They walked until the trees swallowed the world.

  The farther north they went, the fewer open patches there were. The sky shrank to narrow strips between branches. The sun became something guessed at from the way the light slanted, not a disc you could point at. The boy missed seeing a long way. He liked knowing what was coming before it got to him. Here, the woods pressed in close and kept their own counsel.

  At night, when the clouds let him, he hunted for the star that didn’t move.

  He’d lie on his back with his hands pillowed under his head, the fire burned down to a red eye in the coals, Lily a small warmth pressed to his side. The branches above would shift and mutter, and in the cracks between them, the stars showed.

  “Which one is it?” Lily would whisper, following his squint.

  “That one,” he’d murmur, tilting his chin toward the bit of sky where Polaris hung. “See? The one the others walk around.”

  They never stayed in exactly the same place. All of them moved a little when you stared, like shy animals. He narrowed his eyes and counted under his breath, following one star along its slow path and then cutting his gaze across to its neighbor.

  “This one goes,” he’d say, “and that one goes, but that little one there… he stays. That’s north.”

  Lily would stare and stare until her eyes watered.

  “Looks the same as the rest,” she’d complain at last. “A little bigger, I reckon.”

  “That’s how you know it’s special,” he’d say.

  He didn’t tell her he might be wrong. That maybe he’d picked some ordinary star and put all his weight on it. As long as he kept them moving, she believed he knew where they were going. That belief tasted better than beans.

  By day, they followed the ghost of that line as best he could. When the creek bent east, he made them cross it and climb back up the opposite bank. When it ran west, he let them walk along it for a while, saving their strength, then cut away again toward where he imagined north waited, patient as that star.

  They ate careful. A can stretched for a day now—half at morning, half at night—mixed with whatever else they could scrape together. A handful of parched cornmeal here, a strip of salt pork there, a few mouthfuls of beans cooked with creek water in the skillet they had claimed and hidden in that nowhere-space. He did not hunt. He didn’t know how to hunt and the woods were wrong to him still, and the thought of firing the Colt at anything that wasn’t coming straight for Lily made his knuckles itch. Moving meant he couldn’t lay down traps either.

  On the second evening, as the sky went from brass to bruised, they came out of a stand of cedar and saw the hermit’s hill.

  It rose from the bend of the creek like a knot under a blanket, a swell in the land where the grass had been cut shorter and the brush pushed back. The creek curved around its base, chewing slowly at the bank. A narrow path, tramped by the same set of feet many times, wound up from the water to the top.

  At the crest, a cabin hunched.

  It was a mean thing, but sturdier than some they’d seen. The walls were logs notched and stacked, smeared with mud in the cracks. The roof was board shingles held down with rocks, the kind scavenged from the creek. A stone chimney leaned at its side, blackened at the top. No smoke rose from it.

  “See?” Lily said softly. “There’s folks out here.”

  “Someone-” the boy said. “Wants to live out here?”

  He stood a moment in the shade of the cedars, looking.

  The hut faced the creek. From here, he could see a short length of split-rail fence on the slope, mostly fallen, and what had once been a garden patch—dark, bare dirt now, gone to weed. No chickens scratched. No dog barked. No sound at all but the creek’s low chuckle and the birds in the trees.

  His neck prickled.

  Still, a roof was a roof, and people meant news, and news was a kind of food.

  He shifted the carrying pole on his shoulders and stepped out of the trees.

  They went up the path single file, Lily’s hand hooked in the back of his shirt. The ground gave under their bare feet, soft from the creek’s nearness. As they climbed, the smells shifted—less leaf mold, more man. Old smoke. Sweat. Waste. And under that, something else, something sour-sweet.

  The boy’s stride shortened without him thinking about it.

  The flat spot at the top held just enough space for the cabin, a rough chopping stump, and a worn chair. The chair had been dragged close to the edge of the slope, where the occupant could see the water and most of the path. It seemed empty at first glance.

  Then he saw the boots.

  They stuck out from under the lip of the porch roof, heels scuffed white, soles worn down at the edges. A man sat in the chair, back against the wall, head bowed as if he’d fallen asleep staring at the creek.

  A bottle leaned against his thigh. One hand dangled over its neck, fingers hooked just enough to keep it from tipping.

  “Sir?” Lily called, too bright. No answer came.

  The boy’s eyes had fixed on a fly.

  It crawled along the man’s cheek, wandered the sag of his jowl, then took a lazy walk across the cracked line of his lower lip. The man did not twitch. He did not breathe. His chest did not rise.

  The sour-sweet smell thickened as they came closer. Alcohol, yes. And under it, the beginning of something worse.

  Lily slowed. “Brother?”

  “He’s dead,” the boy said.

  He kept his voice flat. It made Lily flinch anyway.

  “You don’t know that,” she whispered.

  He did, but he didn’t argue. Instead he stepped up onto the packed dirt in front of the chair, close enough now to see the milk-cloud in the man’s half-open eyes, the way his lips had gone gray at the edges. The whiskers on his chin were greasy. His shirtfront was stained with something that might have been stew once and might have been worse.

  “Sir?” Lily tried again, softer.

  The man did not answer. His head hung at an angle that would have made a living neck ache. The boy watched another fly disappear into one nostril and did not come back out.

  “Dead,” he repeated.

  Lily reached for his arm. “We should say something. A prayer maybe. Like for—”

  “For later,” he said. “After we know if he’s got anything.”

  She hesitated. Her mouth pinched. “That’s… that’s robbing.”

  “He don’t need it,” the boy said. “He doesn’t eat now. We do.”

  He’d had this talk with her already, in the town. Old Werrin’s boots sat snug around his own ankles, leather stiff but softening. The coat she wore had warmed a man’s shoulders once. It warmed hers now. The dead had not come back to complain.

  “But—”

  “If we don’t take it,” he added, “the foxes will. Or some other fella who comes along. Might as well be us gettin’ fed.”

  She bit her lip and said nothing. That was not agreement, but it was not refusal either.

  He stepped around the dead man, careful not to brush him, and tested the cabin’s door with two fingers. It stuck at first, then gave with a dry squeal, swinging inward on leather hinges.

  The smell inside hit him like a slap.

  Old cooking and unwashed cloth, the sour of human breath in a closed space, damp wood. Underneath all of it, heavier now, a thick, greasy rot that sat on the back of his tongue.

  “Stay by the door,” he told Lily.

  She stood with one hand wrapped around the edge of the frame, the other bunched in her coat’s front where Ember’s scorched head peeped. Her nose wrinkled. “It stinks.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Means there’s been meat. Maybe some’s left.”

  He stepped inside.

  The cabin was one room, low-roofed. A single small window let in a weak sheet of light, more grime than glass on it. Dust motes hung in the beam like lazy flies.

  To the left, a notch of stones made a fireplace, black with years of smoke. A rusted pot hung cold over the ashes. The hearth stones were crusted with old spillovers. The boy’s eye picked out the color of them—brown, gray, something darker at the edges. He didn’t look too close.

  A rough bed frame sat against the back wall, slats bowed, mattress a ticking stuffed with something that had clumped into hills and valleys. The blanket on top was a dark, indistinguishable color, matted and stiff. A table stood near the window with a chair missing one rung. Shelves crowded the wall opposite the fireplace, holding tin plates, a chipped mug, a few jars with cloudy contents.

  It looked like poverty, the same as his own home had, just older. It smelled like neglect.

  He moved through with his hands light and his eyes sharp. You could learn as much from what wasn’t there as from what was.

  Food first.

  Three cans sat in a corner on the floor, half-hidden behind a sack. Their labels had gone to ghosts—faded colors, letters worn to smears—but when he shook one, something thick sloshed inside. Beans, maybe. Or peaches. Either was better than nothing. He touched them one by one, pushing them into that cold, hollow space in his head.

  [Inventory], he thought, and the cans blinked out of the world. The space inside pressed just a little tighter. Not full yet. Not empty.

  “Got some,” he said.

  Lily let out a breath.

  He found a sack of cornmeal too, rolled and tied at the neck with twine. Mice had chewed at its bottom, but most of the grain was dry and sound. That went into the Inventory as well, a dull new weight among their treasures. A crock of lard, half-full and gone a bit rancid at the edges but still workable, followed.

  On the shelf he found a small sack of salt, sewn shut. He slid it into his physical sack instead of the nowhere-space, feeling the heft of it with satisfaction. Salt kept meat. Salt kept people.

  He was easing the cracked skillet off its hook when something on the wall above the bed caught his eye.

  It was a strip of leather, he thought at first—a narrow, curving thing hanging from a nail. Then his gaze adjusted to the poor light and he saw the ridges. The whorls. The tiny, familiar curl where it would once have grown from a head.

  Scalp.

  Not just one. A cluster, tied together through slits in their centers, hair of different lengths and colors: black, brown, one with a thread of gray. The skin had dried to a dull yellow-brown, edges curled.

  His stomach went very still.

  Dressings, he told himself. Comanche took scalps. Rangers did, too, when there was pay on them. Men kept them as proof, as pride.

  Beside them, on another nail, hung a string of small shapes. For a moment, they were buttons in his eyes, until he looked close and saw the folds—the curve, the little notch where they had once opened onto the world.

  Ears.

  Dried up like gristle, some still wearing a scrap of earring. Ten of them. Maybe more. He didn’t count long.

  “Brother?” Lily said from the door. “Find anything?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  He should have told her to stay out. He knew that. He knew her well enough by now to know she would not.

  She came up behind him, boots silent on the packed earth, and followed his gaze.

  Her breath stopped.

  For a heartbeat she hung quiet, suspended, eyes locked on the hanging hair and shrunken ears. Then her stomach remembered itself.

  She turned aside, shoved past him, and ran.

  He heard her hit the yard outside—the scrape of her shoes on the threshold, then the thud of them on bare ground. A heartbeat later, the raw sound of her retching came back, thin and miserable.

  He stayed where he was.

  If he was honest with himself, some part of him liked that she could still throw up over this. It meant some bit of her had been spared what he’d already seen. He wasn’t sure what to do with that feeling, so he put it aside and looked further.

  A low chest crouched at the foot of the bed, lid askew. He nudged it open with his toe and peered in.

  Bones.

  Not animal bones. Not the right shapes. Not thick and blunt like cattle. Long bones with the right number of knobs. Ribs, neat and white. A skull in one corner with teeth still in, caved in at the temple.

  He stared down at them without blinking. The hairs along his arms lifted.

  He looked at the hearth. At the pot. At the greasy ring around its lip.

  “He ate ‘em,” he said quietly, to the bones, to himself. “You really did that.”

  He thought of men trapped in winter storms whittling their company down with their hunger. He remembered the railroad men’s jokes about how far a man would go when the snow locked him in a cabin. Those had been stories told with laughter, made safe by distance and weather and the idea it would always happen to someone else.

  Here, there was no snow. No storm. Just one man and his wants.

  The boy shut the chest and threw away the lard he’d packed into the [Inventory].

  He turned away.

  Near the door, half-hidden under a folded bit of canvas, a wooden crate sat tucked against the wall. It had iron bands on its corners and a paper label stuck to one side, the ink run from damp and years. He knelt and pried the lid.

  The nails squealed a little but gave. Under the lid lay a neat row of paper-wrapped sticks. Waxed paper, yellowed, tied at one end. They looked like over-fat candles that had never seen a wick.

  He lifted one and sniffed.

  The smell made the back of his nose sting. Black powder, just like the one he needed for the gun. But why was it shaped like a candle?

  “Brother?” Lily’s voice came from outside, ragged and small. “Can we go now? Please?”

  “Soon,” he said.

  His head felt strangely calm as he slid the stick into that inside-place.

  As he stepped out into the daylight, the sour, thick air of the cabin fell away. The smell outside was better—still man, still whiskey, but thinned by the breeze.

  Lily stood with her palms braced on her knees, hair hanging around her face, breathing in sharp little pulls. Her cheeks were damp. Someone else’s coat sat heavy on her shoulders, making her smaller.

  She looked up at him, eyes large and wet.

  “He… he ate them?” she asked, though he’d said nothing aloud.

  “There’s bones in a box,” he said. “Scalps too. Ears. Ain’t much else that explains it.”

  Her mouth twisted. For a moment he thought she might cry. Instead she wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, leaving a smear, and squared her shoulders like a much older woman.

  “I don’t like it here,” she said.

  “Me neither,” he answered.

  “Can we say something and go?”

  He stared past her at the man in the chair. Flies crawled confidently now, thick around his eyes.

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  “Fine,” the boy said. “Say it quick.”

  She looked at the dead man, face tightening.

  “I don’t know if you were always bad,” she said in a thin voice. “Or if the world made you bad. But you shouldn’t have done what you did. You shouldn’t have eaten folks. I don’t know if God listens to people like you. But if He does, I hope He makes you sit at the far end of the table.”

  It was not the sort of prayer the preacher would’ve liked. It sounded more honest.

  “Done?” the boy asked.

  She nodded, jaw set. “Done.”

  He shifted the carrying pole to his shoulder again. “Come on, then. Creek’s that way. We follow it ‘til dark.”

  They started down the slope.

  The path was steep enough that they went slow. Lily kept glancing back over her shoulder at the slumped figure in the chair, as if expecting some last twitch.

  She got it.

  They had just reached the base of the hill when a sound came from above—a low, wet grunt.

  Lily froze. “Brother?”

  He turned.

  The man in the chair had moved.

  Not much. His head had lifted, just enough that his chin no longer touched his chest. One hand still clutched the bottle, but the other had fallen to the arm of the chair, fingers digging into the wood as if testing it.

  The boy watched him, every muscle coiling.

  The man’s eyes opened the rest of the way.

  They did not look like any dead man’s eyes he’d seen. No milky film now. No murk. They glowed.

  Green, a sick, wrong green, like swamp water lit from within. It throbbed faintly, pulse-for-pulse with something that was not a real heart.

  The smell hit them next.

  The rot that had been faint before rolled down the slope in a wave now—thick, meat-gone-bad stench, undercut by something sharp and sweet and putrid.

  The man’s lips peeled back from his teeth. They were brown and crooked. A wet hiss bubbled out.

  “Run,” the boy said.

  He did not run. He stepped up the hill instead.

  The dead man lurched forward.

  He didn’t rise cleanly, the way a living man would. The motion looked dragged out of him by hooks, his shoulders jerking, knees knocking against the chair’s edge as he heaved himself up.

  The bottle fell from his hand and shattered on the packed dirt, whiskey and glass shards exploding out in a reeking spray.

  Lily yelped. Her boot skidded on the wet patch. She stumbled backward, arms pinwheeling, and went down on her backside at the edge of the slope.

  The hermit’s head snapped toward her.

  His glowing eyes widened, as if surprised to find something new in his world. His mouth opened in a soundless snarl. Then he threw himself at her.

  He moved faster than any drunk, faster than any stiff corpse had a right to..

  “Lily!” he barked.

  Lily rolled sideways, her small body flipping over, and the hermit’s grasping hands met dirt instead of her throat.

  He hit the slope too hard for his unsteady legs. His knees buckled. He tumbled forward, arms scrabbling, and rolled. His shoulder clipped a rock. Something crackled. He hit the flat place at the hill’s base with a thud that sent a puff of dust up.

  He lay there a heartbeat, limbs splayed at bad angles.

  Then he began to move again.

  The boy didn’t reach for the Colt. Each bullet was too precious. He couldn’t waste it here.

  He spun instead, eyes skimming the yard.

  A plank leaned against the cabin wall—a length of board, part of some crate or fence, one end splintered. He snatched it up. Good enough.

  The hermit writhed on the dirt, fingers digging in as if trying to claw the world closer. His neck twisted, that awful green gaze tracking, fixing on Lily where she scrambled backward on hands and heels.

  He tried to push himself up.

  The boy did not let him.

  He stepped in and swung the plank down with both hands.

  It connected with a dull, meaty sound across the hermit’s shoulders. What should have been a shoulder blade gave a little, but not enough. The board jarred in the boy’s grip. Pain snapped up his arms.

  The hermit jerked under the blow, then kept moving.

  A hiss slipped out from between his teeth. It might once have been a word. It was not now.

  The boy hit him again.

  This time he aimed for the head. The board caught the side of the skull. Something cracked—bone or wood, he wasn’t sure—sending splinters flying. The hermit’s jaw snapped shut. He rolled onto his back, eyes flaring brighter.

  One pale hand lashed out.

  It caught the boy’s ankle.

  The grip was cold. Fingers dug in with surprising strength, nails biting bare skin above his borrowed boots.

  The boy went down on one knee with a grunt, the plank nearly torn from his hands.

  The hermit’s other hand clawed toward his leg. His mouth worked, jaw creaking, like he was trying to remember how to bite.

  “Let go,” the boy growled.

  He wrenched his leg, but the grip held. The hand was like a root sunk in him.

  “Brother!” Lily cried.

  Her fear burned through his momentary panic like dry grass.

  He brought the plank down a third time, straight across the man’s wrist.

  Bone gave.

  The rotten green fire in the hermit’s eyes flared as his hand snapped. The sound was sharp, like a stick breaking. Fingers splayed, then went limp. The boy tore his ankle free.

  The hermit tried to sit up.

  No.

  The boy stepped back, sucking air, and then moved sideways, around the thing on the ground. He did not want it between him and Lily. His eyes never left that glowing stare.

  “Bring me something,” he barked. “Another board, branch, anything.”

  Lily scrambled toward the chopping stump at the top of the hill. A length of split-rail lay near it, one end half-charred. She grabbed it, small hands dragging, and half-slid down the slope with it bumping behind her.

  He took it from her fingers without thanks and stepped back to the flailing corpse.

  This time he aimed lower.

  The first blow came down across the hermit’s knees.

  The sound was wet and hard at once. Whatever held the leg together crunched. The leg jolted, then sagged. The other followed under the second strike, cracking loudly.

  The hermit writhed. His hands clawed at the dirt, trying to drag his useless legs along.

  The boy’s breath sawed. His arms burned. He did not notice much.

  He brought the plank down on the shoulders, again and again, until he heard the dull thump of joints breaking, until the arms flopped like badly tied sacks. The hermit’s fingers still flexed, reaching, but there was no leverage in them now.

  It was slow, messy, and painful. But it worked.

  “Stay put,” the boy panted.

  The hermit did not, quite. His head thrashed against the dirt, mouth opening and shutting. No sound came now. That somehow made it worse.

  The boy had broken a rabbit’s neck once, trying to spare it a slow death. He remembered the feel of it in his hands, the crack, the sudden limp. It had been kinder than letting it hang and choke.

  This thing was not a rabbit. It had eaten people. It had tried for Lily. It couldn’t be allowed to live.

  He slid the board under the hermit’s throat and planted one foot on either side, near the shoulders. The glow in the old man’s eyes flared, fixing on him. Something that might once have been thought stirred there.

  “Don’t you look at me,” the boy muttered.

  He put both hands on the board and leaned his weight into it.

  At first, nothing happened. The neck was tougher than it looked, sinews pulling tight. He bore down harder, teeth bared.

  There was a resistance, then a give. A series of small cracks ran through the hermit’s spine, like a line of dry twigs snapping in sequence. The head arched forward, then sagged at an angle necks weren’t made for.

  The green light in the eyes flickered.

  It sputtered once, twice, as if fighting some wind only it could feel. Then it went out, leaving only clouded gray behind.

  The smell shifted, too. The sharp, unpleasant energy leached away, leaving just rot and whiskey and old dirt.

  The body lay still.

  The boy stayed where he was a heartbeat longer, board still pressed to the broken throat, breathing fast. Then he eased off, muscles trembling, and stepped back.

  He waited.

  The corpse did not move.

  “Is it… is it done?” Lily asked.

  He watched for a long moment, eyes narrowed, counting his own heartbeats.

  “Yeah,” he said at last. “It’s done.”

  Something rose in his head then—another feeling that wasn’t quite smell, wasn’t quite sight. It had come once before, when the imp’s strange little life had gone out. The world seemed to tilt, the corners of things sharpening. An undeniable pressure lit up behind his eyes.

  Level Up!

  Level: 2.

  He sucked in a breath.

  The numbers followed.

  Strength: 5 → 6.

  Dexterity: 8 → 9.

  Vitality: 7 → 8.

  Magic: 6 → 7.

  And after the numbers, four small… weights. That was the best way he could think of them. Four bits of something loose, like stones dropped onto a cloth that he could move around if he liked.

  Free stat points: 4

  You may allocate them whenever you wish…

  Allocate? the knowledge pressed at him without proper words. Choose.

  “Brother?” Lily’s voice wobbled. “It’s… it’s doing it again. The writin’ in my head. It says I’ve gone up a number. Like I climbed stairs.”

  He half-listened. Most of him was turned inward, hands on those four unseen stones.

  He could send them into any of the four piles—Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Magic. He knew that as surely as he knew which way north was. He didn’t know how he knew it; he just did.

  He thought of bullets and knives and the way his arm had already begun to ache from swinging the board. Strength would make that swing harder. Dexterity would make shots cleaner. Magic… he didn’t know what that did yet, not really. It lived in Lily’s [Spark] more than in him.

  Vitality.

  Vitality. Life-stuff.

  Hunger.

  His stomach complained now, a hollow ache behind his ribs. It had been two days of tight rations. He knew that gnaw well. He also knew how long he could walk hungry before his legs failed and his thoughts went slow.

  If more Vitality meant his body used what it had better… if it meant he could go longer on less…

  He shoved the first of the little stones toward that pile.

  It rolled into place without friction. Vitality ticked up.

  8 → 9.

  He pushed the second. The third. The fourth.

  9 → 10 → 11 → 12.

  The number felt bigger in his head than on any page. Twelve. He did not know what an ordinary man’s count was. He only knew this was more than his had been.

  The change washed through him.

  It wasn’t as sharp as eating the imp’s soul had been. There was no shock. No flash. It was more like a slow, deep breath. His muscles, sore from swinging the board, eased a fraction. The ache behind his eyes lightened. The hunger didn’t go away—he doubted anything but food would do that—but it stepped back a pace, as if giving him room.

  He exhaled.

  “You all right?” Lily asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “It gave me… more. I put it in the part that keeps things runnin’.”

  She frowned.

  “Mine too. It says I get four to put where I want. I thought about makin’ the magic bit bigger. It’s already tallest.” Her eyes went distant a moment, following her own inner lines. “Then I remembered what you said. About us gettin’ thin as rails.”

  “Put it in your Vitality,” he said. “All of it.”

  “That’s what you did?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  He groped for words.

  “If you’re more… whatever that is, maybe your body don’t holler for food so loud. Maybe you don’t get sick as quick. Maybe you don’t freeze so easy if the fire goes out.” He shrugged. “Makes you harder to kill, I reckon.”

  Her mouth twisted.

  “I don’t want to be hard to kill,” she said. “I just don’t want to die.”

  “Same thing,” he said.

  She fell quiet, chewing on her lip. He watched her eyes shift back and forth, following something only she could see. After a moment, she nodded once, sharp.

  “There,” she said. “Done. I put ‘em all where you said. VIT. It spelled it funny, but I know what it meant.”

  He wondered what her numbers were now. He wondered how much of the little witch the System saw when it looked at her.

  The thought made him glance back at the corpse.

  If [The Hollow] were going to wake, it would be now.

  He watched for the shimmer. The ghost-breath he’d seen rise from the imp’s body. Nothing moved over the hermit’s chest. No pale haze, no soul-echo, nothing.

  He reached for it anyway, that emptiness inside him, feeling for the tug.

  Nothing tugged back.

  “Brother?” Lily’s voice came softer. “Are you… are you doing the eating thing?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Good.” She shivered. “I don’t like that one.”

  He didn’t know whether he was glad or not. Part of him had expected another rush, another step up. Part of him was relieved the System seemed to agree certain meals were off the table.

  Maybe, he thought, whatever had been in this man when he was alive had already gone wherever the sheriff had gone. Maybe only the green wrongness had been left, and that burned off with the light.

  He bent and wiped the worst of the gore off the plank on a patch of grass, then tossed it aside. The boards lay crooked around the corpse, mute witnesses.

  “What do we do with him?” Lily asked, hugging her arms around herself.

  “Nothing,” the boy said.

  Her head snapped toward him.

  “We can’t just leave him. He might…” She glanced at the twisted neck, the limp legs. “He might stand up again.”

  “He won’t,” the boy said. “Bones are broke. Whatever made him move is gone. If it comes back, I reckon he still won’t be able to move.”

  “He can lay,” he said. “Foxes will get him. Birds. Worms. That’s his prayer.”

  Lily looked like she wanted to argue. Then she glanced at the cabin, at the flies swarming its dark doorway, and swallowed her words.

  “Let’s not stay here,” she said.

  “Agreed,” he replied.

  They went down the hill a second time, the creek’s chuckle loud now in the sudden silence that followed the fight. The boy’s ankle throbbed where the hermit’s nails had bitten it. He’d wash that soon. Rot did bad things if you let it sit.

  They filled their jugs at the creek, him standing steady with one foot braced in the mud while Lily held the cords. By the time the sun slid behind the trees and the first star pricked out overhead, they had put a good stretch of creek between themselves and the hill. The hut, when he glanced back once, was just a squat shape on the rise, a darker patch against the dim.

  They made camp on a level bit of ground where the bank flattened and the trees fell back a little. Lily coaxed a spark from her fingertips into grass, and the boy nursed the flame with twigs and bark until it took. The smell of smoke, clean and sharp, pushed back the day’s rot.

  He pulled a can from the [Inventory]—one of the hermit’s—and opened it with his knife. Beans. He felt almost amused. The world had narrowed down to smoke and beans and blood of late.

  They ate slower than hunger wanted, trading the spoon back and forth. The ache in his gut was there, but dulled. He wondered if that was the Level talking, or just his body giving up on complaining.

  When they were done and the can scraped clean, they sat with their backs against a log, blanket over their knees, watching the fire eat its way through the wood.

  “Do you think everyone gets stronger like that?” Lily asked softly. “When they hit things ‘til they stop moving?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe just us. Maybe them monsters too. Maybe the… the System likes seeing things fight.”

  She made a face. “That’s mean.”

  “The world’s mean,” he said.

  She reached up and fiddled with Ember’s singed hair. The doll stared at the fire with her scratched eye.

  “Those sticks you took,” Lily said after a while. “From the box. What are they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s black powder. Packed tight with a wick on one end, like a candle. I reckon it’ll blow up if set alight.”

  “Like… like a big [Spark]?” she asked, sounding half-proud, half-afraid.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But we gotta be smart about how to use it.”

  She considered that.

  “We won’t be stupid,” she said.

  “I sure hope so.”

  They slept in fits, the boy waking a few times to put more wood on the fire and listen to the night. Once, wolves howled far off, a rolling sound that made the hair on his neck lift. Something splashed in the creek. The stars wheeled slowly, that one stubborn one holding its place.

  In the morning, they followed the water again.

  The land opened a little as they went—a wider strip of grass beside the creek, the trees drawing back. The air had that bright, hard quality that came after a cool night. Their breaths smoked a little as they walked, white ghosts that vanished quickly.

  He saw prints in the mud now and then—deer, raccoon, once the broader, lighter step of a man. Older, half-washed by the creek’s rise and fall.

  Near midday, the light changed.

  At first he thought it was just a cloud sliding over the sun. Then he realized it wasn’t the sky. It was the air.

  The brightness went flat. The shadows blurred. A smell rode the breeze, thin at first and then stronger.

  It was the same sour-sweet stink he’d smelled on the hermit, multiplied by a hundred and left in the sun.

  He stopped.

  Lily bumped into his back.

  “Why’d—” she started, then sniffed. Her face creased. “What’s that?”

  “Death,” he said quietly.

  She did. Her hand found his shirt, fingers clutching.

  They went on anyway. Carefully now. The boy’s other hand rested on the Colt’s grip, thumb near the hammer. The creek knotted in his ears with his own heartbeat.

  They saw the birds first.

  Crows, mostly, black and glossy, hopping along the ground and flapping up into low branches when the children drew too near. Vultures circled overhead, wings held in that shallow V, riding the warm air rising off the ground.

  Then the camp came into view.

  It had been set on a flat rise back from the creek, where you could see a long way in all directions. Tepees once stood there—cone frames of long poles, some still half-wrapped with painted hides and canvas. Now many had fallen. One lay on its side, poles broken, like a giant spider crushed mid-step.

  Smoke still smeared the air in places, thin gray threads rising from blackened patches where fires had burned down to ash. The bank below showed where horses had gone in and out of the water, churning the mud.

  Bodies lay everywhere.

  The boy had no word for how many. Hundreds maybe. Enough that the shapes blurred together at first, becoming just a field of color—brown and red and the odd streak of blue cloth, a child’s toy.

  As they drew closer, the shapes resolved into people.

  Men, mostly, their hair long, some in braids, some loose. Women with their dresses torn, tangled. Children, smaller bodies twisted into shapes he did not want to name. Old ones with gray in their braids. A dog sprawled on its side, tongue blackened, ribs open.

  None of them had died clean.

  Limbs were missing. A man’s chest gaped where something had torn out ribs and whatever lay underneath. A woman’s throat had been ripped away, not cut. One boy lay half under a torn tepee, his midsection simply… gone, chewed away, spine sticking out like a broken stick.

  The ground was streaked and puddled with dried blood, dark and cracked. Flies rose in a buzzing cloud from one corpse as the children’s shadows touched it, then settled again.

  Lily made a small sound in her throat. Her fingers dug into the boy’s side.

  “This wasn’t Comanche,” the boy said, though it was a Comanche camp, or some other people’s like them. “Not just.”

  He couldn’t say Comanche didn’t do this. Men did all sorts of things to one another. But the bite marks… the way the limbs had been pulled as if by something that didn’t care about blade or bone, only leverage…

  Monsters, he thought.

  He looked for movement.

  For a long moment all he saw was the ripple of vulture wings and the black crawl of flies over flesh. No green-glowing eyes looked back from under fallen hides. No low growls came.

  He stepped forward anyway, slow, senses stretched thin.

  “Brother,” Lily hissed. “Don’t.”

  “We need to know,” he said.

  “Know what?”

  “If they’re coming back,” he said simply. “If any of ‘em… stand up wrong.”

  She bit her lip, hard, but came with him. Ember thumped against her breastbone.

  He passed a warrior with two braids stiff with blood, his face turned toward the sky. An eagle feather still jutted from his hair. His chest was a ruin. Nearby, a woman lay on her side, her hand outstretched toward a small shape that had never reached hers.

  The boy did not let his eyes dwell long. He scanned faces instead, looking for the wrong color of light in their eyes, the twitch of fingers.

  None moved. Not yet.

  At the center of the camp, a bigger fire had burned hot enough to blacken the ground. Around it lay more bodies, piled as if they had been dragged there. Some had started to burn. The flames had gone out or been smothered. Half-charred flesh showed teeth marks.

  “Why?” Lily whispered. “Why would… would they kill all of ‘em? There’s old ones here. Babies.”

  He had no answer.

  He stood in the middle of that broken camp, the wind lifting his hair, the smell of slaughter in his nose, and understood something simple and deep:

  The raid on their town, the imp, the hermit’s cabin, this—none of it was separate. The world had cracked when the voice in the ground said Welcome to the System. Everything after was just pieces sliding.

  “Come on,” he said at last, voice low. “We don’t stay here.”

  “Where do we go?” Lily asked. Her voice sounded like it came from far away.

  He looked north.

  “Same way,” he said. “We just gotta keep movin’.”