"No," Hoss said firmly.

"This isn't up for discussion," Ben said.

"I know," Hoss said. "Because we ain't gonna discuss it at all. Joe and I ain't leavin' you, and we sure ain't leaving Adam when he's gone missing someplace—"

"I found him," Ben said, the softness of his tone glaring in comparison to the firmness of his middle son's. He swallowed reflexively and tilted his head, wondering if the detail had been wrong to disclose.

Adam had told him not to disclose anything he knew—the first straightforward advice his first-born had given since Ben had arrived in this place. Was finding him included in the list of things Ben was banned from discussing? Even if it was, Ben could not say that he regretted sharing the detail as Hoss and Joe looked at him in unison. Their cautious relief was palpable, as was their slight skepticism.

Evaluating the room, Hoss lifted his hands, drawing attention to the emptiness of the room. "Then where is he?" he asked.

Not where, Ben thought as he failed to answer the question.

"How come he ain't here?" Hoss pressed.

Not how, Ben thought, knowing that the answers to questions perceived by the midwife as obvious were decidedly off limits. He wondered if Adam had once felt the way that he currently did, stifled by a seemingly arbitrary decree he could neither disclose nor explain. Throat tightening, Ben suddenly felt as though he was choking on everything he could not say as he failed to properly articulate what he could.

Get out, he desperately thought. Take your guns and each other and get the hell away from here. He cleared his throat to combat its tightness; he had to keep a tight reign on his desperation. If either of his sons caught wind of it, if he was anything other than sure, then they would never leave.

"What have those men done to him?" Eyes narrowing, Hoss shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and assessed his father dubiously. "What have they done to you?"

Not what, Ben dismissed the question with a firm shake of his head. He was not sure which had ignited his anger: his inability to answer the second half of his son's question or the fact that it had been dared asked at all. He figured he would accept it either way. "I told you to go," he said gruffly. "That should be enough for you."

"Why?" Joe asked. Spoken so weakly, sounding so painfully hoarse, the question was stilling and stifling.

Not why, Ben thought as he struggled to summon enough strength to do what needed to be done. He would find a way to do what Adam could not—he would find a way to do everything his oldest son had failed to.

"I am your father," he said, his voice quiet but dangerously deep. "If I tell you to do something then you do it." Looking at Hoss, he lifted a finger of authority. "You take the guns and your brother, and you get the hell out of here. Don't you dare stop or look back until you've reached home."

It was as brazen of a warning as he would give. He couldn't say more. In his heart, he knew he should have said less. Eyes still swollen from the attack he had endured, Joe may not have been able to fully discern his father's anxiety, but Hoss had. Brow furrowing, he looked at Ben, his blue eyes shining with a hint of his original fear, conflict, and questions that would remain forever unasked.

Please go, Ben thought. Please…please just… go. It wasn't what he taught them; he knew that. He had never instructed his sons to run away from a fight or abandon family when challenging circumstances seemed intent on forcing them apart.

Leaving would not come easily to Hoss or Joe. Still, he prayed they would listen, in the very same way he imagined Adam had once prayed he would do the same. Ben knew questions that could be perceived as obvious were forbidden in this place, but he could not help wondering what Adam had felt or thought back then. Ben had made a vow to the elders to keep their secrets and that's what had bound him to this place. But he did not yet know if Adam had made the same vow. Or if his had been different. He did not know what had led his oldest son to this town, or the promises he had made once he was there. But he knew, one way or another, he was going to find out, and he had to do everything he could to keep his other two sons from learning the truth.

Hoss and Joe were not to know the truth; they were not to stay. Adam had said that if they left they would be allowed to live; if they remained they would die. There had been a finality in the way his son had uttered the words, a seriousness Ben could neither share nor ignore.

"I want you to leave," Ben said. "I want you to place your trust in me and do as I ask you to."

"And who are you placing your trust in?" Hoss asked.

"Adam," Ben said.

The simple explanation was not a lot. In fact, in comparison to what he could have or should have said it was practically nothing. As he watched his middle son chew on his bottom lip and consider it, Ben was almost certain it would not be enough. He felt locked in place beneath Hoss's assessing stare, his son's palpable concern and skepticism enough to invite an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. The air in the room suddenly seemed too thick, too wet to be drawn into his lungs.

He simply could not say more than he already had, and he knew what he had said was far from enough. If he and his sons never saw each other again, this moment couldn't sustain them. Questions would always remain, an ever-growing list of inquiries that could never be posed in a way in which an answer would be provided. There were so many things that would never be properly explained, but at least he would have Adam, and Hoss and Joe would have each other. If they had to be separated, then there were much worse circumstances to endure. He longed for his sons to understand that. To hold on to that which was obvious rather than all that was not.

Hoss looked at Joe and nodded. "We're goin'," he said, as though he had understood his father's silent plea.

"But Adam—" Joe tried one final time.

"Pa found Adam." Hoss looked at Ben. "Pa trusts him and I trust Pa, so we're goin'."

Overcome with relief, Ben did not trust that he could hamper or suppress his overpowering emotions. He pressed his lips firmly together and nodded, this silent act of approval serving as his parting action as he left the room. He simply did not trust himself to provide anything further, lest he say too much and encourage Hoss to change his mind. It hurt to walk away from them, however, to leave so much left unsaid and his sons and himself with so little to hold onto. Moving through the doorway, he was transported into the narrow thoroughfare and the agony of parting with his younger sons was quickly chased away by concern for his oldest.

The sun was shining bright above, its brutal rays beating down, enclosing the abandoned town in vicious heat. Adam stood alone in the center of the constricting pathway. His shirt was torn open, leaving the deep, linear slashes lining his chest on full display. Beginning somewhere beneath the collar of his shirt, they wrapped around his body, ending somewhere beneath the material covering his back. Red and angry, the edges of skin surrounding the gashes were puckered and raw. Blood seeped from the lacerations, trickling down to cling to matted chest hair, streaking across skin that was deathly pale.

Too pale, Ben thought fearfully. Adam's skin was too pale. His chest had been cut open, his hands and mouth were dripping with blood.

"Who did this to you?" Ben asked breathlessly.

Adam's eyes were wide, glowing with a fear father had not realized son could experience in his inhibited state. Looking down, he absently appraised his injuries as though they didn't belong to him. "You see," he said flatly, looking at his father again. "Now you know."

"Know what?"

Ben took a step forward, then an impulsive step back. He was too disturbed to know what to do. It was a frustrating realization, a horrible thing to admit. He had always been so sure, so certain of what needed to be done—especially when it came to his sons—but looking at Adam he wanted to scream that his son was wrong. He saw, but he didn't know.

"Did she do this to you?" he asked. He thought of the cut on his own chin and how the Midwife had smeared his blood on her fingertips and then licked them clean. She had said Adam had been tasked with bringing her blood. Not for a single second had Ben considered that the blood she had been offered was Adam's own. "Oh, Christ, is this what she's been doing to you this whole time?"

"She needs blood. She can't live without it, and those men can't live without her, and I knew that you couldn't live without Little Joe, so I gave her what was needed. It wasn't an easy choice, I-I hesitated to make the promise, but after I did, I knew it was right."

"Oh, son," Ben whispered. "What about any of this is right?"

Adam licked his sullied lips. "It could have been," he said quietly, tears filling his haunted and hollow eyes. "Now it's all going to go to waste. You don't know it now, but you failed, too. You may have convinced Hoss and Joe to leave. But you didn't make them promise not to come back."

Lower lip trembling, tears spilled from his eyes. He did not try to stifle them; he did not wipe their evidence off his face. He let them come. Ben wondered how long his son had been holding the emotion in, why this was the moment it was finally allowed to come out. And, suddenly, he thought that, perhaps, despite everything else, watching his oldest son begin to cry was the most troubling thing of all. He would never have expected to be allowed to witness such a thing. He would not have predicted that it was possible for this version of his son to cry.

"We're not supposed to ask questions here," Adam continued, his voice cracking with strain, "because it's against the rules, but I have to ask some of you. Why didn't you make them promise? How could you ignore the things I said? What do you think is going to happen now? Don't you understand? I did what I did to save Joe, and now he's going to die anyway. And Hoss is going to die. And you're going to die. And I'll be stuck here, bleeding for all eternity, knowing that my vow should have meant something and now it means nothing at all because you still couldn't just… listen!"

"Then I'll go back," Ben said, eager to provide what comfort he could. The only thing more bothersome than the things Adam was saying was the depth of his distress. He had been so inhibited and cold, so calm and calculated for so long. Ben did not want to consider how truly desperate the situation was if his son was losing control over himself now. If his range of emotion had been transformed from a strange combination of indifferent and parlous to another display that was equally as uncharacteristic. "I'll fix it, Adam. I'll talk to them again. I'll make your brothers promise."

Turning around, he intended to walk back through the doorway, but it was gone, the dusty pathway had taken its place. He looked among the surrounding buildings and found all the doorways were gone. The sides of the structures were seamlessly built, as though the doors had never existed in the first place. Long uncut pieces of lumber lined the spaces where Ben recalled them to be, their wood worn and weathered by the passing of time.

There was no way to go back. Nowhere else to go as he stood rooted in place by the terror which accompanied recollection of what was quite possibly the only true thing the elders had said. The only thing of substance in a place where nothing matters is what leads a man to it and the promises he makes once he is there. Ben did not know what had led his oldest son to this place, but, like Adam, he was deadly certain of what would lead his other two back to it. If a promise bound a man here, then a different vow would keep them away. It could have worked that way for Hoss and Joe, and now it wouldn't.

Ben knew he had failed—failed to listen, to see, to know. He knew what Adam had known from the very moment they first laid eyes upon each other in this place. Ben had tried to threaten him, opening his mouth, and uttering the stern beginning of a sentence which would never be finished: Lord help you if you don't open your mouth and start…

"Lord help me anyway," Adam had said, a statement his father could not have understood at the time.

Looking at his oldest son, seeing the lacerations upon his chest, watching his previous demeanor, somehow so maddeningly apathetic and threatening at the same time, vanish in an instant as he crumbled, Ben thought he finally understood.

"I found malice, Pa," Adam once simply provided. "And if you don't get out of this town, you're gonna find it, too." This in conjunction with his quiet, direct requests that his family leave the town were the only real warnings he was allowed to give. Ben knew that it should have been enough for him to listen and take note, to understand the underlying seriousness of what had really happened, and what was still to come. He should have listened to Adam in that moment; he should have seen what was painfully obvious to him now.

Standing in the street, despair overwhelming him, Ben knew what Adam had known from the beginning: there was no winning a fight that had already been lost. He should have listened; he should have seen. Adam was right, he hadn't trusted him; he hadn't placed his faith in his son. He had looked upon him as though he was impacted and confused. He had wasted his time asking the wrong questions and focusing on the wrong things. He had come to a place where nothing mattered believing the things he deemed important still did. He had arrived believing that this place was just another town whose power of authority had gotten things wrong and accused his son of someone else's crime. Now he knew it was he who had gotten things wrong because his questions and actions had been governed by a faith that held no significance—at least not in this place.

He generally had faith in the law, no matter its form. He believed that, regardless of dire circumstance, truth always won out in the end. He had come here, looked at his oldest and youngest sons, respectively, and held tight to that faith. His faith in them, his faith in Hoss and himself, his faith in the strange trio of men who seemed to possess authority in a place where he had been told nothing mattered. Was it specifically nothing that had not mattered or was it this faith? His vivacious belief that things would work out in the end because, somehow, someway they always did. If they were patient and had faith that the truth would come out eventually and that the law would recognize it when it did, then everything would be fine. Not so in a place like this. Here patience, faith, and law had deeply betrayed him—and worse: it had betrayed his sons.

The middle elder had told Ben he would leave the cave, he would see, and he would know, and when he understood he would be allowed to return to the path Adam had warned him to avoid. But he had also said something else, a statement that rose from Ben's memory to stifle all else.

"When faced with this truth, you must choose to trust us," the elder had said. "You must have faith that what is to happen next is the only thing that can be done."

The recollection was oddly bolstering, empowering despite current circumstances. Stifling his fear and despair, Ben refused to wonder what was going to happen next. He didn't have to because he already knew.

"I know I didn't listen to you," he said as he closed the gap between he and Adam. "But I want you to listen to me, right here, right now. Those men are not going to kill your brothers or me, and that woman is not going to keep you for eternity. I am going to find a way out of this, that is what is happening next."

And Ben knew that he would because it was the only thing that could be done.

TBC