Perry sat and listened to stories. He’d gone down to the general store and bought a pencil, a whittling knife to sharpen it with, and a blank leather-bound book, then began putting his scrip to work buying drinks for the people who filled the place. There was more than one saloon in the town, he’d confirmed that by walking around, but this was the biggest and the busiest. He embarked on the project by asking for biographies, hoping that he’d get the spoken and the unspoken facts about this world.

  Cecil “Dead Finger” Michael was originally from the city, a sewer rat, which from what he said literally did mean that he spent a significant amount of his childhood in an extensive sewer system. He’d been a prospector for a while, made money digging up something he called “honey gems”. He had a certain knack for that, but was now in Grabler’s Gulch looking for a wife. His finger wasn’t literally dead, but the nail of his forefinger was blackened, and he claimed to be able to dowse treasures with it.

  Andrew Weaver was a clothier, his family trade, and he had a wife and seven children, who were back at home while he drank beer after beer in the saloon. The train was late, which meant that he didn’t have the textiles he needed to do his work, and anyway the train was the lifeblood of Grabler’s Gulch, so there wasn’t much work for anyone while there was some kind of delay. Perry took most of this to be his excuse to drink all day.

  Eddie Barlow was one of what Perry had assumed were sex workers. When they spoke, she used the word “hospitality” a bit too much, and placed her hand on his arm. She’d been in “hospitality” her “whole life”, moving from place to place. She was hoping to settle down, apparently, and had come out to “the edge of the world” to do it, though everyone said there were far more wild places beyond the Gulch. Her parents had both died when she was little, and she’d been raised in a farm orphanage, tasked with wrangling pigs that were almost the same size as her, but she’d run away to pursue a better life. She joked that she was still wrangling hogs, and gave Perry a wink that made him uncomfortable.

  Most people were farmers, ranchers, and miners, though the height of prospecting at Grabler’s Gulch had apparently come and gone. The saloon filled as it started to get dark out, still no sign of the sun, and more people came in from their shops and fields and places of employment. Perry had a little table set up, and he got to practice both his handwriting and his pencil whittling, because he was a curiosity and many of them thought the prospect of being immortalized in a book was interesting. The beer helped. If he hadn’t been second sphere, he probably would have had to deal with his hand cramping up, but his fingers were deft, and the writing was coming out almost perfect, a fringe benefit of second sphere he hadn’t had cause to notice before.

  There were hints and portents in the stories that people told, mentions of diseases and blights that Perry had never heard of. There was a moon, but it was spoken of with a temporarily lowered voice, and always with a touch of furtive looks. There were monsters out in the Flux, canny ones and beastly ones, along with some that were indifferent until they were poked. They somehow weren’t the majority of what he heard about — people were more concerned with their cattle and their crops, or the idea of hitting it big with a mining claim.

  A rancher told Perry that one of his cattle had been rearranged the fortnight before: it had been found dead with its muscles and bones made into a sculpture, ribs spread to the heavens, guts filled with its own blood and coiled at the bottom. It was still living somehow, the heart beating as a centerpiece, until the rancher put it out of its misery. The culprit was an ‘ixy’ according to the rancher, an unfortunate sort of creature that made its home in the night.

  A blacksmith had a pinky that was ghostly green, see-through, a result of “an accident” at the forge, working “thickmetal” that had been brought in from the Flux. The blacksmith couldn’t move the ghost pinky, it stuck straight up, and the blacksmith inquired with Perry whether there might be some kind of cure in the city. Of course, Perry didn’t know, but he said he suspected that there wasn’t.

  The town veterinarian was originally from the city, and spent most of the time talking with Perry about the animals that were out in the wilderness, inviting Perry to see a taxidermy collection, or possibly make some sketches. He had all kinds of stories about animals, which he was borderline obsessive about, detailing a time he cut open a pig’s belly and found a clump of hair and teeth, or a living chicken with no head, or a duck that vomited its eggs from its mouth. All but the last seemed plausible, but vomiting up eggs was definitely supernatural. The eggs were smashed as a matter of course, and no one had risked eating them.

  Perry stayed in the saloon, listening to people, not talking too much, mostly making notes. It sometimes seemed as though no two people had the same story — they had come from all over, and their accents were different from each other. They had different things they thought were vital for him to know. He was eventually able to tease out some of the deeper history, things that had happened before Charlonion was settled, but everyone seemed fuzzy on the details, and there were only three of the twenty or so that claimed to have been from elsewhere. The term they used with great regularity was “beyond the veil”, and when pressed, they listed countries that Perry had never heard of. It wasn’t an alternate Earth then, not that he’d thought that was likely. He was cautious about asking too many questions, but it was a good starting point for later reading, if he could find a book. He felt certain that someone had to have an encyclopedia, since there were obviously printing presses, if not necessarily owned and operated in town.

  When nightfall came, a few people ducked out of the saloon, then came back in to report that it was a quarter moon. This was met with two claps from nearly everyone in the saloon, and a double stomp from those who had their hands full, which no one explained to Perry. He had clapped too, which he was only able to do in time because of his superior reflexes. He slipped outside to have a piss and saw that the yellow and green sky had completely cleared up, leaving only stars overhead, along with a white quarter-moon no larger than Earth’s. The stars weren’t in a cluster like the Milky Way, there were instead several thick parallel bands. Perry stared for a moment, trying to work out the cosmological implications of the stripes, and came up short.

  When he went back in, a woman was waiting at his table. She had a long red scarf on, bright and distinctive, along with a messy nest of red hair beneath a broad-brimmed hat. She must have just come in, because she removed the hat and set it down on the table, then shook out her hair and started combing it with a comb made of ivory. In contrast to the other women Perry had seen, she was wearing a pair of brown trousers and a button-up shirt, men’s clothing.

  He sat down across from her and saw her face. She was younger than he’d thought from behind, probably a few years younger than he was. One of her front teeth was chipped, a missing triangle, but her teeth were whiter and cleaner than anyone else’s except the angel’s. She was clearly pretty pale naturally, but sunburnt and tanned in different places, with a smattering of freckles.

  “You’re the chubbo who’s a writer?” she asked. She had an accent that reminded him of Australian, mostly in the upward inflection and the vowel shift. “They say you might buy a girlie a beer, if I told you suzzo.” He understood ‘suzzo’ only through translation: it meant “something” with a connotation of gossip.

  “I think I have enough,” said Perry. He’d filled quite a few pages, writing fast. “But I will buy you a drink, if you have a story you wanted to get off your chest.”

  “Fair enough, chubbo,” she replied with a smile. The word meant something like “buddy” or “pal”, mildly mocking. “Now, my parents died when I was five, and I fell in with a gang of children, little ones —”

  “Did you want me to get you that drink?” asked Perry.

  “I’m talkin’, ain’t I?” she asked, frowning at him.

  Perry signaled for Cleo to bring a beer. “Your name, before we start?”

  “Trigger Queen,” she said with a smile. “I’m a sharpshooter.”

  “Your parents gave you that name?” he asked.

  “Well they died when I was five chubbo, I’ve got no idea what they named me, do I?” she asked. “I’ve had all sorts of names, you pick them up when you move, and now it’s Trigger Queen, or just Queen if you like, or Queenie. Can I go on?”

  Perry nodded. She’d taken offense to the question.

  “So like I say, parents dead at five, I never knew what it was, don’t remember them at all? And then I was in gangs, fightin’ and stealin’ for scraps. When I was ten or thereabouts I turned to burglary, and that I had a skill for, which is how I got my first gun.” She took out a revolver that was at her hip, maybe by way of demonstration. It was long and silvered, highly polished, with an ivory grip. “Now that I had some real skill with, and half my time after was spent grabbin’ grusties to fling.” Grusties were bullets. “And time come I caught the eyes of someone, which led me into a particular line of work I can’t give suzzo about.”

  “Assassination?” asked Perry.

  She barked a laugh and watched his face. “Suzzo like that, chubbo.”

  “For a gang? An association? The Commission?” asked Perry. “Only you don’t strike me as a Commission type.” The Charlonion Commission was as close as the Dusklands had to a proper regional government, and from what he’d heard, most of the people in the saloon half suspected that he had been sent by them as a spy ahead of the harmonizer coming in. They had much more power in Charlonion, and controlled the trains and harmonizers, but their reach outside the city was strained.

  “I’m not a type that’s found much to love in any group,” replied Queenie. “Not the gangs, certainly not bean-bangers like the Commission.”

  “So you worked alone?” asked Perry.

  “Always alone,” said Queenie, nodding. “That’s the way to be. Suzzo is you walked in by your lonesome, is that because it’s how you like it?”

  “I had a horse,” said Perry. “You’re not really alone if you have a horse.” His mind went to Marchand, who was not a horse.

  “Well, I’ll take that as a yes,” said Queenie. “I’m the same, better alone.”

  “And how does that work, if you’re an assassin?” asked Perry. “Not much call for a lone assassin, you’d have to take orders from somewhere.”

  “I said suzzo like that, chubbo,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Plenty of things to take off dead men.”

  “That’s not assassination, that’s just robbery with murder thrown in,” said Perry. He was needling her a bit, which maybe wasn’t wise given that she still had her gun drawn. Firearm safety didn’t seem to be a major priority for her, and to the extent other people had noticed, they had only moved away slightly. No one had told her to put the gun back in its holster. It was, at least, pointed at the ceiling.

  “Nah, chubbo,” she said. “It’s more complicated. And there’s gotta be a reason for it, suzzo that people respect, otherwise they’ll turn on you.” She casually waved the revolver in a circle to indicate the saloon. “These people don’t mind me? I’ve done nothin’ to them. That’s the secret to movin’ among them.”

  He was a little on edge. It was the scarf more than anything, long and red, brightly colored like it had just been dyed yesterday, different from all her other clothes. There was also something about her, the way she’d sought him out, the casual violence, just a vibe that was twigging him. Half the people around looked like they could be thresholders, with little quirks and gizmos. He’d already been on guard, in that calm, catlike way of second sphere.

  He could retreat into the shelf space if he had to.

  She slipped her revolver back into its holster. “There’s suzzo about the frontier, isn’t there?” she asked. “This place’ll be different, once the harmo is here. Too many people already, yaskme.”

  “I think everyone has a size that feels right for them,” said Perry. “Smaller for you than others.”

  “At least the sheriff is dead,” she said with a laugh.

  “You weren’t a fan?” asked Perry.

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  “Consortin’ with a demon, can you believe that?” she asked. She clucked her tongue and leaned forward, then drank half her glass of beer in one go. “Always the same with the people in power, I’d bet every one of the Council are doin’ whatever they please, which is the way to live a life, yaskme, but the thing they please is bossin’ everyone else around.”

  “Half the food they grow out here gets put on a train back to Char,” said Perry. It was a talking point that Perry had heard from some of the farmers. The economics of the frontier town seemed to be that farmers sent produce and cattle back to the city, while the city sent finished goods ordered by catalog to the town. The train was supposed to run regularly, and there was a small train yard to handle switching out cars, but the town was suffering under whatever scheduling issue was happening.

  “And half that doesn’t make it,” said Queenie. “They’ve told you about the Yuuks?”

  Perry nodded. The Yuuksen were the indigenous peoples of the Dusklands, at least as far as he could tell. They were alternately reviled or seen with curiosity, depending on who he’d talked to, and they figured in stories only briefly, often violently. One of the men that Perry had spoken to was half Yuuksen on his father’s side, a “hayuuk”, though he didn’t speak the language, and aside from maybe some different facial features, Perry wouldn’t have been able to tell.

  “They hate the rails,” said Queenie. “And they hate the harmos more?” Again, there was that upward inflection on something that wasn’t a question. “So when a train carryin’ a harmo doesn’t show up … well, you know what I suspect, don’t you?”

  “Hrm,” said Perry. “I guess I do.”

  “We’re takin’ a pozzer out tomorrow, down the tracks, you should come,” she said, smiling at him, chip in her front tooth very prominent. “Train won’t be in, betcha, and you’d get suzzo for the book.”

  “Sure,” said Perry. “I’d need a horse though, and I don’t expect that I’d be much use.”

  “Oh, no one would even expect that, chubbo,” she said with a wink.

  ~~~~

  There were a few things that could mark a thresholder. A strange accent was one of them, an out of place weapon was another, strange magic that didn’t fit, technology that was clearly from another time and place. Ideology was one of the main ones, though that was difficult to uncover. It was something that Perry had given a lot of thought to, because as Xiyan had proven, a thresholder who could slip in and pretend to have been a part of the world all along had a serious advantage, especially for a first strike.

  The problem with the Dusklands was that “strange accent” and “weird abilities” and “out of place weapons” were all essentially the norm. Everyone had a strange accent, everyone came from somewhere else, and the posse that was gathered up had all kinds of strange weapons among them. There was a blunderbuss, an oversized crossbow, a spear decorated with all kinds of feathers, and a silvered rifle that was at least six feet long. Wyatt was with them, and he had a mechanical arm for fuck’s sake, which should have clearly marked him as a thresholder.

  The Dusklands were just like that though, a melange of cultures and people, weird to the core, far more than the Wild West had ever been.

  He was given a horse, which he had no clue how to actually ride. He watched what everyone else was doing and tried to mimic that, hefting himself up into the saddle with a foot in the stirrup. The horse sat beneath him, and seemed not to care particularly much about having someone on its back. Perry had far better muscle strength and body awareness than a normal man, and so didn’t have a terrible time of it, but it took some practice to get the right amount of tension in the reins, and he was thankful that the horse started following the others seemingly on its own.

  Of course, Perry had already claimed to have let a horse die out in the wilderness, and he was an “educated dandy”, so if he was a poor horseman, no one would call him on it.

  Queenie came up alongside him, controlling her horse in a way that he watched closely to get it to slow down.

  “I was thinkin’?” she said. “What’s that book goin’ to be about?”

  “I still don’t know,” said Perry. “The pioneer spirit, what life out in the Flux is like, the melting pot of cultures, that sort of thing.”

  “Melting pot,” she said with a smile. “Yeh’ve got poetry in yeh, eh?”

  “All kinds of people coming from all over,” said Perry. “There’s something nice about that. I think the chance to reinvent yourself, to become someone new, that would appeal to people in the city, though of course I’m mostly writing for myself.”

  “Don’t need to worry about sellin’ it then?” asked Queenie.

  “I do, some,” said Perry. “But if you spend your time worrying about other people, I’m not sure I like where you end up.”

  There were half a dozen of them, including Perry. A few he’d met at the saloon, but two he hadn’t. One of them was a dark-skinned man carrying the blunderbuss, heavily muscled and with a glass eye. The other was a small guy with a mustache that was wider than his head. He had a sword at his hip, along with a long cat’s tail that flicked back and forth. No one seemed to find either of these men unusual.

  They followed the train tracks, going the direction that Perry had come from, which was in the direction of Charlonion. The horses moved slowly, slower than Perry had thought they would, more a mosey than a canter.

  “Now,” said Wyatt, who was leading the posse, “We’re lookin’ fer signs of the Yuuksen first and foremost, and we’re doin’ the two mile rule, should be back a’fore nightfall that way.”

  Wyatt had no authority, he was just a busybody, but people seemed to listen to him all the same. The town had no representative of the law at the moment, not even a deputy who could step in, as the deputy had fled town when the sheriff was hanged.

  Perry wasn’t sure what they were hoping to find. It was, so far as he knew, the nature of the Flux that distances varied, which was why they were only going two miles down the track. It was possible that they would have to go twenty miles to get back to town, though no one liked to talk about exact distances too much, maybe because it was useless. In the best case scenario, they would see a fraction of the track and then come back, and in the worst case scenario seeing a fraction of the track would take them the whole day.

  The distance to Taryton, the next town down the line, varied, but in the worst case, it was something like four hundred miles, and maybe even more than that, given that no one really seemed to trust ‘worst case’. Maybe you could get lost out there forever, under the right circumstances. But if the Yuuksen wanted to set up a train robbery, they could do it at literally any point along the track. The only way this expedition was going to find them was if they set up right next to the town, and there was simply no reason for them to do that. It was also very likely that the Yuuksen didn’t have anything to do with the delay, and no designs on the train.

  They were about a mile into the trek before Perry realized that it was probably just security theater. They weren’t going out to find some proof of malfeasance, they weren’t expecting to see sabotaged tracks, the point was to come back and say they had checked so that everyone in town could feel a little less antsy about the late arrival of the train.

  “What are the Yuuksen like?” asked Perry when the motion of the horses caused him to drift near to Wyatt.

  “Oh, beastly people,” said Wyatt. He was chewing something, maybe tobacco, and spit a perfectly formed brown gob to the side. His mechanical arm was hanging down, temporarily non-functional — he needed to prime it to get it working for a bit, pumping a lever. “The men move like the wind and strike like vipers, tall, brutish, sun-blackened skin.”

  “No more than me,” said Michah, the man with the blunderbuss.

  “Aren’t you half?” asked Wyatt.

  “Nope,” replied Michah.

  “I thought you was,” said Wyatt. “Well, I guess the Flux takes all types.” He turned back to Perry. “And the women have a fire in them, and fire’s not such a bad thing, if it can be tamed. They say a man who takes a Yuuk wife has to tend to her constantly, and a brothel with a Yuuk in it, well, wouldn’t hardly ever need another woman, if you catch me.”

  “Sounds like rank bigotry to me,” said Perry. He kept his tone mild and face blank, but he felt a bit of anger rising.

  “Feh,” said Wyatt, spitting to the side again. He raised an eyebrow. “You asked.”

  “They’re not so different,” said Queenie. “Men aren’t too strong, you just see the strong ones out and about, they keep the runts and the sick ones back at their camp, plus they know the Flux better’n anyone in the Gulch. Women aren’t sluts or whores or wild, it’s just the ones you see come by here. The meek, the humble, they stay back at the camps too.”

  “Feh again,” said Wyatt. “You been to one of those camps?”

  “Yes sir,” said Queenie. “Two of ‘em, ‘fore I rolled into the Gulch. Decent place to hide out, and they won’t kick you out unless you steal from ‘em. Easy enough to bribe with ill-gotten gains.”

  “Not sure I believe you’re a criminal,” said Wyatt. “You’ve got too sweet a face for that.” He chuckled to himself, and Queenie chuckled too, in a way that Perry didn’t quite understand — he didn’t see the humor in it, and didn’t see how she would see the humor in it.

  “Most of ‘em speak passable Commish,” said Queenie to Perry. “They won’t steal from you, so all you need is to tell ‘em you mean no harm.”

  “They won’t steal, but they’ll disrupt a train?” asked Perry.

  “Different,” said Queenie. “Much different. Train’s a symbol to them, and a harmo is more than. They don’t like settlers on their land, and who’d blame ‘em, but there’s more of us than of them, and if they get rowdy, the Commission might step in. But suzzo like this? A train with a harmo on it?”

  “They might attack, if they knew it was coming,” said Perry. “And given a Yuuk can just stroll into town and take a seat at the saloon without anyone stopping him, it wouldn’t be hard to spy.”

  “Yuuks wouldn’t do that,” said Wyatt.

  “They might come in to trade and hear,” said Queenie. “Chubbo’s got a point.”

  “Bah,” said Wyatt. He used his heels to urge his horse on, mostly to bring the conversation to a close.

  Perry had expected bigotry. Normally he wouldn’t have called it out, given that he was pretending to be from their world, but he was fresh off Markat, and it felt like he had the leeway to push back against it, maybe because Wyatt clearly didn’t have a lot of respect from the others. It was good that it hadn’t evolved into a real discussion, because Perry wouldn’t even know where to begin with trying to talk someone into believing that people were mostly just people. Of course, it was also possible that one day he would come to a world where that just wasn’t the case, and there were elements of Markat that he’d raised an eyebrow at, ways in which their notions of equality had seemed, perhaps, not rooted in truth.

  The saloon was mostly busty women in frilly skirts entertaining men, and it was clear that it wasn’t a place that respectable women went. Queenie was the one exception, and she’d been allowed to come with the posse too, with no complaints or even acknowledgement that she was a woman. Perry didn’t know what to make of that, whether it was something in her manner, the way she dressed, or just an element of their culture he didn’t understand.

  They were near to the two mile mark, at least as Wyatt was accounting it, when the terrain started going uphill. It was a fairly steep grade, but the tracks carved through the hill. There wasn’t enough room on the sides for them to go along, and they didn’t want to take the tracks themselves for fear of the train they were so worried about coming along, so they went up the side.

  “This hill wasn’t here when I came by,” said Perry.

  “Wouldn’t be, would it?” asked Wyatt. “That’s the Flux.”

  “The tracks are carved through though,” said Perry. “It just, uh, generates like this?”

  “‘Generates’?” asked Wyatt with a laugh. “Just how it is.”

  “I mean,” said Perry. “The rail line connects Grabler’s Gulch to Taryton, and that’s a constant, it’s not going to change, right?”

  “With ya so far,” said Wyatt.

  “It’s just … the exact path changes,” said Perry. “The terrain changes. If we went counting the number of railroad ties, we’d get different answers, but a train can go from Grabler’s Gulch to Taryton, and there’s all this evidence of work that … no one did?”

  “Too much city livin’,” said Wyatt with a cluck of his tongue that caused his horse to flick an ear.

  “I just want to know how it works,” said Perry.

  “The rail’s a fact of the world,” said Cecil. He was hunched over on his horse, looking haggard. “I helped build a bit of it, northeast of here. And once it’s set, it’s set, nothing’s going to change it.” He had good diction, for a supposed sewer rat. “You’re right, new rail ties that were never there before, that’s something the Flux does, it carves paths through hills, sometimes puts in some tunnels, bridges over rivers, all that sort of thing. Though some of that we have to build up.”

  “Bridges are expensive choke points,” said Perry. “The Yuuk don’t target them?”

  “Burn a bridge down, the bridge’ll reappear,” said Cecil. He let out a burp that sent him upright in his saddle. He looked a bit better than he had. “Rip up a rail tie, it’ll be back by nightfall. I don’t know how it works, but they run a current through the rail when they’re building it, something like the harmonizer, but it keeps on working. The Yuuksen might want to tear it out, and they’ve tried, but it’s a fact of life once it’s down. A fact of the Flux.”

  Perry pondered that. The harmonizer that was supposed to be on the way seemed like it intended to make Grabler’s Gulch a “fact of the Flux” in some way, to staple the town down, except the town didn’t really seem to shift that much, and its population was apparently part of what kept it stable. In fact, he hadn’t actually seen any terrain move around, though it was definitely different from what it had been before when he’d been flying over the tracks.

  “Yuuks,” said Queenie.

  It took Perry a moment to find them, which made him the second. They were on the other side, some ways down the track, barely perceptible, with horses of their own. They were another two miles away, maybe even more.

  “Where?” asked Wyatt.

  Queenie pointed them out, and after a while, everyone agreed that they could, in fact, see Yuuks.

  “Well … lick my shit, I guess,” said Wyatt. “Weren’t expectin’ that.” He squinted. “How many we got, my eyes itch.”

  “Six,” said Queenie without hesitation. “They’ve got horses too, but they’re set up there. Probably have been for a while.”

  “Nothin’ for it but to have a chat,” said Wyatt. He let go of the reins to pump his mechanical arm, which began moving again as soon as he was finished. “Let ‘em know we won’t hold with … Yuuk business.”

  “If they’re waiting around here, they’re probably waiting for the same reason we are,” said Perry. “They want the train.”

  Wyatt sucked his teeth. “Then I suppose we must go and stop them.”