REDWATER JUNCTION

Redwater Junction had not changed, which was the nicest thing and the worst thing I could say about it.

It sat at the elbow of the Ember-Rail where the line dropped south toward the mining camps: one main street of packed red dust, forty or so buildings of weathered board, a water tower, a telegraph office, a livery with ten mechanical horses nodding on their springs in the evening heat. There was a church with no minister. There was a bank with two. The sign over the biggest saloon on the street, a lantern of beaten copper that creaked in the wind, had been missing a bolt since I was six.

I stepped down from the freight coach at dusk with the satchel over my shoulder and stood on the platform, and a man in a dust-colored hat looked me over, spat, and looked away.

Nobody asked who I was. Nobody on the Frontier ever did. It was the first thing I had missed.

…

Hawk Boone's shop stood at the far end of Gunsmith Row, a long low shed of black timber with a tin roof and a hand-painted board that read BOONE & DAUGHTER in letters that had faded to rust. I had asked him once, as a child, who the daughter was. He had said, Whoever's tall enough to reach the bench.

I did not go in at once.

I stood across the street, in the shadow of the feed store, and watched the lit window. A man moved inside it: tall, stooped, gray in the beard, in a leather apron scorched at the hem. He was bent over something on the bench. As I watched he took a thin cheroot from behind his ear, lit it off a gas jet without looking, and went on working. Smoke rose in a single straight line.

Hawk had taught me everything I knew before I knew anything else. How to read a lock, a seal, a rune; how to take a thing to pieces by feel and put it back with a better thought. He had held my father's hand when my father died. He had come to the funeral in a clean shirt and stood at the back, and afterward he had given me a screwdriver set and said, Your daddy owed me for this. Call it even.

In the last life, I had not written to him in three years. I had been so busy being happy.

I crossed the street.

…

The bell on the door gave one tired note. Hawk did not look up.

"We're closed."

"The sign says nine."

"The sign's an optimist." He turned a screw a quarter-turn. "Go find the barman at the Lantern. He'll sell you a hat."

"I don't want a hat."

"Then I can't help you."

"Hawk."

The screwdriver stopped.

He lifted his head slowly. In the gaslight his eyes were a pale, washed blue under heavy brows, and they traveled over me once, from my boots to my cropped hair to the soot on my coat: a gunsmith's look, quick and complete. For a moment his face did not change at all.

"You've grown," he said at last.

"Two inches."

"You look like hell."

"I came on the freight."

"Hm." He laid the screwdriver down, very carefully, parallel to the edge of the bench. "I heard something. Man at the telegraph office was telling it all over town this morning. A Calloway girl, Iron-rank, who made a spectacle of herself at a Sigil Ceremony and slapped a Fairchild. Marshal Whitlock's boys have been through twice already. Said they were asking after a runaway scholarship student."

"That's me."

"Figured." He took the cheroot out of his mouth. "You always did know how to make an entrance."

I took the pin from my lapel.

It was a small thing, a silver oak-leaf with the Academy's crest in blue enamel on the front, and an engraved number on the back. They gave them to every scholarship student at the Ceremony of Admission. I had worn mine for two years. It was the most valuable thing I owned in this world, in the narrow sense of the word, and I put it on the bench between us.

"I need a rig," I said. "A knife, a short-barrel, a pack, three days' rations. A bedroll. A bench to sleep under. I can't pay you for any of it. The pin should cover the first night."

Hawk looked at the pin. Then, at length, he looked at me.

"Thing like that's worth more than I've got in the till," he said.

"It's a pin."

"It's a Calloway pin. There's a man in Ravenport who'd pay three hundred for it." He folded his arms. "And there's a girl in front of me who's known for ten years she could've sold it to a broker at the Exchange for a week's wages and eaten like a queen. You didn't. You carried it. Because you wanted it." His eyes narrowed. "You never want to sell it. So tell me why you're selling it."

"Because I no longer need to be anyone's scholar."

I said it flatly. I had meant to say it flatly. But the room was quiet, and the gas hissed, and somewhere at the back of the shop a clock was ticking, and my voice, I noticed, was not quite level.

Hawk said nothing for a long moment.

"Well," he said. "Sit down. Before you fall down."

…

He did not feed me first. That was not his way. He pushed a battered stool toward the bench, took a mechanism from a drawer, laid it on the leather before me, and said, "Tell me what's wrong with this."

It was a spell-pistol. A big, blunt, six-inch-barreled thing in blued steel, the kind of weapon every rancher on the Frontier kept above his door. The grip was cracked. The cylinder bore a ring of rune-work I did not recognize at first glance, tight, narrow, set in a double spiral, and it was cold. I could feel the cold from where I sat.

"That isn't a test," I said.

"No."

"That is a test."

"It's a pistol." He shrugged. "A rancher's. Three years it's sat in my drawer. Won't hold a charge past the second shot. I've had it open nine times. I have changed the seat, the sear, the primer ring and the capacitor. Can't find it." He leaned on the bench. "You've got ten minutes. If you can't tell me what's wrong, I'll give you a bed anyway, and I'll buy the pin at a fair price, and I'll put you on a train back East in the morning. You're a good girl and I'm not going to let you do anything stupid."

I almost laughed. I did not. I picked up the pistol.

It was a simple trick, in the end. It was a trick that had cost me three weeks in the last life, in a basement in Ravenport, with an instructor who thought I was slow, before I had worked it through. The knowledge came back now whole and quiet, like a tool from its sheath.

I broke the cylinder out and turned it to the light. The double spiral was the clue. Anyone could read the first line of it. Fewer could read the second, and the second ran backward.

I took the pencil from my pocket and traced it.

"Your capacitor isn't the problem," I said. "It's here. Somebody set the charge-loop in the wrong direction. Not by much. A hair. A finger's-width of rune on the wrong side of the line." I tapped a groove no thicker than a thread. "It builds fine for the first two shots. By the third, it's feeding back into itself, and the ring seals shut. You'll see it if you hold it to the lamp. There's a scorch on the inside of the spiral."

I passed it across.

Hawk took it. He held it to the gas jet, turned it, squinted. I watched his big scarred thumb find the groove. I watched him go still.

I had counted nine seconds.

"Well, I'll be damned," said Hawk Boone, very softly.

He put the pistol down, and for a moment he did not seem to know what to do with his hands. Then he reached for the cheroot, discovered it had gone out, and relit it with a hand that was not quite steady.

"Three years," he said. "Three years. I had that on my bench a hundred times. I'd have bet my life on that spiral."

"It's a good spiral. It's only backward."

"Who taught you that?"

I thought about the basement, and the instructor, and a long gray winter in a quiet room. "A very patient man," I said. "I don't think he meant to."

…

We ate in the back, from a pot of beans and a skillet of cornbread, at a table that was also a lathe. Hawk said very little. He ate with the steady economy of a man who has done his own cooking for years. When we had finished he leaned back, set his hat on his knee, and spoke in the tone he used for hard facts.

"I'll make you a loan," he said. "Rig and rations, a bed in the loft, a bench to use at night. In return, you'll mend three of my guns. Not the ones that are broken. The ones I've given up on."

"Agreed."

"That's not the hard part."

"I know."

"Do you." He watched me through the smoke. "Because I'm going to ask you what you mean to do with this, Tamsin, and you're going to say something clever, and I'm going to know it for a lie. So don't." The blue eyes were steady. "Where are you going?"

I did not answer at once.

"Widow's Gorge," I said.

He took the cheroot from his mouth.

The clock ticked. Outside the wind had risen and was dragging a piece of loose tin along the roof of the feed store, back and forth, with a long thin scrape.

"Widow's Gorge," Hawk repeated at last. "Three in five go down that hole and don't come back. You know that. I know that. Every child in this county's been told it since they could walk." He did not raise his voice. "I know you're clever. I know you got an education. But you've an Iron mark and a bad temper and nothing in your pack but a pin. What the hell do you think you're going to do down there?"

Eat it, I thought.

"Get strong," I said. "Quickly. There are people coming for me, and they're very good, and I will not have time to be gentle."

He studied me for so long that I began to think he'd refused. Then he rubbed his face with one hand, hard, like a man scrubbing off a mask.

"Your father used to say you had a look," he said, "when you'd made your mind up. I never saw it till now."

"What look?"

"The one that says the world is going to have to adjust."

He pushed his chair back and went through the shop to the front. I heard drawers. I heard something heavy being moved. When he returned he had a rolled sheet of oilcloth under his arm, brown and cracked, tied with a bootlace, and he laid it on the table between the plates and unrolled it.

A map.

It was old. Older than Hawk. The ink had faded to the color of tea, and the paper was soft as cloth. It showed the Gorge in cross-section, drawn in a clumsy hand: a long ragged slot in the earth, cut by tier into five layers like a layer cake. The first and second were marked in black, crowded with little crosses. The third had a skull in the corner. The fourth had nothing at all.

At the bottom of the sheet, in the same faded brown, someone had written one line.

"My granddaddy drew that," said Hawk. "He went down to the third tier when he was your age. Came up gray-haired. He wouldn't talk about it until he was dying." He tapped the blank space. "He said the first three levels are the ones a person can kill. The fourth is the one that kills you."

I put my hand on the paper. It was warm, strangely. It was warm the way a stone is warm after a day in the sun.

"Don't go to the fourth," said Hawk Boone. "I'll say it once. Don't go below the third. There's something down there that calls people by name."