Perry didn’t know what “stop them” meant, but he hadn’t even been issued with a weapon, and barely had control of his horse. He had no clue what kinds of weapons the Yuuks had, especially given the diversity of weapons within the posse.

  And there was, of course, the possibility that there would be a thresholder among them. There was a possibility that there was a thresholder in the posse, though Perry was starting to find that less likely. And there was a possibility that the train, if there was going to be a train, would be carrying the thresholder.

  The Yuuks were across the rail-split hill from the posse, and Perry was pretty sure that they’d been spotted. They were moving, kicking up dust, and the Yuuks were stationary, camped as far as anyone could tell. If they’d spotted the posse, they weren’t making any clear moves, or at least not mounting their horses.

  If Marchand were up and running, Perry would have been able to zoom in and see them clearly. He probably would have been able to land a shot on one of them, at least if he had a high-powered precision rifle — which he didn’t, because the one rifle he had in storage was amateur work created in Markat by technology from the Farfinder, not something carefully assembled by the United States military-industrial-complex. It was better than they probably had in the Dusklands, but not by that much.

  And of course Perry wouldn’t just shoot at people for sitting next to some railroad tracks, even if he thought they were planning a train robbery.

  The posse moved more slowly than they’d been moving before, which seemed unnecessary. Perry didn’t imagine that the engagement distance would be further than two hundred yards, and that was if they had their own rifles. There was a rock outcropping on their side of where the rail had cut through, which would provide some cover if it came to a shootout, but they’d be much closer at that point.

  “Just scare ‘em off,” said Wyatt, mostly to himself. “Really shoulda been the sheriff’s job, damn him.”

  The horses ambled along. It was a pleasant enough day, with a slight wind. No one had explained to Perry how weather worked in the Flux. The sky above was yellow and green, same as the day before, but now it was shot through with chartreuse, like veins in an eyeball. No one was commenting on it.

  “Don’t suppose anyone speaks Yuuk?” asked Wyatt when they were three hundred yards away.

  There were some general murmurs from the posse, mostly to the negative. Certainly no one knew enough to carry on a full conversation, but the Yuuks apparently took to learning Commish, so maybe it wasn’t a problem.

  Perry stayed silent. He’d be able to step in as translator, if need be, but the fluency he’d be able to speak with would be shocking, and raise a lot of questions, particularly since it didn’t match up with his backstory as a dandy scholar from the city who had never been out in the Flux before. He thought maybe he could figure out how to speak as though he had a poor grasp on the language, but that would take time, and wasn’t something he could just do on the spot.

  The Yuuks did eventually mount up. There were six of them, just like Queenie had said from miles away. The gap between them was as wide as a rail car, and it was maybe twenty feet down to the tracks. It wasn’t where Perry would have posted up, if he was interested in a train robbery, and if they were going to try to drop down onto a moving train… well, he didn’t like the odds of that actually working, but what did he know?

  Their leader wore a belt of bones and had his face painted, black in circles around the eyes and a horizontal stripe of red across his mouth. He was shirtless, but his skin wasn’t particularly dark, and he was just as imposingly muscled as the people telling stories in the saloon had promised. He was wearing slacks that seemed to be the same as those worn by the people of Grabler’s Gulch, and had a rifle unslung, held in one hand. He was barefoot and dusty.

  The rest of them were dressed a little less intimidatingly, though in clothes closer to what Perry would have expected, made of natural leathers. There were two women with them, though everyone was covered up pretty well. Their leader was the only one risking melanoma, it seemed. There were more rifles among them, all the same style.

  Their chief — or group leader — raised a hand with his fingers spread wide. “How-dee,” he said across the gap.

  “Howdy,” said Wyatt with a nod. “Now, what’re you folks doin’ here?”

  “Taking break,” the Yuuk replied. He gestured to the sky. “Day beautiful, air fresh, no train stink.”

  “Well, you folks should know yer right close to Grabler’s Gulch, that’s where we’re all from, more or less, an’ we’re ‘specting a train come through real soon.” Wyatt spat to the side. “So if you could mosey on along, that would be much appreciated.”

  The Yuuk watched Wyatt carefully, and when he was done watching, his eyes scanned the rest of the posse, sizing them up one by one.

  “We will stay,” he said.

  “No, now you can’t do that,” said Wyatt, shaking his head. “You know well as I that the Commission protects their rails, and if someone’s out here makin’ life differcult, you answer to us, but you’ll also answer to them, and I don’t think you’d like their questions too much.” He was using a different sort of voice, trying to project authority, and failing miserably.

  “What we done that make life differcult?” asked the Yuuk, emphasizing the last word, mimicking the way Wyatt had said it.

  “You know the train’s comin’,” said Wyatt. “Don’t pretend you don’t know that, you hear them buzzing across the rails, there’s no other reason you’d be out here, and you know it. Now let’s just — let’s just all be civilized people, why don’t we, and we can both go back where we came from?”

  Perry wasn’t sure how much longer this all would have gone on, but Queenie turned to look down the tracks, and pretty soon, everyone else did too.

  A train was coming.

  Queenie was the first to act. She dismounted her horse and stepped to the edge of the gap between sides, looking down to see how much of a drop it was, then turned to face the train.

  “Fire!” shouted Wyatt, with no warning, and he was, himself, shot shortly afterward, a plume of blood from his shoulder that twisted him around and caused him to fall from his saddle.

  Perry pulled the sword from the shelf space and abandoned the horse, hopping off it, getting behind one of the large rocks. There was a lot of gunfire, but the rifles didn’t seem to hold more than a single shot. Two of the members of their posse had simply left when the gunfire started, or maybe even just before, and they were receding away. The guy with the cat tail was one of them, his tail all puffed up.

  When the gunfire stopped not too long after that, Perry was sitting with his back to the rock, listening to his dying horse, heart beating rapidly in his chest. He had his sword drawn and ready to go, and when he looked to the side, he saw Wyatt groaning on the ground, clutching his shoulder — the one made of flesh and bone.

  “Hold fire! Miwpa, Posya, reload!” called the Yuuk, in their own language. He was crisp and clear, not halting at all. “Shoot them unless they run!” He switched to Commish. “Run now, be safe! Leave us!”

  The train was getting closer. It didn’t quite buzz, but it wasn’t doing the chugga-chugga thing either. Perry could just barely see it down the tracks. There was no plume of smoke rising from it, and it was quite some distance away.

  “We should cross over, finish them,” said one of the other Yuuks, a woman.

  “The goal is the train, the harmonizer,” said their leader. “Get Poti back to the camp, we’ll take care of this.”

  This must have been handled via signals, because Perry heard movements, a grunt of pain, and then the sound of at least one horse retreating.

  During this whole time, it wasn’t clear where Queenie had gotten off to. Cecil was laying on the ground, breathing heavily but unhit, and Wyatt was bleeding, groaning in pain and trying to sit himself up, as inadvisable as that seemed. The posse hadn’t just been defeated, it had been shattered.

  The train was getting closer, the loud droning sound growing in volume. The Yuuks were planning to jump down onto it, which felt insane to Perry. How many feet down would they have to drop? How fast would the train be going? It seemed to him like you’d have to be extremely skilled or extremely lucky to not just fall down and land on the tracks, which in this case meant hitting the side wall of the carved-through area and falling down next to the rail, if not on it.

  But they were doing it, and that meant that he was going to do it too, though he had second sphere and a sword that would let him fly.

  “The girl is down there,” said the leader of the Yuuks.

  “She’s going to get hit,” said the same woman who suggested crossing over. Perry couldn’t see them, but he thought he could recognize the voices. “She’s just standing there, waiting for it? How did she get down there?”

  Queenie was planning her own heist. The idea came into Perry’s mind and it wouldn’t leave, which meant that was going to be what he assumed going forward. How she was going to do that while standing directly on the tracks was unclear, but she’d readily admitted to being a bandit of some kind, or bandit adjacent, and there were all kinds of powers, whether she was the enemy thresholder or not.

  “Ready yourself,” said their leader. “Posya, the horses, Miwya, cross and loot the bodies.”

  Perry timed it more to the approaching sound of the train than to anything else. He turned himself around, crouched down, listening closely, then when the train came, he made his move, launching himself over the edge.

  He had seen the train stretched out in all its glory as soon as his head popped up. It was at least twenty cars all told, with a main engine that was sleek and brass, and a tank of something behind it. The others varied in height and make, and Perry landed on the second-to-last of them, rolling slightly and then finding his footing. The whole thing was far slower than he’d imagined it would be, maybe twenty miles an hour, slow enough that he could have just followed it with the sword.

  When Perry got to his feet, he looked down the length of the train and saw, as predicted, that he wasn’t alone. Two of the Yuuks, their leader and the woman, were ten cars away from him, in the middle of the train. Beyond them, Queenie was standing at the front of the train with her red scarf whipping in the wind. The scarf was now at least twenty feet long, and as Perry watched, it wrapped itself around her with no clear effort on her part.

  The Yuuk leader raised his rifle at Perry, but they were two hundred yards away from each other, on a moving platform, and he thought better of taking the shot.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  Perry ran forward, leaping over the first gap between cars. There was wind from the movement of the train, but it wasn’t enough to slow him down. The roof of the car was covered in dust, but his boots had just enough traction to keep him moving.

  The Yuuks slid down between a gap in the train cars, leaving Queenie far down at the other end of the train. She watched Perry for a moment, then stepped forward and dropped down without so much as bracing herself, removing herself from view.

  Perry kept running forward. He had to assume that they were all going for the harmonizer, wherever in the train that would be carried. He had no idea what he was looking for, whether it would be small enough to carry or whether they’d have to stop the train. They were only three or four miles from Grabler’s Gulch, depending on how space had warped around them, which meant the train would be stopping soon, and that put a time limit on any kind of heist. Half an hour? More?

  When he was at the car just before where the Yuuks had climbed down, he let himself fall between the cars, landing on a small, swaying walkway. He was faced with wooden doors whose glass windows were rattling, and he took a breath, then opened it up.

  He was in a passenger car, and faces turned to look at him. There were maybe twenty people, including one group that was clearly a family, and one man without a face at all, not even a mouth, who Perry elected to ignore.

  “Has anyone been through here?” Perry asked. He was holding his sword, unsheathed, which was a bit of a threat.

  “No sir,” said a man in a black bowler hat and a mustache that hung down to cover his mouth. “You a lawman?”

  “Concerned citizen,” said Perry. He started making his way through the car, then stopped. “There’s a harmonizer on this train, is it forward or back?”

  “Not sure how we’d know that, sir,” said the man in the bowler hat.

  “It’s at the front of the train!” said one of the small children dressed in a neatly pleated skirt. “I saw it!”

  Her father gripped her by the shoulder, and Perry gave the girl a small salute, then made his way forward. He was worried that someone was going to stop him, but they didn’t. He went through the door, out into the walkway, and then through another door to the next car, which must have been the one that the Yuuks had gone through.

  This one was a luggage car, with trunks stacked up along the walls, along with some furniture from people who must have been moving. Perry moved cautiously, worried that someone would pop out with a knife, but there was no one, just the collected belongings of the train’s passengers. There was no sign of the Yuuks, or Queenie, or anyone else.

  The car after that had a heavy door, and there had at one point been a lock on it, but that had been eaten through by some unknown substance or technique, leaving behind metal that had melted and already cooled down, if it hadn’t been some kind of acid. Perry was ready for a fight, but there was only one man in the next car, and he was dead. He had a small office that faced outside the train, with a flap that could clearly raise up or down, letting people come up to him. All around were packages and pieces of mail, which was all relatively mundane, except that there were also all kinds of caged animals, most of them with wings. Perry would have guessed that they were carrier pigeons, but there were owls and ravens too, along with a number of bats hanging upside down in cages with curtains drawn over them. His mind was swimming with questions about all that, but there was a train robbery to stop.

  In the car after that, he found the harmonizer, and the Yuuks along with it. They had killed three men in the room, and there was a fourth that was gasping for breath and bleeding from a hole in his chest. The harmonizer was a pink sphere not more than a handbreadth across, slightly translucent and giving off its own light that was bathing the inside of the train car. It had been extracted from some kind of container that was bolted directly to the floor, and its locks had been sliced through by the same method that had been used to get through the door to the mail car.

  Before Perry could speak, the Yuuk leader raised a pistol and started firing at him. Perry lifted his sword to parry it, and caught two of the three bullets before the six-shooter was dry. The third caused a sharp pain in his right pectoral, and he glanced down to see that he’d been hit. Blood was soaking through his shirt, and he shifted the flow of energy through his meridians, putting more healing power there, draining the Wolf Vessel to stanch the bleeding.

  He went forward with the sword as the Yuuk pulled out a long knife. The woman had hold of the glowing sphere, and she was getting away with it.

  With his eyes on her, he almost missed the Yuuk grabbing a waterskin from his waist. He brought it to his lips, sucked in, then spat it at Perry.

  Perry raised his sword defensively, and the black liquid splattered against it. The Yuuk gave a wild-eyed smile, which fell slightly as nothing happened.

  They went at each other, and it wasn’t particularly close. Perry was just too fast, too strong, and probably could have caught the Yuuk’s knife between his fingers. Instead, Perry’s first strike was simply overpowering. His muscles were hard steel, his stance perfect, and his sword slipped cleanly between the Yuuk’s ribs, straight into his heart.

  The Yuuk backed away, holding his knife up defensively, staggering. He looked over at the woman, who was in the middle of leaving with the harmonizer, and she stared at him with wide eyes, then fled.

  Perry went after her. She was out the door, moving up the train, and he ran after, bashing through the door she’d tried to slam in his face.

  The next car was filled with coffins, all stacked on top of each other, labeled carefully on the corners, arranged so that they would be easy to take out or put in. The place smelled of death, flesh and formaldehyde, and Perry couldn’t fathom why they would be there, but he didn’t have time to worry about that, because the Yuuk woman was racing along the narrow walkway that separated the rows of coffins.

  She just barely managed to escape his grasp as she went out the back door, and rather than going to the next car, she vaulted over the swaying railing and off the train entirely.

  Perry followed her, sword out, and he landed gently on his feet as she was scrambling to get up.

  “Stop,” he said to her. She kept running, and he ran after her, much faster.

  “Stop!” he called to her, this time in her language. She turned back to look at him, maybe because of the volume, or the way he’d said it, more than the word, but it caused her to stumble. She fell against the sandy dirt and cried out. The pink sphere had been in her grip, but she let go of it, and Perry plucked it up from the ground.

  She was up on her feet with a knife in her hand in an instant.

  “Let go,” she said. She spoke English, or Commish as they called it here, at least a few words.

  “No,” Perry replied, holding it back.

  “I will kill you,” she said, knife held out. She was in a fighting stance, ready to move on him.

  She was hesitating though.

  The last car of the train had passed them, and there was no sign of Queenie or anyone else. Perry realized that his chance to catch up was now — he had the harmonizer, and if he let the train get out of sight, who knew how far away it might get. He let it pass though. With the sword, he could go almost as fast as it, and he didn’t want to face down Queenie, not at the moment.

  “My name is Perry,” he said, placing his hand on his chest and speaking as clearly as he could. “You’re under arrest.”

  She came at him with the knife, and he would have been well within his rights to kill her. Instead, he tossed his sword to the side and grabbed the wrist that held the knife, gripped it hard enough that she cried out in pain and dropped the knife, then pulled it behind her back and held her there with one arm. She reared back and tried to kick him in the groin, but Perry was too fast for that, and drew her arm higher, until she yelped and went still.

  “Do you understand ‘arrest’?” asked Perry.

  “Yes,” she replied. “They’ll kill me.”

  “Hmm,” said Perry. “Might be.” He opened the shelf space and looked into it. It was just out of her view, unless she turned around. He had rope in there, but it was further in, and he didn’t think he could grab it while holding her. He let the shelf space close. “I’m going to release your arm now, if you try to run away, I’m going to have to grab you again.”

  He released her, and she immediately ran.

  Perry sighed and went after her. He still had the harmonizer, but with the sword he was able to move at many times her speed, and he elected to fly up into the air and drop down from above, kicking up dust and snatching her wrist. He’d left the sword flying above them.

  “I don’t want to have to kill you,” he said.

  She struggled and he held her firm. He was many times stronger than her. It wasn’t a contest.

  “You want to sell me,” she said.

  “No,” said Perry. “I want answers and justice, in that order.” He hesitated. “Let me know if there’s a word you don’t know.”

  “I speak fine,” she replied.

  He could have switched to her language, whatever the Yuuks spoke, but he’d keep that in his back pocket until he needed it. It would raise all kinds of questions back in town, and while he probably could have spun a story, it was better not to do that.

  “We’re going to Grabler’s Gulch,” said Perry. “We’re going to walk there. You’re going to tell me everything you know.” Her eyes went to the harmonizer that was still in his hand. “And you’re going to give me that satchel,” he said.

  She used her free hand to take the satchel off her shoulder, and Perry put it around him. It was made of animal skin, though it was hard to say what. Cow, maybe. Perry placed the harmonizer into the satchel, but held onto the woman the whole time.

  “I need your name,” he said.

  “Anaksi,” she replied. She was watching his face, and he gave nothing away. He was pretty sure it wasn’t actually her name, because in her language it meant ‘no name’.

  “Anaksi, we’re going to walk along these tracks back to Grabler’s Gulch, then they’re going to deal with you,” said Perry. “Do you understand all that?”

  “I said I knew ‘arrest’,” she replied.

  “And while we walk, you’re going to give me answers,” said Perry.

  She glared at him. “To what questions?”

  “Let’s walk,” said Perry.

  They took their first steps down the railroad tracks together. His hand was still on her upper arm, not tight, but present. He could have let her walk on her own, there was no danger that she would actually escape, but he didn’t want to have to stop the escape attempts.

  “Let’s start with this,” said Perry. Small rocks crunched beneath his boots. “How did your people know a harmonizer was coming?”

  Anaksi was quiet for a while. “We did not know.”

  “You’re lying,” said Perry.

  Anaksi was silent for a time.

  “I just want the truth,” said Perry. “The town lost its sheriff and deputy, so I’m as much the law as anyone there.”

  “A woman came to us,” said Anaksi. “She told us.”

  “Hrm,” said Perry. “The woman who dropped down in front of the train?”

  “No,” said Anaksi. “She was Eeshkee.” The name translated to something like ‘of the people’, and when Perry tried to feel the meaning of the word, he felt like he would translate it back to Yuuksen.

  “I don’t know what that means,” said Perry.

  “Eeshkee,” said Anaksi. “Yuuksen.”

  “What’s the difference?” asked Perry. “You don’t call yourself the Yuuksen?” But as soon as he’d asked, he realized that he knew the answer to that, through the miracle of translation.

  “Yuuksen means enemy,” said Anaksi.

  “They call you your own word for enemy,” said Perry. “Wow.”

  “No,” said Anaksi. “They don’t know what it means. Long ago, someone from a tribe far from here, with a different tongue, was asked the name of his neighbors to the north. He said Yuuksen. They asked him the name of his neighbors to the west. He said Yuuksen. They would point out tribes, and say ‘these are Yuuksen?’ and he would say yes.”

  Perry wondered whether that was true. It wouldn’t be the first time two civilizations met and had a major translation error. The Yucatan Peninsula was named that because when conquistadors asked the Mayans for the region name, they had responded back with something like ‘listen to how these guys talk’, and that became the name of the whole region.

  He didn’t miss that it was the longest answer he’d gotten from her. Maybe she was warming to him, or maybe she just hated being called a Yuuk.

  “So a woman came and told you,” said Perry. “Is that usual?”

  “No,” replied Anaksi. “She might have been a trickster.”

  They kept walking. Perry had lost track of distances, but there was no one around them. They should have been closer to the town than anyone else, but it was possible he was misunderstanding how the Flux worked, because no one had given him that good of a model. He could have asked his captive, but he wasn’t sure she’d be able to explain it either.

  “I’ll try to make sure that there’s some clemency for you,” Perry said. “Some lenience, some charity.”

  “Why?” asked Anaksi.

  “You didn’t kill anyone,” said Perry.

  “You don’t know that,” said Anaksi.

  “I saw your knife,” said Perry. “It was clean, no blood. The man you were with, he did the killing.”

  “My husband,” said Anaksi.

  They walked for a while more. Perry wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He had almost said, ‘sorry’, just out of habit. He could have said that he didn’t know, which was true, but also somewhat beside the point. And he could have protested that he was only acting in self-defense, or that her husband was clearly a killer, but they were both aware of those things.

  Eventually enough time had passed that the conversation was in the past.

  “Your people,” said Perry. “Will they let the harmonizer stand? Or will they descend on the town?”

  Anaksi barked out a laugh. “Do you imagine that we’ll sit by?”

  Perry didn’t imagine that, no. Which was one reason he was taking her with him: she was a hostage.