Sadie had no idea how far Cortez marched her through the desert, tied to his horse. There were times the scorching sun made it difficult to see. He rarely stopped to let her have something to drink, he sure as hell didn't give her anything to eat. With time, she quickly found everything looking the same. She couldn't even tell if they were heading towards anything or away from anything, everything just looked wide, dry and flat, only interrupted by rocks and cacti. Her only indication of the passing of time came when the sun went down, and Cortez found somewhere to secure her while he made camp.

"So, you know where you're goin' or are we just walkin' around in circles?" Sadie asked him wearily as he finally let her have a drink. It had only been one day since Micah had handed her off to Cortez, and already her head was pounding, incredibly fuzzy and her lips were cracked and dry. Between the beating, the lack of food and only getting minimal water, she was starting to wonder if this was the plan all along, if they were just going to walk her around in the desert until she finally dropped. All things considered it was a pretty rotten way to go, particularly if Cortez planned to give her enough water to prolong the experience. She had seen condors out over the desert that almost seemed to be following her, and she was starting to think they knew something she didn't.

"Oh, you're going somewhere alright." He chuckled as he heated himself up some beans on the campfire. "Good thing you invested in good walking boots. There's still a long way to go."

"Mind tellin' me where?" Sadie asked him. Cortez just laughed.

"I just need to meet up with some friends and we'll be right on track." He told her. Sadie started looking around the camp for a way to free herself. She knew her odds weren't good. Alone, beaten, half-starved, suffering heatstroke and unarmed against Cortez was likely not going to end well, but if he met up with his friends, if there was more than one Del Lobo, she could kiss any hopes of getting away goodbye. The ropes were far too tight for her to work loose with her hands, which were already weary and barely functioning. He was being careful to keep his weapons away from her. Hell, he had even tossed the lid of his tin of beans far enough away that she wouldn't be able to get to it. Cortez could clearly see her looking around and eventually just grabbed some more rope.

"Alright, legs together." He told her. Sadie pulled away from him at first, even threw out a fruitless kick or too. Eventually though, he managed to grab them and pin them down. "We can do this two ways lady. I can tie your legs, or I can break both your ankles and drag you the rest of the way there. It's up to you!"

Sadie knew that if he tied her legs as well, she was going to be completely immobilised until morning. She was thinking of trying to get away once Cortez went to sleep, but completely bound there'd be no way she could get out. Once he met up with his friends, there was no way she'd be getting away on the trail. She'd have to hope wherever she ended up being taken there was an opportunity to escape. However, if he carried out his threat, if he broke her ankles, then she could kiss any hopes of getting away goodbye. He'd either do as he said he would and drag her there, in which case she'd probably be dead long before they got there, or he'd figure it was too much trouble and leave her there, where she'd be stranded miles from anywhere and unable to even walk. She finally just nodded to indicate she was going to let him bind her legs. Cortez got a sick little smirk on his face as he tied her ankles tightly, ensuring there was no opportunity for her to just kick the ropes off. Her time as a bounty hunter had taught her a fair bit about binding prisoners. A big mistake some made was to simply tie rope around both ankles in a big loop. She'd made that same mistake with one of her early bounties, and learned the hard way that it was possible with enough movement for the prisoner to slip their feet out of the loop and free their legs. The trick was to bring the rope between the legs as well so that each ankle was bound, that way there was no slack. Unfortunately, it looked like Cortez knew this. Given how quickly he tied her, she was sure he'd had quite a bit of practice.

"Now, I suggest you get some sleep." He told her, slapping her gently on the cheek. "We've still got a long way to go."

Thanks to exhaustion, it wasn't too difficult for Sadie to go to sleep. She was wakened the next morning as Cortez kicked her legs.

"Get up!" He told her as he untied her feet.

"Water." She croaked as she tried to clear her vision. Cortez grabbed her, yanking her to her feet, but she collapsed down again. Sadie could hear him cocking the gun behind her head. "Shootin' me ain't exactly gonna make me go any faster now is it? I need somethin' to drink!"

Cortez put his gun away, before presenting a canteen to her. Sadie quickly took a long drink from it, until he snatched it away.

"OK, that's enough!" He snapped. "Now, on your feet or I drag you!"

She struggled to her feet, her legs a little wobbly under her weight, but managing to get up. Cortez mounted his horse, and flicked the reins, at which they continued their journey.

The second day was every bit as bad as the first, the sun beating down relentlessly. Her feet and legs ached and struggled to hold her, but Cortez dragged her at an unforgiving rate. Wherever he was meant to be, it was like he was late.

She heard him calling out and looked up. It looked like he had run into the friends he was meant to meet up with, but to Sadie's surprise it wasn't just them. She could see that they had about half a dozen other people with them, tied to the horses in kind of a human caravan. The Del Lobos had a reputation in these parts, where travellers would simply disappear. Occasionally bodies would be found in the desert, after the sun and the local wildlife had seen to them. Many thought they were set loose and just got lost. Others that the Del Lobos took them out into the desert to kill them and leave them. After all, what was the point in trying to dispose of the bodies when they lived in one of the largest deserts in the state where a body could lie for years without anyone finding it? But seeing all these people, men and women, all dressed like they were travelling from the cities, she now had more questions.

"Good hunting, I see!" Cortez commented.

"Couple of stages." The other Del Lobo told him. "There were more but…you know how these things go."

"Oh, I know alright." Cortez laughed. "But still, the ones that survive should be good workers."

Workers? Workers in what? Sadie thought it was odd that they were talking about workers, looking around and seeing all the unfortunate travellers. She didn't get much chance to dwell on the mystery though as they all spurred on their horses, beginning to drag all the travellers with them.

The travellers were warned to keep quiet, threatened with unspeakable acts if they tried to plot an escape or run away. Quite where anyone thought they would run to was anyone's guess. They talked in whispers, hoping not to anger their captors. Given the way they talked, Sadie learned there had been more of them when their journey began. She didn't say much, instead trying to figure out where they were taking them and why.

For two more days they were dragged through the desert. A couple more of the prisoners fell, succumbing to the desert. True to form, the gang didn't bother disposing of them. They were happy enough to just cut them loose from the caravan and leave them behind. One or two of them weren't even dead when they left, simply being unable to go on any further and left to their inevitable fate.

They finally got to the first man-made structure Sadie had seen since the fort as they were brought to a giant wooden building in the middle of nowhere. She could see rail tracks from it, leading into a tunnel. There were rail tracks in New Austin, but the rail network at the time was still being built up. These tracks looked like they'd been there for some time, and they were much too narrow for a train…that was when it hit her. A mine! The Del Lobos had taken them to a mine!

"Welcome to Gaptooth Breach." Cortez told them, lighting himself up a cigarette. "This right here, this is where you live and work now. You work hard, you get fed. You don't, well…things get nasty."

The other laughed as he said this. Sadie started to look around, seeing a whole host of gang members there, far more than there should be for an abandoned mine. There were also other people there, working the mine. She now understood, this was why the authorities didn't find the victims of the Del Lobo's raids. They were brought here, to this place and forced to work.

"Tumbleweed is about two day's walk that way." Cortez told them, pointing away from the mine. "If, somehow, you don't get shot and the critters don't get you, the desert will."

He just signalled to the others.

"Get them in chains and feed 'em, they look like they're ready to drop." Cortez instructed one of them. "We can put 'em to work tomorrow."

In turn, they were all dragged to one of the buildings, which had been set up as kind of a blacksmith's shop. Sadie was brought before him first, forced onto the floor, while he looked for a set of leg irons that would fit her. She was held fast as one of them took rivets, hammering them into place, sealing the shackles around her ankles. They were heavy, and the chain was only about two feet, severely hobbling her. Even in the unlikely event someone did manage to break away from the group, they weren't going to be going anywhere particularly fast. It was then that he finally cut the ropes, releasing her hands for the first time in three days. There wasn't much point in having mine workers who couldn't use their hands she guessed. The chains had been riveted on instead of locked, which indicated that they had no intention of releasing their prisoners.

She was roughly bundled at gunpoint into the largest of the buildings. At one point it had probably been some kind of storage facility, but now it looked like what could only be described as slave pens. The new arrivals were far too exhausted to put to work straight away, and so they were bundled in there, locked into pens for the night.

The next day, they were put to work. While most just got on with the work, terrified of what would happen to them if they didn't, Sadie was trying to figure out what was going on, and more importantly, trying to determine if there was a way to get the hell out of there. Cortez had done everything he could to hammer home the hopelessness of escape in the prisoners, making sure they knew exactly how far away they were from the nearest town where they could get help, how many people were watching them and suchlike. To some, it sounded like he was making sure they understood, but to her, she was wondering if it wasn't to keep people prisoner by taking away their hope. The chains and the locks and the armed guards were an effective prison, but there was no more effective prison than people who no longer even tried to escape.

The guards kept good vantage point with longer range weapons in order to ensure they only needed a few. After they arrived, Sadie kept careful eye on the guards for what was possibly a couple of weeks and realised with the exception of when arrivals were brought in, there were only about a dozen guards at any time in the mine. The Del Lobos had a lot of robberies on the trails and so they didn't want to expend too many resources keeping the mine workers in line.

It was perhaps a month into her time in Gaptooth Breach that she finally learned what they were mining for. Through all the dirt and the rocks they pulled out on a daily basis, she finally found some gold. Well, it was glorifying it to call it gold, it was some tiny little grains barely any larger than breadcrumbs. She learned from one of the other prisoners that at one time Gaptooth Breach had been a gold mine, but the company that owned it had simply abandoned it when it ran dry. When it was no longer financially viable to pay people to work the mine, they simply walked away because it was cheaper to just abandon the mine and set up somewhere new than it was to close it properly. Of course, the Del Lobos weren't paying any of their workers, so pulling the odd pound or two from the mine wasn't as much of a problem.

The prisoners were worked hard, from dawn until dusk, every day. They were barely fed and watered. Most of them only lasted a matter of weeks, simply dropping on the job. Pretty quickly Sadie lost track of time. She had no idea how long she'd been their prisoner, with one day blurring into the next. They were wakened at dawn, forced into the mine to dig or sift through the rock and dirt and put back into the pens each evening. The monotony of it all, the routine, the sheer sameness and lack of any real passage of time was almost enough to break anyone, and it was only her time spent looking around for means of escape that kept her from succumbing to the same hopelessness she saw all around her. Very quickly they stopped even imagining the possibility of getting out.

Sadie spent her time watching, checking where the guards went, where they liked to station themselves, how they were armed. She had no weapons to just rush in, so she needed to figure out how best to approach the situation. She could almost hear Charles' voice in her head telling her that maybe if she'd thought about the fort, she wouldn't have been here in the first place. Her rush to get to Micah had led to disaster. As she sat in the slave pen, trying to gather her thoughts on the movements and recon of the mine she found herself comforted by the fact they hadn't taken the eagle-feather trinket she had been given so long ago. She'd rushed in without figuring out the risks, she'd been just like Dutch. Now, she was being forced to try and out-think her enemies rather than outgun them.

More time went by, and Sadie as one of the few prisoners that lasted more than a few weeks had been given a variety of tasks based on where workers were needed. She was once able to see the equipment shed, and was startled to find hundreds of pounds of dynamite. She knew that they had dynamite, occasionally they would blast a section of the mine to speed things along, but she had no idea how much there really was. She also listened in on conversations and tried to figure out what the guards talked about. Most of them spoke Spanish, a language that she hadn't really learned in any real capacity but after months of hearing the same words over and over again, she was finding that she was starting to make connections, figure out what some of what they said meant. She feigned ignorance, but continued to listen, slowly but surely figuring out who their captors were, all in the hopes of finding some weaknesses.

Weeks, months…she wasn't sure how long passed, before she was ready to make her move. She'd managed to secret a piece of metal, part of an old barrel from the mine into the pen, which she ground down on the floor during her few hours of rest time each night into an edge. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. She just needed to get her opportunity, and it came one night in the form of Julio.

Julio was a huge guard, fat, and his stench was almost as bad as the buckets the prisoners were given for their waste. She'd started to figure out from observation he had the unfortunate combination of a huge appetite, a taste for tequila so strong it was little better than moonshine, and by observation a stomach that was fit for neither. Any time he was on duty, he would come into one of the pens to use one of the buckets on his routine inspection of the slaves.

Sadie could hear him grumbling as he came into the pens for his inspection. It was the last stop on his patrol of the grounds that she was a little impressed he'd even managed to make it around given his girth and how much trouble he seemed to have walking. He was holding his stomach and groaning away, but he was almost through the pens.

"Come on you fat son of a bitch." She muttered, clutching a blanket around herself and waiting, hoping this wasn't one of the few times he would wait until he got back to the guard quarters. She had never been so glad to hear vile, thunderous flatulence in all her life as he clutched his stomach. He ended up unlocking the door to the pen and coming in. She waited until he sat down, his body relaxing as he expressed his gratitude to God before she made her move.

She threw her blanket in his face, blinding him before he could get to his gun. She grabbed the blanket behind his head, pulling it taught to stop him pulling it off. He struggled, but months of pushing mining carts and swinging a pick axe had increased her strength dramatically. She grabbed her shiv and drove it straight into his throat, silencing him before he could cry out. She drove it in hard, holding him as he struggled in his death throes, before finally falling still and silent.

Sadie balked as she took his revolver and his gun belt from the floor, bringing her uncomfortably close to the bucket. It was bad enough at the best of times but with him on it, she wasn't sure Hell could come up with anything that would affect her after that. His belt was so large she ended up wearing it as a bandolier and she took his revolver and his keys.

She tipped Julio off the bucket onto the floor and covered him over with the blanket. Hopefully anyone coming by would only give the pens a cursory glance and realise that it wasn't one of the prisoners. Most of them didn't care enough to learn who the prisoners were since most would be dead in a matter of weeks. She slipped out of the pen.

"I'll be back." She promised as she closed up the door. She wanted to release the prisoners, but right now the only thing in her favour was the fact no one knew anything was happening. It was easier to move quietly by herself than with a couple of dozen prisoners that were likely to run for their lives the second they got the chance.

Her leg irons made it difficult to move, but she only needed to make it from the pen to the equipment shed. She looked up to the cliffs over the mine and saw the guards there, waiting until they moved off, before she made her move. She got to the equipment shed, hearing someone inside. She got an idea in her head and strode into the shed. He went for his repeater, but Sadie instead pointed her revolver at the dynamite.

"I wouldn't do that!" She told him. "You go for that repeater; I pull this trigger and we both go up!"

Sadie could see him looking at her in alarm. This was exactly the reaction she was looking for. Her time with the Van Der Linde Gang had taught her a lot, even Bill had been quite informative about some surprising things. He had handled explosives in the military and was usually the one they consulted when a job needed to use dynamite. Dynamite had actually been invented as a way to safely handle nitro glycerine. The guy that made it had done so because his brother had blown himself to hell with nitro glycerine in an experiment. As such, most people were ignorant of the fact that dynamite for the most part was safe to handle unless it was ignited with a fuse or blasting cap. She'd gambled on this asshole not knowing that, and it seemed that was the case. He did nothing as she strode towards him, pistol whipping him to the floor, before smashing the piston into his skull repeatedly.

"I never thought I'd say this, but thank you Bill." She panted as she finished beating the man to death. She took his repeater, checking it was loaded and getting some more bullets.

"Alright, two down, ten to go." She said, gearing herself up for a fight. She bundled up some dynamite, putting some fuses into it.

She took a deep breath as she moved her feet as far apart as she could, cocking the hammer on the revolver.

"OK, here goes." She replied, before taking careful aim and firing.

The moment the chain snapped; she knew everyone in the area would have hear the shot. Gunshots travelled for miles out here, especially at night when there weren't many other noises to drown them out. She knew she had to move quickly. She lit the fuse in the dynamite and ran out the equipment shed, throwing it at the entrance to the building the guards used to rest in. She didn't know how many of them got caught in the blast, but even if it was only one it was a hell of a lot better than the odds she had before.

Her hands were shaky, and her vision was not the best thanks to her mistreatment. She took cover and waited for her opportunities to fire back. She could hear the Del Lobos moving around and yelling to each other as they tried to get to her. The battle took a long time, far longer than she'd have been comfortable with, and she quickly rattled through all her repeater rounds, losing most of them trying to get the two guards on the cliff. She could only assume and hope she got them because they stopped firing back.

She was now down to the revolver and the few rounds she had left. She didn't know how many she'd got, was it five? Was it six? It didn't matter though, when she heard a gun cocking behind her. She looked around to see one of the Del Lobos standing behind her.

"You killed my friends!" He declared.

"You know, a lot of people could say that to me." Sadie replied.

"You think you're funny?" He demanded. "I'm going to peg you out for the fucking crows! I'm gonna…"

She didn't get to hear the rest of that thought. The man fell to the ground with a pick lodged in his back. One of the other slaves had ignored Sadie and come out of the pen. He brought it down a few more times, hacking the man to bits, likely payback for a long time being mistreated at his hands.

"Thanks." She said, nodding and patting the man on the shoulder. "That looks like the last of them."

"You sure?" He asked.

"Well, no one else is shootin' at us, so either they're dead or run off to find more of their boys to come and get us." Sadie told him. "I reckon its best we ain't here when they get back."

"No arguments here." He replied. "So, how do we get out of here?"

"Well, apparently Tumbleweed is two day's walk that way." Sadie told him. "So, I say we break the chains, grab as much water as we can carry and start walkin'."

"You want us to walk?" He asked her. "But the desert…"

"It's either that or wait here until Cortez and his boys get here!" She reminded him. "Now you can stay here if you want or you can help me free as many people who want to take a chance as possible."

The man just nodded in agreement.

"Good." She told him, gesturing to him to separate his legs, shooting the chain. "There, now let's help the others."

Two days later, Sheriff Freeman was in his office, 'hosting' another Del Lobo prisoner. He had been working him over hard for a couple of hours, leaving him a battered, bloody mess. He took a break to light up a cigarette when one of his deputies came in.

"Sheriff, I think you're gonna want to see this!" He told him. Freeman grabbed his repeater and walked outside, just in time to see some very dishevelled looking people walking into town. They had the remains of leg irons on their ankles, and looked tired, weary and covered in dust.

"Alright, someone get these people somethin' to eat, most of 'em haven't eaten in a couple of days." Sadie declared. "I'd have gone huntin' but…had to save what few bullets I had."

"Mrs Adler?" Sheriff Freeman asked, looking to her in shock. She was barely recognisable under the muck and grimy clothes. She just looked to him and nodded.

"Yeah, it's a long story." She told him.

"I'll say…everyone heard you were dead." He said rather flatly.

"Not for lack of tryin'." She responded weakly. "The fort was…"

"Six months ago." Freeman interrupted him. Sadie just looked stunned. She'd lost track of time in the mines; she knew they'd been there for a long time but…

"Six months?" She asked. He just nodded.

"Someone get the doctor! I want these people examined right now!" Freeman demanded. "For God's sake get them fed and watered. Mrs Adler, once you've rested up, come to my office tomorrow. I want to hear just what the hell happened."