The night frayed.

  The sharp edges went first—the screams, the roaring, the crack of guns so close they rattled teeth. Those slipped away in bits until what was left was softer. Groans. Men calling names. Horses blowing, hooves shifting in blood?slick mud. The crackle of little fires where thatch still burned.

  The boy stood in it for a moment, breathing.

  The axe hung from his hand, the head resting on the ground. His chest still heaved. The world around him smelled of iron and smoke and the sour stink of greenskin blood. It clung to the back of his throat.

  [The Hollow] sat quiet and heavy in his chest.

  He let the axe head drop all the way, leaned on the haft, and made himself look.

  The yard of Fort Mason didn’t look much like a yard anymore. It looked like a butcher had gone mad and forgotten when to stop. Bodies lay in heaps and drifts. Some men still moved among them, slow and careful. Others knelt, shoulders shaking.

  Someone shouted from near the gate.

  “Bring stretchers! Bring anything that’ll hold weight!”

  The boy straightened.

  His arms ached. His legs ached. His ribs felt like they’d been used as a drum. His Vitality soaked most of it, turning sharp pain into a dull, distant throb. He could still move. That was more than some could say.

  He looked once toward the chapel.

  Lily sat where he’d seen her last—on the steps, Ember tucked tight under one arm, pistol in her lap. Mary was beside her, both hands wrapped around the doll now, knuckles white. Mrs. Brant was propped against the wall with a bandage wrapped thick around her middle, face pale but eyes open. The white Comanche woman still stood over them, lance point resting on the ground, watching the yard like a wolf watching a tree line.

  He left them there and went where the shouting was.

  Near the gate, a knot of men in blue had already dropped to their knees beside the worst of the wounded. Some bled from deep cuts in arm and side, others from arrow shafts stuck through muscle. One man’s leg bent wrong below the knee, bone trying to poke through skin.

  The Army surgeon—a narrow man with a whiskery jaw and shirtsleeves rolled to bony elbows—knelt beside a corporal whose ribs had been opened like a split log. His hands were already red to the forearms. A bottle of something sharp?smelling stood uncorked in the mud beside his bag.

  “Keep the pressure there,” he snapped at a private whose eyes were wide as saucers. “If he bleeds out, I’ll hold you responsible. You, get that tourniquet higher. God help me, did none of you listen when I talked about arteries?”

  He looked up as the boy approached, saw axe, hat, blood.

  “You.” His eyes flicked over the boy’s small frame and didn’t quite know what to make of it. “You can walk?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said.

  “Then you can carry,” the surgeon said, already turning back to the corporal’s chest. “We need every man who can still stand to haul the worst of ‘em to the barracks or the chapel. Officers’ quarters if we run out of room. I don’t give a damn about rank in this—only who’ll live if I get at them in time. Take a stretcher. Take two men. Move.”

  The boy nodded.

  A pile of litters had grown near the wall—plain wooden frames with canvas stretched between, some Army issue, some cobbled together from doors and blankets. He grabbed one by the handles. It felt light.

  “Here!” a sergeant barked. “Over here!”

  The sergeant had a Kiowa warrior by the shoulders, trying to keep him from thrashing. An arrow stuck out of the man’s thigh, the head buried deep. Blood soaked his leggings. The Kiowa’s horsehair war club lay in the mud beside him.

  The sergeant’s eyes darted to the boy.

  “You got arms enough for this?” he demanded.

  “Yes, sergeant,” the boy said.

  He set the litter down beside them, knelt, and slid his hands under the warrior’s back and knee. The man tensed, teeth bared, black hair stuck to his forehead with sweat and blood.

  “Easy,” the boy murmured. “Gonna lift you.”

  The warrior didn’t understand the words, but he understood the tone. His jaw clenched. He nodded once.

  The boy lifted.

  A week ago, that much weight would have folded him in half. The Kiowa was a grown man, all hard muscle and bone, heavy with the limpness of someone who couldn’t help. Now the weight came up like a sack of flour. His arms sang protest, but they didn’t fail.

  He laid the man carefully onto the canvas.

  The sergeant blinked at that, just once.

  “Hells,” he muttered. “All right. You—kid—take him to the surgeon’s line by the barracks. Tell ‘em the doc wants the leg before the arm that’s got that arrow. Then come back. There’s more.”

  “Yes, sergeant,” the boy said again.

  He took the handles of the litter and started across the yard.

  It was slow going. The ground was churned mud, blood, splinters, dropped guns. Here and there a man still lay where he’d fallen, eyes glassy. The boy stepped around them where he could. Where he couldn’t, he stepped over.

  He passed a pair of enslaved stone haulers—a man with gray at his temples and a younger one whose wrists still had marks where chains had rubbed. Both had their irons off now. One had taken a pry bar to his own shackles with a rage that had bent the iron and snapped the lock. The same bar was now being used as a lever under a fallen beam to free a trapped soldier.

  “Lift!” the gray?haired man grunted. His shoulders bunched under his torn shirt.

  The beam rose enough for the soldier to drag himself out, gasping.

  “Thank you,” the boy heard him say, voice raw.

  The older man just nodded once, breath hard, eyes flicking toward the field outside the gate where more bodies lay.

  The boy kept moving.

  By the time he reached the barracks, a rough line had formed along one wall—wounded propped on cots or pallets, shirts cut away, bandages going on as fast as hands could wrap them. The chaplain moved among them, black coat open, Bible forgotten under one arm. He tore strips of sheet with his teeth and passed them down the row.

  “Where do you want him?” the boy asked.

  The surgeon’s assistant—a young man with spectacles and a blood?smeared apron—pointed with an elbow.

  “Third pallet from the end,” he said. “Arrow in the leg?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doc wants them next. Keep the head above the wound if you can.”

  The boy did as told.

  The Kiowa breathed in hisses as he set him down. His hand snaked out, grabbing the boy’s wrist with unexpected strength.

  “Ha’a,” the man said. The word was short. It sounded like thanks, or maybe just a sound made instead of one.

  The boy nodded once.

  “Stay,” he said, gesturing at the row of men being tended. “They’ll fix you.”

  He wasn’t sure if that was true. But it sounded better than the alternative.

  He went back out.

  The night thinned as he walked. The sky, black on black before, had started to pale just a hair over the eastern hills. Not enough to be color. Just a lifting of the weight overhead. Torches still burned along the walls, but their light no longer felt like the only light.

  The work went on.

  He hauled another man—a soldier with a hole through his arm where a greenskin arrow had gone in and out. Then an Apache youth who’d taken an axe through the meat of his side. Then one of the enslaved men, the dark?skinned stable hand with no chains, his calf torn open where a thrown axe had kissed it.

  “Thought I was done for,” the stable hand said through clenched teeth as the boy carried him. “Never thought a boy’d be the one haulin’ my sorry hide.”

  “Never thought I’d be haulin’ anybody,” the boy said.

  The stable hand managed a tight grin.

  “World’s gone sideways,” he said. “Might as well roll with it.”

  Not just him.

  Everywhere the boy looked, lines that had seemed carved in stone were smeared.

  He saw a Kiowa warrior and a blue?coated private carry a comrade between them, one on each end of a makeshift stretcher. He saw an Apache girl, no older than Lily, hold a canteen for an Army teamster, tilting it so water dribbled past his cracked lips. He saw Mrs. Brant, pale but on her feet despite her wound, directing laundresses and Indian women alike as they boiled water, stripped bedding for bandages, laid out clean cloth on any surface that would hold it.

  “No, not there,” she snapped at a Kiowa boy trying to lay a bloody knife down by the kettles. “Put that in the barrel. You want filth in the water we’re cleanin’ men with? Think, you great goose.”

  He blinked, then did as he was told. Respect flickered in his eyes all the same. Bossy was a language everyone knew.

  Near the chapel, someone had dragged tables out from the mess and turned them into rough workbenches. Lily stood at one of them.

  The boy stopped.

  At first she looked like a child playing at some grown?up game—sleeves rolled to her elbows, hair half fallen out of its braids, face streaked with soot. Then he saw what she was doing.

  A soldier sat on the table edge, teeth clenched on a strip of leather. His shirt had been cut away to bare his shoulder. A ragged wound gaped there where something—an axe, maybe—had taken a chunk out of muscle. Blood welled with every heartbeat.

  Lily’s right hand hovered over it.

  “Ready,” she whispered. Not to the soldier, but to herself.

  She touched the edge of the wound with two fingers.

  [Spark].

  Fire jumped. A tiny tongue of orange?white flame leapt from her fingertips and kissed the bleeding flesh.

  The soldier’s back arched. His muffled scream bit down into the leather.

  The smell of burning meat hit the boy’s nose.

  Lily’s face screwed up. Tears stood in her eyes. She held her hand steady anyway.

  The blood sizzled. It went from bright to dark, the edges of the wound turning black and then dull red. The flow slowed, then stopped.

  The Army surgeon leaned in, spectacles low on his nose, watching. He didn’t look away until Lily pulled her hand back, fingers shaking.

  He nodded once.

  “Good,” he said. “Good. That’ll hold. We’ll stitch around it once you give me some room.”

  He looked at Lily. His voice softened by a hair.

  “You need water?” he asked.

  She shook her head, though her face had gone gray around the mouth.

  “I’m fine,” she lied.

  The boy stepped up just as the surgeon moved on.

  “Lily,” he said.

  She flinched, then saw it was him. Some of the tension went out of her shoulders. Not all.

  “Brother,” she whispered. Her voice sounded like it had been dragged over rocks. “They keep bringin’ ‘em. The doc says I can… I can stop the worst of the bleedin’. Says… says it saves time. Says we’ll run out of bandages if I don’t.”

  Her hand twitched. Little black scorch marks dotted her fingertips, fresh and raw.

  “How many?” he asked quietly.

  She swallowed.

  “Enough,” she said. “Too many.”

  Mary sat on a stool by the chapel door, a basin of water at her feet, hands red and wrinkled. She was washing blood from rags, dunking and wringing and dunking again. Ember lay beside her, propped against the wall, watching with her one scorched eye like a witness.

  Mary looked up at him. Her eyes were huge.

  “They scream,” she whispered. “Lily burns ‘em and they scream. But then they stop. That’s good, right? Stoppin’ the bleedin’?”

  “It’s good,” the boy said.

  He put his hand lightly on Lily’s shoulder.

  “Don’t burn yourself empty,” he said. “Doc’s got other ways too.”

  Lily’s mouth twitched.

  “Doc says I’m the quickest way he’s got,” she said. “Besides that white woman with the lightnin’, and she’s out there still, stompin’ around and bein’ scary. Doc says… says I’m his little brandin’ iron.”

  She tried to make it a joke. It didn’t quite get there.

  “Take a breath between each,” the boy said. “Drink. I’ll haul more in so you don’t have to keep gettin’ up.”

  He turned to Mary.

  “You see her hand shake too much,” he said, “you make her stop, you hear? You throw water on her if you have to.”

  Mary nodded hard, lower lip caught between her teeth.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He squeezed Lily’s shoulder once, then stepped back.

  There was no time to linger. Another shout went up near the wall. More wounded needed moving. He picked up an empty stretcher and went.

  The sky lightened by degrees.

  By the time the first pale smear of dawn showed over the low hills to the east, the worst of the living had been dragged, carried, lugged or walked themselves inside. The dead… not yet.

  They lay where they’d fallen, for the most part. A few had been moved aside to keep passages clear—a bluecoat pulled from under a toppled greenskin, a Comanche warrior laid carefully by the gate with his lance across his chest. Someone had covered his face with a scrap of cloth.

  The boy had carried enough breathing men for the moment. His arms trembled in a way even the System couldn’t smooth entirely. He took a drink from the water barrel by the pump, cold liquid washing some of the ash taste from his tongue.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  When he straightened, a lieutenant with dust in his mustache and blood on his cuff was walking toward him.

  The man had been on the wall earlier, shouting orders. The boy didn’t know his name. He wore Captain Hargrove’s absence like a weight.

  “You,” the lieutenant said. “Militia boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said.

  “You can still walk?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The lieutenant scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week even before tonight. “We’ve got the worst of the wounded inside. The doc says anyone still out here now is either dead or can wait. That gives us one problem left—”

  He jerked his chin toward the breach.

  The ground outside the gate was carpeted in bodies. Greenskins mostly, mixed with a few dead horses and a scattering of fallen men from both sides. Flies had already started to find them, slow and cold in the dawn, but present.

  “We can’t leave this to rot,” the lieutenant said. “Stench’ll choke us, and it’ll draw every damned thing within a day’s ride once the sun bakes it. Doc says disease too. Miasma.”

  He spat the word like it offended him. “We’re to drag every greenskin corpse outside the ditch and pile ‘em. We’ve powder enough for one good burn.”

  “Burn ‘em?” the boy asked.

  “Yes,” the lieutenant said. “I’d bury ‘em if we had spare backs and time. We don’t. And I don’t much fancy giving their souls the chance to get any notions about walkin’ again either, if this damned System decides that’s a trick it wants to play.”

  “Burnin’ sounds fine to me,” he said.

  “Good.” The lieutenant clapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to make him rock. “Grab whoever isn’t fallin’ over and start haulin’. Keep our own dead separate. Indians too. They’ll want to see to their people proper.”

  He turned away, already barking at another squad.

  The boy adjusted his grip on the axe, then slid it through a loop at his belt, the head banging against his thigh. His hands felt too empty without it. He picked up the nearest greenskin instead.

  This one had a jaw half missing from a howitzer blast. Its tusks jutted yellow from a lip that wasn’t there. The armor it wore had been hammered together from bits of other things—bent plates, boiled leather, a piece of what might once have been a cavalry breastplate. Its hands were big, fingers thick, nails more like claws than anything. It had a tattoo burned into one bicep—swirls and spikes.

  He grabbed the greenskin under its arms and dragged.

  Others joined in.

  A couple of Kiowa warriors moved the bodies of their fallen down toward the river. An Apache man with gray in his hair knelt beside a younger warrior, painting a stripe of red across his face before they lifted him. A group of bluecoats, faces set, carried Captain Hargrove’s body on a door taken from his office, hat laid over his folded hands.

  The boy helped where he could.

  Mostly, though, he pulled greenskins.

  They were heavy. His muscles burned. That clean burn he’d felt digging graves earlier now roared. His stats made the work possible. They didn’t make it pleasant.

  He found a rhythm.

  Grab under arms. Haul. Drag the body out past the ditch, to where a broad patch of bare ground lay beyond the fort’s shadow. Drop. Turn. Grab another.

  The pile grew.

  The smell grew with it.

  Greenskin blood, exposed to the air and not moving, turned thick and dark, like oil left too long on a stove. Their flesh had a rankness to it, something like wet dog and rot and a sour note he didn’t have a name for. Even the wind seemed reluctant to go near it.

  He wiped his forearm across his nose and kept going.

  As the sun inched up, painting the eastern horizon a low smear of pink, he straightened from his latest drag and saw faces that weren’t blue or brown or green.

  They were the faces of the Comanche.

  And of the man he’d saved.

  The man sat on a low crate just inside the ruined gate, one leg stretched stiff, the other bent. Someone had splinted the broken thigh and wrapped it thick with bandages, stained through but holding. He wore a shirt of soft leather, darker now with sweat and blood, and leggings striped with dust. A necklace of pale bone and claws hung around his throat.

  He looked less like a man who had been on the ground bleeding out and more like a man who had seen too much and was taking a moment before he stood again.

  Several warriors stood near him, horses’ reins in hand. Their eyes followed every bluecoat that passed with flat, measuring looks. Some of the bluecoats did the same in return.

  The boy walked toward them without thinking about it.

  The man’s gaze cut to him as he came.

  Up close, his face was a map of lines. Not deep yet, but there, around the eyes, at the corners of the mouth. His hair hung in two thick braids, glossy even under the crusted blood. He had eyes like obsidian—dark, polished, with something behind them that watched and weighed.

  He spoke first in his own tongue, a spill of syllables that rolled smooth and sharp both. One of the younger warriors at his side snorted softly, half amusement, half something else.

  Then the man shifted, the weight of his attention settling full on the boy.

  “You move fast,” he said in English, the words slow but sure. His accent bent them a little but didn’t break them. “For a little Ranger. I am Peta Nocona.”

  “Didn’t want to watch you get chopped in half,” he said.

  Peta’s mouth twitched.

  “A good waste,” he said. “For my enemies. Not for me.”

  He made a small gesture with his hand.

  One of the warriors stepped forward, something looped over his arm. It was a necklace.

  The boy had seen feathers before. White hens’ feathers, goose quills, the odd turkey feather stuck in a hat to show off. These were not those.

  They were long, each one nearly the length of his forearm. Dark at the base, white through the middle, tipped in black. The shafts had been wrapped near the bottom in thin strips of dyed leather, red and blue and yellow, beads worked in small, tight patterns. The feathers were bound together at their quills with braided sinew, hanging in a fan.

  Eagle. Had to be.

  Peta took the necklace from his warrior and held it in both hands as if it were something live.

  “In my people,” he said, “Numunuu”—he tapped his chest lightly—“we do not give these for small things. You kill many enemies. You save my life. You stand on your little legs like you are bigger than you are.”

  His teeth flashed, wolf?quick. “These are for that.”

  He held the necklace out.

  For a heartbeat the boy just stared at it.

  Then he took the necklace with both hands.

  The feathers were softer than they looked. The quills were smooth under his fingers, the beads hard little bumps. It smelled faintly of smoke and the oil used to keep the leather from cracking.

  “Thank you,” he said. The words felt small. “I… I don’t have much to give back.”

  Peta shook his head once.

  “You give enough,” he said. “You give me more seasons. More time with my sons. With my woman. That is not a small gift.”

  He pointed with his chin toward the feathers.

  “You wear that, little Ranger,” he said. “Men of Numunuu see you, they know: this boy is friend. Not enemy. You are… how you say… under our sky too now.”

  “Friend of Numunuu,” the boy said quietly, tasting the word. It felt like a river stone—strange at first, then right in the hand.

  Peta nodded.

  “Friend,” he confirmed.

  He looked at the boy for a long moment, head tilted like he was trying to see past skin and clothes and blood.

  Then he spoke again, this time in Comanche.

  The warrior to his right barked a laugh. Another grinned. Even one of the Kiowa nearby, listening in, cracked a smile.

  Peta turned back to the boy, eyes bright.

  “In my tongue,” he said, “I call you something new. Haa’e-sootsu-puhi. It means…”

  He frowned, searching for the right English. “Runt?Who?Kills?Good. Little one who makes big death.”

  He seemed pleased with it.

  The boy felt his ears heat.

  “It’s… a long name,” he said.

  “Good names are long,” Peta said.

  He chuckled softly and then winced as the motion tugged at his broken leg.

  The boy couldn’t help it. Despite everything—despite bodies and blood and smoke—his mouth twitched too.

  “I ain’t… much for names,” he said. “System still calls me ‘unnamed’.”

  Peta’s brow furrowed.

  “System,” he repeated. The word sat wrong in his mouth. “This… voice that puts numbers in our head?”

  “Yes,” the boy said.

  “Names are not for that,” Peta said. “Names are for people. System can keep its own.”

  He jabbed a finger at the boy’s chest. “You are Runt?Who?Kills?Good. Numunuu will know that. That is enough.”

  The boy let that settle.

  “Runt?Who?Kills?Good,” he said again, under his breath. It felt foolish and sharp both. He couldn’t imagine Lily saying it without rolling her eyes. He also couldn’t imagine not feeling something when he did.

  He slipped the necklace over his head.

  The feathers lay against his chest, cool at first, then warming with his skin. They sat a little crooked over his torn coat. He adjusted them until they felt right.

  Peta watched, satisfaction in his eyes.

  “You called… all this?” the boy asked after a moment, gesturing vaguely to the plain where Kiowa and Apache and Comanche still moved among the dead, to the fort behind them with its broken gate and its shared wounded.

  “The war party?” Peta nodded once. “Yes. I sent riders. Sat in council with my own chiefs. With others.”

  His mouth tightened a fraction. “Before, it was only us and bluecoats and other tribes, always circling, biting. That is old way. I know that way.”

  He jerked his chin toward the field.

  “These green demons,” he said. “They are new. They do not care if you are Comanche or Kiowa or Apache or white man with brass star. They only care that you are meat.”

  He made a low sound in his throat, disgust and anger both.

  “Some of my men said, ‘We fight them like we fight Texans. One more enemy. We are great warriors. We are strong. We do not ask help.’” He snorted softly. “Pah. I told them strength is not closing your eyes when a stampede comes. Strength is seeing what is in front of you.”

  He nodded toward the fort.

  “I came here once before,” he said. “Long time. Before System. Not inside. Just close enough to count guns. I did not like what I saw.”

  A flash of teeth. “Now the same guns are pointed at green things. So I sent word. Kiowa. Apache. Even Cheyenne.”

  “Cheyenne?” the boy repeated.

  Peta tilted his head.

  “People far to north,” he said. “They ride like we ride. They fight like we fight. They lost many when bluecoats pushed them. They have reason to hate you pale faces.”

  He shrugged. “We were to meet them. Their war party did not come.”

  “You think they just… didn’t want to?” the boy asked.

  Peta considered that.

  He looked out across the plain, where a small cluster of warriors in paint and feathers stood on a low rise, watching the horizon as if expecting something to come crawling over it any minute.

  “No,” he said at last. “Cheyenne I met are proud. Stubborn. They give word, they keep, or they die trying. Maybe they stayed because bluecoats near them make threat. Maybe they see new monsters and must fight those at home.”

  His mouth tightened. “Maybe they are dead. These days, there is too much of that.”

  He let out a breath.

  “Either way,” he said, “we did what we could with who came. And we still lost many.”

  His gaze flicked once toward the bodies laid out near the gate, covered in blankets. “Better than losing all.”

  The boy nodded.

  “What will you do now?” he asked quietly.

  Peta’s shoulders rolled in a small shrug, the motion tired.

  “I do not know,” he said. “World changed like river after flood. Channels all different. Places I thought were safe now are not. Places I thought were enemies….”

  He glanced at the fort again, at the blue coats moving along the walls. “Now are less so.”

  He shifted on the crate, adjusting his bad leg with a little hiss.

  “I know this,” he said. “Numunuu alone cannot stop all the demons. Kiowa alone cannot. Apache alone cannot. Bluecoats with their cannon cannot. We ride apart, we die apart. That is simple.”

  He tapped his temple. “So I say: maybe it is time to ride together. Not forever. I am not fool. Old hates do not go away because new ones arrive. But for now? While sky still spits monsters and System plays its games? Better to stand with any who will stand, no matter… skin.”

  His eyes went back to the boy, to the brown of his face, the hat too big on his head, the feathers glaring white against his dirty coat.

  “Even little Rangers with ropes of dead souls in their eyes,” he added quietly, almost to himself.

  The boy’s fingers twitched near his chest.

  He wondered what Peta saw when he looked at him. He wondered if the Hollow showed somehow, a shadow behind his irises.

  “Some white men won’t like that,” the boy said. “Standin’ with Indians.”

  He jerked his chin toward the fort. “Some of ‘em barely like standin’ with other white men.”

  Peta’s mouth crooked.

  “Some Numunuu do not like standin’ with bluecoats,” he said. “They say I am foolish. Weak. That I have forgotten blood of my father.”

  He lifted his chin a little.

  “I have not. I will still cut white man’s throat if he comes for my children when this is done. But maybe there will be fewer with worth cuttin’ if we ride together now. Maybe my sons will see sun over land that still has buffalo on it. Maybe yours”—he flicked his gaze toward the chapel, where Lily’s slight shape hunched on the steps—“will grow up without green teeth at their door.”

  He shrugged again, softer.

  “Or maybe we all die,” he said. “My old grandmother liked to say: sun will rise even if no one is left to see it. Better to fight than sit and wait for dark.”.

  “Stickin’ together sounds better than the other thing,” he said.

  “Yes,” Peta said. “It does.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke.

  Hooves clinked on stone behind them.

  The white Comanche woman rode up at a slow walk, her pony picking its way through the churned mud with care. Her lance rested upright now, point toward the sky, its shaft resting in the stirrup leather. Blood had dried on the steel head in dark flakes. Her pale hair hung in two long braids, stray wisps plastered to her temples with sweat.

  She swung down from the saddle with the same easy grace as before, bare feet hitting the ground without a sound.

  Up close in the morning light, the boy could see her better.

  Her skin was as brown as any Comanche’s from sun and wind, but the undertone was different, something paler not quite hidden. Freckles dusted her nose. Her eyes were that washed?out blue he’d seen, almost gray. Her cheekbones were high; her mouth was a determined line.

  She had a knife at her belt, a revolver in a beaded holster, and a string of small metal charms braided into her hair—thimbles, buttons, bent coins.

  She looked at Peta first, eyes going straight to his leg.

  “Husband,” she said, voice low. Worry flickered through the word like wind.

  Peta’s expression softened in a way the boy hadn’t seen yet.

  “Narua,” he said.

  Narua. The name slotted into the boy’s memory like a cartridge into a cylinder. White Comanche. That would be her.

  She touched his shoulder, fingers light, then his bandaged leg, then his face, as if checking he was all there. Only after that did she turn to the boy.

  Those pale eyes took him in—hat, feathers, skinny frame, blood, axe, all of it—in one long, measuring sweep.

  “You are the one who pulls little guns on big monsters,” she said in English. Her words had the same plains lilt as Peta’s, but smoother, like she’d been using them longer. “The one who threw iron at the gate.”

  The boy swallowed.

  “I did some of that,” he said. “You’re the one who threw lightnin’ at the things trying to kill my sister.”

  Her mouth tugged up at one corner.

  “I am,” she said. “You’re welcome.”

  He nodded.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I—” Words felt like rocks in his throat. Saying thanks for someone keeping Lily alive seemed too small. “If you hadn’t, they’d be dead.”

  Narua’s gaze flicked toward the chapel.

  Lily was inside now, just visible through the open door, bent over another wounded man. Mary sat on the steps, shoulders slumped, Ember in her lap. Their small shapes looked fragile against the stone.

  Narua’s face softened.

  “I know what it is to have people try to kill your children,” she said quietly. “And your self, and your whole life. I will not stand and let that happen when I can stop it.”

  She lifted her hand, flexed her fingers. Little sparks danced between them, faint in the dawn. “System gave me this. I might as well use it for something I do not hate.”

  “Witch?” the boy asked, because he didn’t know a better word.

  Narua snorted.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  She nodded toward the feathers on his chest.

  “He wears new name now?” she asked Peta. “Runt?Who?Kills?Good?”

  Peta grunted.

  Narua looked back at the boy, eyes amused.

  “Good,” she said. “Fit name. You look like something coyote would chew and leave, but you fight like badger–but braver.”

  The boy wasn’t sure if that was compliment or insult. Maybe both. He hadn’t seen a badger before, but he heard a lot of things about them.

  “Badger’s mean,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

  Narua laughed.

  It was a brief, bright sound, there and gone.

  “See that you live long enough to grow into that necklace, badger boy,” she said. “Eagle feathers sit heavy. Men will expect you to carry that weight.”

  She turned back to Peta, words sliding into Comanche again. The boy caught only pieces—war, council, wounded. Her hands moved as she spoke, sharp little cuts of air.

  Peta listened, then nodded.

  At some point a bluecoat sergeant approached, hat in both hands, eyes cautious.

  “Sir,” he said to Peta, because whatever else, you didn’t survive long on the frontier by failing to recognize another leader.

  “Lieutenant Prichard is callin’ a meeting. War chiefs of… your folks, their folks”—he jerked his chin toward the Kiowa and Apache—“and himself. Talkin’ about what comes next. He… ah… asked if there was someone could translate.”

  Narua’s eyes slid to him.

  “I can speak enough,” she said. “Tell your lieutenant I will come.”

  The sergeant nodded, plainly relieved.

  “And the boy,” he added, jerking his thumb at the boy without quite looking at him. “Lieutenant says he wants the boy there too. Officers and chiefs all saw what he did. Figure he’s earned a place at the big table, even if he can’t see over it.”

  The boy blinked.

  “Why?” he asked before he could stop himself.

  “Because you blew up my gate and kept damned monsters from pourin’ through it,” the sergeant said bluntly. “Because you called those beasts of yours—whatever the hell they were—and turned the tide. Because you shot more greenskins than half my company and then hauled more wounded than any three men I’ve seen. Hell if I know. Lieutenant just said, ‘Bring the boy.’ So I’m bringin’ you.”

  Peta made a low approving sound.

  “In my people,” he said, “one who kills many enemies and lives stands in council to speak. You do not hide him away like a woman stitching moccasins.”

  He looked at the boy. “Go. Listen. Speak if they ask. You may not be chief, Haa’e-sootsu-puhi, but System has made you big in other ways. That counts now.”

  Narua added, “And I will be there. If you say something foolish, I will hit you with my lance butt.”

  The boy wasn’t sure if she was joking.

  “Guess I better not say anything foolish,” he said.

  Narua’s mouth quirked.

  The sergeant shifted from foot to foot, clearly wanting to be back where he’d been told to be fifteen seconds ago.

  “Council’s in the captain’s office,” he said. His face flickered when he said captain, like the word hurt now. “Or what’s left of it. Lieutenant Prichard’s usin’ his map room. Chiefs’ll be there soon as they can limp to it.”

  He jerked his head back toward the fort.

  “You comin’?” he asked the boy.

  The boy glanced once more toward the chapel.

  Lily was still working. Mary still washing. Mrs. Brant still organizing. Narua and Peta and the other warriors would be close enough if anything went wrong. There would be no more monsters tonight. The silence that had followed the System’s promise of two days’ breathing room sat over the land like a held breath.

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m comin’.”

  He adjusted the eagle feather necklace so it sat straight, wiped one blood?stiff hand half?heartedly on his trousers, and followed the sergeant back through the broken gate, through the yard, past the howitzer standing mute with its barrel blackened from overuse.

  The stone building that held the captain’s office loomed ahead, its windows still smoky from the lamplight that had burned all night. Men had already taken Hargrove’s body away. The doorway gaped, dark.

  He paused on the threshold.

  For a heartbeat he saw Hargrove behind his desk again, maps on the wall, pale eyes taking his measure. He heard the man’s last words in his head, quieter than the System but heavier.

  You put that gun of yours wherever it hurts ‘em most.

  He touched the butt of the Colt at his hip with two fingers. Then he stepped inside, into the dim room where war chiefs and officers would decide what came next.