Tanner flinched, his muscles—already straining and tense—locking into place for a terrible moment. He blinked rapidly, chasing away the sudden wetness in his eyes and swallowed hard, his throat dry as ash. He turned his face away, biting the inside of his cheek to keep his lower lip from trembling.

He had no reply for that.

Not for a long while. Tanner just stood there, trembling, not willing to risk exhaling the tightness in his chest. He glared at the discarded bucket on the floor.

The stupid, damn bucket.

He finally pulled in an uneven breath, grinding his molars together as a bitter, angry bike rose up his throat.

“Get out,” Tanner whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying, cold fury. “Get out of here, Hoss. Go wait for Jesse to come back so you can lick his boots some more.”

Hoss stood his ground for three long seconds, his chest heaving under his flannel shirt. He looked like he wanted to say more, wanted to grab Tanner by his leather vest and shake him until the old Boy Wonder tumbled out. “Tanner—”

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Tanner snarled cutting him off, he finally pushed himself off the stall, making a point of hitting the bucket out of his way with his stick, and glared at Hoss, “Or I swear to Freyda, I'll give Jesse a real reason to hate us both.”

Hoss didn’t react to the threat, but something in his posture shifted. The pity in his hazel eyes didn't vanish—Tanner doubted it ever would—but it was overlaid with a cold, hardened resolve. He looked down at the empty bucket lying in the mud, then back at Tanner’s shaking frame, taking in the white knuckled grip on the cane and the telltale tremor in his leg.

For five agonizing seconds, neither man moved. The Kosmoceratops in the stall gave another impatient huff, the warm scent of her breath blowing between them, settling over the spilled water and the dust. The silence in the barn felt thick enough to choke on.

Tanner’s jaw worked, a muscle leaping under his pale skin. Every instinct roared at him to swing the cane, to strike out at the solid, immovable wall that was Hoss, to force the man to drop the stoic act and hit back. But the brutal reality of his own body betrayed him; his right thigh twitching under the denim of his pants, and his lower back was seizing up from the awkward strain of balancing the pail. If he took a swing, he’d go down, and Hoss wouldn't even have to dodge.

With a harsh, wet breath, Tanner shifted his weight back onto his right heel, adjusting his grip on the cane with a sharp snap of his wrist. He didn’t wait to see if Hoss would follow him. He just set his jaw, planted the brass nib of his cane into the barn floor, and forced his body forward.

He couldn't stay in the barn. He couldn't stand the smell of the place, couldn't stand the feeling of being trapped inside four walls.

Hoss shifted, stepping to the side as the broken man hobbled past him. From the corner of Tanner’s eye he could see Hoss lift a hand, pause, and lower it again. He let out a slow, weary sigh that sounded more like a groan, his thick shoulders dropping a fraction.

“If you keep pushing yourself like this, you’re just gonna end up face down in the dirt,” Hoss said quietly, his voice dropping into that infuriatingly steady cadence. “If you don’t care about yourself, fine. But don't go running off just to try and prove something.”

Tanner didn’t stop his awkward, uneven trek across the barn. His grip on his cane tightened, his left leg buckling slightly when he finally looked up to glare at Hoss—but he didn’t stop. His lip curled back, revealing a flash of white teeth in a cold, venomous snark that dripped with pure, unfiltered malice.

It wasn’t the lopsided, easy grin of the boy wonder, it was a corpse’s smile.

“Can't run, Hoss. In case you hadn't noticed the stick.” He tapped the brass nib of his cane hard against the dirt floor with his next step, the sharp, hollow thunk echoing off the barn rafters.

Tanner didn’t look back as he limped towards the door. He couldn’t. If he turned around, he’d either throw his cane straight at Hoss’s broad, infuriating face or break down right there on the dirt floor, and he’d rather let a trike trample his ribs than give Hoss the satisfaction of either.

He kept his gaze firmly on the ground in front of him. His heart was still drumming wildly in his chest, sweat dripping down his trembling form. He didn’t pay it any mind. His dark eyes fixed on his purpleheart cane, watching it strike the floor with a rhythm he hated: clack, step, drag.

Clack. Right leg forward. He could feel the dull, heavy pressure of his heel striking the ground, the weight of his body braced against the ground.

Step. Shift the weight to the cane.

Drag. Left leg follows. Heavy and unnatural, moving with an automatic muscle response that felt more like someone else’s leg had been sewn onto his hip.

Then it repeated.

Every step out of the barn was a brutal, calculated negotiation between his mind and a body that refused to cooperate. He had to keep his eyes glued to the dirt, his jaw tight with focus. Look down. Plant the heel. Check the angle. Move.

He was supposed to feel lucky. He was supposed to be grateful he was breathing.

That's what they told him, that’s what Dr. Harris had said, over and over when he was teaching Tanner how to stand again. It could have been worse. He could have lost all use of his legs. He could have lost feeling to his entire body. Tanner could have just died.

That would have been kinder.

But instead, he survived, like he always did. Tethered to a broken body that couldn’t haul a bucket of water ten yards without having a big, solid bastard like Hoss look at him like a sickly calf.

The bright morning sun struck Tanner like a physical blow as he broke the shadow of the barn door. He squinted against the glaring light, narrowly avoiding tripping over the rough earth. The air was crisp, carrying the sharp scent of damp sage, dew, and soil.

Tanner dragged his left foot over a clump of stubborn weeds, keeping his eyes glued to the dirt path that cut through the tall grass toward the far pasture. He told himself he was going to check on the young trikes grazing near the timberline, make sure that they were all accounted for and healthy.

It was a lie.

He just wanted to walk until he couldn't hear the hum of the farm, until he was far enough away that no one could see him fall.

By the time he cleared the main fences and reached the boundary of the far pasture, sweat was running down his neck, soaking the collar of his shirt. His right thigh trembled from taking the brunt of every awkward impact, and the dull, deep ache at the base of his spine felt like a red hot spike driven between his vertebrae.

The fiery hate and boiling frustration that had fueled his sudden departure from the barn was the only thing keeping Tanner’s trembling frame from giving out. His chest heaved, his lungs burning as cold sweat dripped down his brow and stung his eyes.

In the East, everything was smooth. Flat concrete, seamless glass, and ramps. The whole world had been compacted into a suffocating, bustling nightmare—a crowded, terrifying hive of modern monsters who had patched his shattered spine together with cold needles and sterile knives just to keep him as a trophy—but at least their floors were smooth. At least there he had Milo to lean on when his legs got too heavy.

Tanner sucked in another wheezing breath, hauling his body forward another step, his heart twisting in his chest at the thought of the gentle man.

Most importantly though, beyond that Eastern wall, he had those cursed chairs that acted as a personal cage of steel. Tanner had sworn that if he ever got back to the West, he’d never sit in a rolling seat again.

He hadn't accounted for the terrain. The West wasn't smooth. It was rutted, wild, broken, and steep. A hundred yards over unpaved earth exhausted him more than a mile on a smooth floor.

Sweat dripped into his eye, blinding him momentarily. Without thinking he lifted his arm up, wiping his eye with the back of his hand—forgetting that currently it was supporting half his weight with a cane.

Idiot.

Tanner’s right knee buckled slightly as he tripped over a fallen fence post. He felt the heavy leather of his boot twist hard to the side, the stiff material binding tight around his leg as his ankle shifted under his full weight.

He gasped at the sudden weightless drop, his gut rolling. He frantically slammed his cane down hard to catch himself before he could fully collapse. The purpleheart wood vibrating right up into his shoulder socket, his upper back aching with the sudden force of catching his weight.

He froze, his head hanging, his brown curls damp and clinging to his forehead as he swallowed the thick knot that had formed in this throat.

“Freyda, damn it,” he whispered to the grass, slowly pulling his right foot under his body from where it had wedged awkwardly under the post.

His breathing came in ragged, wet hitches. The far pasture stretched out before him, green and golden under the vast emptiness of the Western sky. Out here, there were no skyscrapers blocking the light. No overcrowded, choked streets. Just space. Beautiful, brutal space that he no longer had the legs to cross.

Tanner grunted, tearing his eyes away from the endless sky and back to the ground below him. He rolled his aching shoulder once and then pushed with the cane, forcing himself into a forward momentum again.

Eight years ago he could have sprinted across this pasture without losing his breath. He’d been a Saurboy. He’d been The Boy Wonder of the West. He’d ridden wild beasts, vaulted over fence lines, and run till his lungs burned just for the sheer joy of feeling the wind in his hair. He had owned this wild land, he had Jesse’s heart all to himself.

He wasn’t a fool. He knew the unforgiving horrors of the wild lands, Tanner had witnessed them time and time again. He knew that eight years was a long time to wait, that the west would have kept moving—that Jesse had every right to find another man to keep him warm and safe.

So why did he come back?

The thought had been circling his mind like a vulture since the day he’d dragged his broken frame back onto western soil. A relentless, cruel voice echoing through his broken body and made every dawn feel more heavy than the last.

Tanner had nothing out here. Not anymore. He should have stayed dead.

He stepped forward with his right leg, pausing as he struggled to find his footing for a brief moment. His eyes stung, though not with sweat this time.

When Bailey—that beautiful beast—had landed on him at the bottom of that canyon eight years ago, that should have been the end of it. That should have crushed the air from his lungs and left him dead. Then the East would have moved on, leaving his body to be picked on by scavengers until some unlucky soul found it.

Jesse would have mourned him, eventually stopped crying, and built a life. He would have taken Hoss into his bed years ago without a shred of guilt.

Instead, Tanner had crawled out of the grave eight years late. He returned as a twisted, bitter ghost holding a cane, taking up space in a barn, ruining the only peace Jesse had managed to salvage. He crawled back because he was losing his mind beyond that Great Wall, but the west didn’t welcome him home.

He didn’t belong out here.

Tanner reached the crest of the small hill in the far pasture where a lone, ancient ponderosa pine offered a wide canopy of shade. The grass here was long and soft, shielded from the brutal sun that hung heavy in the sky and beat down on his back.

His right leg was trembling so violently it felt like strung wire about to snap. His vision swam with spots of gray. Down below the small hill, the young trikes were grazing peacefully, humming low and true to each other.

The broken man let out a ragged, wheezing breath, shaking his head feebly. His body was completely spent. The pit of burning anger and spite had run out of fuel and been smothered, leaving him empty. He couldn't go another ten paces if his life depended on it.

“Pathetic,” he muttered to the wind, his voice dry and raspy.

He veered off toward the base of the great pine, his strength completely spent. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely hold the purpleheart knob. Carefully, agonizingly, Tanner lowered himself down against the broad trunk of the pine.

His legs stretched out awkwardly before him. His breath came in gasps, his ribs aching, his clothes heavy with sweat. Tanner dropped his cane beside him in the grass, the wood clattering against an exposed root, its brass tip glinting in the morning light. The bark dug into his back, his shoulder ached with an overexerted fire, and the ground felt hard and unforgiving.

Tanner didn’t care. He was too tired to care. He just leaned his head back against the rough trunk of the tree, letting his shoulders slump as he closed his eyes.

For a long time, he just lay back against the bark, occasionally his heavy eyelids would drift open and he would stare at a cloud or the land below. Up here—away from the farm, away from Hoss's watchful eyes and the seething, merciless jealousy left in the space where Jesse should have been—it was nice.

Tanner almost felt like he was twenty again—it was easy to pretend.

The sheer, open silence of the West washed over him. No metallic hums, no crowded corridors, no chatter of eastern patrolmen or millions of people trying to coexist inside a shoebox.

It was just the playful rustle of pine needles above, the distant, low call of the small trike herd. The smell of wild sage, damp pine, wildflowers and the musk of dinosaurs filling his lungs. The feeling of the solid, ancient earth beneath him and the tickling of grass against his right leg.

It was the West.

The wild.

The home he’d dreamt about in those sterile, white rooms over the wall.

A heavy, dark quiet settled over his mind, the cruel, angry spirit draining from his soul completely. He let out a long breath, and opened his eyes, squinting as he looked up through the canopy at the bright, endless blue.

He had missed this sky so much it had made him weep in the East.

Tanner had dreamt of coming back. He had told grand stories of his home to Lucas just so he could get some faint taste of the wind. He had prayed to Freyda—he had begged, wrestling with some unseen cosmic force he hoped was listening—just to see a Western sunset one last time before he died.

He sighed, a small, weary smile tugging the corner of his lips and easing his features. Tanner didn’t fight it when his heavy eyelids fluttered shut. He could hear the thrumming in the ground and sky, the rushing of water, the footfalls and flapping wings of beasts—the ancient, gentle lullaby that Freyda sang when man slowed down enough to hear her, to feel the way she rocked the cradle of the earth.

—

Im too upset with this to put warnings here right now. Sorry. I just… ughhh I know I should wait until I like it but I’m not patient enough for that.

—

The shrill, piercing shriek of the bedside alarm clock didn't sound like a technological marvel; it sounded like an insult.

Milo didn’t move for a long moment, praying that the alarm would shut itself off and let him slip back off into the heavy, medicated haze of his sleep. It didn’t. The sharp, insistent mechanical rhythm continued, demanding his attention.

He groaned, burying his face into his pillow. After another five seconds he gave in, blindly swatting at the nightstand until his palm connected with the plastic casing of his phone, silencing the noise.

For a long, luxurious moment, he stayed under the thick duvet, laying in the comfortable dark of his bedroom. Milo slowly turned, his heavy lidded eyes staring up at the popcorn ceiling while the weight of the previous day settled back onto his chest.

The silence that filled the room afterward felt heavier than the alarm itself. It was the quiet that always got him—the vast, empty space where another person's morning routine used to exist. Milo rubbed his face with both hands, wiping away the sleep, feeling rough stubble along his jawline, and swung his legs out from under the heavy duvet.

The apartment was chilly, the radiator clanking and hissing a rhythm he had known by heart for years. He took a moment to stretch, letting his back pop and his aching muscles tighten with a deep yawn, and stood up.

Outside his first story apartment window, the predawn sky hung in a weighted, slate gray smear, illuminated only by the rhythmic, amber blink of a construction crane working on the ever expanding upper levels of the residential block.

He dragged a hand through his perpetually messy dark hair, grabbing wire rimmed glasses from the nightstand and pushing them up the bridge of his nose. The room smelled of yesterday’s stale coffee and the clean, lemon scent of laundry detergent. It was a normal morning in a normal world of concrete, asphalt, and routine, but there was a pressure building behind Milo’s chest.

To any other citizen of New Haven perhaps.

They had no idea that the Eastern world had just been permanently altered, and Milo—for once—was going to be a part of that change.

Western Asset-01-M.

Today, Dr. Young and his team were finally being given access to the asset for study and to bridge the gap between worlds.

Milo didn’t feel ready to change the course of history though.

Milo dressed in the dark—dark corduroy trousers, a white button down shirt that had seen better weeks, and a simple windbreaker. He brushed his teeth, did his best to tame his hair, and shaved, taking an extra second to give himself a pep talk in the mirror before he walked out of his room. He closed his door silently behind him, walking into the hallway in his bare feet, the hardwood floor cold against his soles, and pushed open the door to Lucas’s room.

His son was curled into a tight ball in the center of a twin bed covered in a faded comic book quilt. Lucas was six, with the same unruly, dark hair as Milo and a habit of burying his face so deep into his pillow that Milo always worried he’d suffocate.

Right now, he was curled into a tight ball, one small hand clutched around the frayed ear of a stuffed rabbit. His chest rose and fell in that deep, untroubled rhythm only children possessed—a stark contrast to the hollow, restless exhaustion that had hollowed out the last eighteen months since Joana’s funeral.

Milo gently brushed a lock of dark hair off his son’s forehead. Lucas murmured something incoherent, nuzzling deeper into the pillow, and Milo felt that familiar, heavy ache in his chest.

“Lucas, buddy,” he murmured, his voice thick with morning gravel. “Time to wake up”

Lucas stirred with a soft, disgruntled whine, burrowing deeper into the mattress as if he hadn’t spent the previous night throwing a fit over going to bed. “No school…”

“Not school today,” Milo whispered, smoothing down the boy's pajama shirt and patting his shoulder gently. His voice remained low and gentle, “Remember? Daddy has to go to work early. Real early. You're going to go stay with Mrs. Gable down the hall for a few hours until Grandpa picks you up at noon.”

At the mention of Mrs. Gable, Lucas cracked one eye open, squinting through the dim light of the bedroom window where the dawn light was just starting to peek through his curtains. “Does she have the good cereal today?”

A radiant warmth bloomed in Milo’s chest and he chuckled, nodding.

“The very sugary kind that I usually tell you no to,” Milo promised with a tired, affectionate smile. “Come on, get up and put your slippers on.”

Lucas rolled off his bed, landing in a heap of blankets on the floor with a dramatic sounding thud, and pulled his construction print slippers over his mismatched socks. Milo watched him for a quiet second, the lingering weight of his own exhaustion momentarily pushed aside by the simple, grounding gravity of fatherhood.

The small boy stretched lazily, yawned, and didn’t get up off the floor. “I melted.”

Milo couldn’t help the short, sharp burst of laughter that slipped past his lips. The heavy fog in his mind cleared just a fraction, replaced by the ridiculous, immutable laws of six year old physics.

“Did you now?” Milo crouched down, resting his forearms on his knees, peering down at his son who was currently draped across a faded rug like a discarded pair of pants.

“Yeah,” Lucas mumbled, his cheek pressed firmly against the carpet fibers. He looked up at his father, blinking slowly, trying to look as innocent as possible, “Can you carry me?”

Milo let out a quiet sigh that was half amused, half resigned. “Alright, I guess I can. But if you’re liquid, you better not drip everywhere.”

He scooped his son up off the floor, Lucas—still carrying the stuffed rabbit—instantly wrapping his small arms around Milo’s neck and letting his full weight drop against his chest. The boy smelled like warm laundry and maple syrup, his dark hair like the watermelon soap he insisted was the best because it had an action hero on it. Milo hummed, patting Lucas’s small back as he reached down for the bookbag he prepacked.

“You'll behave for Mrs. Gable?” Milo asked, slinging the bag over his unoccupied shoulder. He carried him down the short, dim hallway, feeling every single step in his knees.

“I will,” Lucas mumbled into Milo’s shoulder, his voice muffled by the worn fabric of the windbreaker. He nuzzled into his dad’s neck with a sleepy sigh, “If I’m extra good, can we get pizza?”

“We’ll have to see, kiddo,” Milo said softly, smiling as he grabbed his own leather briefcase from the entryway table. The leather was scuffed at the corners, smelling faintly of old paper, damp wool, and the black ink of fountain pens he stubbornly refused to replace with ballpoints. “Daddy’s got a lot of work to do today, I may not be home until after dinner.”

That seemed to warrant Lucas’s attention—despite having explained this the night prior—the boy stiffened in Milo’s grasp, his small fingers curling and clawing into the man’s jacket. His voice was small when he spoke, the noise made Milo’s heart twist between his ribs. “You’ll be back for bedtime?”

Milo paused, his hand resting on the brass knob of the front door. He tightened his arms around his son, drawing Lucas closer until he could feel the fast, rhythmic beat of the boy's heart against his own ribcage.

“I will,” Milo promised, his voice low and steady despite the tight knot forming in his throat. He unlocked the heavy front door of their apartment, his mouth pressed into a tight lipped smile. “I wouldn't miss bedtime for the world, buddy. I'll be home before you even finish getting dressed in your pajamas.”

Lucas let out a long, shuddering sigh, the tension melting out of his small frame as quickly as it had arrived. He nodded, resting his forehead against Milo’s shoulder once more. “Okay. Promise?”

“Pinky promise,” Milo said, hooking his free pinky finger with Lucas's tiny one.

“Lock it?” The boy asked, holding his thumb out.

Milo chuckled, a breathy, light sound, touching his thumb to the boys while keeping their pinkies hooked together—creating what crudely resembled a lock, “It’s locked.”

Satisfied, Lucas loosened his grip, letting Milo carry him out into the cold, silent hallway of the apartment building. The corridor was quiet, lit by the dim, flickering fluorescence of a building that had seen better decades. The floor was stained with something that looked suspiciously like wine in three spots and the air conditioning unit sounded like a cicada trapped in a jar.

“Did you find a wall people?” Lucas asked, humming and tapping the man’s back. Like every kid in the city, he’d heard the playground whispers about the wild men who lived out beyond; those savage, lawless creatures who slunk around in the shadows—it didn’t help that Milo himself was obsessed with the very idea of their existence. “Is that why you go so early?”

“Maybe,” Milo smiled softly. He leaned down, pressing a gentle kiss into the messy crown of Lucas's hair, crossing the short distance to Mrs. Gable’s door.

The dear old woman’s apartment was just three doors down, the faint aroma of cinnamon already drifting through the gap under her door. The woman had been widowed some ages ago, was occasionally visited by her grandchildren, and absolutely adored Lucas, treating him as one of her own.

Mrs. Gable had become a lifeline for Milo, always willing to watch Lucas when he needed to work overtime and making an extra effort to cook them casserole at least once a week.

Milo knocked three times—a gentle, familiar rhythm.

A moment later, the door creaked open, revealing Mrs. Gable in her floral housecoat, her grey hair pinned back in a neat bun. Her eyes softened as she took in the sight of Milo and the sleepy, semi liquid six year old in his arms.

“Morning, Milo,” she said in her warm, gravelly voice, stepping aside to let them in, her smile gentle and welcoming as always, “You look like you haven’t slept a wink, dear.”

“Not much,” Milo admitted, carefully setting Lucas down onto the rug inside her entryway. Lucas immediately rubbed his eyes and began inspecting her slippers and holding his rabbit close. “Thank you for doing this on short notice, Mrs. Gable. Things... well, today’s a big day.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about a thing,” she reassured him, patting his arm with a wrinkled hand, her bracelets clinking together softly, “We’ve got cocoa, the colorful cereal, and a morning full of cartoons lined up. You just go do whatever important work you need to do.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Milo admitted with a warm smile, passing off the bag he packed to the woman.

He knelt down to Lucas’s eye level, adjusting the collar of the boy's pajamas, his hand lingering on the boys warm shoulder, “I’ll call Grandpa around eleven to make sure everything’s on track, okay? Be good, listen to Mrs. Gable, and don’t eat the whole box.”

Lucas offered a tiny, solemn nod, leaning forward to press his forehead against Milo’s—their private, silent goodbye. “Bye, Daddy.”

His heart tightened, “Bye, buddy.”

“Go on with you, Milo,” the older woman waved him off with a dish towel when he stood, her expression softening behind her thick bifocals. “You've got history to make or whatever it is you do over at the university. Leave the boy to me.”

Milo laughed and offered Mrs. Gable a grateful nod, before he backed out into the hallway. The moment the heavy door clicked shut behind him, the brief warmth of fatherhood receded, replaced immediately by the cold, heavy reality waiting for him outside.

The morning air in New Haven was sharp and smelled faintly of damp asphalt, diesel exhaust, and the sweet, artificial musk of the municipal roasting plant three blocks over. The apartment complex—a blocky, thirty story concrete structure with caged balconies and peeling gray paint—had yet to wake up. A few windows glowed with the sickly yellow hue of cheap bulbs, but mostly, the building looked like a sleeping giant, waiting for the sun to crest over the skyline to start its daily routine.

Milo pulled his windbreaker tight against his chest and stepped off the curb onto the cracked pavement, walking briskly towards the gravel lot behind the building.

He unlocked his car—a dependable, fourteen year old gray sedan with a dented rear bumper and a dashboard cluttered with parking receipts, half empty coffee cups and whatever wrappers Lucas had stashed between the seats—and sank into the cracked vinyl seat of the driver’s side. Milo plopped his briefcase in the passenger seat, and cranked the key. The engine sputtered.

“Oh, c’mon,” Milo muttered, scowling down at the dashboard, “Don’t do this today.”

The engine turned over on the second try, coughing once before settling into a familiar, low pitched idle that rattled the loose change in the center console. Milo sighed and let the heater blow lukewarm air at his knees for a minute while he buckled his seatbelt.

The heavy gray sedan rumbled out of the apartment lot and merged onto the damp, mid morning asphalt of New Haven. The traffic on Central Avenue was its usual sluggish, soul crushing self—even though the digital clock on the stereo only read 5:47. Brake lights bled a dull, bruised crimson through the gray mist as thousands of cars, buses and delivery vans crept forward in neat, orderly lanes.

Milo didn't mind the crawl.

For the first time in eighteen months, the quiet hum inside the car wasn't filled entirely by the suffocating weight of Joana’s absence or the administrative dread of grading undergraduate midterms. Instead, a sharp, electric current of professional anticipation buzzed beneath his skin.

He drummed his fingers against the worn steering wheel, the radio spitting static as it fought between two stations using the same frequency. He drove with a mechanical ease, his mind drifting back to the file he had skimmed late last night on his laptop.

A Westerner. An actual, living, breathing human being from the lawless, dinosaur ridden expanse on the other side of the massive border wall.

Western Asset-01-M.

Milo sighed, turning on his blinker to merge to the right lane. The bureaucrats loved their alphanumeric designations, stripping away humanity or life at every chance they got. This would be no exception it would seem.

For years, the West had been a subject of academic speculation, grainy satellite telemetry, border patrol rumors, and political posturing.

To the average citizen it was a mythical wasteland—a jagged, untamed frontier beyond the Great Wall where the climate grew wilder, the terrain turned to red rock and scrubland, and ancient, reptilian behemoths roamed free across the plains. Most Easterners viewed the West the way medieval peasants viewed the edge of a flat earth: a terrifying void populated by monsters and cannibals.

But Milo was a linguist and an anthropologist: the idea of a civilization of people beyond the wall was the subject of his every other paper, the concept was his holy grail.

The West wasn't a monster story; it was a lost chapter. The wall had gone up centuries ago—ages really—cutting off migration, trade, and communication, forcing two halves of human civilization to evolve down entirely different paths. The East built high rises, paved highways, and democratic empires on software and concrete. And—up until a week ago when the anthropologist first got an email from a shady government address—it was believed that the Western half of the population had been wiped out by the wild and brutal conditions.

The West had survived apparently.

Milo’s chest tightened, his heart skipping into a more frantic rhythm against his ribs. The Director’s sudden clearance to grant his research team access to Western Asset 01-M felt like a seismic shift. History was being written today, and his name was going to be on the footnotes.

Around him, the city architecture began to change. The sleek glass towers and corporate storefronts gave way to heavy industrial zones—warehouses with corrugated iron roofs and sprawling rail yards choked with freight containers.

He stopped at a drive-thru tucked beneath a concrete overpass, grabbing a large, black coffee that tasted like burnt rubber and hot water, and a greasy ham-and-cheese croissant from a teenager who looked like he hadn't slept since he was fourteen. Milo paid with a tap of his phone, swallowed a mouthful of the bitter brew to jump start his sluggish brain cells, and pressed on, turning up the radio to keep his restless mind from spiraling.

The towering brutalist architecture of central New Haven slowly gave way to lower, heavier government and agricultural complexes, barbed wire perimeters, and armed checkpoints where military police in gray body armor directed traffic with sharp, bored gestures. After twenty minutes of driving by what felt like an endless maze of fields of cows and corn, he exited the main highway, turning his sedan toward the sterile, heavily guarded security complexes.

Ahead of him, dominating the distant horizon, rose the Wall.

It was a monstrous architectural achievement—a towering barrier of reinforced gray concrete and interwoven steel mesh that stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. Armed guard towers punctuated the ridge every half mile, their searchlights cold and dark against the overcast sky. Floodlights hummed with residual power, and heavy razor wire crowned the summit like a rusted halo.

Milo grimaced, took another sip of his brew, and flashed his Department ID at guard standing between himself and the cluster of looming concrete buildings that make up the Administrative Border Control facilities. It was a complex designed for training border patrols and house maintenance vehicles.

It also conveniently had a medical quarantine zone that was far enough from the city that business could be done without civilians ever knowing.

The guard scanned the pass with a handheld terminal, the device beeping twice with a cheerful green flash. The guard handed the items back, his eyes lingering for a fraction of a second on Milo’s rumpled jacket and messy hair, as if trying to figure out how someone who looked like an adjunct professor had business in a high security military zone.

Ultimately, the man just shrugged and waved him forward, “Gate's open, Doctor. Keep your speed under twenty once you're inside.”

“Understood. Thank you,” Milo said, putting the sedan back in drive as the heavy hydraulic steel gate hissed open, rolling back with a deep, bone rattling groan.

Ten minutes later, Milo parked his car in the underground parking bay—a handwritten sign designating it as a researcher lot—grabbed his briefcase, and walked briskly toward the medical holding wing. He swiped through three security doors before he finally stepped out into the main administrative hub of the building.

The contrast between the admittedly messy but lived in environment of New Haven and this facility was jarring.

Here, the air smelled of industrial bleach, cold stainless steel, and the metallic tang of ozone. Fluorescent strip lights hummed overhead, casting a harsh, flat white glare over epoxy coated concrete floors. Security personnel in heavy gear paced the corridors in pairs, their boots clicking rhythmically against the floor, while medical staff in pale blue scrubs hurried between labs clutching clipboards and digital tablets.

Milo wandered through the sterile walls with his head ducked low until he found his departmental liaison, Dr. Jill Thorne, standing outside Observation Bay 4, the rest of his team huddled close by. With a single nod to a researcher he didn’t immediately recognize, he wordlessly slid among their ranks.

Thorne was a tall, thin woman with sharp features, slicked back hair, and a lab coat so stiffly starched it looked like it could stand up on its own. She was currently arguing in a harsh whisper with a stocky military liaison who wore the twin silver bars of a captain on his collar, a medical professional standing firmly by her side.

Milo leaned over to the researcher next to him, a woman he had professionally argued with on three separate occasions—Dr. Loftin—his voice a hushed murmur, “What did I miss?”

Dr. Loftin didn’t turn to him fully, though she took a small, half step towards him, careful to not draw any attention to the pair. “Apparently the asset was being housed in an outpost further west before this and woke up during transport.”

“This whole thing is a disaster, Milo. The brass are shitting bricks,” One of Milo’s colleagues—Aaron—leaned over and interrupted before Dr. Loftin could continue. His usually charming, laid back demeanor buried under hunched shoulders and a harsh whisper. “The bastard bit some nurse’s arm when they tried to sedate him. They’re saying he took a chunk out of it.”

Aaron’s words hung heavily in the chilled air of the corridor, turning the hum of the fluorescent lights into a sharp, grating buzz.

Milo’s ribs tightened, his heart doing an uneven, clumsy flip in his chest. He shifted his weight, his fingers tightening slightly around the handle of his scuffed leather briefcase. He looked past Dr. Thorne, the medical staff, and the captain toward the thick, reinforced observation glass of Bay 4, though, with the crowd, he couldn’t make out anything other than blank white walls and medical monitors.

“Bit a nurse’s arm?” Milo murmured back, his brow furrowing as he adjusted his glasses. “Was he defensive, or was it a reaction to the sedatives? What were they using?”

Dr. Loftin let out a sharp, quiet breath, crossing her arms over her clipboard, casting a warning glare at Aaron. “Ketamine cocktail, from what I heard. They’ve treated him like a wild animal from the moment they dragged him across the border, and now they're surprised he acted like one.”

“He isn’t just ‘a human being,’ Loftin,” Aaron countered in a fierce whisper, rubbing the back of his neck. “He’s from the West. We’ve not seen a westerner stray this close to the wall before. For all we know he could be a dangerous individual who was exiled.”

Milo looked between the two fronts for a moment, adjusting his briefcase again, before he muttered, “It doesn’t matter who he is, we’ve got to at least attempt to make decent first contact.”

“First contact is over, Dr. Young. The border patrol made contact with a rifle,” Loftin said pointedly, turning sharply toward the observation door.

Dr. Thorne’s sharp voice cut through the corridor, ending the hushed debate instantly.

“Enough,” she snapped, turning away from the captain with an expression that could curdle milk. Her piercing blue eyes locked onto Milo and she smiled—a predatory, brittle thing that spoke of too little sleep and bad coffee. “Ah, Dr. Young. So glad you finally joined us. I assume your morning commute was pleasant while the rest of us have been managing a crisis since 0400.”

“Good morning to you too, Jill,” Milo said smoothly, offering a tight, unbothered smile that didn't reach his eyes. “I see the warm hospitality of the Department is in full effect.”

The captain—a broad-shouldered man whose name tag read MUTZ—crossed his arms, the tactical fabric of his uniform straining. “Save the pleasantries, Professor. The subject is gaining consciousness again, I need to know if your team can get this asset to cooperate or if I can put a bullet in his skull and get on with my life.”

“He's not just an asset, He's a human being," Dr Loftin corrected instantly, her tone sharp. She opened her mouth to further protest but was cut off with a sharp glance from Dr. Thorne.

The Captain let out a dry, humorless laugh, tapping the screen of his tablet and his voice dropped into a low, dangerous mutter, “Oh, he's human, all right—stubbornly, aggressively human.”

Thorne stepped closer to the group, her starched lab coat rustling faintly. She looked exhausted, the faint shadows under her eyes contrasting sharply with her pale skin, but her posture remained rigid. She placed herself firmly between the gathering of researchers and the Captain, gesturing to Milo, who straightened “I assure you, sir, we can get him to cooperate.”

The captain eyed Milo with undisguised skepticism. “You're the linguist? The guy who thinks we can teach him parlor tricks?”

“I study human communication, Captain,” Milo said, keeping his tone even though a cold knot of dread was slowly forming in his stomach, a bead of sweat running down the back of his neck. He adjusted his glasses and took a step forward, “Language isn't a parlor trick. It's how people survive. What’s his current status?”

Finally, the medical professional—an older man with a nametag reading Dr. Harris—stepped closer, looking down at his own clipboard. “Not good, professor. I haven’t finished reviewing the border patrol’s reports yet, but he fell while trying to flee.”

Milo’s lips pressed into a thin line, the faint spark of academic excitement that had fueled his drive withering away, replaced by a sick, heavy sorrow. “And the injuries?”

“Bullet graze his thigh, bruising, lacerations, a couple of broken ribs, concussion, and a bad pelvic hairline fracture—standard injuries from a tumble down a canyon,” Harris rattled off, flipping a page on his clipboard before glanced over, letting out a heavy, defeated sigh. “The real issue is the lumbar spine.”

Milo swallowed hard, looking warily over at Dr. Loftin, whose expression was grim.

Harris didn’t pause, he lowered the clipboard and straightened with an expression that Milo knew all too well. “We stabilized what we could, but... he's lost sensation from the waist down.”

The silence in the observation corridor grew suffocating, thick with a collective, horrified stillness. Even Captain Mutz seemed to shift uncomfortably, his jaw tightening as the reality of the situation hung in the sterile air.

“Waist down?” Milo repeated, his voice barely more than a breath. The words felt foreign, heavy, and terribly final. “So he’s... he’s paralyzed?”

“For now, functionally, yes,” Dr. Harris said quietly, tapping the edge of his clipboard with a pen. “With time and a few surgeries we could repair pathways, he wouldn’t be able to walk unassisted, but he would be able to walk.”

The doctor paused, glancing at the captain, “That is of course, only if the board signs off on it. Which… they only will if he’s proven to be useful.”

A cold weight settled in Milo’s stomach. The exhilarating fantasy of making first contact with a representative of an unknown human society crashed violently against the cold, brutal reality of human suffering. They hadn't just discovered a westerner; they had broken one. And judging by the clinical, detached tone and the aggressive manner of the Captain, they were treating him less like an ambassador of a new world and more like a prisoner of war.

Thorne sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Which brings us to our primary operational problem, Dr. Young. He's waking up and we need to communicate with him.”

“And you want me to calm him down?” Milo asked incredulously, looking towards the heavy steel door of the observation room.

The heavy silence hung in the hallway, thick with the sharp scent of bleach and unspoken tension.

Captain Mutz folded his arms tightly, his tactical vest creaking under the pressure. “We need you to get through to him before he hurts someone else or himself anymore.”

Milo looked from Mutz to the frosted glass window of Observation Bay 4. Through the faint, blurred silhouettes on the other side, he could see the shadows of medical staff starting to retreat to the door as monitors started to flash and ring shrill warnings. He felt a cold drop of sweat trace down his spine.

This man needed help. Desperately.

“What about his personal effects?” Milo asked, his voice dropping to a low, intense register. "The things he was wearing when he was caught?"

The captain gestured down the hall toward the property locker room. “We logged them. Heavy leather duster, a knife made of forged iron, bandana, and... this.”

The captain reached into his tactical vest and pulled out a heavy, blued steel revolver, holding it up by the grip. It was old school, mechanical, beautifully crafted with intricate brass etchings along the cylinder and a polished walnut handle worn smooth by years of use.

Milo stared at the gun, a cold realization settling over him, his breath hitching.

A revolver.

It wasn't a crude, stone age weapon. It was meticulously engineered, beautifully crafted metal and wood. It proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the West possessed an advanced, industrialized society of their own. They weren't dealing with a caveman; they were dealing with a man from a distinct human civilization that had simply taken a radically different technological and ecological path.

And the Eastern Border Control had broken one of their sons and treated him like a rabid dog.

“Anything with writing?” He asked, trying to keep his tone flat.

Dr. Thorne and the Captain shook their heads, Thorne was the one to speak this time, “Not that we’ve identified yet, it could just be glyphs.”

“Well, he doesn’t speak Eastern Standard, obviously,” Milo finally said, forcing his voice to remain steady as he set his leather briefcase down on a metal bench against the wall. He unzipped his windbreaker, suddenly feeling suffocated by the heat of the sterile corridor. “So… Body language and tone are our best bet right now.”

Milo took a slow, deliberate breath, steadying the tremor in his hands before grabbing an audio recorder and hooking it to his belt . He adjusted his wire rimmed glasses, and nodded toward the heavy, reinforced door of Observation Bay 4.

“Keep the armed guards outside,” Milo insisted, turning his gaze sharply onto Captain Mutz. “If I walk in there surrounded by tactical gear and drawn weapons, he’s only going to freak out more.”

Mutz grunted, though he gave a curt nod to the two guards flanking the door, signaling them to hold their positions. “You've got ten minutes, Professor. If he gets aggressive, we step in. No exceptions.”

“Ten minutes,” Milo agreed quietly.

He swiped his keycard against the reader. The heavy pneumatic lock disengaged with a loud clack and a long, mechanical hiss. The door opened slowly, releasing a faint wave of cold, antiseptic air mixed with the sharp, acidic scent of sweat and fear. Stepping through the threshold, Milo let the door seal shut behind him, leaving the harsh chatter of the corridor outside.

Milo stood in the doorway for a long moment, his chest tight.

The observation bay was freezing. High output fluorescent panels flooded the windowless room with an unnerving, stark white light. The sound of the monitor was deafening inside the enclosed space—a steady, rhythmic beep... beep... beep... that spiked in tempo every time the man on the bed shuddered.

In the center of the space was a sturdy looking steel medical gurney. Straps of heavy black nylon crossed over a broad chest, pinning the man down firmly across the sternum and upper arms. His forearms were bound to padded side rails.

Western Asset-01-M.

At first glance, the man strapped to it didn't look like a mythical monster or a hardened wasteland raider. He looked shattered. He looked ruggedly human.

He was in his late twenties or early thirties, with broad, powerful shoulders that looked entirely out of place on the slender, clinical frame of the medical bed. His skin was deeply weathered, burned a rich, dark bronze, crisscrossed with faint white scars along his forearms and neck. His dark hair was matted with dried sweat and dust, sticking to a broad, stubborn forehead, and a fine, jagged scar ran horizontally across the bridge of his strong nose.

His clothes had been stripped away, replaced by a coarse, blue institutional gown that looked entirely alien against skin baked by an unforgiving western sun. His body was tense, rigid under the nylon leather, muscles corded and trembling with exhausted fury.

The westerner was breathing in rapid, shallow hitches—the ragged, panicked hyperventilation of someone caught in an endless nightmare. Every few seconds, his head rolled restlessly from side to side, his eyelids fluttering open to reveal bloodshot, terrified eyes that stared at the ceiling, processing nothing except pain, terror and captivity.

Milo felt a sudden, sharp ache in his chest that had nothing to do with academic curiosity and everything to do with Lucas.

He imagined his own son—small, fragile, terrified—strapped to a metal table in a strange, incomprehensible world, hurt, unable to move his legs, surrounded by strangers who spoke a foreign tongue and poked at him with needles.

The thought made his stomach heave.

Milo swallowed hard, forcing himself to take a deep breath. When he took a slow, deliberate step forward, the man’s head jerked toward the sound with terrifying speed.

The frantic, rolling movement of his head stopped instantly. His dark, bloodshot eyes snapped toward the doorway, locking onto Milo with a feral, terrifying intensity. For a second, there was no recognition in those eyes—just pure, unadulterated panic and animal desperation.

The man didn't speak; he let out a harsh, broken gasp, his chest straining violently against the nylon straps. The heart monitor on the wall spiked instantly, its rapid, frantic beeping filling the silent room like a ticking bomb.

Milo froze.

Every primal instinct in his own body screamed at him to back away, to flee the room, to protect himself from the cornered animal thrashing before him. His own heart had taken up its own panicked, rapid rhythm against his ribs. He was just a linguist, a desk researcher who spent his life translating old manuscripts and studying how language develops over time, not a handler accustomed to breaking hostile subjects.

“Imagine it's Lucas,” Milo told himself, his chest aching as he forced his feet to remain planted on the cold linoleum.

He remembered the golden rule of approaching a frightened, cornered creature: Make yourself small. Make yourself non-threatening. Show your hands.

Milo deliberately slowed his breathing, consciously lowering his posture. He didn't stride forward with authority; instead, he let his shoulders slump, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, palms turned slightly outward so the man could see he was holding nothing—no weapons, no needles, no restraints.

The westerner didn’t seem to care.

“Easy,” Milo whispered, his voice soft, melodic, and pitched deliberately low. He didn't use any grand or complex vocabulary; he spoke the way he spoke to Lucas when the boy woke up screaming from a nightmare. “Hey... easy now. It's alright. I'm not going to hurt you.”

The man let out a harsh, choking shout—a clear attempt to say something—his chest straining violently against the heavy nylon straps with each breath. The physical effort tore a terrible, wet groan tore from the back of his throat, his face twisting into an expression of absolute, soul crushing torment.

He hissed out another warbling phrase, his voice raw, gravelly, and thick with a distinct, archaic western drawl that sounded entirely alien against the sterile walls of the lab. It wasn't Eastern speech; it was slower, rounder at the vowels, rough around the edges like wind over gravel.

“I know,” Milo said softly, taking one agonizingly slow step forward. He kept his eyes locked downward, avoiding direct predatory eye contact, projecting as much submissive, non-threatening body language as he could muster. “I know it’s scary. I know you’re confused. You just… gotta calm down.”

The man snarled—a guttural, desperate sound. He thrashed his upper body, his shoulders straining against the leather and nylon. A wet, choked sob tore from his throat, raw and utterly human, betraying the sheer psychological break happening behind his eyes.

Again he yelled, tears finally spilling over his lower lashes, carving pale tracks through the sweat and grime on his cheeks. He looked so young—too young to be a dangerous border crosser, too young to have his body broken like a discarded tool. He looked like someone's son. Someone's brother.

“I'm sorry,” Milo murmured, taking another half-step forward. He stopped about three feet from the edge of the bed—well out of biting range—and carefully, slowly, lowered himself to his knees on the cold epoxy floor.

The action shocked the man into a momentary stutter of motion. His thrashing slowed, his chest heaving as he stared down at Milo with wild, disbelieving eyes. His dark eyes narrowed, blinking wildly to clear themselves of tears to study the Easterner.

“I'm Milo,” the researcher said softly, pointing a finger gently at his own chest. “My name is Milo. I'm a researcher. I'm not here to hurt you.”

The westerner watched him, his pupils dilated with a cocktail of adrenaline and pain medication. He didn't relax—his body remained coiled like a tightened spring, every muscle screaming with tension—but the immediate, blind frenzy of the panic eased, if only slightly.

“There you go,” Milo murmured, his voice cracking slightly.

The man’s bleeding lip—where he had bitten down on it during the fit—trembled. He swallowed hard, his throat working convulsively, his dark eyes darting frantically around the room—checking the ceiling, the monitors, the locked door behind Milo, searching for an escape route that didn't exist.

His eyes shifted to the only unrestrained part of his body, his legs.

He spoke again—quieter this time, sounding more like a lost child than anything—his voice cracking violently, a ragged sob breaking through his teeth. His eyes narrowed, breath hitching as his breathing sped up again. His wild gaze turned to Milo once more, this time burning with an intoxicating, hateful intensity. He yelled again, a broken language the Easterner could understand.

“Hey, hey, look at me,” Milo whispered carefully. He didn't try to touch him; he knew better. He just stayed there on his knees, holding his hands open, palms up, projecting as much calm, steady energy as his nervous system could muster. “You’re going to be okay. Breathe. Just breathe with me.”

Milo took a slow, exaggerated deep breath through his nose, letting his chest rise visibly, then exhaling slowly through his mouth.

The man stared down at him, his chest still heaving, his body trembling from head to toe with the violent tremors of shock and exhaustion. The monitor beside the bed shrieked a high pitched warning as his heart rate spiked.

Slowly—painfully—the panic began to subside.

The exhaustion of massive trauma, heavy painkillers, and pure adrenaline withdrawal began to take its heavy toll.

His head fell back heavily against the pillow, no longer able to sustain the frantic terror. His chest stopped straining against the nylon straps, settling into slower, heavier hitches. The wild, defensive snarl melted away, leaving behind a look of profound, hollow defeat. He didn't stop crying—silent, hot tears continued to leak from the corners of his eyes and soak into the hospital linens.

The heart monitor’s frantic tempo slowed, dropping from a dangerous peak into a sluggish, heavy rhythm.

Milo stayed completely still, squatting on the cold floor, his own muscles aching, waiting until the man finally settled.

—

Also!!!! I do want to give a shout out to my sister for being a my camera man! Camerawoman? Eh.

It is much easier to handle things when I can use two hands instead of one. So having her there made things a lot easier. She is scared of bug tho so most of these are taken from further away and had to be zoomed in.

Starting off strong with a uhh… I honestly have no clue. I scooped it out of the water. It’s genuinely surprising that I’ve not been bitten or stung or harmed in some way while intentionally handling things until now.

The spider is also a mystery spider! It looks like it’s some kind of orb weaver considering where I found it and (even tho you can’t see it in that image) it had a very decorative backside. But it was hairy! Which I don’t see with them very often!

Okay, I did some quick research. The first bug is a Water Scorpion! And I’m pretty sure our spider friend is a Green Lynx Spider.

So, I actually found three of these guys while out tromping around! These are all of the same one I found, but she’s a Castleback orbweaver! Very cool looking spider. I didn’t bring any containers to bring critters back home otherwise… she would likely be frozen.

—

And if you can’t tell, I love handling bugs and spiders and do it very regularly with little to no hesitation! This is because I have grown very confident in being able to ID the dangerous bugs in my area and being able to read their body language! In the many years I’ve been handling bugs, I’m really going to emphasize spiders here because that’s what most people are afraid of, I’ve never been bitten or stung while intentionally handling a single one of them!

Of the hundreds, if not thousands of spiders I’ve dealt with, never once, have I been bitten. I really want to emphasize this.

Because today was a first and I was bitten while handling a spider. One of these castleback orbweavers actually. And, I’m usually the person to look back and assume that this means I handled the spider incorrectly and scared her into biting but… this was two seconds before she bit me.

There is no pressure, I’m not actively chasing her with my other hand, and she isn’t getting pinched in any way. By all means, I was handling her correctly.

Why did she bite? Honestly, I don’t know. There are lots of reasons.

It could have been my hands were shaking or maybe there was wind. Or I pinched her on accident before. Or she was still upset at me for plucking her off of her web (I was careful not to damage it so I could place her back). I generally like to leave web spiders, especially orbweavers, alone because I don’t want to damage webs and the second they are out of their web they feel significantly more threatened by everything. (Why I prefer handling wolf spiders)

The most likely reason she bit was because she was overwhelmed. And I can’t blame her for that.

The truth is, even when a spider does bite, it is only defensive! A spider will never go out of its way to harm. I’m aware of the risks I take when I poke around spiders and honestly surprised it’s taken this long for me to get bitten.

Did it hurt? I mean… sorta? It felt like a fire ant bite for like a second and then I was fine. But significantly better than a fire ant bite because I’m fine today, no itch or bump. Almost like… getting poked playfully by your friend with a sewing needle?

I’ll be honest, it was more startling than anything else.

—

Warnings!

Mentioned Death. I think that’s all of them really? Not much.

—

The train ride from Livingwood to Bitterdown felt like traveling backward through time.

The iron tracks of the Eastern Union Rail Line hummed beneath the heavy floorboards of the passenger car, a steady, rhythmic clatter that felt like a pulse echoing up through Samantha’s worn leather boots. It rattled violently, spewing thick soot across the pristine wilderness, a physical reminder of the collision between two entirely different worlds.

Sammy sat with her knees pulled tightly to her chest on the hard bench of the passenger car, her worn leather boots propped on the wooden frame in front of her.

It was a strange thing, riding a train out here. To the folk who had lived in the West for generations, these roaring steel serpents were monsters of iron and steam carving ugly, black trenches through the sacred, golden tallgrass. It cut up ancient migration paths. It wasn’t a new thing—the West had developed steam engines decades ago—but never before had they been constructed on such a scale, over such terrain.

The railroads had been something that belonged to the larger eastern cities, those sacred, secretive places that any westerner denied her the location of.

They didn’t belong in the wilds.

But to Sammy, the sulfurous scent of coal smoke, the screech of steel on steel, and the violent jolting of the suspension were deeply, painfully familiar. It smelled like the factories outside of central New Haven. It smelled like home.

Or, at least, what used to be home.

Sammy pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the landscape shift. The open, wild prairies were slowly twisting, scarred by the encroachment of deep wagon ruts, hastily thrown up telegraph poles, and the crude timber camps of Eastern expansionists.

The East was bleeding over the wall. They came seeking land, gold, and the wild, untamed magic of a frontier they didn't respect, bringing their noise, their pollution, and their cold, bureaucratic arrogance with them.

And right in the path of that tide sat Bitterdown.

Bitterdown had once been a sleepy outpost, little more than a notch in the dirt where tired travelers and guild members came to rest before venturing into the deep wilds. But ever since the eastern migration began—ever since the great wall opened its gates and spilled thousands of city folk into the frontier—the town had bloated into an ugly, chaotic creature tearing at its own seams.

The whistle of the locomotive screamed like a wounded raptor as the train ground to a shuddering halt, iron wheels biting down hard against the steel tracks. The sudden deceleration slammed Sammy forward, her brow nearly cracking against the worn oak back of the bench in front of her.

She caught herself, sucking in a sharp breath as the coal scented steam billowed past the passenger windows, obscuring the platform outside in a thick, sulfurous white haze.

Sammy adjusted the heavy canvas duster resting on her narrow shoulders, tucked her fraying collar higher against the chill, and stood up. She grabbed her leather satchel and walked out into the aisle.

Sammy stepped off the train car, her dark eyes darting nervously across the platform, the contrast was sickeningly familiar. She sucked in a deep breath, her shoulders hunching up slightly.

Tall, narrow boarding houses built from green, unseasoned pine leaned precariously over dirt streets churned into soupy mud by heavy iron wheeled supply wagons. The air smelled of woodsmoke, coal dust, wet theropods, and desperation.Electric wires—strung up by Eastern outfits with more copper than sense—dangled haphazardly between raw pine telegraph poles, humming with a cheap, buzzing energy that made the local birds skittish.

Eastern merchants in bowler hats hollered over Western trappers; canvas tents spilled out into the alleyways; and the pristine air of the pine forests was choked with the stench of coal soot, wet garbage, and unwashed bodies.

The Westerners walked through the chaos with tight jaws and handguns resting low on their hips, glaring at the Easterners who blundered through their town like tourists in a graveyard.

It was two worlds grinding against each other, throwing off sparks, and nobody looked particularly happy about it.

Sammy adjusted the heavy satchel slung over her shoulder. Deep inside its leather pockets rested her Eastern pass—a laminated, stamped ticket back to the sterile clinics of New Haven—along with a worn leather ledger stamped with the crest of the Paxcolt Ranch.

She wasn't here just to cross back into the East to get Jesse medicine—though the clock ticking on his bubbling, fluid filled lungs echoed in her mind with every beat of her heart. She was here because Bitterdown sat in the shadow of the eastern wall, and because this was the last place The Boy Wonder had been seen alive.

She needed to know. The obsession that had consumed her for a year and a half demanded an answer before she stepped back over that border. To do that, she needed proof that she wasn’t just another Easterner who was poking around where she didn’t belong.

Samantha needed to talk to Mayor Bickley

She pushed through the surging crowd, her small frame darting expertly through the gaps. Samantha kept her chin down, but her dark eyes darted left and right, taking in the neon painted signboards slapped over traditional wooden storefronts.

They hated her type here.

She could feel the stares—sharp, suspicious glares from the locals who could spot her city bred stride a mile off, and dismissive, arrogant squints from the wealthy Eastern prospectors who thought anyone in worn leather was a savage.

“Alright, Sammy,” she muttered under her breath, twisting violently to avoid running into a large, careless man that was guiding a huffing pachycephalosaurus through the crowd, “Just… keep walking.”

To her left, a local blacksmith pounded away at a glowing spur on an anvil set right out in the dirt, sweat glistening on his weathered brow. To her right, a popup stall made of corrugated steel flashed a blue, LED sign advertising satellite reception for Eastern folk only. The bright, crisp neon glow looked utterly grotesque reflected in the filthy mud puddles at her feet.

She kept her pace steady, eyeing the towering form of the Town Hall—a sprawling, two story timber edifice that looked like it had been hastily expanded three times over to accommodate the swelling bureaucracy.

“Hey! Watch the jacket, Yokel!” The voice was sharp, nasal, and unmistakably metropolitan.

Before Sammy could step out of the way, a shoulder slammed into hers with enough force to spin her around. She stumbled on a slippery patch of mud, her boots skidding before she caught her balance against a hitching post.

The man who’d bumped into her was practically dripping with Eastern vanity. He wore a crisp, tailored windbreaker in an obnoxious neon teal, pristine slate gray cargo joggers, and sleek white sneakers that were currently taking a tragic bath in thick, brown western sludge.

“Great. Fantastic,” the man scoffed, staring down at a splash of brown mud on his cuff. He didn't even look Sammy in the eye at first, flicking his fingers toward her in a dismissive, waving motion. His western speech was slow, sloppy, and made Sammy grind her teeth “Look where you’re going, Boor.”

Sammy’s hand instinctively drifted near the pocket where her ledger rested. She took in his slicked back hair, the wireless earpiece humming softly in his ear, and the smug, untouchable air that every mid level corporate scout seemed to carry like cheap cologne.

“It’s a dirt road,” Sammy said, her voice flat, pitching it just enough to hide her own New Haven accent. “Dirt tends to stick.”

The man finally looked up, his eyes scanning her frayed collar, the canvas duster, and her muddy boots. He shook his head, scoffed and turned sharply on his heel, muttering under his breath in Eastern, “Unbelievable. Barbarians.”

“Have a nice day in Bitterdown,” Sammy muttered under her breath as he strutted off, watching him narrowly avoid stepping on the tail of a tethered, sleepy looking Ceratopsian resting by the saloon.

She shook her head, a cold knot tightening in her chest. That was what she was trying so hard to get back to. The arrogance, the pristine isolation, the casual cruelty of people who thought convenience was a birthright. But if it meant saving Jesse, she’d drag herself through a mile of that noise.

Sammy turned back toward the Town Hall.

The heavy oak doors were propped open, guarded by two Western deputies with heavy lever action rifles slung over their shoulders. Inside, the waiting room was a cloud of pipe smoke, wet wool, and raised voices.

She expected to be stopped by the deputies, but the front office was a circus of stressed clerks and arguing homesteaders. With an ease that surprised even herself, Sammy slipped right past them, following a hallway toward a door marked with:

OFFICE OF THE MAYOR.

Samantha didn't knock. She cast a quick glance around the empty hallway, turned the knob slowly and pushed her way inside.

The office was quiet, smelling faintly of old paper, chicory coffee, and dried lavender.

Sammy paused at the door, unable to step fully in, taking in the woman who had sent Tanner to his death all those years ago—but had been nothing but a trusted ally in almost every tale she was mentioned in.

Behind a large oak desk sat Mayor Bickley.

Emily looked exactly as the stories described, though time and the suffocating weight of leadership had clearly carved their toll into her.

Even still, amidst the chaos ruining her town, Emily looked immaculately, almost defiantly composed. Her sandy blonde hair was pulled back into a tight, severe bun, not a single stray strand escaping. She wore a simple, high collared blue dress—dignified, unpretentious, but distinctly civilian. No gunbelt, no silver badge. Just a woman holding down a fort with sheer, stubborn will.

As the door clicked shut, Emily looked up from a stack of land deeds. Her dark green eyes swept over Sammy, instantly cataloging the oversized coat, the dark skin, and the sharp, impatient posture.

A shutter seemed to slam down behind her eyes before Samantha even had a chance to plead her case.

Sammy finally stepped fully into the room, her boots thudding loudly on the pine floorboards and she closed the door behind herself. She rolled her shoulder back, lifting her chin up as much as she could, “Mayor Bickley.”

“If you're here about the permits for the Eastern telegraph line, the office hours are on Thursday,” Emily said, her voice smooth, polite, and entirely devoid of warmth. She didn't offer a seat. “And if you're a land speculator, the eastern plots are closed for surveying.”

“I'm not a speculator,” Sammy began, her voice echoing in the high ceilinged room as she took three deliberate steps toward the desk. She shoved her shaking hands into her duster pockets, before she got the chance to pick at her fraying sleeves, “And I don't… I don’t care about your wires. I'm looking for information.”

Emily sighed, a delicate, exhausted sound, and dipped her steel nibbed pen into an inkwell. “The town marshal handles missing livestock and stolen gear, Miss…”

“Samantha,” Sammy cut in, leaning slightly forward. She swallowed hard, taking a deep breath before continuing, “And I'm not looking for cattle. I'm asking about Tanner. Tanner Paxcolt.”

The air in the room instantly went dead.

The tip of Emily’s pen froze mid stroke. A tiny droplet of dark ink blossomed onto the crisp white paper beneath it, ruining the page.

For a fraction of a second, a flicker of profound, agonizing grief crossed the mayor's features—so fast Sammy almost thought she imagined it. But just as quickly, Emily’s face smoothed into an impenetrable porcelain mask. She dabbed the blotch with a piece of felt, her hands maddeningly steady.

“Tanner Paxcolt has been gone for seven years,” Emily said, her tone flat, utterly stripped of emotion. Her green eyes narrowed slightly, “There is nothing left to say about him. If you are a reporter from the city looking for folklore, you can turn right back around.”

“I'm not a reporter,” Sammy stated, her heart starting to beat faster in her chest, stroking the fire that lived between her ribs. “I'm looking for the truth.”

The mayor didn’t look amused.

“Mr. Paxcolt left Bitterdown seven years ago,” Emily said, her tone dropping an octave into something flat, cold, and final. Her green eyes didn’t look to meet Sammy, instead focusing solely on the page before her. “He went southeast into the scrubland on Guild business. What happened after he rode out is between him and the wilds. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a town to govern. Good day, Samantha.”

“Don't do that,” Sammy snapped, suddenly—startling herself—the irritation she’d been harboring since Livingwood flaring hot in her chest. “Don't give me the official ledger line. I know he came through here last. I know he took the contract on the mad Tyrannosaur. He spoke to you before he left!”

Emily slowly rose from her chair. She wasn't particularly tall, but her posture was immaculate, radiating an icy, unyielding authority that made Sammy feel suddenly very small.

“I have work to do,” Emily declared, pointing toward the door with a finality that made Sammy’s heart skip. “Get out of my office before I have Vance throw you in a holding cell.”

Sammy bit her lip. Her pulse pounded in her ears like a wild drum. She was getting nowhere. Cold. Closed off. Emily was just like the rest of them. They protected their little myths like dragon's gold, wrapping Tanner up in stories about him riding off into the sunsets, leaving the truth to rot.

If Sammy walked out that door now, she’d leave with nothing. All her reading, all her obsessive searching, all the late night arguments with the hired hands and Saurboys at the ranch—it would all end in a dead end.

Sammy hadn't ridden an iron beast across the frontier just to be dismissed by a mayor in a high collar. She had challenged Jesse, pestered him at every opportunity.

She couldn’t roll over now.

Sammy reached into her leather satchel and pulled out a thick, leather bound ledger, and slammed it down on the edge of Emily's desk with a sharp, heavy crack. The leather was scuffed, bearing the deep, burned signet of the unmistakable Paxcolt coat of arms.

Emily blinked, startled by the noise.

“Danny sent me,” Sammy lied, her voice dropping into a steady, defiant pitch. She looked Emily straight in the eyes, unblinking. She needed to sell this—she puffed out her chest as much as she could, glaring at the woman with her jaw tight, “Daniel James Paxcolt. Tanner's older brother."

Emily didn't flinch, but her jaw tightened, a microscopic crack in her composure. "Danny Paxcolt doesn't send eastern girls to do his talking."

“Then look for yourself,” Samantha challenged, pushing the ledger forward.

Emily’s sharp eyes darted down to the ledger, her face expressionless.

Sammy flipped the book open to a page filled with neat, precise columns of numbers, signatures, and legal brand registrations. At the top of the page, stamped in heavy black ink, was the official seal of the Paxcolt Ranch, alongside Danny’s jagged, distinct signature authorizing Samantha to handle regional accounts and cross border tallies. “I’m a bookkeeper and ranch hand.”

Emily stared at the ledger for a long, grueling minute. Her fingers twitched at her side. Slowly, she reached out, her calloused fingertips brushing against the burned leather emblem.

Samantha leaned over the desk, her dark eyes drilling into the mayor’s. “Danny deserves closure. Not folklore. Not songs. He sent me to get any information from you, because he knows you were the last one who saw Tanner before he disappeared.”

Emily didn’t look up, her gaze fixated at the signature on the page. The tight, perfect bun at the back of her head seemed to lose its rigidity as her shoulders imperceptibly dropped. The coldness in her green eyes melted, leaving behind an ocean of raw, hollow exhaustion.

She looked at Sammy—really looked at her—seeing the grease under her fingernails, the worn leather, and the desperate, stubborn fire in her eyes.

“Danny…” Emily whispered, the name tasting like ashes on her tongue. She closed her eyes, letting out a long, shuddering breath that rattled in her chest. “Freyda help me...”

Emily reached out with a trembling hand and slowly closed the ledger. She didn't return to her pen. She slowly sank back into her chair. The unyielding Mayor of Bitterdown vanished, leaving behind only a tired, heartbroken woman sitting in a quiet office.

“Sit down, Samantha,” Emily muttered, gesturing to the wooden chair across from her.

Sammy took a seat in the wooden chair across from the desk, her heart hammering against her ribs. A sharp, cold knot twisted in Sammy's gut at the lie. She was parlaying Danny’s real, bleeding grief for her own answers—but the desperation in her chest quickly swallowed the shame whole.

She needed this.

Emily looked out the window, staring past the noisy, muddy streets of Bitterdown, her gaze drifting toward the jagged, blue outline of the eastern mountains.

The older woman took a breath and turned towards the Easterner once more. She reached into a bottom drawer, pulled out a ceramic mug and a chipped clay pot, and poured two measures of lukewarm chicory coffee. She didn't offer sugar. She simply pushed a mug toward Sammy, her movements heavy, devoid of the practiced elegance she had displayed just moments earlier.

“You look like him, you know,” Emily said softly, her voice barely carrying over the distant rumble of a freight engine idling near the tracks. She forced a brittle smile, “Not in the face—no, you’ve got that city blood written all over your brow. But in the eyes. That same reckless, stupid refusal to leave well enough alone.”

Sammy gripped the mug, letting the sharp heat seep into her chilled fingers. “I didn't come here to cause trouble, Mayor.”

“Everyone who comes through those doors causes trouble, Samantha. The Easterners bring their contracts and their wire; the Westerners bring their pride and their guns.” Emily leaned back, wrapping both hands around her mug, staring into the dark liquid. “How has Danny been?”

Emily’s question hung in the quiet office, surprisingly soft against the low, distant rumble of steam engines grinding away outside.

Sammy swallowed hard, the lukewarm chicory coffee tasting bitter on her tongue. The guilt flared again—sharp and persistent—as she thought of Danny back at the Paxcolt Ranch. She thought of his weathered, tired face, the quiet way he looked out over the pastures at sunset. She thought of him screaming in the storm, begging Tyler for forgiveness.

“He's managing,” Sammy eventually whispered, choosing her words with extreme care. “He keeps the ranch running. There was a storm but… he’s pushing through, putting the work in. Doesn’t talk much about Tanner.”

Emily closed her eyes for a moment, nodding slowly as if the answer was exactly what she had feared.

“That sounds like Daniel,” Emily murmured, her gaze drifting back toward the tall window. Outside, a cloud of thick black soot billowed past, briefly darkening the room before dissipating into the pale sky. “Tanner never spoke much about him either.”

She set the mug down on a coaster, her sharp green eyes fixing on Sammy with a sudden, perceptive focus that made the younger woman freeze.

“And you?” Emily asked, her voice dropping into a conversational, almost casual rhythm that felt far more dangerous than her earlier coldness. “Where do you come from, Samantha? You don’t look like you came from the upper districts.”

Sammy felt her throat go dry. She shifted in her chair, her fingers tightening around the ceramic mug. Her ribs tightened as if a hand had curled around them and she fought to draw her next breath, disguising the harsh movement as a sigh.

Emily might have been the only woman in the West to know what the differences between districts of the East meant.

“New Haven,” Sammy answered, keeping her tone clipped and low, hoping the brevity would end the line of questioning. “Outside the central district. Industrial zone.”

“New Haven,” Emily repeated, letting the words settle between them. She tilted her head, watching the way Sammy instinctively pulled her chin down. “The city of high walls and spotless glass. A long way to travel just to end up in the mud of Bitterdown.”

“It wasn't for me,” Sammy said flatly, a defensive flare sparking in her chest. “The noise. The wall. The way everything is measured out.”

“So you ran to the edge of the world instead,” Emily said, a faint, melancholic smile playing at the corner of her lips. Something sharp and dangerous flashed in her gaze, a warning perhaps, like a viper about to strike. “It’s always the city folk with the heaviest burdens who think the frontier will wash them clean. Did you leave family behind back East? Or did you just slip out in the middle of the night like half the poor prospectors staggering through my streets?”

“I left what I needed to leave,” Sammy replied, her dark eyes darkening with a sudden, protective edge. She took a deliberate sip of the bitter coffee, trying to steer the conversation back before Emily peeled away any more of her layers. “My past isn't what brought me to your office, Mayor.”

“Fair enough, we all have our ghosts” Emily conceded softly, leaning back into the heavy oak chair.

“Like Tanner,” Samantha reminded, leaning forward slightly, her boot heel tapping a nervous rhythm into the floor. “I don’t have all day to chat ma’am.”

Emily didn’t flinch at the sharp interruption. Instead, she let out a slow, dry breath, setting her mug down onto the desk with a quiet clink. The flickering shadow of a passing coal train swept across her face, highlighting the deep, exhausted lines etched into her skin.

“You’re right,” Emily said, her tone dropping into a solemn, heavy cadence. “We don’t have all day.”

She reached into a small drawer on the right side of her desk, her fingers brushing against something metallic before pulling out a small, tarnished drinking flask. It was a simple thing at a quick glance, but on its chrome surface there was an intricate emblem.

An allosaurus rearing.

“It’s been… seven years now?” Emily began quietly, her voice sounding thin, like dry leaves scraping across a porch. She nodded, her eyes fixed on the flask on the desk, her thumb tracing a worn dent, “Tanner stopped by, said he was traveling through the area, but… something was bothering the poor fool.”

Samantha reached out hesitantly and placed her mug onto the desk. Her heart pounding between her ribs as she extended her hand further, carefully taking the flask off of the table to examine its worn surface in her own hands. She knew this flask, one of the Saurboys she had managed to talk to months ago had mentioned it.

Tanner had taken it off of The Piebald Piper’s stiff body as a trophy.

It was Tanner’s flask.

Sammy held her breath, her eyes widening. She didn’t look up at “He was hired up north, he shouldn’t have been traveling down this far, Miss Mayor.”

“He shouldn’t have been,” Emily agreed softly, her voice barely a whisper. Her hands, now empty, curled up into fists on the table, but her gaze remained fixed on the flask. “I don’t know why he was here, Samantha, when I asked him he just said he was visiting.”

Sammy nodded once, her dark fingers moving over the engraved crest.

The Mayor paused, wrapping her arms around her waist as if a sudden draft had swept through the warm office. She shook her head, her gaze finally falling from the flask to the table, “I… should have pressed more… but Tanner could be a terrible, cruel thing when he was angry.”

Samantha’s fingers trembled against the cold, tarnished chrome of the flask. A sudden, sharp ache blossomed behind her breastbone—a physical ache born from holding her breath too long, from carrying a mountain of secrets inside a ribcage that felt too small to contain them.

She traced the raised, worn edges of the rearing allosaurus. The metal felt ice-cold, yet it seemed to burn her skin. Tanner held this. The man who she let haunt the margins of her life, the ghost whose shadow cast a long, dark stretch over the entire Paxcolt line—he had sat right where she was sitting, clutching this exact piece of steel.

“He wasn't a cruel man,” Sammy stated bluntly, the defense leaping from her throat before she could filter it. It came out smaller than she intended, a quiet, bruised whisper that lacked the conviction she desperately wanted it to have. “Martha said… he used to cry over the trikes.”

The older woman sighed, the breath rattling in her chest.

“Cruelty isn’t always about malice, Samantha,” Emily said softly, her green eyes reflecting a profound, ancient sadness. “Sometimes cruelty is just a complete, reckless disregard for what you leave behind when you burn out.”

Sammy swallowed down a lump of dry dread. The smell of the chicory coffee, dark and scorched, suddenly made her stomach churn. Her ribs tightened in her chest, choking her lungs like a pair of cruel, bony hands bearing down on her soul.

Her gaze flicked back to the flask.

“He wasn’t himself that morning, but I let us pretend things were fine,” the Mayor continued, the memories leaking out of her like blood from a slow, festering wound. “Until… the mad tyrant…”

Emily stared down at her folded hands for a long breath, the silent burden of seven years weighing heavy on her shoulders.

Sammy leaned in, her pulse spiking slightly, her grip on the metal flask tightening until her knuckles were pale. The worn metal was cool against her warm palm.

“I asked him for help,” Emily muttered, her voice tight with a shame that seemed to run soul deep. She chuckled, a wet, choked sound that sounded far too forced. “He was so angry at me. So angry at the town. He thought we were using him... and maybe… maybe we were.”

Her voice got quieter, rough around the edges, an ancient accent growing thicker around the vowel, “Maybe I was. But I… I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“But… he still went after the tyrant,” Sammy whispered slowly, watching the woman’s face carefully, her coat suddenly feeling far too hot and heavy on her back.

Emily finally looked up, her green eyes swimming with pain as she met Samantha’s gaze, and nodded once. Her tight bun held every blonde hair firmly in place, making the sorrow in her face look unnaturally sharp.

“We waited,” the older woman drew a sharp breath, forcing her expression back into something far more composed and detached. She rested her elbows on the desk, interlacing her fingers. “A whole week passed… we didn’t think much of it. I didn’t… I figured he was just taking his time to spite me.”

The word week hung in the heavy, coffee and lavender scented air of the office, settling over Sammy like a bucket of ice water.

A week.

Her grip on the tarnished flask tightened until her knuckles turned a stark, bloodless white. Deep in her chest, that cold, sharp fury—ignited back in Livingwood and stoked by every pretentious Easterner she’d dodged on the muddy streets—flared into a roaring inferno.

“A week?” Sammy’s voice was barely a whisper, but it cut through the room like a blade through hot fat. She stood up so fast her chair scraped violently against the pine floorboards, the harsh screech echoing off the high ceiling. “You waited a whole week?”

Emily didn't flinch, but her green eyes hardened defensively. “Tanner was the most capable guild man the West had seen in decades. He’d gone dark for longer than seven days before—”

“He was tracking a mad Tyrannosaur!” Sammy slammed her palm flat onto the desk, rattling the clay pot and sending a splash of dark coffee over the edge of her mug. “He went out into the scrubland alone, chasing a rogue apex predator—and you all just sat here for seven days, sipping your chicory and filing land deeds?”

Her mind raced back to the West she had come to know. The West that Danny had shown her when every other local turned their nose from her like she reeked of a plague. The West that proudly paraded its ideals of loyalty, kin, and looking out for your own. They claimed to hate the cold, unfeeling bureaucracy of the East. They sneered at the Easterners for treating people like numbers on a ledger.

Yet here sat the Mayor of Bitterdown, admitting she had treated Tanner Paxcolt—a man who had bled for this frontier, the Boy Wonder of the West himself—like a nuisance who had simply walked off in a huff.

“You didn’t even think to look,” Sammy snarled, her jaw tight, her voice thick with absolute disgust. “You just assumed he was spiting you.”

“Watch your tongue,” Emily said softly, though a flicker of raw guilt washed over her pale features. “You don’t understand the burden of keeping this town from tearing itself apart—”

“No, I understand perfectly,” Sammy interrupted, her dark eyes flashing with pure venom. She gestured wildly toward the window, toward the churning mud, the neon signs, and the surging crowds of Eastern prospectors and stoic Western trappers. “You’re all the same out here. You wrap yourselves up in your grand legends and your tragic songs, but when a real man is dying nobody wants to get their boots muddy!”

“That is enough, Samantha!” Emily finally snapped, her eyes alighting with a furious green flame, any composure she had forced into her shoulders disappearing within seconds. She didn't stand up, but Sammy could feel her looming all the same. Her voice dropped to a ruthless whisper, “If you want to belittle me for my mistakes, be my guest, you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last. But it won’t change anything, will it?”

The sharp, crackling silence that followed Emily’s outburst hung thick in the air, broken only by the faint, muffled thrum of the crowded town outside.

Sammy’s chest heaved. The hot rage that had pushed her to her feet burned behind her eyes, making them sting. She wanted to hurl another insult. She wanted to tear into this woman, into this town, into the whole hypocritical frontier that had let Tanner rot and left Jesse to choke on his own blood.

It won’t change anything.

It was a phrase Samantha had heard a million times over, and still detested all the same. She swallowed hard, her jaw clenched as the fire of her pride lashed against her heart.

Emily was right.

She looked towards the door through the corner of her eye. Her anger was only going to get her kicked out and this was her only shot at getting answers.

Sammy’s teeth ground as her jaw shifted, her expression still taut and tight, her soul writhed in her ribs. Slowly, deliberately, Sammy forced her fingers to uncurl from the edge of the oak desk. She took a long, ragged breath, swallowing down the copper taste of her own anger with a grimace.

She pulled her chair back up, the legs dragging softly over the pine, and sat down, hard. The chair creaked under the sudden pressure, but Samantha didn’t blink. Her hands trembled as she crossed them over her chest, trying to create a physical barrier between her snarling heart and the woman before her that didn’t feel as fragile as her ribs.

“No,” Sammy said, her voice strained, pulled taut like a rope on the verge of snapping, but steady enough to keep from breaking. “It won’t.”

Emily watched her carefully, the green fire in her eyes slowly dimming back into that dark, hollow fatigue. She leaned back, pressing her hand over her face for a brief second before pulling it down, looking infinitely older than her years. She reached forward, straightening a stack of official looking papers on her desk without a word.

“A week later Jesse showed up, asking for Tanner,” Emily began, her voice cool and detached. Her hands sat on the desk, tightly clasped over each other, her stern green eyes staring relentlessly at Sammy, “That’s when we sent a search party out for Tanner.”

Sammy’s stomach dropped.

The name hit Sammy like a physical strike.

“Jesse…” Sammy breathed, the word slipping out before she could stop it. Her voice cracked slightly, breaking through the frustrated defense she had created. The flaring anger in her chest dwindled for only a second—but it was just long enough for the older woman to catch.

Emily’s sharp eyes locked onto her instantly. The mayor’s brow furrowed, a keen, perceptive light flare in her dark green gaze. “You know Jesse?”

Sammy caught herself, pulling her shoulders back and swallowing the ugly, uncomfortable emotion she didn’t have the courage to name rising in her throat. She looked down at the flask on the desk and grabbed it again, tracing the dented chrome to avoid Emily’s piercing look.

“I know him,” Sammy muttered, her tone tight and clipped, though her heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. “He’s… at the ranch. He’s sick. Real sick.”

Emily’s composure wavered again. A soft, pained exhale escaped her lips, and she sank lower into her high backed chair. “Freyda’s mercy…”

She closed her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose with two trembling fingers.

“What did the search party find?” Sammy asked, her voice dropping into a low, desperate murmur. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the oak desk, forcing Emily to look at her. “When you sent them out?”

Emily opened her eyes. The raw grief was still there, but over it, a familiar, stony barrier settled back into place—the defensive wall of a woman who had to keep a dying town from tearing itself apart.

She forced her shoulders to straighten, resuming her regal posture as best as she could. “The search party found the tyrant two days later. It was dead. Its throat had been torn out, a shot through its eye. The beast had been slaughtered and dead for days by the time we found it.”

Sammy held her breath, her heart hammering against her ribs. Tanner did it. He actually killed it. He wasn’t killed by the beast. “And Tanner?”

“He wasn't there,” Emily said simply, her tone a dangerous kind of neutral. “But… Jesse wouldn’t stop looking. He found Bailey, Tanner’s mount, four miles south of the tyrant. The bird was out of her mind. He only managed to get her saddle off before she nearly took his hand and ran off.”

Emily stopped. She looked down at her hands—which had fallen into her lap—her knuckles pale against the blue fabric of her dress. “We never found anything else. Not for a while.”

Sammy felt a cold drop of sweat trace a line down her spine. The story followed the thousand different iterations that Samantha had heard over the past year. Except that last statement. Not for a while. “What do you mean?”

“Three years ago... four years after he went missing,” Emily began, her voice dropping so low Sammy had to strain to hear it over the distant hum of the town, as if Emily were confessing a sin to the dark corners of the room. “I was.. I was out surveying the eastern border plots myself. Near the base of canyon... right under the shadow of the Eastern Wall.”

Emily paused, her throat working as she swallowed hard. “The spring snowmelt had caused a rockslide, washing out a cavern at the bottom of the ravine. I... I climbed down to check the boundary markers.”

Sammy held her breath, not daring to blink, afraid to miss a single detail. The office felt stiflingly hot, the air heavy as lead.

“I found him, Samantha,” Emily murmured, tears pooling in her green eyes, though she refused to let them fall.

The room seemed to lose all air. Sammy’s fingers twitched against the flask, dread pooling in the back of her throat like bile. “You found... Tanner?”

“What was left of him at least,” Emily admitted, her voice losing all sense of authority or detachment. She sounded younger, smaller. “It was... just bones. Time and scavengers had done their work.”

The ambient noise of Bitterdown—the shouting merchants, the creaking wagons, the whistling steam from the train—faded into a dull, roaring static in Sammy’s ears.

The older woman turned away sharply, her breath hitching, “He… he must have taken a fall off the upper ridge. Drunk perhaps. Or… Freyda… it could’ve been on purpose.”

“No,” Sammy breathed, the word slipping out before she could stop it.

Emily didn’t stop, her voice trembling, “Crushed his legs from the fall. He must—he must have crawled into that hollow under the cliff… or some… beast dragged him into their den. He—his flask was there.”

Silence settled over the room like a heavy burial shroud.

Sammy sat frozen in her chair. The world seemed to wobble slightly on its axis. She stared down at the flask in her hand, her dark eyes wide and glassy.

The silver gleamed dully.

A sudden, crushing weight slammed down into Sammy’s chest, her breath hitching in a pathetic, choked gasp.

For a year and a half, Samantha had built her entire existence in the West around a phantom. She had lived and breathed the legend of Tanner Reily Paxcolt.

She had read every crumpled newspaper clipping, listened to every exaggerated campfire tall tale, memorized every myth about the boy who conquered the wilds and vanished into thin air like a god choosing to return to the heavens.

She had built him up into an invincible titan—a savior of the West, a man who had conquered the wild and escaped into the horizon like a phantom. She had wanted so desperately to be like him. To be wild. To be untamed. To be someone who could look at this unforgiving, miserable land and ride right through it. Who the people loved.

Samantha had used his ghost as a shield, telling herself that if a person could be that wild, that strong, that free, then maybe there was hope for her in this brutal land, too.

He hadn't ascended into the wild. He hadn't conquered the frontier.

He had fallen off a wet rock in the dark, broken his bones, and died alone in the mud at the bottom of a ditch.

It was so small. So pathetic. So horribly, terribly human.

“Why?” Sammy choked out, her voice rising, sharp and jagged with a sudden, boiling disappointment that tasted like bile in her throat. She looked up at Emily, her dark eyes flashing with pure rage. “Why the hell didn't you tell anyone? Why did you let his brother—let everyone—keep… keep thinking that…”

She couldn’t finish it, the ugly, stinging tears that welled up in her eyes finally running down her hot cheek.

Emily didn't flinch from Sammy's anger. She just looked at her with a profound, terrible pity.

“Look at this town, Samantha,” Emily said quietly. She gestured toward the window, toward the dusty, struggling town, her hand trembling. “Look at what has become of us. The East is pouring over the wall, tearing down our forests, filling our streets with filth and noise. The West is dying. The people out here... they have nothing left. They are tired, they are hungry, and they are terrified.”

Emily looked back at Samantha, her eyes steadfast even though the light in them was dead.

“They needed the Boy Wonder,” Emily whispered fiercely. Her chest heaving in hardly controlled breaths, but her shoulders stayed impossibly straight. “They needed to believe that somewhere out there, in the wild, untamed places of this world, a boy was still riding free. They needed to believe that the West couldn't be broken. If I told them that Tanner died broken at the bottom of a muddy ditch... I would have destroyed the last piece of hope they had left.”

“It's a lie!” Sammy slammed her fist—the flask still held in her trembling hand—onto the desk, rattling the inkpots. She stood up, lip trembling. Her voice cracked, breaking with every breath she tried to suck in through the choking grip over her, “It's all a stupid, fake lie!”

“It was a mercy!” Emily shouted back, her composure finally shattering into raw, jagged grief. “It was a mercy for his family! It was a mercy for his town! I carried that secret for four years, girl! Do you think it didn’t burn me alive! Do you think I don't see his face every time I close my eyes?”

Sammy backed away, shaking her head.

The anger in her chest curled and twisted, devolving into a hollow, sickening disappointment that bled her dry. The hero was dead. The legend was a lie. The West wasn't a place of grand adventures and mythical rangers; it was just a giant, cruel slaughterhouse that broke people, swallowed them whole, and erased them without a second thought.

She shook her head, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand.

“You're a coward,” Sammy whispered, the words tasting like acid on her tongue. “You and your stupid town.”

Emily closed her eyes, bowing her head. She didn’t say anything for a long moment, but when she did, her voice was breaking with a profound mix of self loathing and duty, “Maybe I am. But the lie kept them moving forward. Didn’t it? What do you think the truth will do for Jesse right now? Will it heal his lungs? Will it bring Tanner back?”

Sammy couldn't answer. She couldn't stand to look at the blonde hair, the neat wool dress, or the silent, suffocating walls of the town hall for another second.

She grabbed her leather ledger off the desk, shoved it back into her satchel, and turned on her heel.

Emily didn’t call after her.

She unlatched the door and threw it open, bursting past the startled crowd of settlers outside. She ran down the porch steps, her heavy boots churning through the deep, dirty mud of Main Street, ignoring the shouting merchants and the deafening hiss of the eastern train engine.

She ran until her lungs burned, stopping only when she reached the iron fence marking the edge of a storefront that sat at the end of town. Beyond it, in the distance, the cold shadow of the eastern wall loomed over the horizon.

Sammy leaned against the cold iron bars, pulling her oversized duster tightly around her small frame. She buried her face in her hands, her body shaking as hot, angry tears spilled over her cheeks.

The iron fence was cold against her forehead, the damp metal smelling of rust and soot, but Sammy couldn’t move. She just stood there in the shadow of the border, her breath coming in ragged, shuddering gasps that hitched in her throat.

A ditch. The words kept repeating in her mind, a rhythmic, maddening cadence to match the pulse pounding behind her eyes. Tanner Paxcolt—the untouchable legend, the boy who had carved his name into every timber of the frontier, the ghost Danny talked to when he thought no one was listening—had died broken, cold, and entirely alone at the base of a nameless canyon, dragged into the dirt by time and scavengers.

It was so terribly, brutally small. There was no grandeur in it. No tragic, heroic last stand against the wilderness. Just a stupid, slipping foot on wet rock and four years of a lie kept alive to preserve the fragile pride of a dying town.

And Jesse is choking on his own lungs while they sing songs about a dead boy.

She didn't have time to mourn a phantom. Tanner was bone and ash, but Jesse was still breathing—barely. His lungs were filling with fluid, his skin burned with fever, and if she spent her time weeping over a dead man she never met, she’d be burying the Saurboy.

A harsh, mechanical horn blasted through the overcast sky, vibrating through the iron bars and shaking Sammy out of the dark spiral. She opened her eyes, wiping her face violently with the dirty sleeve of her oversized duster. Her skin felt raw, stained with mud, sweat, and salt. She looked down at her hands—her calloused, scarred, grease smudged hands—and then past the iron fence, toward the towering grey slab that bisected the horizon, an unnatural monolith even miles away.

The Wall.

On this side, the mud of Bitterdown stretched out like a festering wound, choked with manure, coal smoke, and the desperate, sweat drenched bodies of frontier folk who clung to a dying ideal. But beyond that grey line lay the East.

She felt a wave of nausea roll through her stomach, a slick, familiar dread that made her ribs ache.

Samantha had fled that place.

She had spent a year and a half shedding every layer of the city, scraping the polished, sterile perfection of New Haven out from under her fingernails until she bled, all so she could be free. So she could be wild. So she could pretend she belonged to the open air instead of the grid.

And now, Sammy was crawling back. All because the frontier had nothing to offer a dying man except a shovel and a prayer to a god who didn't listen or couldn’t be bothered to care.

“Hang on, Jesse,” she whispered into the cold wind, her voice dry and rasping, she wiped her face and straightened her shoulders. “I’m not letting you die like him.”

A shuttering exhale escaped her chest and she pushed herself away from the iron. Sammy turned away from the fence and began the long, brutal march toward the eastern transit terminal.

Samantha didn’t bother with calling for a wagon or hitching a ride, no, that felt like a mercy she didn’t deserve. So she walked, her boots biting into her feet and threatening her with blisters that felt as menacing as a fly.

The transition between the West and the East wasn't a sudden line drawn in the dirt; it was a slow, agonizing slide from rot to sterile perfection.

For three miles, the wilderness slowly succumbed to high tension wires, concrete foundations, and the omnipresent shadow of the Eastern Perimeter Wall. The massive grey barrier stretched north and south as far as the eye could see, towering hundreds of feet into the grey sky, a brutalist monument separating the chaotic, sun baked mud of the frontier from the pristine order of the eastern districts.

It took her a little over an hour to reach the Gate, the hot western sun sucking the anger from her soul and leaving her feeling painfully empty, bare and directionless.

Rising up from the grey expanse was the Border Outer Checkpoint, a sweeping structure of tinted glass, dark steel, and sharp, aggressive angles that made the surrounding ruined pine forests look soft and weak.

Sammy slowed her pace, her boots heavy on the flat concrete. The air here smelled completely different. The rich, musk heavy scent of wet dirt and woodsmoke was entirely gone, replaced by the sharp, ozone tang of high voltage conductors, industrial disinfectant, and cold rain.

Her heart performing a frantic, irregular rhythm against her ribs. She looked down at herself. Her canvas duster was stained with grease, red canyon mud, and dust. Her boots were scuffed to the leather, her fingernails lined with black dirt from months on the Paxcolt ranch. She smelled of woodsmoke, sweat, and cheap tobacco.

Around her, the few people moving toward the eastern transit terminals were clean. They wore crisp, synthetic wool coats, polished shoes, and neat hair. They didn't walk with the heavy, rolling gait of frontier hands; they moved with the brisk, efficient purpose of citizens who had schedules, bank accounts, and air conditioned apartments waiting for them.

When Sammy stepped into the shadow of the transit terminal, the cold glass doors slid open with a soft, pneumatic hiss.

The air inside hit her like a physical force, the smell of New Haven washing over her like a frigid wave. The smell of home. It was at one point, all she had known. A familiar comfort she dreamt about when the days got long and hard.

Now, that same sterile air felt like a noose tightening around her neck.

Samantha steeled herself and took a step forward. And then another. And another. Forcing her heavy feet to move across the pristine floors at a casual pace despite the bile creeping up her throat and the way the blinding lights swam in her vision.

When Sammy stepped into the queue, the air around her seemed to shift.

The couple in front of her—a man in a tailored charcoal coat and a woman holding a sealed glass coffee tumbler—both took a synchronized step forward, subtly creating an extra two feet of space between themselves and Sammy. The woman’s nose twitched, her eyes flicking down to Sammy’s boots, the frayed hem of her oversized coat, and her worn satchel.

Sammy saw the look. It was a expression she used to see every day when she lived in the lower blocks of New Haven—a mixture of mild disgust and clinical pity reserved for scavengers, border trash, and unwashed frontier strays.

Her jaw tightened, a hot flash of anger flaring in her chest, but she forced her eyes straight ahead.

Thankfully—like all things from the east—the line was efficient. She only had to wait a few minutes before she was at the front.

“Next,” a flat, synthesized voice chimed from the security booth.

Sammy stepped up to the waist high barrier. Behind the thick layer of reinforced, glare proof glass sat an Eastern border agent. He wore the high collared, navy blue uniform of the Transit Authority, his hair clipped in a precise, militaristic crop. He didn't even look up at her initially, his fingers flying across an integrated computer as he processed a stream of data.

“Identification and destination,” the agent said, his voice coming through a small, crisp speaker at Sammy’s ear level.

Sammy reached into her satchel and rummaged around with a weary sigh. Her fingers brushed past the worn, hand stitched leather of her western ledger until they found the rigid, cool plastic of her Eastern Citizen Identification Card. She hadn't pulled it out in what felt like an eternity. The edges felt strange against her calloused fingertips—too smooth, too perfect.

She paused for a second, staring at the identification photo, a grainy glimpse at a younger version of herself that still dreamed of what lay beyond the frontier, of the life she could build for herself. Samantha pressed her lips into a pale, flat line to stop them from wobbling.

“Here,” She croaked, the eastern words feeling stiff on her tongue. She slid the card through the narrow deposit tray under the glass.

The agent took the card, dropping it into a scanner. A pale red laser swept over the plastic, casting a faint grid over the man’s pale, expressionless face. A soft, high pitched ping echoed from the console.

The agent froze.

He looked at the screen, then slowly lifted his head, his brow eyes locking onto Sammy with a sudden, sharp intensity that stripped away his bored demeanor. Immediately, one of the corner guards—a large man in tactical gear that covered his face and a black military grade gun clutched in his gloved hands—stiffened, their helmeted head slowly turning to watch the scene.

The agent looked at the digital photograph on his monitor and then he looked at the girl standing on the concrete. Sammy’s skin was scarred and wind chapped, a faint smudge of grease streaked across her jawline, her dark hair pulled back into a messy, practical knot held together by a wooden peg. Her eyes were sunken, shadowed by deep, violet exhaustion, but beneath the fatigue was a dangerous, feral edge that no city citizen ever possessed.

“Samantha Oakley?” the agent asked, his tone dropping its automated cadence. “District seven, New Haven?”

“Yes,” Sammy said, her voice sounding raspy and harsh even to her own ears, nodding her head once in a polite dip.

“You’ve been flagged as an inactive migrant for two hundred and twelve days,” the agent stated flatly, his fingers tapping a fast rhythm against the desk. The guard shifting their grip on the large gun. “No updated residence, no income filing, no check in or mail. Where have you been, Miss Oakley?”

“Out,” Sammy said flatly. Her chest tightening as she watched a woman walk through the barrier without a hitch, taking a second to glare back at Samantha. She swallowed, shoving her hands in her pockets. “In the territory. Working.”

The agent’s brow furrowed in faint disapproval, a skeptical hum escaping his pale, clean shaven throat. He reached out and pressed a button on his console. “As a migrant you're required to have check-ins every six months, you’ve neglected to report in. You’re listed as displaced and hazardous ma’am. You’ll need a full biosecurity sweep and a tier three re-entry clearance before you can board the line.”

He nodded towards the guard, who rolled their shoulders back and began to walk towards them with heavy boot falls that echoed in the sterile space like a countdown.

Samantha’s eyes darted over to the gun, her ribs tightening painfully.

“I… I was too far out, there was no station. And I don't need a re-entry clearance,” Sammy stammered quickly, her heart hammering against her ribs as she leaned closer to the glass. “I’m not staying. I just need to get to a central distribution hub. I need to file a medical transit permit.”

The agent stopped, and held up a hand, signaling the guard to halt their approach. He looked at her like she had spoken in an ancient, dead tongue, his brows raised. “A medical permit? For export?”

“For medicine,” Sammy clarified, her voice cracking slightly despite her best efforts to keep it firm. She nodded to herself, her eyes flicking to the guard once more before locking onto the agent “I need antibiotics. I have the credits to pay the processing fee—”

“Medical exports to the unaligned territories are strictly regulated under Section Nine of the Border Trade Accord,” the agent interrupted, his voice dropping back into that agonizing, controlled monotone that sounded like it could have been pre recorded.

He waved his hands, dismissing the guard with a lazy, bored gesture, “You cannot purchase or transport controlled pharmaceuticals over the perimeter without an approved Department of Medicine and Border Security authorization.”

“Then… give me the paper,” Sammy demanded, slamming her hand against the metal counter. The loud clack made the couple ahead of her turn around with wide, startled eyes. “Give me the application. I’ll fill it out right now.”

The agent stared at her hand on the counter, his mouth setting into a thin, tight line. For a second, Sammy thought he was going to call the armed guard again. But instead, he let out a slow, irritated breath, typed a short command into his panel, and reached into a side slot.

He pulled out a heavy, transparent plastic clipboard holding a dense, four page paper document and a cheap, disposable stylus.

“We don’t handle frontier medical exemptions,” the agent said, sliding the clipboard and her plastic ID card back through the tray. “Board the shuttle line on Track Two. It will take you to the Regional Administration Complex near the corner junction. Go to Gate Nine. File the request there. If the bureaucrat on duty signs off on it, you can take your medicine back to whatever hole you crawled out of Miss Oakley.”

Sammy snatched the ID card and the clipboard off the tray, shoving the plastic card back into her pocket. She looked around, chest heaving, “Where is Track Two?”

The agent didn't answer. He simply gestured with a dismissive wave of his hand toward a massive set of frosted glass double doors that slid open with a soft, pneumatic hiss. “Next.”

Samantha rolled her eyes, adjusted the strap of her satchel, and quickly scuttled off before the guard could stare a hole through her shoulders.

Thankfully—unlike the west—the East was organized enough to have a million signs directing you where to go instead of assuming the location of everything was common knowledge.

It took her less than ten minutes to find the terminal.

The transport was called an Inter-District Monorail, but to Sammy, after a year and a half of creaking wooden wagons, stubborn birds, and the rattling iron nightmare of steam engines, it felt like stepping inside the belly of a dead, silver beast.

There were no windows that opened. There was no smell of rain or fresh dirt. The cabin was a long, seamless tube of molded white composite and brushed aluminum, lit from above by long strips of cool, LED lights. The air was pressurized, thin, and so cold it made Sammy’s teeth ache, smelling faintly of synthetic lemon.

When Sammy stepped onto the car, the silence was deafening. There was no clattering of iron wheels, no shouting conductors, no smell of burning coal. Only the quiet, ambient hum of climate control and the soft chime of automated announcements.

Bile rose in the back of her throat as she walked through the cabin, her head held low. She sat down on a smooth, molded plastic bench near the rear of the car.

As the doors hissed shut, the train slid away from the platform without a sound. There was no jerk, just a sudden, terrifying surge of smooth, silent acceleration that pressed Sammy back into her molded plastic seat.

She stared out the floor to ceiling panoramic window on the side of the car.

Outside, the natural world was being swallowed alive. What was left of the sprawling, wild pine forests of the borderlands rapidly gave way to towering, light grey concrete sea walls, high voltage power grids, and massive, automated logging processing plants that stripped entire hillsides bare with terrifying, robotic efficiency. Giant crane arms picked up massive pine trunks like toothpicks, feeding them into churning steel hoppers while technicians watched from air conditioned glass booths.

Samantha tucked her coat tighter around herself, her brows furrowing. She squeezed her hands into fists in her lap and cast a careful glance around the cabin.

The monorail was half full, populated by Eastern commuters. Almost all of them sat in complete silence, glowing blue light reflected in their eyes from the personal devices strapped to their wrists or held in their hands.

And every single one of them was studiously avoiding looking at her.

Or rather, they were looking at her when they thought she wasn't paying attention. Sammy could see their reflections in the polished glass of the windows. They stared at her wide, mud stained leather coat. They stared at the frayed canvas satchel resting between her feet. They stared at her hair, her weathered skin, and the stubborn, tense posture of her shoulders.

To them, she wasn't just a stranger. She was a ghost from a backward era. A savage who had wandered off the map and come back smelling of dirt and animal sweat.

Sammy pulled her duster tighter around her chest, trying desperately to shrink into the plastic seat. A cold wave of shame washed over her, making her stomach twist.

She stared down at her hands for the rest of the ride, unwilling to risk making eye contact with them. Deep down, a cold, suffocating panic clawed at her throat. The walls of the transport felt like a cage closing in. The sleek lines, the smooth surfaces, the total absence of real, living earth—it felt like being buried alive.

Glass skyscrapers reached toward the heavens like needles of frozen light. Sky-bridges intersected above sprawling, multi-tiered highways crowded with automated vehicles. Everything was clean. Everything was measured. Everything was cold.

Within forty minutes, the monorail slowed down, a smooth, electromagnetic hum echoing through the floorboards as a calm, pleasant female voice chimed over the speakers:

“Now arriving at Sector Four Regional Administration and Frontier Transit Hub. Please ensure all personal belongings are retrieved before exiting. Have a wonderful day.”

Samantha had to make a conscious effort to not bolt out of the car, her chest still heaving in frantic, shallow pants.

The Administration Building was a gargantuan, brutalist structure of dark grey granite and darkened glass that towered fifty stories into the overcast sky. It looked less like a place where people worked and more like a fortress built to crush the spirit of anyone who dared approach it.

Inside, the central atrium was a terrifying cavern of echo and light. Hundreds of people moved in organized, silent lanes across a floor of polished white marble so glossy that Sammy could see her own dirty reflection walking beneath her feet. High above, suspended from the soaring ceiling, massive digital displays flashed continuous updates on trade tariffs, agricultural yields, and border security threat levels in bright, neon-green numbers.

Sammy was directed to Queue Nine: Non-Standard Foreign and Border Logistics Requests.

The line was long, snake like, and moved with the agonizing, glacial pace of absolute bureaucracy.

When it was her turn, Sammy walked up to the central intake desk, where a uniformed clerk glanced at her uniform, listened to her brief, desperate explanation about needing respiratory antibiotics for border transit, and handed her a metal clipboard stacked thick with white paper forms.

“Fill out sections A through F,” the clerk said in a rehearsed monotone. “Form 109-B for Controlled Pharmaceutical Transportation, Form 88 for Frontier Exemption, and a Personal Indemnity Declaration. Take a seat in Area 4. You’ll be called when an adjudicator is available.”

“How long will that take?” Sammy asked, her voice crackling with exhaustion, she looked around, her shoulders hunching further as she caught the glare of another woman. “A man is sick.”

“Adjudication times vary,” the clerk replied pointedly, already looking past her. “Take a seat, Miss.”

Sammy took a sharp, ragged breath, snatched the clipboard, and turned toward Area 4.

The waiting area was a vast grid of metal chairs set under harsh, humming fluorescent lights. Dozens of citizens sat in rows, waiting for their numbers to be called. As Sammy walked down the aisle looking for a seat, the familiar shift in the room occurred—heads turned, gazes lingered on her stained clothes, and people subtly shifted their bags out of her way as if she carried a disease.

She found an open seat near the middle of the room, sank into it, and rested the clipboard on her knees. Samantha forced a full, deep breath through her lungs, her hands trembling as she looked down at the clipboard in her hands.

The document was a dense, nightmare maze of fine print, legal jargon, and endless blank boxes:

Application for Temporary Export of Controlled Biological and Medical Commodities to Unincorporated Zones.

She flipped through the pages, skimming the documents.

Item 12: Primary Recipient Designation.

Item 13: Unincorporated Residency Permit Number.

Item 14: Justification for Medical Intervention.

WARNING: Transferring Eastern medical tech, pharmaceuticals, or supplies to unregistered frontier populations without prior Bureau authorization is a Class 3 felony punishable by fines, asset seizure, and revocation of migration status.

A dark, heavy knot twisted in her stomach.

She clicked the attached pen and brought it to the first page, but her mind stalled. The words blurred together. Her chest felt horribly tight, her lungs struggling to pull in the thin, cold, heavily filtered air of the atrium.

Every time she closed her eyes, she didn't see the legal jargon—she saw Jesse, lying on a narrow cot in the ranch house, his face pale and wet with sweat, his breath rattling in his chest like dry leaves. She saw Danny, sitting quietly by the stove, his shoulders stooped under a lifetime of silence. And she saw Tanner, lying in the dark at the bottom of a cold, wet ravine, forgotten by the world while everyone sang songs about his ghost.

It was all too much. The grief, the desperation, the absolute, cold indifference of the city around her, of the wilds that awaited her—it felt like a heavy weight pressing down on her chest, threatening to crack her ribs open.

“Tough paperwork, isn't it?”

The voice was quiet, pleasant, and entirely unexpected.

Sammy flinched, her shoulders jerking up as she snapped out of her trance. She pulled the clipboard up defensively against her chest, her knuckles white around the pen. She turned her head slowly, her dark eyes defensive and sharp. She didn't have the energy for small talk, especially not with some well dressed Easterner looking to pity the savage.

Sitting on a low, continuous bench of black molded resin that ran along the edge of the queued area was a man. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, dressed in a slightly rumpled, practical tweed jacket with reinforced elbow patches and a pair of dark corduroy trousers. He had a warm, open face, coal colored hair that was slightly messy, and a pair of thick, wire rimmed reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

He wasn't looking at Sammy with the disgust or fear that the other Easterners had displayed. Instead, his hazel eyes held a look of intense, almost academic curiosity, softened by a genuine, friendly smile.

On his lap sat a thick notebook crammed with loose papers, sketched maps, and handwritten notes.

“Excuse me?” Sammy said, her tone sharp, defensive, and gravelly. She didn't uncross her arms, holding the clipboard tightly against herself like a shield.

“The form,” the man said, gesturing with his pen toward her clipboard. He spoke with a warm, measured cadence—the smooth, articulate accent of an Eastern academic, but without the cold, condescending bite Sammy was used to. Completely unbothered by the young woman’s blatant hostility. “109-B? You look like your ready to tear it up.”

Sammy didn't answer. She just glared at him, her jaw set into a hard, unyielding line. She looked back down at the paperwork, her jaw set. She scribbled her name into the top bracket with quick, aggressive strokes. “Just trying to get through it.”

The man chuckled softly. He leaned back against the bench, shifting carefully so he didn't disturb the man sleeping beside him. “I’m sorry. I didn't mean to pry. It's just... I’ve seen about forty of those forms get stamped with a red 'REJECTED' seal over the last three hours alone.”

He snickered, looking over the area and at the clerks with a bemused light in his eye, “The clerks at Gate Nine aren't human, Miss.”

Sammy looked down at her paper, then back at the man, her brow furrowing further.

“I need medicine,” she muttered, her voice dropping low and harsh, the way Danny’s would when Hank tried to tease him. “It's not a joke.”

“I never thought it was,” the man said gently. He extended a hand toward her across the small gap between them, his fingers thick, pale, and soft. “I’m Milo. Milo Young.”

Sammy didn't shake his hand. She just stared at it until he slowly lowered it back to his notebook, his polite smile never wavering. Her thumb pressed hard against the metal clip of the board. “I'm busy.”

“Right, right. Apologies,” he chuckled again, his hands smoothing his pants down before his fingers mindlessly fiddling with a golden wedding band. “I get talkative when I'm bored. We’ve been waiting here for two hours. Government offices... no matter how fast the trains get, the paperwork always moves at the speed of a dying snail.”

He paused, shifting slightly in his seat.

“You just came back across the border, didn't you?” Milo asked, his eyes scanning her outfit with that same intense, fascinated interest. “The duster is a giveaway, we’ve not started manufacturing our own yet. Not pretty enough for the folks going over.”

Sammy’s eyes narrowed, her heart beating wildly in her chest as she leaned away. “Are you a cop?”

“A cop?” Milo laughed, a quiet, cheerful sound that echoed strangely in the sterile atrium. “Heavens no. I’m a Senior Researcher with the Department of Anthropological and Cultural Studies. I study frontier socio-dynamics and language.”

“A researcher,” Sammy repeated, the word tasting sour on her tongue. She crinkled her nose, looking him up and down. “So you study people like they’re bugs in a jar.”

“No, no, nothing like that, right now I’m working on a paper about the western and eastern languages similar roots,” Milo corrected gently, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses, though his smile felt oddly tense.

He glanced down at her paper with a slight grimace, “And right now, I’m studying a young woman who is about to ruin her only chance of getting medical supplies because she’s too honest for her own good.”

Sammy paused. Her boot heel tapped twice against the polished marble floor. “What are you talking about?”

Milo’s voice dropped into a quiet, confidential whisper as he quickly glanced around “If you fill out the form to make whoever you're trying to get that medicine to officially registered, they’ll never approve it.”

His expression darkened, a spark of frustration igniting in his gaze, “Trust me, I work with those bastards at the top, they aren’t keen on leveling the playing field between us and the West. That includes medicine.”

Sammy turned her head to face him fully, her chest heaving with a sharp, panicked breath. She tied to keep her tone under control, but her voice cracked, “What?”

She needed this medicine. Jesse needed this medicine.

Samantha was going to fail. Jesse would die.

Her grip on the clipboard tightened, she looked between Milo and the sheet twice, her breath getting shallower and shallower. Her voice broke through as a hiss through her clenched jaw, “It's penicillin! It's basic medicine! A guy is dying!”

“To the Directorate, a vial of broad spectrum antibiotic is high level medical capital,” Milo explained patiently, his voice bitter. His brows furrowed, his eyes sharp and competent, “They believe that if they start feeding supplies over the border, it encourages the frontier population to stay independent instead of submitting to re-integration. They want the West to fail, Miss.”

The words hit Sammy like a slap across the face. It was so cold, so calculated, so utterly monstrous—and yet, it made total, terrifying sense. It was exactly how New Haven worked. Everything was a ledger. Everything was a calculation of cost versus control.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Sammy asked, her voice breaking, the desperation finally breaking through her hardened exterior as her vision blurred with hot, unshed tears. “Just let him die?”

“No,” Milo prompted softly, a slight grin easing his hardened features. He pointed a finger at the top of her paper. “You just lie.”

Sammy blinked. “What?”

“If you want those meds, you don't list a recipient. You claim it’s a personal prescription,” Milo advised, leaning in closer. “Cross out Section Three. Say that you were recently exposed to someone with an infection and witnessed the methods of medicine the West offers. You don’t want to die from their lack of medicine and would like to take a precautionary dose into the west for your own use.”

Sammy stared at him, her mind frantically churning through the logic. “Will they believe that?”

“You're an Eastern citizen,” Milo said, gesturing to her clipboard. “You have a valid ID. You look exhausted, pale, desperate and shell socked—no offense. They won't care if an Easterner takes medicine out to the scrubland for herself. They only care if you try to give it to a Westerner.”

He gave her a reassuring, warm smile. “Claim it for yourself. Pay the personal prescription fee, walk out with the sterile cases, and once you’re past the gate... what you do with it is nobody's business but your own.”

Sammy stood frozen in the middle of the queue, the heavy plastic clipboard resting against her ribs.

It was so simple.

A lie.

Just another lie to stack on top of all the others. She had lied to Mayor Emily about Danny’s grief. Emily had lied to the whole world about Tanner’s death. And now, to save Jesse’s life, Sammy had to lie to the very system she had spent her whole life trying to escape.

She let out a long, shuddering breath, her shoulders slowly dropping as the tension drained out of her, replaced by a cold, functional clarity. She looked down at the paper, lifted the stylus, and began to draw a dark, heavy line through Section Three.

“Thank you,”Sammy muttered, not looking at him, her eyes fixed on the paper as her hands worked with frantic, precise speed. “I mean it. Thank you.”

“Don't mention it,” Milo replied cheerfully, leaning back against the resin bench and picking up his own notebook. “I consider it a public service. I’m plenty happy to spite those bastards. We’re waiting for a committee hearing—trying to get a grant approved to bring over a western asset so my division can get a proper interview. Supposed to meet with the Department Undersecretary in twenty minutes, if he ever finishes his lunch.”

Sammy kept writing, her pen scratching loudly against the paper. She filled out her name, her old New Haven district number, a fabricated story about exposure, and a formal request for respiratory antibiotics. Her mind was entirely focused on the grid of boxes, her heart hammering a steady, rhythmic cadence against her ribs.

“He's been asleep since we left the transit station,” Milo added with a soft, affectionate chuckle, shifting his shoulder slightly where another man—a researcher from the looks of it—was resting his head, “Traveled all the way from the central sector last night. Absolute workaholic.”

Sammy didn't really care. She was almost done with the first page.

“That's nice,” she mumbled absently, checking a box labeled Self-Administered Option.

If Milo noticed her disinterest, he didn’t give any sign.

“You know, you really should let me interview you sometime,” Milo continued, completely unbothered by her brevity. “It’s rare to find an Easterner who has actually integrated into the further communities. Most of them just stay near the border, the Westerners are very pokey with how far immigrants get.”

Samantha huffed as she flipped the page, “Yeah, tell me about it.”

Milo laughed, “No one I’ve found has gone very far. My team has been trying to track down a connection to the Paxcolt’s, if you’ve ever heard of them? I don’t know if you’ve made it that far but maybe you could—”

Sammy’s hand stopped.

The pen hovered above the page, a small blot of blue ink expanding on the paper.

The atrium around her seemed to go dead silent. The humming light displays, the echoing footsteps on marble, the distant chime of the monorail announcements—all of it faded into a cold, roaring static that filled her ears like rushing water.

Paxcolt.

Slowly, agonizingly, Sammy lifted her head.

She turned her eyes away from the clipboard and towards Milo, her voice a hesitant whisper “Yeah I… I work for him…”

Samantha examined the man further, her brow furrowing. There was nothing particularly striking about Milo—he was normal, clean, and thoroughly Eastern.

But Sammy’s gaze didn't stay on him.

She looked at the man beside him.

The man was slouched heavily against Milo’s other shoulder, his body relaxed in the heavy, dead sleep of profound exhaustion. He was broad shouldered, wearing a dark green polo shirt. His brown hair was cut short in a clean, modern style, though a few stray, messy locks fell over his forehead.

His face was turned slightly toward Sammy, resting heavily against the tweed fabric of Milo’s jacket.

The blood roared in her ears, louder than the train engines of Bitterdown, louder than the wind howling across the open valley.

The man’s jawline was sharp, a fine, pale scar running horizontally over his nose, his skin bearing the faint, permanent weathering of someone who had spent years under a harsh sun before returning to the shade. But there was no mistaking the stubborn ridge of his brow.

It looked just like Danny’s.

Sammy’s breath locked in her throat. The clipboard threatening to slip from her numb fingers. She couldn't move. She couldn't blink. She just stood there, her dark eyes wide, glassy, and filled with a sudden, paralyzing terror as she stared at the sleeping man.

It wasn't a phantom. It wasn't a legend. It wasn't a skeleton at the bottom of a muddy ditch.

—

Warnings!

Sickness? Mentioned death. Yeah that’s pretty much it.

—

The rain had stopped three days ago, but nobody on the ranch was foolish enough to call it a mercy.

Instead of clear skies, the thick, suffocating fog of the wet season had rolled from the peaks down into the valley, trapping the damp like a dirty wet rag laid over a fevered forehead. The air tasted of rot, copper, and the stagnant river silt trying to dry into gray, cracked crusts across the lower yard. Every fourth wooden fence post was growing a fur of white mold, and in the dark of the main barn, the muffled, wet coughing of the livestock sounded eerily like the men in the houses.

The storm had been miserable, yes, but at least then people had something to fight against.

Now everyone was letting their exhaustion seep through.

The silence that had consumed the ranch was heavy enough to bruise. It wasn't a peaceful quiet, but the hollow, breathless stillness that settles over a place after it has been thoroughly gutted.

The hired hands—Old Pete had gone to three of the local towns and used some old favors to bring back an additional fifteen workers, but they were still coming up short—worked through the yard with shovels and iron bars, their voices flat and spirits low. A brittle cough was making its way through their weakened ranks. Two men who had been working as drivers for three years had already passed from it, another three were bedridden.

Tabitha and Walter—the Saurboys who had been the storm's harbingers—had ridden out at first light two days ago, their heavy trail packs slung low over the hips of two exhausted, threadbare mounts. They hadn't said much by way of farewell.

In the West, when the work was done—or when a place became too sour to stay—you simply checked your cinches, tipped your hat, and turned your back. Walter had looked at Sammy once from beneath his frayed brim, his eyes harboring a strange, guilty relief, as if he were escaping a sinking ship before the last of the air ran out.

The trail was calling them. They had contracts, places to be, and had already fallen behind schedule. The Stonerun ranch wasn’t the only place to have found trouble in the storm, and the Saurboys had a duty.

Sammy had watched them go from the edge of the porch, her arms wrapped so tight around her ribs her fingers dug into her canvas coat until her knuckles turned ash gray.

They were gone. The other Saurboys had scattered back to whatever dust bitten trails they’d crawled out of.

But Jesse had stayed.

Not because he wanted to—Sammy was sure of that, she could see it in his glassy eyes. Every second he stayed was a drop of rain on a smothering fire.

Whatever was left of what drove the man was withering away right alongside him.

Jesse had stayed because he couldn't walk, couldn't sit, and, with every passing sun, was finding it increasingly difficult to do something as simple as draw air into his chest.

The air inside the main farmhouse sat thick and hot, smelling suffocatingly of damp pine shavings, boiled vinegar, liniment, and the sour, metallic tang of sickness. It was a dark room off the kitchen—a room meant for storing cured meats and spare harness gear—that had been hastily cleared out when they dragged Jesse off the back of the supply wagon a week ago.

Sammy sat on the floor of the kitchen, her knees pulled up toward her chin and her back curled against a lower cabinet, directly across from the dark open maw of the side room. Her dark skin was pale and ashy from exhaustion. Her ugly canvas coat lay discarded on the floor beside her, leaving her in a faded flannel shirt that was frayed at the cuffs.

The coat didn’t feel like a shield anymore.

She had finished her morning chores: feeding the dilos, cleaning the tack, and helping Martha in the office with the dreary number of the ranch. Usually, Samantha loved the time she got to spend with Martha crunching numbers and talking about the finances of the ranch. Math was a universal language and something that Sammy had always excelled at.

She was good at it, it made her useful on the ranch—and Martha had a good head on her shoulders and far more patience for Sammy’s whirlwind energy than any of her teachers had ever been.

But this time, the session had served as a brutal, chest tightening reminder of the reality of the west: Over 345,000 acres of land were currently unusable due to fence damage, another 75,000 was waterlogged. Four of the smaller barns had flooded, ruining all of the equipment. Countless livestock shelters in the fields were washed away. The grain and feed they had stored for the coming winter months had started to sour—they still hadn’t found the source, there was no telling how much was unusable. Three of the housing cabins had major damage and were unsuitable.

Samantha had to step out of the room when they went over the livestock, she couldn’t bear to watch Danny’s face as Martha read off the casualties.

Sixty-five head of Nasutoceratops, thirteen of them were calves. Forty-two Kosmoceratops, fifty-seven Utahceratops, ten Dilophosaurus, and twenty-four of their driving raptors. They had at least a hundred and fifty livestock currently crowded in quarantine barns.

Sammy let out a wet sigh, burying her face in her arms and squeezing her eyes tightly. She bit her lip to stop it from trembling. The numbers burned behind her eyelids, each one a small, jagged piece of a life she was trying desperately to find in the frontier being torn away by the weather.

One of the Nasutoceratops—a spring calf from last season with a deformed crown from her own mother stepping on her—had been Sammy’s. Not on paper, but Danny had said it. The heifer, which she had named Pricilla after her Meemaw back home, had been the first Sammy helped calf. And when Pricilla’s mother rejected her, Samantha had spent every night bottle feeding her.

They had found Pricilla under a pile of fallen timber from the Milbo landslide early this morning, Old Pete had been planning on telling her at lunch.

The thought of the sweet heifer hit Sammy like a physical weight, squeezing what little breath was left right out of her lungs. She pressed her forehead against her knees, muffling a sob that silently shook her shoulder, and listening to the agonizingly slow rhythm of the farmhouse.

From the dark room across from her came Jesse’s breathing—a ragged, shallow rasping sound, like dry corn husks scraping together in a winter draft. Every few minutes, the steady rhythm would break into a harsh, shuddering rattle that made Sammy’s own chest ache in sympathy.

Floorboards creaked behind her, followed by the familiar heeled clicks of Martha’s boots. The woman stepped into the kitchen, holding a stack of leather bound ledgers tucked under her arm. Her eyes were shadowed, encircled by dark purple rings of exhaustion, but her posture remained resolutely straight.

She paused in the doorway, looking down at Sammy.

“You don't have to sit on the cold floor, child,” Martha said softly, her voice raspy from hours of talking through ruined balance sheets and tallying losses. “There's a chair by the table.”

Sammy didn't look up right away, she couldn’t risk letting the woman see the red in her eyes or the way her lip wobbled. She swallowed hard, and sucked in a hitched breath, “Well, I… I like the floor. It doesn’t creak like those… those wooden chairs.”

Martha sighed, a sound loaded with the quiet grief of someone who had survived too many hard seasons on the frontier. She walked over, set the ledgers on the kitchen counter, and leaned against it, looking down at Samantha.

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, Sammy could feel her eyes burning into her back, watching her breath hitch.

“Sammy.”

Martha reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a clean, folded handkerchief, setting it gently on the floor beside Sammy’s knee.

“You’re allowed to cry for her,” Martha said softly, her tone stripped of any sternness. She gently laid her hand down on Samantha’s head, a gentle, soothing pressure that threatened to break the younger woman. “You bottle fed that little girl every three hours for two weeks. There’s no weakness in mourning something you poured your heart into.”

Sammy stared at the small square of cloth, her eyes blurring. Her throat felt clogged with dust and salt, but she couldn’t bring herself to pick it up. If she took it, if she acknowledged the kindness, the dam would completely break.

She couldn’t bring herself to say anything, she just shook her head.

Martha didn’t move her hand, her voice shifted into a somber whisper, “You know… Old Pete says when Tanner was still little he’d cry over every trike they took to be butchered.”

The name didn’t do anything but make Samantha’s chest squeeze, a choked gasp forcing its way between her lips.

When Sammy didn’t perk up, Martha shifted.

She let out a low, grounding breath and knelt beside the younger woman on the worn floorboards. She didn't press any further about Tanner, nor did she force Sammy to sit up. She simply stayed close, her presence a firm anchor in a room that felt entirely adrift.

“I know,” Martha murmured gently, resting a hand on Sammy’s trembling shoulder. “It’s so much all at once. It’s all coming down heavy, and there ain't a person on this ranch who doesn't feel like they're sinking.”

Sammy let out a ragged, trembling exhale, finally lifting her chin from her knees. She reached out with a shaking hand and picked up the handkerchief, clutching it tight in her fist until her knuckles turned white.

“It's not just Pricilla, Martha,” Sammy whispered, her voice barely carrying over the quiet scraping sound of Jesse’s shallow breathing from the dark room across from them. “It's... it's all of it. I just… it- Martha, I don’t know if I can do this.”

Samantha choked on a sob, her heart beating against her ribcage, trying to break through. Her lip quivered, voice breaking, “I thought… I thought if I came out here things would… they would be different. Because—because you all seemed so… free.”

She shook her head, her dark gaze fixed on a knot in the wooden floor. “And I thought if I could… if I could just be like him—like Tanner—if I could be the one to solve what happened… then I could—I don’t know…”

Sammy buried her head back in her arms, hot tears finally pooling over against her will. “But I… I’m not strong or… or good like him. And everyone… They hate me because I- I came from over that damn wall. And I just… I can’t do it.”

Her shoulder shook with each ragged gasp, her face hot with a prickling embarrassment that made the walls feel like they had eyes. The fire that had kept her moving faltered, filling her chest with a smoke that stung her lungs and her pride all the same.

“I tried- I tried so hard, Martha,” Sammy tried to pull into herself more, her voice a broken whisper, as she shook her head, “I tried to be- to be brave and… and keep pushing through. But it’s all just—the West just… it takes everything.”

Martha didn't answer right away. She sat back on her heels, her dark, exhausted eyes turning toward the open doorway where Jesse lay in the shadows.

The older woman stared into that dim, heavy room for a long moment, listening to the agonizingly steady rasp of Jesse’s lungs before turning back to Sammy. Slowly, she reached out and pulled the trembling girl into a firm, grounding embrace.

Samantha didn’t fight it, she fell into Martha’s embrace with a shuddering sob, wrapping her arms around and curling her fingers into her dress. She held on like a man caught in a storm at sea, like Martha was the only thing that could stop her heart from bleeding out all over the kitchen floor.

She cried, an ugly, horrid thing that clawed its way up her throat and pushed its way free of her chest. Sammy buried her head in the older woman’s shoulder, her entire body trembling.

Martha hummed, an old, soothing lullaby that Sammy heard her singing to the trike new mothers. Her hand ran gentle circles up and down Samantha’s back, applying a gentle pressure that felt like she was building a shield around the young woman.

She let Samantha cry for a long time, shushing her and muttering gentle nothings that made Sammy’s heart ache for the embrace of her Meemaw back east, to feel her father’s strong arms hold her tight.

“Listen to me, Samantha,” Martha said eventually, her voice dropping into a quiet, unshakeable register that cut through the haze of Sammy’s tears. “I don’t want to hear you talking like that, you understand?”

Samantha shook her head once, “But… I can’t- I can’t even—”

“None of that,” Martha hushed, reaching down with a calloused hand to cup Sammy’s face, forcing the girl to look up into her tired, resolute eyes. “Out here, Sammy, people harden up until they turn to stone. They let themselves get miserable and cold because life ain’t ever easy and the wilds are cruel.”

She paused, wiping a tear from Samantha’s cheek, “But you? You came all the way across the world, looked at this unforgiving rock and its miserable people, and decided to care anyway. That ain't weakness. That’s called hope, child, and it's a grit of a different sort, one we are damn short of.”

Martha gently pressed a thumb over the damp trail on Sammy’s cheek. The younger woman’s breath hiccuped, a painful hitch that was smoothed over by Martha’s warmth.

“But carrying all that hope for all of us? It’s hard work,” Martha continued, her voice soft as velvet but firm as old oak. “It’s real hard. And it’s alright to take it off your shoulders. Ain’t no one will blame you for it.”

Sammy let out a small, shuddering breath, her fingers tightening briefly in Martha’s sleeve before her grip loosened. The weight in her chest hadn't vanished, but the smothering smoke was beginning to recede, leaving behind a dull, manageable ache.

“And those folks who hate you?” Martha hummed, letting Sammy’s face go and smoothing back a strand of hair, “They are shallow minded assholes who are afraid of what hope can do to a place like this.”

The silence in the kitchen stretched, heavy but no longer suffocating. For a few long minutes, the only sound was the soft, rhythmic rustle of Martha’s apron as she kept her arms wrapped around the younger woman, anchoring her against the relentless weight of the frontier.

Slowly, Sammy’s breathing began to even out. The jagged gasps smoothed into quiet, exhausted exhales. She unclasped her fingers from Martha’s dress, using the edge of the handkerchief to wipe her face, her eyes rimmed red and swollen, but the wild, panicked edge in them had finally dulled.

Martha gave Sammy’s shoulder one last firm squeeze before placing her hands on her knees and pushing herself up from the floorboards. Her joints popped with a dry, tired click, but her expression remained steady.

“Now, you sit right here for as long as you need,” Martha said, her voice returning to its familiar, low rumble. “Let your mind settle. This ranch has survived worse, don’t you be fretting about that. I’m going to go talk to Old Pete about the grain and leave you be for a spell.”

Sammy gave a small, silent nod, pulling her knees back up to her chin and resting her forehead against her folded arms. She didn't say thank you—the words felt too small for the weight of what Martha had just given her—but the tension in her shoulders had noticeably eased.

Martha turned, taking a slow, heavy step toward the back kitchen door, leaving Sammy alone with her thoughts.

Almost alone.

There was Jesse.

Samathna looked over at the open doorway into the side room.

Inside, Jesse shifted on the narrow cot, a groan escaping his cracked lips before settling back into the ragged, labored rhythm of his breathing. He was laid out on a narrow rope bed that groaned under the slightest shift of weight.

He didn't look like a Saurboy anymore.

He didn't look like the sharp, arrogant man who had stood in the storm and mocked her with cruel, shifting stories about Tanner’s death. Stripped of his leather duster, his heavy silver buckled belt, and his sidearm, he looked shockingly thin. His shirt had been cut away days ago, replaced by broad strips of coarse linen wrapped suffocatingly tight around his chest and torso to bind his ribs.

Sammy stared at him, her hands clenched so hard into the fabric of her trousers that her nails bit into her palms. Her head pounded with a dull, thumping rage—a white hot, agonizing frustration that had been building inside her chest until she felt ready to scream at the empty walls.

It swallowed that hopeless despair, stomped it out and took residence in her chest.

It was easier to be angry.

Her Mama would have hit her over the head for it, but it was true. Sammy had long since discovered it was easier to let all of those ugly, terrible feelings simmer into anger.

Back in New Haven—back in the East where the streets were paved with smooth asphalt and light bulbs flickered to life at the flick of a switch, where the emergency rooms were gleaming, sterile places—you didn't wrap a chest like that. You didn't lock a man's lungs into a vice when he had bruises the size of dinner plates blooming black and purple across his side. Binding would only keep him from breathing deep. It let the fluids settle. It let the dampness rot inside him.

She had told them. Freyda, she had tried to tell them.

When Jesse’s breath first began to sound like dry autumn leaves rustling underfoot, she had stood right in this cramped doorway and yelled at Hoss until her throat was raw. She had told him to cut the bandages. She had told him about pulmonary edema, about infection, about needing clean air, antibiotics, sterile needles—things that were standard issue in every urgent care clinic.

Hoss had just stared at her with his broad shoulders squared, his bloodshot eyes wild with grief, his jaw set like an iron anvil, and turned her away. He had spat curses at Danny every time the man tried to check in on Jesse, pointing a fat, pale finger at him. And if Sammy dared to try to reason with him Hoss would mutter something about how entitled Easterners were.

Because of that, obviously, Samantha had to be wrong.

Everyone bound ribs in the West. It was their standard practice, and they were a stubborn people who looked at anything new with a scrunched nose. Binding made it hurt less for Jesse to breathe. It made him stop writhing with every slight gasp when they had resorted to just using whisky and willow tea to numb the pain.

It was barbaric. It was stupid, backward, miserable nonsense, and it was driving Sammy out of her mind.

Now, he was dying of pneumonia. Plain, simple, preventable pneumonia.

And instead of taking the risk and trusting what she—an easterner who they all knew had more advanced medicine—had to say about it, they were all going to just let the man wither away.

From the side room, Jesse coughed.

It wasn't a normal cough. It was a wet, rattling, desperate hitch—a sound like someone trying to drag air through a bucket of heavy river silt. It went on and on, rising into a pathetic, wheezing gasp before breaking off into a wet, hollow groan that seemed to tear right through Jesse's shattered chest.

Sammy flinched, her jaw setting so hard her molars ached. Her stubborn, furious temper flared even brighter in her chest, hot and bitter, fighting against the crushing weight of helplessness that had been suffocating her.

She wanted to grab the heavy pewter pitcher on the washstand and throw it through the window, just to hear the glass shatter, just to let some air into this stifling, medieval tomb. But breaking anything would just get her extra chores and banned from the kitchen until Jesse finally kicked the bucket.

So instead she just glared at the open door.

The back door that Martha had slipped out of opened again, this time though, Hoss stepped out.

The massive man looked completely hollowed out. His broad shoulders were slouched, his usual steady, easygoing presence replaced by a ragged, twitchy exhaustion. His shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, stained with sweat and old mud. He carried a wooden bowl filled with steaming broth.

As soon as Hoss saw Sammy sitting on the floor across from Jesse, his eyes hardened, the tired sorrow instantly shuttering behind a wall of defensive coldness. He shifted his large frame, deliberately blocking her view of the bed behind him as he half stepped into the side room.

“He's asleep,” Hoss said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. It was a lie, and they both knew it; the wet, labored rattling of Jesse was still audible. “You don't need to be sitting here botherin’ him, Samantha. Go help Tyler with the trikes.”

“He's not sleeping, Hoss. He's suffocating,” Sammy hissed through her teeth. She stood up, her small frame rigid with a wildfire that threatened to choke her alive but was the only thing keeping her from bursting into tears again. “He’s got pneumonia. And if you keep those linen wraps tied around his chest like that, he can't cough it out.”

Hoss’s small, dark eyes flashing with a sudden, cold warning. “The wraps are keeping his ribs set so they don't hurt him any more and he can sleep. We know what we’re doing. We ain’t stupid.”

“You almost killed him with Laudanum!” Sammy snapped back, her fingers twitching at her thighs. “He almost died! You people are guessing! You’re just throwing whiskey at him and hoping for the best!”

Hoss’s jaw worked, a muscle twitching wildly in his cheek. He looked like he wanted to yell, to shake her, but the sheer, unyielding conviction in her voice seemed to strike a nerve. He stared at her, his empty hand curling into a fist.

“Because it's what we got!” Hoss barked, his voice rising before he caught himself, shooting a nervous glance down at Jesse’s sunken face. He lowered his voice to a harsh, grinding rasp. “We don't have your fancy city magic out here, Samantha. We got what grows in the dirt and what we can boil in a pot. The west is hard. People get hurt, and... and Freyda takes 'em if she wants. That's just how it is.”

“Now back off,” Hoss muttered stubbornly, rolling his shoulders back and trying to compose himself with a deep breath. “He don't got the breath for your questions right now, Samantha. He don't need you barking at him about Tanner or the Guild or whatever else you think you're owed. Just... leave him be.”

“I don't care about Tanner right now!” Sammy lied, her voice cracking slightly. She did care—she still wanted answers, still wanted to know what secrets Jesse refused to mutter and were neighing him down like a cloak of iron. But watching a man—a strong, sharp, infuriatingly clever man—wither away into a pale, wheezing ghost was unbearable. It felt like a crime against nature.

“Hoss…” Jesse rasped, the word barely a puff of air against the thick silence of the kitchen.

Hoss instantly straightened, turning towards the dying man on the cot. He took two steps into the small room and knelt beside Jesse, his eyes going soft, somthing painful sparking in them, “I’m here, Jess. I'm right here. What do you need? More water?”

Jesse’s gray eyes were heavy lidded, staring unseeingly at the rafters above. A thin sheen of cold sweat coated his exposed chest and brow. His jaw twitched, his cracked lips moving without making a sound.

He sucked in another whistling, wet breath before his gray eyes shifted slowly, focusing with immense, agonizing effort on the dark skinned girl sitting outside the room. His cracked lips pulled back over his teeth in a pale, pathetic shadow of his usual smirk.

“...t-tell the kid…” he wheezed, his chest rattling violently, “...tell her... Tanner... got taken by the moon…”

“Shut up, Jesse,” Sammy whispered, her jaw tightening so hard her teeth clicked. Tears of pure, hot frustration prickled at the corners of her eyes, but she brushed them away furiously with the back of her hand. “Just shut up. You're not funny.”

Jesse seemed to think otherwise.

He tried to laugh—at least Sammy assumed that’s what the noise he made was—but the sound instantly twisted into a violent, hacking fit that convulsed his entire body. He doubled over as much as the tight bandages would allow, his knuckles turning chalk white as he clawed at the thin blanket.

The wet, terrifying gurgle in his lungs surged up into his throat, choking off whatever breath he had left. His skin turned a sickly, mottled gray, his eyes rolling back as he fought for oxygen that wasn't coming.

“Jesse! Jess, calm down, breathe—” Hoss placed the wooden bowl on the low, three legged stool that served as Jesse’s nightstand. He reached down with trembling, massive hands, trying to hold Jesse steady, his face pale with sudden, unadulterated panic. “Damn it, Jess, stop fighting it. Breathe!”

The wet, rattling spasm tore through Jesse's chest, each heavy convulsion jerking his shoulders violently against the rope frame of the cot. His lips turned a faint blue, his eyes wide and completely unfocused as his lungs fought against both the fluid trapped inside them and the thick, unyielding linen binding his ribs like an iron band.

Samantha stood up, her hands shaking, but she didn’t dare to step forward.

Hoss panicked. The massive man leaned over the cot, trying to use his sheer weight to force Jesse’s body still, pressing a heavy hand against Jesse’s sternum, rubbing it firmly.

“Quiet down, Jess, I got you. Just… relax, breathe!” Hoss's voice cracked, the raw terror finally breaking through his hard frontier exterior.

For five agonizing seconds, Jesse didn't breathe at all. He just lay there, locked in a vice of his own broken chest, his eyes wide, bloodshot, staring blindly at the dark pine rafters above.

Then, with an awful, tearing sound, his lungs gave way, and he dragged in a ragged, wet gasp of air.

He collapsed back into the mattress like a puppet with its strings cut. His hands loosened from the sheet, going limp. His eyes rolled back, the lids fluttering half shut, leaving only the whites showing.

The wet, clicking rattle came back—faster now, shallower.

Silence settled over the room again, heavy and thick as wet wool.

Hoss stayed bent over him for a long time, his forehead resting against his own knuckles on the edge of the mattress. His broad back hitched once, twice, in quiet, silent sobs that didn't make a sound.

Sammy looked at Jesse’s hollowing cheeks, the black and blue discoloration creeping up his neck from his crushed shoulder, and the sheer, helpless misery etched into Hoss's broad frame.

These people were trapped.

That was the bitter truth she was being forced to accept.

They were just as trapped as the East was. But they weren’t trapped by walls and fat, lying rich men and women who only cared for the money in their pocket. No, they were trapped by their mountains, their mud, and their ancient, brutal way of living. They accepted death like they accepted a bad winter—with a quiet, solemn shrug and a freshly dug hole in the cold earth.

Jesse was dying and they were just going to let him because it’s what Freyda wanted. Because the strong survive and the weak die.

Samantha could watch Hoss mourn a living man. She couldn’t. She turned on her heel and shoved the kitchen door open, letting it slam hard against the frame as she stepped back out into the gray, weeping afternoon.

The mud in the main yard had churned into a dark, soupy trench. Near one of the nearby barns, Tyler was straining against a wooden fence post, trying to hammer it into the saturated earth with a heavy wood maul hammer. Every time the iron struck the wood, a wet thwack echoed across the yard, spraying brown slurry over his canvas trousers.

Tyler was breathing heavily, his hair plastered to his forehead by the mist. He saw Sammy coming down the porch steps, and his gaze darkened—not like it had before the storm, no, that had been with anger; this was something worse, a bitter, accepting thing that hollowed the light from his eyes.

He turned his head, sucked in a breath, and turned back to her, this time with a gentleness she didn’t deserve soothing his features.

“How are you doing?” Tyler asked, lowering the maul. He wiped his muddy forearm across his brow, his voice thick with a messy mix of concern and obligation.

“He's dying, Tyler,” Sammy said flatly, stopping in front of him, deliberately choosing to not expose the hurting, twisting thing in her chest. “His lungs are filling up. Hoss won’t listen.”

Tyler looked down at his muddy boots, his jaw working as he swallowed hard. “I wasn’t asking about Jesse.”

The words hung between them, heavy and raw.

Sammy stared at him, her chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths. She had prepared herself for hostility, for another lecture on how she was just a blind, selfish little girl who was obsessed with a dead man; or even for Tyler to turn his back and keep swinging that maul. She hadn't prepared for gentleness. Not again. It felt like a trap—a soft surface covering a pit of quicksand that would swallow her whole if she dared to step on it.

“Don't,” Sammy muttered, her voice dropping into a razor thin whisper. “Don't do that, Tyler. Don't act like it matters how I am when there's a man suffocating.”

Tyler didn't look away this time. He rested the heavy head of the wooden maul against the mud, leaning slightly on the handle. His shoulders were slumped, the dark circles under his eyes rivaling Martha’s. “And what are you going to do about it?”

The question hung between them, cold and sharp as the mist settling over the yard.

Sammy opened her mouth to snap back—to fire off another bitter truth about their archaic medicine, about how back East a simple dosage of penicillin and an oxygen mask would have fixed this days ago—but the words died in her throat.

She looked at Tyler, really looked at him.

He wasn't mocking her. He wasn’t looking at her like she was getting worked up over nothing. He wasn't standing there with the hardened, defensive posture of a Westerner dismissing an outsider. He just looked tired. Utterly, bone deep exhausted, holding a heavy maul in a sea of mud, waiting for an answer she wasn’t sure she had.

Samantha blinked, straightening herself. “What?”

Tyler didn’t answer right away. He just stared at her, the heavy maul sinking an inch deeper into the soft, soupy earth between them. The wind shifted, carrying the sharp, vinegar stench of the quarantine barns across the yard, mixed with the damp smell of rotting pine.

“I asked what you’re going to do about it,” Tyler repeated, his voice quiet, almost flat, but stripped completely of the sharp edge he’d carried since the storm hit. He shifted his grip on the maul’s handle with a deep sigh through his nose. “You’re the expert on not letting dead things be dead. So... what are you going to do?”

The barb hit her straight in the sternum. It wasn't spoken with heat or spite, and that made it infinitely worse. It was delivered with the dull, clinical accuracy of a man stating a fact about the weather.

Sammy’s breath hitched, a hot, prickling flush rising up her neck beneath her damp flannel collar. The urge to snap back was immediate—to throw his exhaustion right in his face, to scream at him that wanting answers wasn't a flaw, that caring about a man who had gone missing in the dark was better than letting the wild swallow him whole.

She took a half step back, her boots sinking an inch into the cold slurry. Her fingers twitched and curled into fists. She glared at Tyler, waiting for the defensive wall in her mind to build itself up, to offer her the safety of rage.

But as she looked at him standing there in the rain soaked yard—his knuckles raw, his clothes reeking of wet iron and mud, holding a fence post upright in a valley that was slowly rotting from the roots up—the rage sputtered out.

He was right.

She was done being angry about it.

Sammy just shook her head, her fists uncurling and shoulder slumping with a rare sense of defeat. She sighed, “You think I haven’t tried? Hoss practically threw me out of the room. He thinks because I came from across the wall, I don’t know a damn thing about how life works out here.”

“Because you don’t,” Tyler said bluntly, looking straight at her now, his gaze unblinking.

The words hit Sammy like a slap. She opened her mouth, a hot, defensive retort springing instantly to her lips, but the raw honesty in Tyler’s eyes cut her off before she could utter a sound.

“You got different eyes, Sammy,” the young man stated plainly. He wasn't fighting her. At least, Sammy didn’t think so. Tyler was a surprisingly complicated person when he wanted to be one.

He leaned his weight heavier onto the maul’s handle, the wood groaning softly under his knuckles. “You look at Jesse dying and you see a problem to fix when we’ve already done all we can.”

“Because there are ways to fix it!” Sammy’s voice cracked, sharp and desperate against the vast, indifferent stretch of the valley. She took a step toward him, ignoring the cold slurry creeping into her boots. “It’s just an infection, Tyler! It’s fluid in his lungs! In New Haven, a clinic doctor would give him amoxicillin, stick an oxygen cannula in his nose, and he’d be up and complaining about the hospital food in three days!”

“Well, look around, Samantha!” Tyler finally snapped, gesturing wildly with one muddy arm toward the ruined, waterlogged ranch, the shattered fences, and the dark line of trees in the distance. “Do you see a clinic? Do you see a doctor with a white coat? You’re talking about a place that might as well be on one of the damn moons!”

The word echoed in the cold air, striking Sammy like a physical blow.

Taken by the moon.

Jesse’s rasping, bitter joke suddenly echoed in her ears. But as her mind raced, the anger vanished, replaced by a sudden, terrifying clarity that set her heart hammering against her ribs.

New Haven wasn’t on the moon. It was East.

East.

Past the border outposts, past the old rail lines, beyond the wall that divided two fronts, straight into the heart of a world of glass spires and sterile clinics. Where the supplies that she needed to keep Jesse from dying was sitting on shelves in corner stores.

Sammy froze, her eyes wide as she stared past Tyler, looking east towards where she knew a wall lay beyond sight.

The East had antibiotics sitting on shelves under electric lights, gathering dust while men out here choked on their own fluid because their stubborn, prideful culture demanded they take a shovel to the cold earth and call it Freyda's will.

“Sammy?” Tyler’s tone shifted, the anger draining out of him as he noticed the sudden, eerie stillness that had settled over her. He lowered his arm, his brow furrowing.

Sammy didn’t say anything.

The wall wasn't just a barrier keeping people out; it was a dam holding back everything that could save a man’s life. And Sammy and a slip of paper that let her walk between both worlds.

“Sammy?” Tyler asked again, his brow furrowing slightly as the silence stretched out. “Hey... I didn't mean…”

“Tyler, you’re a genius,” Sammy whispered, her breath blooming in a pale cloud between them. “I need to go home.”

Tyler frowned, taking a slow step forward, something that looked dangerously close to alarm and fear flashing in his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“The medicine, Tyler. Antibiotics. Ampoules of penicillin. Sterile needles,” she said, her voice gathering speed, the words tumbling out as the frantic, logical math began to click together in her head. “It's not magic. It's just medicine. They keep it in the central distribution hubs near the border gates for the construction workers.”

Tyler stared at her, his jaw slowly setting into a hard, skeptical line. “They don't hand out city medicine to frontier folk.”

“They won't hand it to a frontier folk,” Sammy said, stepping closer to him, her eyes wide, dark, and suddenly blazing with a cold, terrifying purpose that made the exhaustion roll off her like water. A manic, thrilled grin crept up her face, “I just… I go home, flash my little passport, go in and fill out some papers to bring medicine over the border and… and Jesse won’t die!”

“You're out of your mind,” Tyler said flatly, shaking his head, though he didn't raise his voice and something warm sparked in his gaze. “You're completely, entirely cracked.”

“Probably,” Sammy shrugged, her grin only getting wider, “Besides, this way I can stop by Bitterdown, maybe they’ll be more open about talking about Tanner.”

Tyler wiped his face with his wet hands, letting out a long, shuddering breath that sounded dangerously like a sob. He looked at the farmhouse, then down at his muddy boots, before finally looking back at her. “Of course you are.”

—