They awoke in dead silence.

  Not real silence. The world never went all the way still. There was always something—a board settling, a horse shifting, a fly’s thin buzz. But the shouting had gone. The wild yips. The woman’s scream that had torn up through the floorboards and then cut off.

  What was left was a sort of thick silence, like the town had stuffed cotton in its own ears.

  His back ached where the stone of the foundation pressed it. His arms were pins and needles where they wrapped around Lily. Her breath warmed the hollow of his throat in small, damp bursts. Smoke threaded through the cracks above them, thinner now but still there, smelling of pitch and flour and things he did not want to name.

  “Brother?” Lily’s whisper was a scrape. “Is it over?”

  He didn’t know.

  Somewhere above, a board creaked. A far-off crash answered it, followed by the soft, collapsing sigh of something giving way. There were no more hoofbeats, war cries, or gunshots. Nothing but the slow gnaw of fire dying out and the occasional pop as something burned through.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Can we get out?” Her fingers clenched in his shirt. “I don’t like this. It’s hard to breathe.”

  He didn’t like it either. Being in the dark with the weight of a building over him made his skin itch; his mind kept supplying little pictures of the floor giving way, of all that lumber and stone pinning them like beetles. But the idea of pushing up the tarp, of sticking his head into whatever waited—Comanche with knives, houses still blazing, the sheriff lying wherever he’d fallen—

  He made himself move anyway. That was the trick. Keep moving. Always keep moving. The world never waited. Someone told him that long ago, but he never remembered who.

  “Wait here,” he told her. “If something’s bad, I’ll push you back.”

  “I’m not lettin’ you go alone,” she began, but he was already wriggling toward the mouth of the hollow.

  The tarp above had sagged more while they lay there. Ash had sifted down and mixed with the dirt, turning it a sickly gray. He pushed up with one hand, slow, until cool air touched his knuckles. No hand grabbed him. No spear came slicing in. He edged the cloth aside enough to see.

  The alley behind Cobb’s store looked wrong.

  He’d known every inch of it before, every leaning barrel and broken crate, the way the light cut down between roofs at midday, the little trickle of run-off that left a green stain along the foundation when it rained. Now everything was gray and black. The barrel closest to the wall had burst; charred staves stuck out at angles, and the earth around it was dusted white where flour had spilled and then burned. The store’s back wall was dark with smoke, boards blistered and blackened. The air tasted like acrid smoke.

  At least, the Comanches were gone.

  He eased out, dust scraping his shirt, then twisted and reached back for Lily. Her hand latched into his, small and fierce, and he hauled her up after him. They crouched between the barrels, heads low.

  “Don’t look street-ways yet,” he warned. “Let’s see the back first.”

  They slipped along the wall, bare feet whispering in the ash. The alley opened onto the strip of hard-packed ground that ran behind the row of buildings. Smoke still bled from the saloon roof in a thin, sullen plume. One of the boarding house windows was just an empty hole now, glass blown out, the curtains gone. The blacksmith’s place had half-collapsed; the awning over his forge had fallen, a sagging tent of charred canvas draped over twisted iron.

  Bodies lay everywhere he looked, like fallen leaves.

  Here a woman in a torn dress, one arm flung out, hair spread and threaded with ash. There a man facedown, shirt burned through across the back, blackened patches showing skin underneath that was no longer skin. A dog lay on its side by the back stoop of the saloon, ribs still showing under the singed fur, legs stiff.

  Lily’s breath hitched beside him.

  “Brother,” she whispered. Her voice wobbled. “We… we should say a prayer.”

  “What for?” he asked without thinking.

  Lily’s hand went colder in his.

  She swallowed. “We should… we should say something for them.”

  He looked at the bodies. At the burned boards. At the sky beyond, already going yellowish with late-afternoon light. Prayer didn’t help them when they were alive. No doubt, a lot of the folk here prayed that god would take the Comanches away and that didn’t happen. What good would it do now that they were dead?

  “Later,” he said. “We say things later. First we find food. Water. Anything we’d need.”

  Her head snapped toward him. “We can’t just step over ‘em.”

  “We can,” he said. “Or you can walk around them if you like. They ain’t movin’.”

  She flinched like he’d slapped her, but she didn’t argue. He saw her throat bob as she swallowed hard, saw the way her gaze skittered off the nearest body, refusing to land.

  He wished, for a moment, that he’d kept the thought to himself. Saying it out loud made it sound cold. He didn’t care that it did, only that his words disturbed Lily.

  Something glimmered at the edge of his sight, a ghost-shape like the letters he’d seen in the dark under the store. [Inventory], his mind supplied without him asking. The word had been there on that strange list, along with Strength and Dexterity and the rest.

  He frowned, testing the shape of the thought. [Inventory]

  There was a feeling then, behind his eyes. A hollow space opening, like a cellar. It wasn’t a place he could see with his eyes, but he could feel it: a here that was not here, big enough to hold… something… anything.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Store first.”

  The general store’s front was in better shape than he’d feared. The big glass panes had cracked in spiderweb patterns but not all the way through; soot streaked them, turning the inside murky. The door hung crooked, one hinge torn half-free. The bell above it was gone.

  Inside, the air was thick with the sour smell of smoke and the sharper stink of spilled vinegar.

  Shelves had toppled in places, dumping their goods. A sack of sugar had burst, white crystals melting into gray paste where the heat had reached. Jars of pickled something had shattered, glass teeth scattered, their contents oozing and already attracting flies.

  The boy’s eyes went to what was whole, not what was lost. It was a habit by now.

  “Watch for nails and glass,” he told Lily as he picked his way over a fallen crate. “Don’t cut your feet.”

  “I won’t,” she muttered, but she stepped where he stepped, close behind.

  On the back wall, the row of tin cans that had once looked like treasure to him—neat and shining, all lined up—was a ragged mess. Half had fallen; others were dented, labels scorched half-off. But metal didn’t burn easy. He snatched up the first can his hand found. The paper clinging to it was too blackened to read. It had weight and the faint slosh of thick liquid inside.

  Food. Hopefully.

  He turned it in his hand. The strange hollow at the back of his mind stirred again, almost expectant.

  He thought about that space and the can at the same time, the way he’d once thought about a crack in the floor and a coin he wanted to see disappear into it. [Inventory], he thought, more sharply.

  The can went out of his hand.

  One moment its rough, soot-gritty surface was under his fingers. The next, his hand closed on empty air. The weight vanished so cleanly his arm jerked a little with the sudden lack.

  He froze, fingers twitching.

  “Lily,” he said. “Did you see—”

  “It just—” Her eyes were huge. “It went away.”

  He had the sense of it, though. The can wasn’t gone. It was there, in that cool other-space, as clear in his head as if it sat on a shelf he could reach into if he wanted. He thought of it coming back, picturing it in his hand again. His fingers tingled.

  The can dropped into his palm, just like that.

  He almost dropped it for real, more from shock than weight.

  Lily let out a little squeak.

  “Do it again,” she said.

  He did. In, out. Gone, here. The motion never changed, only his mind did. Each time he reached for that not-place, he felt the edges of it a little more. There was room there; not forever-room, not bottomless, but space enough he could feel something like walls far off.

  “Let me try,” Lily said, bouncing a little despite the ash and ruin around them.

  He handed her the can. She clutched it with both hands, tongue caught in the corner of her mouth.

  “Inventory,” she whispered.

  Nothing happened.

  She frowned, nose wrinkling, then shut her eyes as if that might help.

  “Inventory,” she said again, firmer.

  The can flickered. For a heartbeat its weight seemed to pull her down, then it was gone. She gasped and opened her eyes wide.

  “It worked,” she breathed. “It’s… it’s someplace. I can feel it. It’s like when you hide under the bed and still hear me, ‘cause your ears are out but your body’s in.”

  Her fingers flexed in empty air. “Can you get it?”

  He reached for the space. The can was there, floating in his sense of things beside the one he’d put there himself. Except there weren’t two. There was just the one. He pulled.

  The tin appeared in his own hand, solid and real.

  Lily’s mouth fell open.

  “Hey!” she protested. “Gimme back!”

  “It’s the same place,” he said slowly, ignoring her glare. “Mine and yours. Just one. We both see it.”

  “That’s… weird,” she said. “How does that work?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t matter. Means if we get split, we can still share things.”

  Her face sobered at that word—split. She hugged herself with one arm, can pinned between elbow and ribs.

  “We won’t,” she said. “Right?”

  “What do you think?”

  They tested it with more items. The half-butchered hare that hung from his waist. A jar of pickled vegetables that had somehow survived without cracking. A wrapped package that smelled of smoked dried meat when he pressed his nose to it–probably bacon. A small sack of salt tied with string. A case of pemmican. Each one winked out of existence for the world and into that cool inner space when one of them thought the right way.

  After a while, the space began to feel tight. It was like packing too many things under their pallet; he could sense edges now, the sense of fullness pressing back, a muffled warning.

  He shoved another can in anyway. The space refused it. A new line of thought wrote itself in his head, in the same flat, clear tone as before.

  Inventory full

  He blinked. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “It’s sayin’ it’s full,” he said.

  Lily squinted as if trying to see what he saw. “When I tried to put that sack of flour in, it… pushed back at me.”

  He considered that. How did it work? What were the limits?

  “Your Strength was lower,” he murmured, remembering the pale lines in the dark. Strength: four for him. For Lily… he didn’t know. He hadn’t been able to look. But he remembered how small she was, how the System had called her magic something before anything else.

  “Maybe it’s tied to…” He groped for the right word. “…how much carrying it thinks we can do.”

  She tilted her head. “That’s stupid. It’s not real carryin’. It doesn’t sit on our backs.”

  “Maybe it don’t know that,” he said. “Or maybe it don’t care.”

  He pushed at the full feeling from his side, testing, and got only the same refusal. Inventory full. He tried handing Lily an item and having her push it in. It went easier for a moment and then jammed again. Full is full, whatever side you came from.

  “All right,” he said at last. “We take food first. Things that go bad first. Rest we carry like always.”

  He was good at choosing. It was a different sort of hunting. His hand went unerringly for what mattered: tins without bulges or holes, jars with unbroken seals, hardtack that hadn’t burned, a small crock of lard that had rolled under a shelf and escaped the worst of the heat. Pickled vegetables, cloudy but still sealed under wax. Three more cans of beans. A tin that might be peaches if the scorch mark on its label hadn’t lied.

  Into the Inventory they went until it refused any more. After that, he found a burlap sack that hadn’t been shredded and began filling it with what was left, choosing lighter things for Lily’s sake and heavier for his own. The sack bulged and sagged, stinking faintly of old potatoes.

  “We should get clothes too,” he said at one point, glancing at her thin dress, at his own ragged shirt. “Blankets if any.”

  “From the store?” she asked.

  “From anywhere,” he said.

  The first time he knelt by one of the bodies, Lily stayed where she was, hands fisted in her skirts, eyes wide. It was Old Werrin this time, lying half in his doorway, the bucket spilled, water long gone. His boots were still on his feet.

  The boy touched the old man’s ankle. It didn’t feel like a person’s ankle. It felt like wood under leather.

  He worked the boots off with sharp tugs. They were stiff, one heel worn down more than the other. Inside, they were damp and cold. He turned them upside down and shook out ash and something that might have been a dead beetle.

  “They’ll fit,” he said. His own feet were smaller, but stuffing rags in toes was better than going barefoot through briars.

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  “Brother,” Lily whispered. “That’s—”

  “Old Werrin don’t need boots now,” the boy said. “We do.”

  He pulled them on, ignoring the way the stiff leather bit at his ankles. The world under his soles suddenly felt thicker, less sharp.

  He stripped a wool coat from another man who’d died half in the street, bullet hole marking his chest. Lily turned away while he did it, shoulders shaking. When he held the coat out to her, she hesitated only a moment before jamming her arms into the sleeves.

  “It still smells like him,” she said in a small voice.

  “It’ll keep you from freezing,” he said.

  He watched her square her shoulders inside the coat, making it hers.

  Not everything was so heavy. In one burned-out house, under a fallen rafter that had spared a corner of the room, he saw a flicker of color. He stooped and dug it out from under a charred plank.

  It was a doll.

  Half her hair had singed away, leaving stiff black tufts. Her dress was scorched brown at the hem and one of her painted eyes was scratched, leaving a white scar across the blue, but she still had both arms and one small leather shoe.

  He turned her over in his hands. Some girl had slept with this thing. Some girl who might be under that rafter now or out in the street or—

  He cut that thought off.

  “Here,” he said.

  Lily’s face lit when she saw it, then crumpled.

  “She’s broken,” she said, taking the doll gently.

  “Fire does that,” he said.

  She stroked the doll’s scorched dress.

  “I’ll call her… Ember,” she decided after a moment. “’Cause she’s all black at the bottom.”

  “Fine name,” he said.

  She tucked the doll into the front of her new coat, only the singed head peeking out, and for a moment she looked more like any other little girl he’d seen in town, clinging to a toy, than like the girl who had hidden under a store while the world fell apart.

  By the time they reached the sheriff’s house, the sun was low, bleeding orange along the tops of the buildings. The sheriff had lived near the jail, in a squat house with a patched roof and a porch that had always been swept clean. Now the porch boards were smoking and one corner of the roof had peeled back like a broken fingernail.

  The door hung open. Inside, the air was cooler, dust heavy instead of smoke.

  The boy stepped in first. The front room held a small table with two mismatched chairs, one knocked over. A chipped basin sat by the door. On a nail hung the sheriff’s second-best coat, the one he wore to church. It had a tear near the elbow where someone had snagged it on a fence. No one had bothered to take it.

  “Brother,” Lily whispered. “Should we…”

  She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to. The sheriff had been kind in a way that stuck. That made this feel more like trespassing than any other house.

  “We should see if there’s food,” the boy said. “If there is, it’ll rot if we leave it. It might keep us alive if we don’t.”

  Framed like that, it became duty instead of theft. At least to him.

  They searched quickly. A loaf of bread gone half-stale. A heel of cheese with some mold he could cut off. A little jar of coffee. A tin of salt pork, unopened.

  In the back room, where the narrow bed sat against one wall and a small chest along the other, he paused. The bed was neatly made. The sheriff had not had time to come home and tear the covers back. There was a patch of clean floor where boots had stood and no boots sitting there.

  The sheriff wouldn’t be needing them either. A useless thought. They were gone with him, wherever he lay.

  The boy’s gaze snagged on a board under the bed. It didn’t sit quite flush, not the way the others did. A gap, thin as a knife’s edge, ran along its side.

  He knelt, shouldered the bed up just enough and slid his free hand along the board’s edge. His fingertips found the loose end. He levered it up.

  Dust puffed. Underneath, in a shallow hollow, rested a wooden box.

  It was nicer than anything else in the room. Dark wood, smoothed and oiled, with a brass latch. Some long-ago hand had carved a little design into the lid—a star.

  He lifted it out and set it on the bed. Lily hovered at his shoulder, doll clutched to her chest.

  “Do you think we should—”

  “I’m going to,” he said, and flipped the latch.

  Inside lay a gun.

  He’d seen pistols before. People wore them on their belts or their horse’s belts when they rode through, some heavy and ugly, some plain. This one was… pretty. That was the only word his mind offered.

  The grip was dark wood with a shine like river stones, worn where fingers had held it countless times. The metal above was blued with a little bit of scrollwork picked along its length. The long, octagon-shaped barrel caught the light dullly. The cylinder sat behind it, six-chambered. A Colt, he thought—it looked like the one a drover had once put on Cobb’s counter to be oiled, pride in every line of his face. People kept talking about it too.

  Beside it, nestled in cutouts in the wood, lay a small leather bag that sagged with the weight of what felt like lead shot; a tin of percussion caps; and a folded paper twist of powder, though there was surely more in the little horn-shaped flask tucked into the corner.

  There was also a paper on top of it all, folded twice, edges soft from being opened and refolded. Ink marks crawled across it in careful lines.

  The boy picked it up and stared at the marks. They meant as much to him as tracks in the sky. He could feel the shape of them wanting to be something—words, sense—but his mind slid off.

  “What’s it say?” Lily asked.

  He snorted softly. “You know I can’t read.”

  “It might be for us,” she said stubbornly. “Or about us.”

  “If it was for us, he’d have said with his mouth,” he said. He set the paper aside, careful not to tear it. Maybe someday he’d find someone who could tell him what it said. Maybe not.

  He wrapped his fingers around the revolver’s grip. It fit his hand as if it had been made for it. Heavy, but not too heavy. Solid. He’d never held a gun before but it felt right.

  He had watched men load guns like this. Powder first, in each chamber. Then a ball or a bullet, seated with the lever. Then caps on the nipples at the back, each one a tiny promise of fire. Black powder burned hot and fast. He’d seen it before. He knew enough to keep the muzzle away from Lily and his own feet.

  “Can you use it?” Lily asked, awe in her voice.

  “Reckon I can learn,” he said. “Can’t be too hard.”

  He slid the revolver into his waistband for now, snugging it so the weight sat right against his hip. The leather bag of bullets and tin of caps he tucked into the burlap sack, the powder horn next to them. The paper he folded and slid in too, in case it mattered later.

  “Thank you,” Lily whispered to the empty room.

  He didn’t know if she meant the food, or the gun, or the man who had left both behind.

  They left the house as the light thinned. The town looked smaller now, without people moving in it, like with no muscle underneath. Smoke drifted in low curtains. Somewhere, wood gave way with a drawn-out groan and then a crash.

  “We can’t stay,” he said.

  Lily had been staring at the place where the sheriff’s hat had once hung by the jail door, or maybe at nothing. She jerked as if he’d nudged her.

  “Where will we go?” she asked.

  He thought of the men who’d come through town with dust on their boots and stories on their tongues—drovers driving cattle from somewhere up north, merchants talking about cities with more people in a single street than this town had ever seen, railroad men arguing over tracks not yet laid.

  “North,” he said. “Folks come from there. Means there’s somethin’ to go to.”

  “Not south?” she asked. “Or east? That’s where the sun comes from.”

  “South is where the Comanche come from,” he said. “And east…”

  He had no idea what they’d find if they went east. “We go where they say there’s more of everythin’.”

  It wasn’t much of a plan. But it was better than nothing and, more importantly, it kept them moving forward.

  They made one last stop at the town well. Miraculously, the stone ring had survived. A few charred boards lay nearby where a fallen roof had missed. The boy hauled up the bucket, sniffed the water. It smelled like water. Cool and clean. The fire hadn’t reached down that far.

  They drank until their bellies sloshed, then filled two empty jugs he’d salvaged from behind the saloon and tied their necks with cord to hang from the ends of his carrying pole. The burlap sack full of salvage hung in the middle. He hefted the stick onto his shoulders. The weight bit in but did not crush him. The [Inventory] was full anyway and the road ahead was long.

  They walked out of town with the sun at their backs.

  He didn’t look back often. When he did, the town looked like a child’s toy left too close to a stove—warped, blackened at the edges, some pieces melted to nothing. The church bell was a humped shape in the dirt where it had fallen. No one rang it for them as they left.

  They walked until the burned smell thinned, replaced by the dry scent of grass and the faint, clean cold of evening air. Not far. Just enough that when they stopped and made camp in a dip between two low rises, the town was a smear on the horizon.

  A scraggly stand of mesquite gave them a bit of shelter from the wind. The land here had been grazed hard; there was more dust than grass, but there were fallen branches and dry twigs enough for a small fire.

  The boy dropped his load with a grunt, rolled his shoulders, feeling the ache dig in. He gathered an armful of dead twigs and a few thicker branches, stacking them in a loose cone.

  He had flint and steel in his pocket. He knelt, shaved a little curl of dry wood, added a twist of old grass from under a rock. The wind nosed at his fingers, cold and nosy.

  He struck steel and flint. Sparks spat and died. He tried again and again, jaw tightening. Once, a spark caught the grass and a tiny lick of orange rose. The wind leaned in and took it away, leaving only smoke and his own angry breath.

  “Hold still,” he muttered, hoping the fire would live this time.

  It didn’t. His fingers were starting to go numb. The flint slipped once, scraping his knuckles. He hissed and stuck bleeding skin in his mouth for a second, tasting iron.

  “Let me try,” Lily said.

  “You don’t know how,” he said around his fingers.

  “The System told me things,” she insisted. “When it was sayin’ the numbers. It said…”

  She screwed up her face, remembering. “It said I was a Witch.”

  He stared at her. “Witch?”

  He knew a bunch of stories: old hags in the woods, women with herbs and muttered curses, the preacher’s warnings about consorting with darkness.

  Her chin jutted.

  “I don’t feel like a witch,” she said. “I don’t have a crooked nose. But it said it. And when the fire almost started, it… showed me how.”

  “How?” he challenged. “You gonna blow at it better than the wind?”

  She lifted her hand instead and pointed at the little ruin of his tinder pile. Her fingers trembled a little. Ember’s scorched head peered from her coat front like an interested witness.

  “I don’t know,” she muttered. “I just… think of it comin’ out.”

  She frowned, concentrating. For a moment nothing happened. He was about to say as much when something bright flicked at her fingertip.

  It wasn’t like a match. It didn’t flare and die. It was more like a chunk of the sun had been pinched off and forced through a very small hole. A fiery spark jumped from her finger to the dry grass. The tinder glowed, then smoked, then caught with an eager, hungry rush.

  Flame crawled across the curls of wood, licking them up, then reached greedily for the stacked twigs. The wind gusted, but this time the fire had teeth. It bit down and held.

  Lily jerked her hand back, staring at her own skin as if it belonged to someone else.

  “It tingled,” she breathed. “Did you see? The System calls it [Spark].”

  He had seen. His heart thudded, fast and hard. Witch, the System had said. The word sat heavy in his head.

  “It worked,” he said. “That’s what matters. Guess we won’t have to worry much about starting fires.”

  She smiled then, small and proud and frightened all at once.

  “Don’t tell no preacher,” she said.

  “Preacher’s dead,” he reminded her, and then wished he’d bitten his tongue. Her smile wilted. She turned her face toward the fire instead.

  He dug into that cool inner space with his mind and pulled out a can of beans. This one’s label was only half burned; he thought he could make out the ghost of letters, maybe even a picture of a bean plant, but it meant little. He opened it with his knife, folding the lid back in jagged petals the way he had before.

  They heated the beans by the fire’s edge, the can propped on a flat rock. The smell rose, thick and familiar. His stomach clenched hard enough to hurt.

  “We should eat slow,” he said. “Make it last.”

  “We got more,” Lily said. “In the… the place.”

  “Still got more days ahead of us than cans,” he said. “Slow.”

  She nodded, chastened.

  They ate much as they had in their house, sharing the one spoon, counting without meaning to. She still got more. It felt like a law of the world now. When the can was scraped clean, they sat with their backs to a low rise, the fire crackling in front of them, the town a faint dark smudge behind.

  The sky overhead was clear. Stars were pricking their way through the blue, sharp as nail heads. The cold air bit them. He pulled the coat he’d taken from the dead man tighter around Lily’s shoulders and tucked the blanket from their house—rescued from the rubble and carried draped over the burlap sack—around both their legs.

  “Do you think there’ll be more of those… numbers?” Lily asked after a while, voice drowsy. “Like, if we do things it likes, will it… count different?”

  “Probably,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “Feels like someone’s writin’ on the inside of my head.”

  “Then we make it write good things,” he said. It sounded clever in his own ears. Maybe that was how you dealt with new rules—pretend you’d meant them.

  She yawned, jaw cracking. Ember lolled forward from her coat, nearly tumbling into the dirt before she caught the doll and set her safely in her lap.

  “North,” she murmured. “We’ll go north. Find a town away from Comanches….”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t say what the voice in the back of his mind whispered—that towns were made of the same stuff, wherever you went. Wood and greed and hunger. Fire liked all of that.

  He was reaching again, in his head, for the sense of the [Inventory], just to reassure himself that the food was real and still there, when the bushes behind them rustled.

  It wasn’t the soft hiss of grass in the wind or the swaying of the branches on the trees. It was a jerk, a quick, deliberate shaking, like someone shouldering through.

  The boy was on his feet before he finished thinking. The revolver was in his hand. Between the town and here, he’d found time enough to load four bullets in the chambers, hands working on the memory of old men’s fingers doing the same. He had caps on each nipple. Powder in each tube. The barrel was pointed at the dark before his mind caught up.

  Lily scrambled up too, blanket tangling her legs.

  “What is it?” she whispered, edging behind him. Her hand found the back of his shirt, gripping hard.

  He didn’t answer. His eyes strained into the shadows beyond the firelight’s reach. Most animals kept away from flame. Wolves watched from a distance, amber eyes catching sparks and then vanishing. Coyotes yipped and laughed far out. Whatever this was had come close enough to brush the mesquite.

  Leaves shivered again. A low, wet sort of growl burbled out, wrong in his ears.

  Then it stepped into the light.

  For a heartbeat his mind tried to make it a child. It was small, no taller than Lily’s shoulder. Thin limbs. Big head. But the proportions were off. Its arms went too long, fingers tipped with broken-looking claws. Its skin was the color of bruised mold, a gray-green slickness that caught the firelight foully. Its eyes were too big and too round, yellow with slit-black centers. Its nose was little more than two slits above a mouth full of sharp, crowded teeth.

  Its clothes—if they could be called that—were rags of leather and what might once have been canvas, patched together haphazardly. A knife hung from a strip at its waist, crude and jagged, more like a broken piece of metal someone had given up grinding.

  It hissed when the light hit it, lips peeling back. Its eyes flicked from the boy to Lily to the can beside the fire, as if weighing which to bite first.

  Lily made a strangled sound.

  “Demon,” she breathed, shrinking fully behind him now, her forehead pressing between his shoulder blades.

  He didn’t know what else to call it either. Preachers talked about devils and imps, things that slipped in when men left doors open. This thing fit those words better than anything he’d ever seen.

  The demon imp snapped its teeth together once, twice, like a man cracking knuckles. Then it lunged.

  It moved faster than he’d expected. The distance between them vanished in a blink. For an instant he saw his own reflection in its eyes.

  He didn’t think. He pointed the revolver’s barrel at the center of that hurtling shape and pulled the trigger.

  The Colt roared.

  The sound was a fist to the ears, a flat, deafening crack that banged off the low rises and came back smaller. Fire spat from the muzzle. The smell of black powder bloomed.

  The recoil slammed into his hand. His arm kicked up. His fingers went numb for a heartbeat.

  The thing jerked mid-lunge.

  The bullet hit its chest, just off-center. He saw the impact as a puff of darker wetness, a flower of black-red on gray-green skin. The demon’s mouth opened wider, but whatever screech it meant to give turned into a wet cough. It toppled sideways, momentum carrying it past him, claws scrabbling lines in the dirt as its legs kicked twice, three times, then slowed.

  It lay still, chest heaving shallowly. A thin, high whine leaked from its throat, dwindling. Its eyes rolled once, then fixed on nothing.

  Silence rushed back in behind the echo of the shot. His ears rang.

  He realized he was breathing hard, chest tight. Lily’s grip on his shirt had gone so fierce it almost tore cloth. He could feel her shaking.

  “Is it dead?” she whispered.

  He stared at the thing. The hole in its chest oozed slowly, dark stripes running along the curve of its ribs. Its fingers twitched once more, then flattened. No rise in its chest. No breath.

  “Yes,” he said.

  As he watched, something else happened.

  It was like the hare, a little. When he’d killed rabbits before, sometimes in certain cold mornings he’d seen the ghost of their heat in the air, steam rising. This was not that. This… shimmered.

  From the imp’s chest, from its open mouth, from its eyes, a faint haze rose. Neither smoke nor steam. Light, maybe, or the memory of it. Pale and colorless, like breath on a winter’s dawn, except it did not vanish. It hung there, trembling, as if unsure of where to go.

  His skin prickled. Something inside him stirred.

  [The Hollow]

  He could feel it, a yawning emptiness at the center of himself, hungry. The haze from the dead thing seemed to notice that empty place. It leaned toward him, almost politely, like a dog waiting to see if it was allowed to take the scrap on the ground.

  He should have backed away. This was the awful thing the System had told him about under Cobb’s store. This was consuming souls. That was preacher-talk for damnation.

  Instead he took one small step forward.

  The hunger inside wasn’t words. It was not even a voice. It was just a pull, like when you’d been walking in the sun all day and someone set a bucket of cold water in front of you. You could say no. You just had to mean it more than anything.

  He did not mean no more than anything.

  He was so tired. So small. The world had turned bigger than him in ways he couldn’t touch. Here was something the world seemed to be offering specifically to him.

  “What are you doing?” Lily whispered. Her voice sounded far away.

  He didn’t answer. He reached out—not with his hands, but with that hollow the System had marked. The haze slid toward him eagerly, slipping past skin like it wasn’t there, pouring into that space.

  It was cold. Then hot. Then both at once. It felt like drinking a mouthful of water only to find it was smoke that somehow filled muscles instead of lungs.

  Soul consumed!

  +1 Strength.

  +1 Dexterity.

  +1 Vitality.

  +1 Magic.

  Each word landed with a small thump inside. He felt them. Bones thickening, just a hair. Muscles tightening, a fraction of a fraction. The air on his skin sharper. The world a touch closer, clearer.

  His hand on the revolver’s grip steadied. The ache in his legs eased as if he’d rested, though he hadn’t. His heart still raced, but now it felt like it had just a little more room to beat in.

  The haze was gone. The demon imp’s body looked more empty now, in some way he couldn’t point at. Just meat and bone and ragged leather on the ground.

  Lily’s fingers dug into his side.

  “Brother,” she said, horrified. “What did you do?”

  He swallowed. His mouth tasted of iron and ashes and something new.

  “I ate it,” he said. “I ate its soul.”