Stars, Hide your Fires

by BlueWay

Norea Du Noc lives, and the Fifth follows. Escaping to Earth from Asticassia amidst a meteor shower they find themselves in a mythical heartland of a world left behind by Capital, Ad Stella 122. Stars, Hide your Fires, traces their fortunes, their fate, and their destiny as they wander through the American West like the settlers before them, generations ago.

4. III

III

---

Winter '23 -

The old coot speaks nonsense -

A dead woman -

On the path to something that may be -

Two riders -

Freezing to death -

Huddled together in another man's hay -

Glow Rollings -

Baile Frydin -

Pleading with the Hacendado -

The return of property -

Cowboy hospitality -

Sharing another woman's bed -

Truth came with the morning -

Fortaleza Blanca -

A trial -

Jerusalem and Tiberius -

Sleeping among American horses -

Quien con lobos anda, a aullar se enseña -

Spring '23 -

Breaking horses -

Breaking himself -

A doctor's prejudice -

A place to be -

A star falls out of sight -

---

Honest Hearts

In the winter of 123, snow pelted Texas where Norea du Noc and the young man remained in San Angelo and it had been indeed a cold winter that had been predicted about the weather service, and as talk of the Blood Meridian, of the loss of Space that had mattered greatly for some but not for most save for the wild dogs that had been cut from its chains and ran rampant but were quickly being dealt with by traitors to Capital and the Texas Rangers with the Duty Force. Towns and cities and homes and lives were destroyed in the fighting, but none ever came to San Angelo, and of these tragedies, in the long course of Ad Stella as consecrated by the founding of Side 1, the people of the Earth had long gotten used to it. But as the new year rose with pure white skies of cloud, and not on an anomaly that came from God knows what, the people of Earth had warmed to the idea that never again they would have to worry about the Benerit Group or the Space Assembly League or their proxy wars that made their homes battlefield for the sake of containment.

Throughout the world, a new day was rising, not for all, but many, and there had still be those who had straddled the line between living and surviving.

The young man and Norea Du Noc trudged along out of San Angelo to its north west where said by the cowboys and cowgirls on that region, there had been a ranch that maybe, just maybe, would bear better fruit than what could be had in town by those who had no IDs, no papers, and hidden truths about them written into their skin. The tent that which they had relied for half a year had broken and shattered in ice, leaving them with only their sleeping bags for those first few snowfalls, huddled by their fire which did wetted down, and then did die entirely. They had gone with the other vagrants like them in the border of San Angelo and bundled together around an metal trash can brought out from town and in it had been scraps of wood and scraps of trash that could bit lit on fire and so nearly twenty had huddled around the gnarly smelling flame and wrapped in their blankets and clothing and found warmth in each other's proximity. In these times the older of the vagrants who had been there around San Angelo for longer than most there had been alive subsisting week by week by the charity of others on the street told all the freshmen who had been new to rough living that around this time was when the Texas Rangers and the Duty Force came out for last recruitment and then no more in the spring, promising warm beds and warm food and shelter and pay and benefits, and in the cold that had seemed so pleasant that many of them did took, and after a while many of them returned back to their vagrancy.

"And that ole feller that keep coming by, he was one of us. He was 'ole Carson Dedman."

"Oh there he goes again about Carson this Carson that- well I fuckin' knew the guy too you coot it been only twenty years ago."

"Then you don't gotta listen to me now do ya? But oooh yeah I know his story: how he failed to make it in Cascadia as an actor and came out here because if he were to be homeless he rather be in a warm place. Yessiree I seen his one movie, he was an extra with a few lines and he ain't sell shit of the scene. But he been like us once and he was offered just the same and you know that son bitch done made it and he think he's so much better than us, coming down and offering us what he done get through as if we'll all end up like him."

"A man with a house and a family and a job? Yeah how terrible."

"And he's a god dang ole slave to History I'll tell ya. Texas Ranger, believing this and that about honor and moral right in this world while he goes on and carrying a gun, a gun!" The old coot had spit into the fire to the disdain of all else. "Texas Ranger more like god damn fairy god mother."

"What in Sam Hill are you talking about?"

"The Old West lies dead in the ground a million years, and our ancestors, oh our ancestors, the future that rose from it might not be what they wish for, but it's the future for a reason, and the more we invoke them old ones the more liable they be to come back up and show us what it was like before we were civilized."

With his poncho the young man wrapped him and Norea up in the same spread and they listened to the coot if only because it had been too cold to move otherwise away from the fire.

"Cycle of sin." The old coot said spread his hands so dirty they had been near black to the fire and he felt nothing at all. "Cycles and cycles and cycles of it and we've been so close to breaking it and yet here we are."

"That Blood Meridian done make you gone crazy."

"No. It be the world gone that way by what we go back to, and I don't care to help it." He spat one more time to the fire and his spit had been black and bloody. "Soon enough we're gonna see Injuns rolling over them yonder hills bringing hellfire. Mark my words."

Every homeless shelter had been full every night, and every church and every home had closed their doors if out of malice or out of necessity, it had been no difference to those caught out in that white landscape left to freeze over. Those not taken the slip to go with the authority forces of the area had done as they did years prior and toughed it out. The strong often walked further south, migrating like the birds that had been so unbothered by modern life to warmer pastures for wintering. The daring broke into old homes, siphoned gasoline and chopped wood like frontiersmen of old from trees that were thinning out in number further away from town to bring back and make fires that sometimes never were caught at all in their cold and wetness, and the weaker still died: frozen beneath bridges, dead in bus stops overnight when the cold crept up to them and never let them go. Their bodies had been taken by the city and simply cremate and deposited out to the winds, without ceremony, passing from life to death as most homeless had been: transient to the world that went on around them. One day, one had died in camp that the two wanderers had made. They found the woman in their tent amidst all their things when they had gone into town to look and beg and work for food and some money to no avail, and this woman no older than them and yet somehow even worse for wear had been curled up in that place that offered little protection more, and then she died there. Norea now knew how she had looked when she arrived back in their tent broken and battered, and she stared at the body, wrapped up in the coverall jumpsuit of a gas station defunct, and she became just a piece of nature.

This was not their first body. Far from it. The young man had often been unaffected by them after he had seen his own dead before: when one of the many of his kind had his body reject the implants violently in their quarters, and the Peil doctors had carted him out for all to see and they had been ghosts staring at their own who now knew what they would look like if they died whole.

They went around the body, gathering all their things except for the tent which had been falling apart already, but yet this poor woman had seen it a good enough place to die.

They left her and that cherry tree wordlessly, holding each other's hands as they made at once the decision to leave that place or else end up like her eventually and went on on distant prospects.

They walked on the road out of San Angelo in the direction of north west just as the cowboys said that their place had been, and as they walked on concrete roads and then dirt roads where every step they took had been cracking with the smooth sheen of the winter coating it. It had been cold, cold beyond all reckoning that they in their summer wear had not been prepared for, for cold was a temperature alien to the young man in this degree, and for Norea in her life thus far even the Fold had avoided the coldest of countries because by all reckoning the only thing worse than fascist Spacians had been when the world had gotten so cold that even machines froze dead in their tracks. With San Angelo behind them now they trudged with their own breaths beating back against their faces, what little they had on their backs with them; an EGF canteen frozen solid whose markings had been covered by tape to hide what it was too hanging from Norea's belt.

In that pure white landscape that burned at their eyes like the fire their bodies craved all they could do was look down and track the impressions of the wood through biting and icy snow glass as movement alone kept them unfrozen. They continued like that with no regard to time or distance save just for movement, for the cover of white clouds above had provided light from the sun but no hint or indication of where it sat. The young man did not look at his watch, stolen from a man who try to lay him and instead had been put senseless onto the floor, and instead went into the reality of all the world that for each and every action there had been equal and opposite reaction, and here Texas weather revealed that cold survived even when it had been so hot, and for the first time in those months the young man realized that he truly had been on Earth: Now in that era not Humanity's only planet, but it had been the one that mattered, and would always matter, as the common idea of Home, for no matter who had been born elsewhere to whatever circumstances, Earth was as absolute in the course of the Human condition as had been water, as had been air, as had been love. He, who had never a home to call his own realized that he had been home here, even if broadly, even if in an abstraction, and that what this cold was was not a personal attack on him but rather just a state of being agnostic to his existence, and therefore not a cruelty outright.

Down the road, a horse had appeared, a chestnut beast with two figures on top of it. They approached in a slow trot, the horse bound figures bundled up in clothes so deeply that they seem like cocoons upon saddles, the sunglasses or riding goggles of either the only source of flesh behind their wrappings as the horse comfortably road ahead. They did not stop as they passed the two, the rider and passenger both looking and then pivoting their forms to take them in as they passed, all four in that time and space staring back at each other in recognition as travelers often did passing on their journeys, without a word, and then away from each other as the horse went down the road they came and disappeared.

They went on. Trudging forward.

"Would you rather this, or the desert?" The young man asked Norea, arms tucked into his pits and half hunched as the stinging wind and snowflakes that began to fall started to come down. The movement of his lips felt good, for at least he felt them moving.

"Neither." Had been too angry at the amorphous shape of their situation than anything to want to harbor conversation.

"Come on, choose." He goaded.

Norea thought as they shuffled through ice and snow on that flat and featureless landscape that seemed now all too common in their life.

"I guess this is better." She muttered looking at her breathy clouds in front of her face become lower and lower gradually in volume. "It's easy to get warmer." They were both shivering but they did so now all the time and had put it away from their thoughts. "You put on more layers, bundle up, make a fire, but it's the other way around if you want a fight. The worst type of fighting is when you're cold." And she had been lucky either in vehicle of mobile suit that had been somewhat insulated. For as big as her weapons had been, the more precise work of groundwork had still been asked for, and the Fold still had its boots on the ground who had to stick it to EGF patrols or Benerit Group convoys waiting in snow, in mountains, far away from anything close to comfort. This, now, was reckoning for all that time cold in her metal when she could have been colder still.

They walked for hours a path that would've taken them far shorter to carry themselves over in more temperate weather, and it had been near dark and their entire bodies near rigid when they found the great arch that marked the territory of ownership, as it dimmed the dark lettering the arch that offered itself as a gate into the territory beyond had been unreadable. But beyond that had been the plains again, and even beneath that singular color the rolling soft curvature of the land had been beholden to these fences that gaped only at that gate and arch that had gone on left and right to the horizon, whose wire and wood had created a world within itself, not unlike that of the space colonies above and the many facilities, of whom many alive could say they had lived within those borders all their lives. They took a step past those gates, and they continued on.

The young man thought of her voice, her words, which he had just heard and in the last few months of living, and he had remembered somehow of the desert, and how her hard and harsh voice despite its higher sound had sounded so smooth, so lovely, when it spoke a language which she had not let more of out, and that had never come up again, and then he thought of the small talks they had of dinner, of the people they saw around town often who were like them and the trials they had and unfortunately they were all in a race for a place in the world that fed them well, as in Asticassia, as on Earth. He listened to it and the tone that she used to talk to him in the tent, and she spoke of stories on her range: in Europe and Asia where her cell of the Fold had been and how the stars were the same there as they had been in America, and that her accent, so neutral that it had been American somehow had started to turn and shift to that Western twang that they heard all around him, and that no doubt that his voice so prim and put together and charming had no doubt been going that way soon.

She for her part to distract herself from the cold thought of the nature of belonging, the nature of where she was, and if time at all would ever come where she could be considered a Texan and what the prerequisites of that had been at all if it was not alone by blood or by birth. For she was Earthian, and if there was any pride in her body that it had been that she was born on Earth in the opposition of Spacians, and during the battle in Asticassia just before she lost Sophie, she had wrought out in rage toward Earth House and wondered what any Earthians at all were doing in that "ideal" world, which had been disgusting to exist at all. Inside her she thought of this: that there had been a word for a realized fantasy, and that word had been nightmare.

She had shuffled along the snow well and if anything about the cold at least it had settled the pain of her midsection for a time. She had been a shorter woman, and she had wondered at all if because she had been on Earth, for as Olcott thought, he a Spacian turned over to the cause, that Gravity had a way of bringing people down. A few more inches would do her well, but she doubted that if she hadn't been done growing her injury might've stunted her more. She had no reference, no memory of parents to look up to to see where she might fall, whereas Sophie at least had known her mother, had seen and put memories to her before she was taken by a rocket casing from a mobile suit weapon being discarded in the middle of a fight and crushing her as she stood. This cold, this ice, the dark of the world approaching, had been truly a world without mothers.

They were cold, so cold, but they did not complain of it. They were going to be cold in San Angelo, withering away for now opportunities and no charity. At least here, going out this way, they had thought they could take this chance for no other existed.

As the cold dusk turned into a cold night, the temperature dropped further, and primal fear had taken them as they became like the animals that were now present around them, unseen but heard and smelled. They heard cattle near, so many that they were not accountable totally to those uninitiated, and they became just another element of the Earth like the wind or the snow, their senses so shot and worn down that the only thing they concentrated was the bubble of ambient light that they approached, step by step until the dark shapes of building approached, of no detail like the arch could be concerned, until they were upon them and one building and then they had been so cold wild and snow blind that they did not care and pawed around for a entrance to that shape, and they found it, unlocking the hatch and finding instead of snow they found rubber mats and wooden board and the wheat strands of hay littered. They were not Human then as they walked in frost on their faces and their fingers foreign to them beyond all recognition and their socks wet and iced over again beneath their boots, and in their minds who had been freezing in their skulls when they walked into that lit place and sought nothing but relief from the cold, for they could not go down any further even as a large manor lay a few hundred feet down that long road.

They went into that building leaning on each other, door shut behind them, and saw what they thought the heads of over a dozen horses mounted on the walls, myriad in color and size, and they thought them frozen too, but they were not as they stared at them with their black beady eyes from the stalls and breathed and silently nickered in one long row beset on either side with them. At the end of the row had been golden hay and a light above it, and they were so cold that if any place to fall and to bundle it had been there, and it was the night and they could shelter there and then emerge in the morning in the hopes of approaching the manor and finding a job.

They were not thinking straight as their snot and their spit froze on their faces, and they trudged through that row, unfeeling from when the horses with their long necks had reached out and nudged them with their noses. Moving through to the end they found the mountainous squares and piles of hay where at the bottom lay one half broken apart, and with the poncho cast off on the floor they both held each other for warmth and fell into it.

A boot had kicked in the door they came in, and then came a flurry of boot stomps as several hammers of firearms came to be cocked, and the two had still been too cold to react to it.

A great handful of men and women's shadows came over them, and with one sigh and the slide of metal back into leather came a swear. "Shit."

Ten minutes later they were gathered up separately and wrapped in thick wool blankets and stripped down almost entirely and brought into that manor that came whether they wanted to or not, big strong arms bundling them up like children and taking them into that place, and the next time they both had been lucid they had been curled and sitting in front of a great stone fireplace as in the corner of the room stood the unmistakable forms of the vaqueros, the buckaroos, caballero and cowboy all watching, all arms crossed amongst each other in quiet concern as of them one man had stepped to the fire and tended it still with a metal poke and turned his head to the two vagrants and said. "You two seem to have made habits of getting stuck out in the worst, ain't ya?"

The cowboy Lacey Cold hunched over in his flannel and jeans as if he had still been off the range in the Summer, cowboy boots still on as riding his hip, as did the hips of all his compatriots, were pistols of various make and model that all had their own sheen but none like the silver tone that had been his six shooter.

They were still shivering when the young man nodded.

"Eeyup." Cold acknowledged. He brought the poke out from their logs and placed it upon the lip of the grate as the young man and Norea dried within a great sitting room lined with book cases and western iconography that seemed almost set up, but authentic for the virtue that they were in the west, and the many animal pelts and pictures and heads mounted from game had come of that land and the people that lived there. Along the stone shelf on top of the fireplace had been a long line of pictures of various frames but the oldest having been a boy no more than thirteen years old who was no doubt Lacey Cold when he had been young, and at his shoulder near equal height had been a blonde boy equally as rugged in their jackets and their hats with horses reeling behind them in their pens.

Although many of them had their hats they had kept them tucked at their arms or hung at their belts by loop and hook as they stood along those walls and talked in a language seen only by people who had worked a long time with each other, who brought their eyes and their shoulders in a forum of conversation entirely silent until storming down from stairs elsewhere a blonde man at parity with age with Lacey Cold came into the room having been ruffled and appearing to have just been woken up with a white tee-shirt and a joggers on into that sitting room where he had seen what had been cause for him to be summoned down.

"Well, shit." The man spoke in the same western, affable voice that many in that country did.

"That's what I said." Cold rose, looking again with his honest eyes at the two wanderers and telling them in that silent language to just stay put as he took to approaching the man very slowly, hands at his belt akimbo. "Door alarm kicked off about twenty minutes ago and when we was going to see what it was we found thems two huddled up near frozen dead."

"That right?"

"That's right."

The two men spoke with a familiarity that allowed an economy of words between them, the blonde man sweeping around the room and seeing each of the handful that had accrued there. "Supper done or not?"

The cowgirl Baile, her cleft lip making it so she always bared some teeth, stepped forward from the wall, arms crossed. "Biscuits were just being passed out."

"Well," the blonde man started, "Go on, git. Don't let this interrupt eatin'."

"You put them back out there you know what's gonna happen." Baile cut all pretext. "I ain't better not see you try and do that, Rollings."

The man named Rollings threw one hand up as Cold pocketed his hands, gesturing with his head for the others there present to leave and go back to their business. "Christ, woman, I let go a few people you act like I let them off the Ark and that flood is coming."

"You mighta as well, world falling apart, stars falling outta the sky. This place was for people to live, Roll', not to run a business."

"I ain't having this now, and I sure as shit didn't want it the last ten times you brought it up."

"Baile," Cold interjected low and cool. "Go on back to supper. Don't do this in front of our guests." Cold had put emphasis on that last word and she seemed much pacified as she had been the last to leave leaving Lacey Cold, Rollings, Norea, and the young man together, thick wooden doors closing behind her. Rollings had come over to the two as Cold fixed himself a drink. Rollings had been clean shaved much like Cold, who among the hands they saw there had been unique in regard to the men.

"Drink?" Cold asked the room.

"No." Responded Rollings.

"And you two?" Cold asked Norea and the young man.

"Lacey they're kids."

"We're 18, or about to be." Norea had said her first since being brought in there and the young man had frozen up at her brashness. In reality he had been the one to want to talk their way into a place to work, a place to stay. Rollings had walked to the side of the fireplace to face them as they sat wrapped in blankets, drying but still cold and unwilling to move from that flickering warmth. Rollings had looked them up and down and then back to Cold who had been nursing his first glass of whiskey. Rollings nodded.

"I seen 'em before. Five-six months back out on a drive out to Monroe. They were out in the desert east: the Scar. Caught 'em walking the length of it and they were nearly dead for it."

"You save 'em?"

Cold shook his head and came with it the jingling of ice in glass. "Well, they're nearly dead but they ain't obviously. They woulda made it I think. Besides we had a schedule to keep."

Rollings looked them over again. "So, you twos some tough bucks, but apparently ain't tough enough for old man winter." He stepped forward and kneeled, offering a hand to both. "My name's Glow Rallings, and I'm the owner of this ranch."

He was young for what he proclaimed himself to be the hacendado, a fact evident even to the two strangers of that place.

"Norea Du Noc." She raised her hand to meet his from her blanket and let it fall from her, dressed back in her clothing. His hand had been rough, rough as rough as Lacey Cold's but rough enough to know that this man had known hard work in his life.

When Rallings had went to the young man, he had been honest as Cold had pegged them not to be in that desert. "I don't have a name."

"Don't got a name?" Rallings echoed back at him. "You don't want a share or what?"

The young man took in a breath of that warm air, letting it stew before he talked, looking Rallings in the eye, not confrontationally, but to deliver what he said completely and without hesitation. "I was taken from my home when I was a kid, the people who took me gave me a name, but they're gone now, and that name never sat well with me. So I don't have a name now, and I don't remember the one I was born with. That's what it is, Mister Rallings."

For all his honesty with Norea in that last half-year and all the truth that she had known of him, that had come after time and understanding with her and her alone. But the pragmatic, one statement truth of him was needed to be said, and he said it without fault. She looked at him wide eyed and in that silent shock Cold looked at her and knew that the young man had been telling the truth.

Cold poured another drink and then one for Rallings and then walked and sat on the arm of the leather chair that had been closest to Rallings before he handed him that glass and he took it as he looked at the mystery deposited in his living room that night in January. Before he took his drink, he asked, "Where are you two from?" And that had been evident just from the way they spoke, and they had been hesitant to answer at all until Cold rumbled in his throat:

"New Orleans." He looked at them with the unusual intelligence he wielded; a man who knew others. "Or…?"

"We don't want to waste your time, sirs." Norea held her head down to Rollings. "We're here to see if there's work available and a warm place to sleep. We're… we're not well off."

What amiable look about Rollings had been had soured and gone grave, his eyebrows pulling down and breathing deeply as he rose again and came back to the fireplace, and how even in his soft clothes meant for lounging he had not minded the fire, an odd mutant of his shadow coming off of the flames across the room as he blocked it.

"You Spacians? Fell outta the sky from some escape pod and been roughing it these last few months?" Cold had been content to listen to Rollings go on and as he sank in the chair it had been a thing he had been much used to based on how he shut his eyes.

"No." Norea had been offended by the fact. "I was born in France."

"And I'm from… around here." The young man answered. "Oklahoma."

For once Norea had been the more anomalous one, even as the young man sat there with no name. More and more little nuggets of absurdity said with no waiver in their voices. "Then how you two end up together?"

"School." The young man answered.

"Right. And what school is that?"

They had been silent about it until Norea answered. "A technical school."

"East River? In Austin? Houston? What about if your parents can afford to put you two up in one I don't quite think you'd needed to risk life and limb to come out here and ask for a job."

"Asticassia." The young man answered. "The Asticassia School of Technology."

Cold and Rollings shared a look that spoke of if the other had known what they were talking about but to no avail.

There was a girl in concert with the Fold there in Asticassia. She had been there because she had much love of the world and hope in her heart that one day Earth and Space could be connected, and that she could help it along by going to Asticassia, and using the skills learned there to start building that bridge. Nika Nanaura was dead, and before she died Norea had taken out all the pain and grief of Sophie's death on her at the time, beating her near senseless for the crime of hoping that being in Asticassia, something could come. Nothing for the years. Nothing for her journey. All those Earthians that had gone there to that false perfect world and what had come of it? The same thing that came here in that room with fire and shadow and a man of a ranch who had not recognized anything.

"Right." Rollings dismissed. "You know what I won't waste your time either. We don't got openings here at the Ranch, sorry to say."

"We'll sweep, we'll clean, we'll cool, we'll do anything you tell us to, Mister Rollings. We just need a place to stay, at least for the winter."

Rollings took a sip of his drink before putting it besides the picture on the stone shelf that had been him and the young Lacey Cold in front of their first horses that they had broke, hands at his hip and much solid in his standing. "Well you just need a place to stay? Nothing about eating? Nothing about the heat you're gonna use the air you gonna breath the shit you gonna put in my pipes?" His hand flicked with each on the list. "It ain't ever just about a place, and we ain't in the situation

"We can work, we've been working these last six months." The young man rose up, and had shown him his hands "Worked in Gunner Colt's Sawmill for a few weeks, done my time in the Aqua Direct fishery. I don't think there's a business in San Angelo that we haven't worked for or asked to work at. Rollings had looked at the young man's hand and indeed they had been worn.

"Yeah? If that's the case why why aren't you still back there?" And the case had been was that Norea had been too proud to let go of what she had been raised to do and they all had paid for it. He looked back at her and he had shaken his head. He wasn't going to use her like that and she wouldn't be used like that.

"If I told you you might think I'm just trying for a sob story, Mister Rollings." The young man said.

"This whole world been a sob story since we crucified God's own son, a story rolling all in a line and I've got my own pieces put to it." He looked away and back to Cold who had been unsupportive in either direction. "Kids don't you got parents or family to go back to?"

No answer had been an answer as they both shrunk down.

"Please. We need something. Anything."

"Shit." Rollings had sworn taking another drink before speaking in Cold's direction. "Ya shoulda just warmed them up in the bunk house and told them that we got nothing. Send 'em away in the morning."

Cold opened his eyes. "Ain't nothing to send them off away to, Glow."

"Ain't our problem."

"Maybe, maybe not. But they're here now." Cold had shrugged and he had closed his eyes again savoring the warmth of fire and whiskey in his stomach.

"Is there really nothing for us here? Nothing at all?" Norea stood. She had known in war and brotherhood that that was always a place for the damned and the downtrodden in the Fold, but these cowboys hadn't known them or their plight from Adam.

Rollings ducked his head as he considered much within himself before speaking. "You heard what I was talking with Miss Frydin? That polite cowgirl?" They both nodded slowly, Rollings walking along that stone shelf in front of the fire, the faces of nearly a hundred reaching out into that room as combined witness from the past. "No more than three months ago I had to let go three hands, and all of them with families, because we couldn't afford them no more. Four kids among them. But when we hire we hire hands to live on the ranch because that makes sense, and I gotta put room and board to 'em and it ain't like the old days where we coulda sold our good steers up Space ways every time some Beaner Group company had a quarterly executive function. It ain't good, but sometimes what's right ain't good and I gotta keep this ranch going because I got near twenty mouths to feed and a business to run, and if I start with you two, then what next?" When he had walked to the end of the line he had stopped and look at both of them, the look on his face of a man much conflicted. "Go onto yonder bunkhouse. We'll get you fed for your troubles. We'll let you sleep in the kitchen tonight, and then we can have one of our hands ride you back to San Angelo in the morning."

In those months the two had known what it had felt to be denied, and this had been denial, plain and simple. No more words could be said and Rollings would not hear any from them. But for the young man, he and Cold still had some business. They had gone to where their packs in the room had been now dry and he had dug into it and at its very bottom he had pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Cherry Reds.

He rounded the room again and had presented it to Cold, who took them, considered them. "You dropped these."

As if he still had his hat on Cold had dipped his head in recognition, and then the young man and Norea had put on their bags and their jackets and walked back out into the night toward a long bunk house.

Lacey Cold sat there for a long time considering those cigarettes, and when he was done he rose and talked to his oldest friend.

When they had exited the manor onto its porch to their side had been Baile, and from where she stood leaning against the wall if one concentrated they could hear the murmurings on inside, but she hadn't been interested. Her hair had been a light lavender seen in the prairie flowers of that country, and she fit it well as she wrapped herself in her canvas jacket and had been waiting for the two, hands in her pockets.

"Come on, let's geter some grub." And then she led them across the snow again in the dark of night into the bunkhouse.

They sat at the long table and apparently it had been in rare form tonight as near twenty men and women and some children pranced along the bottom floor of a long bunkhouse that had been surrounded by additional dwelling units and shacks all built by hand and by grit and by time that belonged to the older hands there among them, of them had families to account for the children. There had been no head of the table for it had been where from the kitchen stoves and ovens off to the side had been slid in as if it had been a chute by which the food had been put and with a processions of hands the food was brought to where it was needed. The two recognized nearly all there, for they had been the same cowboys that had come upon them in that desert, and they had been recognized as well as they ate their first hearty meal in weeks in the forms of potatoes and biscuits and beans and tortillas with a thick cut steak that had been plentiful onto plates that had been in use for near fifty years.

"Cowboy steak." Said the man who had been cook, and he had been of the vaquero variety, finally sitting down and eating himself.

"Cowboy this and that Rose." The old man who had had a scope around his neck while out riding had bellyached toward the Mexican. "Can't you just drop it. It's implied anyway if we're eating it."

Norea and the young man said nothing as they ate down fast, and although side conversations had been plentiful enough they had been the topic of the night, taken into a people who seemed no more bothered by their presence except for the concern that they all look skin and bones. They children had eaten fast enough leaving the adults the older to take their time and savor that meal as they had all meals, and of their half had been men, and the other half women or at least those that had put out that feminine appearance. All young and in their prime save for a few holdouts that wore the years of the world on their face like ravines made by tectonic movements. A TV had played on its story about city nurses in a hospital that every other day the worst thing on Earth seemed to befall them but it had been ignored as they had all ate fast and after the dinner they sat that the same table and smoked and drank coffee and asked them many questions and in the answers they both gave a story had been formed about them about how they came out of New Orleans, born by storm, and walked west until they had found themselves in Nacogdoches being given charity from a Imam and a mosque, and the clothes they wore to that day had been a part of that charity as they walked west to get away from their amorphous past that they wanted to put behind them and wanted to speak no more of. They spoke generally, places, things guarded as they were and that had been fully understandable. No one in their situation often had an alacrity of transparency about them and those that worked at that ranch had been simple people who had understood the complexities of others even if they did not want to partake or get mixed up in. Baile had sucked on a cigarette on the corner opposite of the cut that broke apart her upper lip, and she nodded along with all that they said and she had been quite happy here and now they had been warm and well fed and that her job was done for the evening. The two spoke of where they had come from, and it had been more than they spoke of themselves to other people in their whole lives: On how Norea had been from France, how ravaged and contradictory that country and the Old World had been and had seen fighting and seen people dead she had been fond of and no one had blamed her for wanting to get as far away as she did. To those cowboys the world beyond Middle America had been as good as another planet, as if if they had left they would no longer be able to draw air within their lungs, and that the distance for them between there just outside of San Angelo to Mumbai or New York City or any other of the first world metropolises where some people had never seen a horse before was just as large for them a distance to the Moon or the Sides.

One of the older hands had gotten up and on his belt still had been his pistol belt, and her eyes had immediately tracked to it as he had done nothing but get up to take a sip of water and return.

When it had been the young man's time to speak, he told the story that in two parts described why he hadn't given his name. He told them all that he had, to his best recollection, was born up in North Texas or Oklahoma, and that he had been of the Comanche, and when a Native American man had stood up from his place down the table to see him more clearly, he had called his bluff that he had not looked any meaningful percentage native. But he had explained one step further: That he had been taken as a child, and the Native cowboy face cleared, and the same old story that had been old in that land played out. He had been taken as a child, and in order to befit the intention of those who took him, he had almost everything changed about him down to his flesh. Now, free from them and all, he wasn't sure what he wanted to be, and he hadn't even started to think about where he had come from, but the two of them had come out here to at least get a stable base, and the room went quiet.

"Yeah it ain't easy." Spoke the cowboy with the scope whose real name had been Chalk, and the scope he carried had been the same one that provided him true in four civil and business proxy wars in Nevada, Canada, Sonora and then up and down the Rio Grande in a water conflict. "No trees round here." He spun his finger to the plains around. "Nothing to break up the wind so anything you try to put down just gones blown away."

They told him what Rollings had told them and that they were to stay the night here and there again had been another uncomfortable silence, but none could argue.

The way of the world had often been at odds with those that lived in it, and here that cowboy hospitality had been there because of the situations that lot had been in, all due to what Rollings had no doubt managed them up to be. Baile stirred as she did in her chair and it wrought with discomfort. As they all carried their dishes to a tub full of soapy water, a trough that was long and all had washed down their dishes in it before putting it upon a rack for later sorting, she had put brought the two asides and told them this:

"You two sleep in my bed tonight. You two… familiar with each other like that?" They both had either shook their head or nodded but meant the same thing as they explained that they had slept together for months now because it had been necessary so that they thought nothing of it. "Well that's good because I only got a twin in there, but you two get a good night sleep and I'll go give a piece of my mind back in the manor to Roll' and Cold and see if we can't do anything for it." She had seen Norea try to open her mouth to protest but shook her head once. "I know what it's like, and if not that I know right from wrong and this puts all in a sorta ways."

That night in a room sectioned away big enough for a desk and a bed in its corner, the two of them lay in another woman's bed, the sheets smelling like plywood and leather and salt, and tired as they were they had not slept. There was not much hope about them for what tomorrow would bring but they had lived through much, and would get through much yet, and as they lay in the dark of a room that had been decorated and held much in the form of a life lived here on the ranch from photos to old memorabilia to creature comforts like a small computer that would not be out of place in Asticassia, they laid there savoring the warmth, even if it was temporary.

"These are some good people." The young man whispered as he lay on his back and Norea had taken to half on top of him. She had been light and if any pressure she put on him he had only wanted more of it.

"People usually are." She whispered back. "It's the world and how they have to live in the world that makes them bad."

"So you think people are born good? Even if this world is how it is?"

"You think I hate Spacians just because I am Earthian?" She tilted her head, her chin on his chest and a part of her returned. That cold part of her that had been intent on killing all, including herself. It had been cold like the winter and what it promised was death, but that was how she lived her life until just very recently. "No. It's so much more."

He looked at her and their eyes had been lucent in the dark. "Would you tell me one day? All of it?"

"That's a lot of evil to put on someone. Why?"

"I figured you might enjoy someone else to help you bear it."

"Tsk." She said once bumping her forehead down into his chest in very much a way to get him to stop talking. "It's no matter much anymore, since all of them are dead above. I can't kill the dead, after all."

"Perhaps, perhaps not, but what they've done remains. I'm a pretty good example of that."

"You're a pain in my ass but we're stuck together…" She breathed tiredly, and her breath still smelled like dinner, which hadn't been a bad smell to him. "It's not a bad life."

The dark encroached around them more in their minds to take them to sleep and rest, but the young man had something to say to her:

"Norea?"

"Yes?"

"I don't know about people being born good, but I know you are." For all that she had told him in that church that he could not know who she was, he never quite believed that, and now he knew it true. He knew enough about her that he could say it true.

She looked at him wordlessly, and then sharply, very much annoyed. "Shut up, don't say that sort of annoying stuff when we're sleeping like this."

"Never ever?"

"Never ever. Go to sleep."

When the dawn rose the cowboys had been up earlier, and knocked on their door had been one of them confused on why Baile had been sleeping in but when it opened it had been the two of them and instead just offered them some coffee.

They walked out and were greeted with that great white landscape, and now the visage of cows that went on in their plenty off one direction of the ranch behind fencing that no doubt went to the horizon. Cows, at least a hundred in sight off to the rolling white, while in a paddock a few horses trotted about in their blankets off the stable that they had stumbled into that last night.

Before them stood Baile Frydin, Lacey Cold, and Glow Rollings, each of them on horses of their own, and Rollings in attire more befit a cowboy himself. All of them looked like they had lacked sleep that night and only Cold seemed like it fit him. Behind them a small all terrain cart with a spool of wire and fencing material had hosted a man wrapped up familiar, goggles staring at out them from the driver seat. Cold swung his horse as if he had wanted the horse to talk to them as the they came up, his thumbs held in his jackets pockets. "You two have breakfast?"

They nodded.

"Right." Behind them shuffled all the hands of the Ranch, off to do the work of the day, some more emerging from the additional living quarters around as if unison were to bear witness of the going of the guests that came that night. "Glow?" Cold turned over, and Glow had trotted his horse slowly up to the two, dressed in all black save for his boots. "Be a man. Tell 'em." Rollings had been much averse to do whatever he had been doing, but Cold had lit a cigarette, striking the match against his thumb nail, hunching over in the morning breeze to block it before lighting his cigarette and taking out another from that same box that the young man returned to him. Rollings had taken it in his hand and let Cold press his own cigarette to it as he traded it out in his mouth and sucked in the embers to light it, passing it back off to Rollings who put it in his mouth and smoked and blew once.

"Christ almighty." Baile spit on the ground through her split lip. "You make it seem like you're telling these youngins they've got cancer."

"Shut up Baile." Cold said once, and that had been that as Rollings began to talk to the two, trying to gather words in himself before he had resorted to talking about what he had known.

He pointed at Baile. "I known her since I was ten. She came in when me and Lacey's Abuela took her family in as house servants and she grew into being a cowgirl. One of the best there is. Maybe not the best at herding but not the worst, and she knows how to ride. More than that, she's always had strong opinions and more often than not they're opinions I may want to listen to even if they're not the best." He swiveled back, pointed down to Lacey Cold. "And Lacey I known since I was younger than that. For all thirty-two years of my life I can count the weeks where I ain't seen him on my toes and fingers after we fell in together. He's the best damn horse breaker and horse raiser this side of Texas and maybe all the world and come hell or high water I know this man's gonna be at my table, sky gone red or blue or white or whatever."

"Shucks." Cold smoked.

"And so when these two kept me up till crack ass a' dawn when they know I gotta be in town to meet with clients the next morning making the case for you two: a scary looking girl from France and you who don't got a name to them, consider that high praise already, but that ain't enough. 90% but you gotta help me with that last 10%. You hear?"

"Yessir." They both said, and they had not known they were holding their hands together and gripping them tight.

"I'm gonna ask you a few questions, and if you can answer them truthfully, I'll let you work on this ranch and all that it entails. At least for the winter." That had woken them up more than coffee, and they stood ready. "If you want to be on this ranch you owe it to us to be honest, and I don't meant the complete truth of yerselves for all Men are entitled to their own secrets, but we need to know enough that we know you ain't bums, dead beats, dead heads, bastards, criminals or perhaps even Witches, but I doubt that even if you are scum that you would be even that. Now, first question for both of you: I'm gonna be in town, and I might be obliged to check in with a few businesses in there checking to see if you two did work in these places. Gonna be random, and I won't ask you what businesses, but if what you said was true about looking for work, am I gonna get people telling me that you showed up asking?"

"Yessir." They both said again.

"Don't sir me." Rollings had taken each with a glancing blow.

"You asked for it by taking over, Glow."

"Shut up, Lacey. Now, question two: If I go look up Asticadia or whatever on my phone later in between meetings, will I get an Asticashia Academy, and if I inquire will they send me transcripts that you two did attend?"

"Asticassia." The young man corrected, but he shook his head. "And no. Asticassia was destroyed during the Blood Meridian." Rollings cocked his head, and then all the older adults froze solid with implication, and then outright statement. "Asticassia was a school in Space."

Whispers of the words that came floated through all watching, and Cold had been first to thaw as he looked around to all his fellow hands and with a gesture of his hand and finger told them all to go on.

"Thought you said you twos were from Earth." Baile had said, small and unsure.

"We are." Norea spoke. "But we went to space to go to Asticassia. We escaped before things went bad."

"What do you mean, went bad?" Cold had turned back over. "You knew what was coming? Why Space went dead all those months ago?"

"No." The young man spoke up, half-painfully, and half-sorrowfully. "We were in our own problems and had to leave."

"Problems like what?"

"Disciplinary. Didn't like who led us… didn't like where our lives were going." An extreme reading but true out of the young man's lips.

Norea followed up. "We ended up in New Orleans after running away, and everything you've heard after that was always true."

"You more Spacian or Earthian?" Rollings asked the young man, his voice dropping low. "The people who took you, they brought you to space?"

"Yes… and I don't know. I really don't know." As was why he had been living the life he did now, and perhaps they there had known. "I've been in Space most of my life, but I know I was born here on Earth. I'm half-Mennonite and half-Comanche. I don't know if that's supposed to mean something or how much it's supposed to mean, but it's a part of who I really am and I'd like to find out one day."

"Okay." Rollings said as if more to stop him, for heavy had been the young man's heart and here it had been tipping over. "Next question: You two done farm work before?"

They both shook their heads, and Rollings nodded at Cold and Baile.

"If you was employed before over in San Angelo, what happened?" Rollings asked next.

Norea stepped up again and it was hers to bear. "I was in a fighting ring for money and I lost a match pretty badly. He had to take care of me." And with that she had dug for her shirt, pulling it up, the ugly bruise of it still there, faded, but unmistakable. "I couldn't work, nor could he."

"I'll ring up Dedman next time he's around." Baile had put asides. "I thought we's shut down that thing last year."

"You know how it is." Cold smoked on. "People will always fight."

The sun was rising behind them all, and the Ranch came to life as it had done for centuries, without fail, beneath a red sky or without, as in war and as in peace. Rollings settled himself up, and looked straight toward the young man for a question just only for him: "Last question: What was the name that you once went by?"

It occurred to the young man that of all that had been of the world now, of all who he could not see but could reasonably ascertain in knowledge from the stars above now so empty, that he had now perhaps been the last of his kind, outlived of even the Original, and that if he had a time to claim that name for himself wholly it might've been now. But a false name was no name at all, and that name now meant nothing to him than what had been pressed into him like a brand. Scars heal, and he had wanted to start that healing.

"They called me Elan Ceres." And for the first time in half a year, the Fifth had returned for just a moment as his voice took on that trained and perfect lilt that emulated the voice of an executive, picked out of an algorithm for hitting all the right notes that investors loved to see in the executive chair. The Fifth had returned and through his tan and new life-lived ruggedness that lithe and pretty boy from Asticassia still was able to be summoned up.

There was some recognition in Rollings' eyes. "Why do I know that name?"

"Did you have stock or shares in any of the Benerit Group companies?"

"Yeah. Put a lot of money from the Ranch in it and it's still god damn frozen."

"Then I would suppose you might've seen that name pass as regards Peil Technologies."

They were all quiet for a long time as Rolling swirled the information within him, turning his body to look at that sunrise that had come over the plains of Texas and over San Angelo as it had since the beginning of the world. The cowboys had told them that Rolling had been like them once, in that bunk house after a good day's hard work shucking shit, breaking horses, breeding cows with nothing but the country and his fellow cowhand for company. That he had not been so distant from them that what he was doing was independent of them. He just had learned a different way about working now.

He closed his eyes and he talked to the world. "You know, every mess I ever been in, it was never one thing that put me in that mess. I didn't have a good run of anything and then suddenly just veer left and found myself in the shits. Every time I been in a bad way, it was always because of a whole can o' thing that I been collecting until it got so full and it right tipped itself over. And those things I put in that can never seemed bad or harmful at the time, no they were just innocent things, small things, but it all adds up over your life and my can has been put over more times than I can count. Maybe even something like this." He brought a hand to the horn of his saddle and looked back to all in that circle of trust and decision, and then he put his word down. "For now I'm gonna pay both you half-wages so that together you make one. Consider it the apprenticeship stipend. We'll take you on. If I got questions you best answer them when I come back." The two stood up straight, ready to work, knowing that this chance had not been given lightly as Baile smiled wonderfully and Cold stood between them and Rollings. "Work hard, don't add to my can." He brought the reins of his horse up and the horse had straightened, ready to go, but not before he talked to Cold and Baile. "Lacey, Baile, these two are your charges now. Put 'em to work. Sort out how they're living. Teach 'em. You know how it goes. Add 'em to your book and don't let me think too much about this."

"Well you think too much anyway."

"Between the two of us I'm filling in."

"Just get outta here Glowy."

"See you at supper, Lacey." Rolling's horse kicked up snow, and it had been off in a storm of its own like the best of riders from cowboy times to kingdom come, and before the barreling of his horse's hooves had been gone Cold had mounted up his horse and motioned for the two to follow, and they did with Baile mounting up alongside him.

"Alright I ain't got naer any sleep last night so I suppose that makes it teaching day. Drop your possibles drop your bags off in the bunkhouse we'll see what we can do for you when we turn in tonight." Cold hadn't spoken this fast yet for the two newcomers, but they listened and they trudged through the snow. Cold had passed by the small buggy with its cart behind it and without stopping yelled out, "Win, you and Baile go do the run of the fences. We still got spare saddles?"

A muffled voice came through that come off as the wrappings of the driver came off and revealed another young man about the age of the two of them. He was Asian, nearly mistaken for a girl by the way his pony tail cut out from the wrappings that kept him warm. "Yeah, out by the stable with the tools."

"And broke horses?"

Win had taken a look at the two in one swipe, knowing more than what Cold asked. "I think those two Morgans would do 'em good."

"Don't want to take 'em away from Max's family it's almost Lockland's birthday."

"Lock will be fine, he's been looking at that Mustang that you broke night of the blood moon anyway. Says it's got magic powers to it."

Win and Baile had been off shortly after, Baile giving a tip of her hat to the new hands as she and her horse took off after the vehicle, and before the two had split to go drop their bags Cold had given them instructions but he had come away pleasantly surprised and in that morning light wore something other than stoic on his face, and less than an hour later two young, just come of working age Morgan breed horses, one chestnut brown and the other a dark bay trotted along the outside rim of the paddock by two riders on worn and second-hand saddles as if they had been doing it all their life, and now Cold had his own questions and they answered in action more than word. The young man had rode his horse well trained, almost too well trained as he rigidly had been straight backed about it.

One of the farm hands had come up on the fence of the paddock and watch him ride and correctly pointed out that he had ridden for dressage, all polite looking, and that there had indeed been training to him that this was not his first time on a horse, but perhaps not in that condition: in the usage of his horse as a tool. As for Norea, she had ridden, and she had ridden rough, and had ridden as if trained up on it bareback. Myriad contradiction and complication, and yet they rode as if they had been used to handling beasts. The two horses had been polite and well broken in and amiable to their riders who had been light upon them, and they had been polite back as what vestigial memories of their skills in horse riding came back in cautionary steps.

"Lacey Cold," the farm hand spoke to him as they saw the new hands take their horses trotting around the rim of the paddock, only for them to veer off toward the center, directing their animals with control that had been slow, measured, but they knew what they were doing, and in the middle of that paddock where snow had been thickest they put their horses near side by side and looked at each other with great amusement and curiosity at themselves. "They say that you can learn a lot about a person just by the way they ride."

"Yes they can." Cold responded. "Yes they can."

"Do I want to know?" The young man had asked, habitually patting his hand along the the broad neck of the horse he had been given: the dark bay Morgan.

"You first."

"The Original knew how to ride. So we all knew how to ride too."

"Before or after you knew how to pilot?"

"Same time… and how about you?"

"In Russia, horseback is sometimes more useful to travel there."

He smiled at her in light of their good fortunes, another chance given to him, and she had been too late to hide her smirk as she looked away, her hands fiddling with her reins as her lips had been small on her face for her efforts. "We've been so… busy, that I don't think I've taken the time to properly know you, Norea Du Noc."

"There's not much to know." In her soft and casual tone that did not seem that offended with these annoying things he said and how he said them, all her sentences to him had felt as if missing that one part that he had been seeking for and had confided in her that she could divine, but for now it had been missing and it bit in like the cold between her breaths. "You know why I was alive."

The hint of sadness he had known, and as it had been then, it was still the same now.

They circled the paddock one more time with their horses compliant, as if within them lay some wonder too about their riders whom they had only seen in the dark of their stable the night before and came before them as if they had been regulars, and Lacey Cold had looked very happy as if he had won a bet, and in many ways that he and the ranch had.

The ranch was named officially, the Ranch at Fortaleza Blanca, shortened around town often in many ways, it had been of three cattle ranches in the area of San Angelo and the only one that did horses as well to a certain pedigrees, and horses did the many farm hands ride preferable to walking in the snow. At twenty-seven thousand acres it had been the mutant consolidation of three different ranches that had gone bust in the area for the last hundred years, and one of only four remaining in the San Angelo area in Ad Stella where increasingly agricultural product from all Earth had been challenged by entire continents made in space converted to perfect ecosystems for growing or raising, and if not that it had been the alternative foods built up anyway through science that like the hands that cared for cattle, were threatening ever more to put them to History outright, and yet on that ranch they survived beyond all reckoning for two reasons: both of the same event.

On the night the Blood Meridian came across the world the owner of the ranch, the Abuela, alone in lineage as the last of her name, who had been much in her faith as she neared the end of her life, had gone the way of many and sought to it to meet God on her own terms, and when she had been put to rest and the red sky did finally set, the question came of who was going to own and run the ranch into that new future where leveraging premium beef to well-to-do Space executives would not be a thing anymore. That was how Glow Rollings had stepped up, and how he had gone from hand to head and gotten the way he did.

"What Glowy neglected to tell you that, of those three families that he let go of these last three months, he set them up in Louisiana or up in Detroit. He called in favors with the meat markets we work with and had them transferred up there to be cattle inspectors. A good job, nice job in big cities for their kids to grow up in and not this."

"We're thankful, sir." The young man had said.

Cold nodded as he rode his horse as natural as breathing: the brown Tennessee Walker he rode large and entirely his own, putting his hips at shoulder level of the two he rode with. "He might be playing straight and narrow, but he's doing it because someone's gotta for this ranch, and I trust that man with my life."

Cold had done well to explain all that as the two of them rode besides him out along the borders of Blanca for them to properly see the breadth of what they were getting into, and even in the snow that had beaten some definition the center of the ranch had disappeared and they were once again alone out on that white landscape but in better hands. The sun had been out today beating back the worst of the warmth, but the wind kept going and rode the rim of the ranch bundled up with masks and goggles found in the saddle bags that had smelled of other people but they were warm reprieves against the beating wind, and in their riding Cold had told them all that they needed and would get introduced to. He showed them from the rim of his world the shallow lakes and springs that had risen up from the ground or dug and refilled from below, the stream that had gone through the property that ran even in the ice that went out all the way to San Angelo, along with a small grove of apple trees put up as one of the last things his Abuela did on the property and had born fruit when ripe and had been a pleasant addition to the garden that the house had maintained for their own usage. In the east did the dry lands reach up, but there Blanca had been on the borders of many things and the ecosystem had been one of them, still able to support the several hundred head of cattle that they did and much, much more.

That last, and most important lake of all the ranch property, large and natural enough looking to be called a lake proper, artificially made with some great acreage to it, and on the small beach of it a sign post had stood. They went on.

The Abuela had come from rich money in Mexico and when these farms had been failing in her time she had bought all of them and consolidated them with the center of it being an old fort which had been long buried in the ground beneath the manor of the house. She had done so to retire in this country and in her buy up bought the failing farm of the Cold Family and the Rollings Family, and when their families had decided to move to the cities with the payment the boys had begged to stay as children often do with change. These children had been Lacey and Glow respectively, and around them the new base of farmhands had been built off of the old. Only those like Chalk or Jennybelle who had been building on those lands since the 70s had remained, and what had been the mass of it had been singular strangers or people not too unlike them, all brought in on the expense of the Abuela who cared not as much for the business and economics of the ranch that her heirs had not been at liberty to exercise. Nineteen people lived on that ranch and with the addition of them two had been twenty-one.

"My parents let me stay under her and her workers at the time because there were far more opportunities for me to live a good life here. My Pa was soldier. Fought in the last great wars where them drones outnumbered men 5 to 1 and he got his stupid ass drafted. After the war he didn't want the family anywhere near any of those companies that made 'em, so, they let me stay here while they lived in the city for their health. Glow's family stayed and I was with them for a bit before they left too. I been staying in that manor close to near 25 of my 32 years."

"Never thought about leaving?" Norea asked in her trot.

"No." Cold said once, letting his horse bring them to the crest of a small hill and looking out on that winter landscape glistening in that new sun where what melt had shined from a landscaped paved over by wind and Gravity. "This here is good country."

They rode until they had found the cart with Baile and Win, the two of them disembarked and tying off metal wire into fencing and barbed wire, and they had dismounted the horses except for Cold and they came up to them as they worked.

"Winnie," Baile had sucked in between her motions with pliers and wire. "Say hi to the new hands."

Win Nguyen had been busy tying as he did so he had raised his hand up. "I saw you two on the road up yesterday. You guys are some crazy assholes trying to do that walk now."

Win Nguyen had spoken with a west coast accent, a boy their age and similarly out of place, but long used to the life he had found himself in by the tan of his skin and the wear on his gloves.

"Who was the other person?" Norea asked.

"My girlfriend." He answered with just a bit of pride. "Sometimes she spends the night up, sometimes I spend the night in San Angelo. Pretty nice having one of the fastest horsies that lets me get back before dawn break. Reminds me of having a car. Not that I'd trade for this point. Gas is too expensive for my ass." Win looked over at the two horses the two new hands had ridden in on. "Your horses are good stock, nice and simple and uncomplicated. No personality or maybe they're just mellow. Darker horse, that's the one you rode guy, his name's Jerusalem, and the other's Tiberius."

"Real dramatic names, Win." Baile bellyached and the man who named them.

"Would you rather them Sodom and Gomorrah?" He looked back at the two newbies. "I wasn't allowed a phone until about, last year, did a lot of reading out books religious and classic because it's all Glow-boy got in the house."

Baile spoke as she worked, and all of them talked as people very used to each other did, gesturing to the two new hands and then back to Win. "Winnie's another one of the sorry sort. Only reason we keep him around is because the Ranch gets tax benefits."

"Oh I thought it was because you liked me."

"He was a grade-A juvenile delinquent. What you do again Win?"

"Breakfast and eggs." Win answered.

"Breaking and entering." Cold clarified. "That was what, four five years ago?"

"Something like that."

"Abuela volunteered the ranch to take him in when she saw his case in the papers, and now as long as Win doesn't break the law again."

"Ah we're all outlaws already, just give it a few more years." Win spat on the ground and his spit was black with tobacco.

"How you think that, Win?"

"World doesn't take kindly to people who live on their own and can fend for themselves. We're cowboys ain't we?"

"Maybe, maybe." Cold had motioned for the two new hands to go to Win. "Alright, you two we're fixing fences today when we find it, we go in for lunch around eleven, then back out till dark. I'm sure between the three of us we'll fill you in on what we do here and what you need to learn."

They had twisted wire into cable for the next few hours and it had been very cold but beaten back by a shared thermos of hot coffee not used to drink but to unfreeze their hands, riding along the fence and determining its condition until they had found holes in it. Then came toe cutting, the twirling of more wire, and then the wringing of it tight to keep the cows in and the coyotes out. All the while the three hands there spoke candidly about how it was to live and work on that ranch and they were much fond of it, unbothered by the world, and only caring for the sake of living. The young man would look to Norea and what of her face was shown through her coverings and did see her listen, did see her with a calm he had not seen of her ever. That had put him in a good mood, and by the time they had returned to the center of the ranch for lunch he had been much warm still as they arrived into the bunkhouse whose kitchen had been brimming with activity. Lacey Cold had called the group to attention, near a dozen, and as the gerente he had said simply that starting today that there had been two new hands that were to be joining the Blanca and that they had already known how to ride horses, which garnered great applause and hollering, and that the business of getting them situated with both work and living there would begin that day.

"Y'all know how it goes. Now welcome Norea Du Noc, and…" Lacey Cold had taken a long look at the young man, and then he had given him, if not a name, then at least something to call him by, "Blondie." The young man had no time to think of it, but he could reasonably guess why as water dripped down from his hair.

With coffee cups raised, the cowboys had all greeted them, but with no further ceremony it was still a work day, and eating needed to be done quick.

"Cowboy noodles." The farmhand named Rose had announced, and they all dug in and got out.

When they all saddled up again Cold had made his explanation to him alone. "I know you're touchy about your name. Still, I gotta call you something, and don't treat it like a name if you care to do so; treat it like a sound that means you're being called upon. Just like these horses when we whistle. Easier for me that way. But when something comes up, you let us know, and I'll put it into the book."

The young man was not bothered that much of it, that a name had been given to him by a man he hadn't known at all. In the days and weeks that followed, Norea would never call him Blondie and that had been what mattered.

They worked three days more in various small jobs ranging from matters of the houses, the barns, the range, horses and cattle and the various other animals that were kept for the sake of eggs and milk, a regiment clearly meant for them to get familiar with places and things and the lowliest of work that they could start at. Glow Rollings did not return that day, calling in to Cold's not often seen cellphone, telling them that the client wanted mull over what they were asking for from the ranch a little more. Cold had only said one word five times and then the call was over.

They slept where they had been found: in the stables among hay on two cots brought out, and that it had been warm enough and the reason why they had come in with guns drawn when they were found was because very much of a coyote problem and they had thought they had gotten into the stables. Not that there had been any worry about the horses, but there was still a problem if they got in, and they slept so tiredly there had been no words between them at all even if they had much to talk about. An ache to their bodies, but an ache more honest than in their entire lives.

No flinch to the branding of flesh, or the clipping of ears on hogs and cattle, no complaint at all to the cleaning of hooves or the shoveling of shit. There had been dirtier things in life to be accord to and they had reeled themselves back from that. This was life was new, was simpler. It was a promise given to them and one they had to keep.

When Rollings came back on the fourth day, he had come into the night at the stables to see if they had been still there, and they had been. He had looked much spooked about them, as if seeing them truly, knocked out cold on their cots bundled beneath thick blankets. But he said no more and did not wake them. When he exited the stable Lacey Cold had been there, and when they talked they talked honestly between themselves about more than just the two new hands that had shown up. They talked about the world that was to come and the world those two had come from. They talked about how Elan Ceres had indeed been a real man, and, the only way about it that made sense was that he himself had run away from his life in those final days before the Blood Meridian with some unusual intelligence about what was to come to all of Space and tried to come into a new life altogether.

"I'm telling you Lacey, sure he got that a tan and he look ragged. But you tell me if that in there ain't the same man." Rollings held up his phone and showed there a picture of Elan Ceres plastered on the frozen, non-updating roster of Benerit Group company pages. Cold looked at it a long time before shrugging, walking off back into the house, leaving Rollings with this:

"People can change, Glowy. Quien con lobos anda, a aullar se enseña"

The winter of '23 had gone long and cold but in the relative low work that could be done in the cold there had been much time for teaching: the affairs of the ranch had been put down to the two new hands bit by bit by every single hand that had been, and every hand had been obliged to do it for them. They learned of the cooking and the cleaning of twenty people, where to get the mail and how to check the pipes for the animals by the farm meant for those on the ranch and how to get the chicken eggs without breaking more than one or two and learned how to clean out hooves of both cattle and horse. They heard of theories and advice imparted to them by every who would pass or was in hearing range and was given a story to go with it too. The direct impression that these were people not often given the opportunity to tell their stories all over again very evident and just as smothering to the two of them.

"Good thing about being what I was," he breathed out tiredly one night and she had been listening. "Is that when I came to replace the last one no one had to go through that introductory period with me. I just was."

"Must've been lonely." Norea had said, and only then he realized it had been.

She had known oh so well.

One night a month and a half in, the young man asked her on his cot about how welcoming these people had been, and she sat there, lazily sketching into her book with that new implement of hers she kept always on her, even if the book was not. She looked up, her cot up against the wall of hay as the horses breathed in their sleep.

"Just how us Earthians are." She answered, not looking up from her work. "Spacians have no concept of sharing, or communal living. If Spacians don't want to share or live together they can just build another colony or space station and be done with it. Here on Earth we don't have that choice. And I think these people have known that for generations."

"Even Mister Rollings?" The young man had his hands behind his head, looking up at the lightbulb above them flicker occasionally.

"It's not like we don't understand why he was so reluctant to take us on. And he's still paying us."

Not enough resources, too many mouths. One of the oldest stories. There was no true night for them yet as that lightbulb had still been on, dimly lit. Even now they had been on duty, just in case. Not provided with a gun but the hay pitchforks would've been enough.

"Think you're okay with all this? We might be here for a while." He turned over to her.

She had finished up her sketch of the day: the cold desolate landscape itself of the ranch out in its pastures, the book closing with a thump before being placed within her bag and a small trunk that had been brought out for them. "It's alright, I've got nowhere else to be, and there are worser places to spend the rest of a life."

"Might get a bit boring."

"Again," she shook her head. "There are worser things to happen to someone then ending up on a farm all their life."

They worked and they worked for weeks and they had fit into the crowd now, not that they had been rejected at all. Not after those first few nights when details slowly trickled in and the truth about them had been revealed: that they had indeed been Earthians, but they had been to space, and for nearly two weeks dinner conversations from both adult and child swirled about them about that great undiscovered country that lay above them all seen in the night that now more rumor than reality since that red wave came and wiped Man from it. They asked questions of Space and all about what it had been like to live up there, and what type of people and kids found themselves in Space, and if there were any cattle and horse ranches like them, and it had been a trick question because they knew it had been because many horses from that ranch had been sold and sent to colonies who emulated the plains that they had been on for amusement and recreation like tourist destinations. They asked about whether or not they knew of distant relatives or friends who they might've thought had gone to space and made it there but neither of the two had known any, and that for all their questions and all their wonderment about the fact that Space had indeed been real, the young man had realized what Norea had long ago: That Space had been a place of no accounting, no real link asides what it had been done in its name to keep that separation between them present, because distance and travel method had only been one type of binding. The older hands who had seen or even been in the old wars had soured however at the mention of Space at all and retired to their bunks, for they had known all they needed to of Space long ago.

Chalk who had been to war against the Spacians in proxy wars settled his jacket and retired for the evening, but told the two of them this:

"What Space did often affected Earth a helluva lot, but not the other way around, and when the Blood Meridian came with all its scary bit, yeah it changed the color of everything for a while, people got spooked, but it was scary because we didn't know what it was and after it came and went we realized that now for perhaps the first time what had happened in Space didn't do anything for us Earthbound. Glad you twos got clear of it before it all got reset."

Over a hundred years of space exploitation and all of them, even in that secluded corner of the world, had known it well.

Distantly a radio played in the corner of one of the new Texas local news stations. Sports had been the talk, but even the presenters had felt new and awkward about it. This had been the first time in decades that over the air they were able to talk freely without the censorship or the constant over watch of Spacian firms. News had always come in day by day, and Rollings when he did join them to dinner listened to that radio intently about the survival of any groups or entities at all that had been in Space. He listened to reports of the terrors that were happening because of the remnant Benerit EGF, and then the remnants of Benerit itself as cities that it holed itself in all either acquiesced, dissolved overnight and opened their gates, or had gone down in bitter fighting against Earthian government forces. In that last week New York City had been reclaimed, and in the week prior the Seattle Benerit managers had all disappeared into the population or the wilds of America, and the American Federation that had been the government entity that managed the North American continent had set out in trying to find them and their assets. Earthian investors had been all left in the dark, and Rolling had been among them.

The young man now known as Blondie to them and Norea Du Noc worked a smattering of everything until late March of the AS 123, the first thawing had been well underway, and grass had poked out from what had been in those last few months deep snow. On that morning at 5AM still long before the dawn, Lacey Cold had gone to the two new hands as they ate their cowboy oatmeal and cowboy eggs with their cowboy coffee and cowboy bacon amidst all others. Today on the schedule that had been put up on a whiteboard everyone had had a magnetic button assigned to them with either a color or when that color became double that button with a sticker on it. Their buttons had been off the many squares that designated either house work such as laundry or cooking or gardening or cleaning or duties that had put them out on the range or in the barns and stables, and further still had been a smaller section dedicated to San Angelo: Groceries, taking the many kids there that hadn't been working age to school and then back, Business Deals, and then work with the Texas Rangers. Baile had been often the one assigned to that.

"Blondie, Norea." The Native American man, who was known by the wašícu name of Masterson, had been one of the many cattle drivers called for them as he came in from the cold. The two of them perked their heads up. "Cold and Rollings are waiting for you by the stable."

Norea had thrown on a hand-me-down jean jacket and the young man his waxed canvas, gloves put on and expecting something different today all the same. A band had been wrapped around Norea's hat, her implement kept there securely by clip and binding which she had secured as she had every time she wore it, she waiting for the door until she put it on, same as the young man and his own.

They went out into the dark and Masterson had given the young man a very slight nod, and the young man had given one back.

The intricacies and ritual of cowboy living had not been theirs yet but it had been slowly coming of them. They walked to the stable and already there pulled out had been Jerusalem and Tiberius, with Cold having mounted his horse: Junior and Rollings atop his Colt named Bluebone.

Without greeting they had kicked their boots into the stirrups and climbed a top naturally and easily, benefits of being smaller as they were. The horses did not walk off a step as they mounted.

"People pay a premium for our horses." Rollings said first. "The groundwork and breaking we do is legendary in this country. Texas Rangers prefer our stock more than any other else and it's a good part on why we're still solvent." Their horses had been of a type that listened and rode easily, that they did not mistake. "You two have done good work, and I'm obliged to keep you on for longer, but first we gotta just see if you're capable of really coming into our business here." The four of them rounded the stable to the holding pens where the young horses had been, either born to their roster or taken from the wilds where horses had still roamed, wild horses who had never seen men walk before and brought to the ranch. With two lassos Rollings and Cold had spun them up as if levitating, old hat to them, and when one flew out they had caught one of the wild horses that had been patrolling the edges of its own pen, crazed and indignant and breathing heavily as the two men had gone into the pen on either side of the horse and roped it steadily by barrel and by head, planting their cowboy boots in the mud as teach of them spoke. Rollings spoke Spanish, and Cold had spoke English, and in their words they had spoken to the horse very gently as it kicked up mud and snow caught between two ropes pulled until it had come down to the ground. Lacey Cold had approached the horse, patting it along its neck and holding his body to it as, after a while, he rose, and the horse did too, and although it still bore madness in its eye with the curl of rope around it Cold had taken the rope and the horse and brought it to the edge of the pen out toward Norea for her to take. She held on tight, the horse brought against the railing as Cold and Rollings gestured for the young man to follow them, and they repeated the process all over with a wild colt, handing the rope to the young man and then maneuvering so that between the four of them each wild horse had been held by two ropes and two riders.

They had an idea what was coming.

They led the horses out of their pens and then rode all to the artificial lake out in the ranch, and when they approached the wooden signpost and its board nailed onto it had revealed a long line of scratch and tally marks that carved up the board as if a wild cat had gotten onto it. The lake itself had been shimmering in movement.

"Last thing I want to see is if you two are good enough to break these horses to saddle and ride. Put it in your all in the same way I hear you two are in the rest of things." Rollings said as he stopped Bluebone, a horse nearly as grand and powerful as Junior.

"Yessir." They both had responded, and again he scoffed.

"Thought I told you not to."

And Cold had told them to keep doing it.

The two new hands had seen the process of breaking horses, for Cold had been the man in charge of that. Every other day it had been that business of his, and he had earned his namesake with the way horses sloshed about in the pens amidst snow and mud and each day he had wandered into the manor taken his shower and dropped dead in his quarters in there until the next morning. Horses to him had been a part of nature that he as a Man had wholly the ability to control more than weather more than the stars. In him had been a boy who had known horses because in the soul of each horse had been the soul of all horses, and for each he spoke to had been the sum of all horses that had come before him and the promises made to all that that would come after. He had been good at breaking horses that he had been able to do it with just a rope, a hackamore, a pen, and his own soul, but Baile had let them know a few days ago as if knowing what was coming to them what they used the artificial lake for in terms of breaking.

"You want to live forever?" Cold had asked them, letting the rope go on the wild colt he shared with Norea. "Go break that horse."

"You too, Blondie." Rollings had let go of his horse. "If Cold's been teaching you right, you all should know the gist. Besides they're 90% broken."

"10%. Right." The young man had unmounted his horse holding the rope, Jerusalem getting away from him as he handled another of his flock even he knew had been dangerous.

The two new hands had looked at each other back to Cold and Rollings and then to the horses they were left with, the ropes going tight and the wild colts starting to wander as Jerusalem and Tiberius put their hooves into the sandy ground of snow. No preparation, no preamble. Just going and doing. Cold had brought some hackamores and deposited them on the ground with more saddles and saddle blankets. They each had gone to the sides of their animals, rounding the front as they had been told to do so, as they had seen of Cold himself, and with their hackamores taken from the ground they had slowed their walk in front of each horse as they stared back at them. Norea's horse had reared itself back but she had held out one hand and froze as she made smooth shushing noises with her mouth, and upon that spooking the young man's horse also reeled, but he had already been there at its nose.

Norea did not talk to her horse. She did not give the horse language, only sound, only her eyes. For Norea it had been like her first time in a mobile suit, too engrossed by a machine made for adults twice her age, and having to figure things out on the fly, for the sake of all their lives. She had reached up, atop the top of the horse's head and put down pressure as Lacey had often liked to teach horses to respond to, and it dipped its head down and she had wrapped the hackamore around its head as she looked into the horse's eyes and nodded up and down, putting her hand from the top of its head to against its neck, running the back of her hand down its nose to see her, to feel her, to recognize her. The young man's horse had been snorting at him all the while, bowing its head back and forth until it reluctantly got the hackamore on and the young man had been scared that it would take a bite out of his hand.

"You wouldn't hurt me, right?" He talked to the horse and the horse had given it some ample thought before shaking his hand off of him, about to take off, but the reins had been in his hand before it had happened and that unnatural strength that might've come from grafted blood and bone, a nutrient cocktail required of enhanced persons, had kept the horse where it had been. "Easy. Easy."

Norea had kept up a purr in her throat as she held the reins of the horse she led now, bringing it over to the dropped saddle and saddle blanket as the two onlookers led Jerusalem and Tiberius away with them, giving them space. She had dropped her hat and her jacket, knowing where she was to go, putting her hand on the horse as she held up the saddle blanket to it slowly, and what stirring it did do slowly went away as she patted down the barrel of the horse with her hand while shushing it, replacing the motion of her hand with the saddle blanket, to let it touch upon the horse. This had continued for several minutes as the young man had been struggling with his horse, it refusing to follow even with its hackamore on. Eventually she quickly placed it on the back of her horse, taking it on and off again and on and off again until her horse had no reaction.

"You taught her to do that?"

"Nah she's just a good observer."

She ignored the peanut gallery, repeating the motions again with the full saddle as the larger object, heavier, had put the horse skittish again, but she had kept the shushing motions with her mouth until it settled, quietly, its eye on that side of the head evaluating her truly.

Animals had always been easy to her, at least in understanding. What they did on Earth had been of a base understanding that could not be put upon by privilege or oppressions. They were animals in service to themselves, and no one blamed them for what they did, because it had been right and natural in the world. What she understood in animals was that there was nothing hidden in them, as much as there was nothing to hide in herself. Her hate had come from a place very real, and she had spent her entire life letting it take over her as an instinct. She had finally put the saddle on the horse and recreated that old saying: leading the horse to the water below.

"Come on, come on." The young man beckoned his horse, but still it would not move. The look in its eyes was wild, but yet totally looking at him, through him, as if it could see in him what no one else did and sought that there was no respect to be given.

Norea had led the horse to water, and, more than that, started wading in until she and the horse had been chest level. An old trick of the Comanche for those whose souls and spirits did not align with their animals, at least not at first. The horse had been very warm against her as she led it in, and seeing further she saw the markers for where the artificial lake had gotten deeper. The water was very cold, but she had been colder once. She brought the horse to a stand still, and as she dragged and smoothed her hand along its side, she found the stirrup underwater and pulled herself up and on.

In the water, the horse had tried to buck beneath her, but the weight of the water stopped the worst of the movements as she cinched herself in and put her boots into their loops, bringing the reins to her and taking a deep breath as the wetness of her drenching was electrified in the wind. She had been breathing and panting like the animal beneath her, and as it tried to rear up she took a breath and drew the horse forward, out toward deeper waters. The animal had wanted to force her off, to get rid of her entirely, but the pressure of water had kept down its erratic movements, and if it meant to leave she would pull and push the horse forward toward deeper water, for even horses had instincts to swim and to avoid it when possible. All the while her teeth gnashed, barely speaking language as she hummed and hollered down at the horse in notes and tones that could less be described as Human and more like a dog, half shivering but there for the horse, feeling it beneath her try to reject, but bit by bit, finding itself becoming used to it. She meant no harm to the animal, no power to show or give. She just wanted it to understand what she was doing, what she wanted.

She came from the Earth, and in some way the horse had recognized it as for thirty minutes in the cold Norea had bounced the horse back from varying level of waters in its attempt to get her off of her, until its instincts took over and let her remain. The want to not go into deeper waters trumped the instinct of getting that foreign feeling off its back, and that had been the trick to water breaking horses.

The young man had been having a tougher go of it, opting to pull the hackamore down on its head and make it acquiesce by force. These animals had been tools first after all. Feeling that pressure on its skull he had finally dragged it over to the saddle and the saddle blanket and done that process of acclimating it to the gear, and when it had gotten it out there was no shortage of scuffing to it. No shortage of sounds that noted its displeasure. He wanted to be done with it, so he had led the horse to the water as Norea had been leading hers out, and she had given him but the smallest of looks, the one that confided in him that it wasn't going to be that hard. The horse had to be dragged for him, into the water at a time, and he had gone in there cold and wet and bringing the horse up to its chest in water and he had begun that same process of trying to mount it.

Before he had been able to get both legs up and over the horse had jerked even in the pressure of the water, sending him off balance and then into the water below.

He swore, coughing out water that came in and now freezing cold, ampules of river grit on his back as he emerged to a horse that turned over and looked at him and his misfortune.

From the shore, the two cowboys watched as they had every other first horse breaking in their generation and the generation that came after. Everyone on that ranch had broken a horse at least once, just as tradition, and not all had been successful, the principle was at least they tried. The measure of people had been revealed, and as Norea emerged out from the water to place her coat and hat back on with her compliant horse, Cold had gestured to her. "She's got a natural talent in breaking, I can tell. Don't think she can wrestle a horse but she knows 'em."

Again, the young man had tried to mount the horse, but again he fell in a splash that the numbness had long since passed through. "You really want to do this to me?" he asked spitting out water that came into his mouth. The horse did not respond, and he led it deeper into the water, and as the horse began to understand how deep it was going to go it turned back before the young man could mount it, backing off, but not before he grabbed the line, being dragged up back to shallower waters. In his frustration he sought to catch one of the horse's forelegs with the rope to nearly drown the thing, rounding the back of the horse, but what had come up from the waters to him had been so fast, even with its drag, even with its cushion. Cold had reflexively tensed up as he saw it happen.

The back leg of the horse had come up from the water like a shark of ocean water, taking its surface level prey, and in that white flash the young man had risen his arm up to block that lightning fast blow, but his harm had been brought to sacrifice as in that sloshy wake its hoof hit his arm, and if he screamed it was covered up when he fell back into the water, still holding the rope.

He didn't hear the snap.

He did feel it, however.

Norea had saw it happen, pivoting her horse back into the water in concern, but a whistle that came from the shore had frozen the horse as it came up to its knees in water. It had been Lacey Cold, and she was not to go any further.

Obscenity and anger. "What's your god damn problem?!" He said half sloshing with water, up at the horse who he had still its rope. His body had made him lock his left arm across his stomach, putting pressure on it, straightening it even though something aching and piercing in its pain had been there, kept at bay by the water that now drenched him. The horse nickered at him finally, his fists clenched as it did so, its dirty teeth as if in scowl. He stood there, in pain up to his waist in water, looking dead at the horse, they both facing each other as more and more spit came up to his mouth that he had brought down to the ground, breathing as hard as each other.

He felt bad for this horse, brought in off the cold plain, put in a weird place where men afoot had one by one trained and broken the rest of them until at last they came for it. Cold had been firm with all the horses, but never abusive, never meant to establish power over the horses, and alone now in that water the young man had wanted so much to do so himself.

But that had only meant that in his reflection, he saw the horse hold its own feeling.

Fear.

Because what else would it fear then?

He had taken off his shirt in the water and rolled it into a rope wrapping it around his own neck and then underneath his arm as he hissed at any movement of it, cinching it tight on his neck as his one remaining free hand slowly reached up to the side of the horse and patted its neck. It was warm, and the horse did not move.

"I need to ride you. Is that okay? I need to get on your back and stay there and ride you up and out to where it's nice and warm and then your day is gonna be over. I know it might not make sense to you on why you'd do it, but a lot of things in life don't make sense, and I know you been through a lot already." He spoke softly, almost delirious again as pain swirled within him. "So have I." He rounded the horse to the stirrup beneath the water, and slowly, very slowly, as the horse jittered, he had put his boot into the loop and held himself there, head against its body and waited. "Come on. It's nothing. It's nothing. I don't want to hurt you. Come on."

He waited there for a long time, and when the sun was high in the sky he finally threw his leg over onto the saddle and pressed himself to the back of the horse's neck. Even as his arm pulsed in isolated pain, and he held it to its neck and he leaned down against it, and that he told it he knew what it was like to be scared. He told it that he too had been taken from where he had been born and brought to do something he never thought in all the world's turning he could be made to do. He stroked along its head as they sat in cold waters together, and he told him that what he was doing wasn't that bad, and that if the horse would just calm down then all the craziness of the world might make sense to it one day and that'd he'd be taken care of for as long as he lived. With his wet hair stinking to the horse's neck, the smell of it: an animal, stuck to him, and below his body he felt the horse's blood pumping and pumping through arteries and that he felt his own heartbeat too against it. He closed his eyes, and he let the heartbeat of the horse become his own, and he stayed there a long time as he numbed out both pain and himself. Every so often the horse would try to move under him, but he guided it to deeper waters and then it did so no more as they moved back and forth along a parallel line to the drop to the deeper. His poncho and hat had come off in the water. The horse was warm and he kept to it for his own life.

After some time, Norea, shivering but conquering, had brought forward the horse she had broken to wade again, up to the young man and his own.

Softly, she called out for him, and he opened his eyes to her: wet and ruined but doing what needed to be done, grasping the hat and the implement well close to her chest as his poncho and hat were on the saddle's horn.

"You good?"

The horse beneath him did not stir. It was frozen, waiting for him. He patted his left arm against it one more time, and then he had rightened itself on its back as the mouth rope and the reins were brought into his hands, and he had begun the slow process of bringing them back to shore. "Yeah." He said once. "I don't know. Maybe."

She turned her own horse around, and the young man held his horse to see if it would follow. It did not. With one hand he tied the reins to his wrist and beckoned it forward up out of the lake.

They'd taken three hours for this.

Before the two cowboys could congratulate them the young man had weakly said:

"Hey does my arm look broke?"

He had barely needed to move his body and gesture to it before Rollings had let out a curse. "Shit."

The ride back had been equal parts worry and equal parts praise, and with two new using horses Rollings had been happy and Cold had been indifferent about it save for the broken arm that swelled pretty badly. It was him that had used his cellphone to call into San Angelo for a doctor and Rolling that had taken him back to the fireplace as he and Norea were brought to it, a flame going, and he put up on one of the comfy leather chairs as Norea had wrapped his poncho about him.

"When did you get so good about horses, huh?" He whispered to her as she sat on the arm of the chair adjacent, a cup of coffee in her hand being nursed as Baile had been in there nursing him and his arm.

She shrugged. "I've always been good at breaking things I suppose."

"I remember my first broke horse." Baile said as she tended to the young man's arm, brought off her duties today at the farm and the chickens. "Same watering hole. Just like a hundred generations before us. I'm usually quick to call out bullshit, but some things are just tradition."

The young man had winced as more and more Baile had fiddled to set his arm right with a large splint, just to settle before their house doctor had come.

"Is looking like you two will be sticking around for a bit. I'm happy to hear." Baile had been there for them in those weeks, teaching and talking and guiding, same as any other, but she had made it her role to. She had been of Rolling and Cold, perhaps the third sibling to them, if not in relation then at least by history there at that ranch. She had always been there as they had, and she had known better the comings and goings of people and the changing of the guard. She was a good woman, rough, but good, no why to it.

There had been stirrings at the door, Cold and Rollings to the stable to go quarter the new animals leaving Baile with them both. She went to the door and she had chatted at who had come.

"I'm serious, though." The young man spoke to the fire even as he was talking to Norea. "How'd you just, do it?"

"Wish I knew how. It was mostly the horse, I guess. Like it wanted it."

"Guess I was just lucky."

"Yeah," she scoffed once. "Lucky."

"Now you best take care of this feller. He's shaping up to be a good ranch hand and you know how we are, Doc." Baile had brought the home visiting doctor, and the young man and the doctor had already been acquainted. It had been Doctor Hale Candy. Norea hadn't recognized him, being nearly out cold when she had been at all in that hospital. Hale Candy stood at the entrance of the living room with his bag slung on his shoulder, and he stared at the young man and the young man stared back. "What's the matter, Doc?"

Doctor Candy shuffled once, mouth dry as he shook his head and entered. "Nothing… Just I haven't had my coffee this morning."

"Oh? I'll go get some." Baile left, and Candy had been before them all: these two ranch hands who had been praised.

"What're you doing here?"

"Working."

Norea had passed over her hat from her right hand to her left, and although she did not know this man who appeared, she knew the shift of the air. She knew enough to keep that writing implement close at hand.

"Working?" Doctor Candy ghosted.

"No trouble to be had. And they know everything." The young man explained, biting through the pain that made him sweat. Doctor Candy had taken one long look at Norea and didn't believe it.

Baile had returned with a cup of coffee in hand, throwing her arm around the doctor in good jest. "Doctor Candy here has been the Blanca's family doctor for about thirty years. He knows how to treat us well, ain't that right Doc?"

Candy had taken the cup of coffee and put it asides, coming to the young man and kneeling before him, his back to the fire. "Now," he said much labored. "What seems to be the problem?"

His arm had been plain to see and the young man gestured despite his misgivings with the doctor that came. It had been slightly bowed at an angle.

"How did you get this." He asked accusatorily but Baile had answered.

"He was breaking in a horse Doc. The usual type of thing. His first time so who can blame him?"

He could apparently, looking at the arm and then bringing it off of the arm rest where it lay. Norea had stood up, and he stopped, turning over to her and looking at her with all the animosity in the world that he could summon in that civilized place.

"Doc? You good?" Baile had asked, arms akimbo and innocent.

He stared at this witch, illuminated by flame until he could no longer. "Yes, just considering what I can do for this boy here." He put the young man's arm back down and summoned from his bag an electronic device, he putting a long tube with a flat head along the surface of his arm until on the screen it was attached to saw what had happened: a fracture, but just that in its simplest terms. The doctor seemed much pleased at this. It meant he didn't have to be here long.

"It's just a broke arm, Doc." Baile had come over and leaned in, wondering about the mum silence of Candy that had not been typical.

"Yes, but I'm just wondering if he can take it."

"What?"

"What I would do."

Candy looked into the young man's eyes and then he went into his bag and brought out a tool by which fit the grooves of fingers. "I am going to extend your fingers to give traction to the broken bones here, try to right them before I set them in a cast. A reduction, that is." He looked back into his eyes and said this: "It might hurt."

With his free arm the young man wiped down his face. "I'm used to it."

The doctor had offered the young man the tool, and he had held it with his fingers before the doctor pulled his arm straight, pulling the tool down on his wrist as the very flesh of him on his arm, slightly bowed, slowly began to straighten itself out as if it had been a jack that was being used to set it right again. His pain had been on his face but he said nothing as the doctor pulled on the tool. Norea had been at his side then, a hand on his shoulder in silent reassurance. The doctor had pumped out again with the tool, and then he stopped, a sweaty breath that the young man held let go as the doctor put it back on the arm rest and went back into his bag with several rolls of cloth. "Baile?" He turned, and Baile had been there standing in the entry way, she nodded. "Can you go get me a bowl of water?"

The cowgirl went away, and when she did, the doctor had returned to the both of them. "This world really has gone crazy. I'm serving Witches."

Norea had stood back, the mechanical pencil in her grip. "We're not-"

"He knows." The young man answered with the ringing of pain in his ear. "He was the one that saw you at the hospital."

With a tight jaw he went back to the young man's hand, turning over to the back, running his thumb over the canals there made for otherworldly powers. "So you're one too." Imperceptible, even if touched, except for those who knew its mark. "I knew the work was never done."

"I don't know what you think we are, but we're far away from that." Norea stood over both of them, mechanical pencil in hand. "We're not witches."

"Yet you are. A broken horse is still a horse." The water sloshed in a metal bowl deeper in the house. "What devilry did you do to them to let you stay?"

"Nothing but honesty." The young man said. Suddenly his arm hadn't been an issue anymore as much as the man before him. Cathedra had been more than an organization; it had been the religion of men scared by powers they created themselves.

"I won't let you hurt him." Norea's hand is on his shoulder again, and it stays. The doctor had looked up at her with all the reverence of the Devil and sniffed once.

"I suspect you won't. But that's how this always starts, isn't it? Earthian Witches, Spacian Witches, it's all the same to us regular people. That's the way of things and you know it." He paused, looking to those pictures on the stone fireplace of families lived and worked and died here. "If you care and respect for anything of these people, you should run off. There is a curse about you. I know it."

Norea's hand had held the young man tighter, but she did not squeeze as his free hand came up in silent communion with hers and tempered her once. "You may want us to disappear. But we won't. We can't. And I know how that must feel for you someone who has suffered at the hands of Witches: that we keep marching on instead of running off. But I assure you, if it were so easy to disappear we would've done so a long time ago."

They sat their in silence, old battlefields returning for the both of them. In some deep part of her Norea knew the prejudice in this man because it was the prejudice she felt for Spacians. But that hate had nothing more to cut, and what use was a blade without war?

Baile returned with a bowl of water and they disengaged, and out from his bag had been a towel. All watched on intently as Doctor Candy washed the man's arm once and then dried, and then dipping the roll of bandages into the water, had begun the long process wrapping up the arm in one, two, three layers that as time went on each had hardened into a cast that wrapped his hand up to his fingers.

"Let's say a month, month and a half." He stood up, putting away his things. "You seem particularly healthy, young man."

"Are you… in a rush or something, Doc? Your bedside manner isn't usually this strained." Trying to rectify it in light of Baile's comment he had only give a sparse smile.

"I'm pressed for time today, unfortunately. And I must be off."

Hale Candy had left the manor as soon as he had come, his car stirring up and driving back down the road again.

In the months that followed, the two of them, the man known as Goldie and Norea Du Noc, became acclimated to the farm, and full on hands themselves there: given a place, food to eat, pay and work. They had come across another community again, an idyllic friendly one that did not need to know of what they came from and instead if they were willing to be fair and honest and hard workers. They got up at the crack ass of the day and worked until night, they worked in the slop of animals and at the whim of those paying, beset before that world as the seasons came and went. They became not witches, but a cowboy and a cowgirl, and as they settled into that life, they thought that maybe that was the life they had needed all along: to be kept in that place where no evil had been had except for maybe rough housing and drinking and smoking and rabblerousing, but all innocent to them all the same.

Soon, in their dreams blacked out from work, they returned, and in each of them they dreamed of the life they left, of the life that could've been, and, more importantly, how they might've died: as Witches.

Now they lived as people of the country.

There was no more hunger, no more cold or hotness that would kill them. This was the closest they had ever been to that normal life.

As Spring rose in the year Ad Stella 123, Norea Du Noc had left five pages in her sketchbook unoccupied, but found herself not enthused at all to use them. On a grocery run into San Angelo, she had put herself asides some money to buy herself another sketchbook bound in local leather, and what for she hoped had been the last time, she put that long used sketchbook away at the bottom of her things and started anew. She had climbed the stable on that temperate night as the young man slept soundly. She climbed up as the horses watched into the scaffolding and out to the roof, where she sat, spreading a saddle blanket across that slope for her to sit on, book in one hand, pencil in another.

Half a year homeless, and then half a year training up to this new life. It was a year ago when the orders for the strike against Plant Quetta had been sent down, and nearly one year until the end of that life had begun in the fire and shadow of Gundams. Nearly one year since she had fallen back to Earth with that boy in tow, that boy who for one year bore no name and waited for one from her. She had been no closer then then she had been on that night in Louisiana where he scrounged for his poncho which he still wore. This had been a year longer than she had expected to be a part of and not where she thought she would be. Yet this was what had happened to her. She would never complain about a continuing life. She had grown up too spartan for that, and yet there had always been that lingering discontent within her: that there had been a fight out there she was not a part of, that there had been people left to kill.

And yet there had been none left. Surviving was victory over the Spacian class, whose remains now as far as she knew only squabbled and bit amongst each other like dogs. But who was to account that victory? And in what war? She wish she knew, she wished for a lot of things.

Above, the night sky had been dead, and yet fully alive in its natural state. There had been no Humans up there in any significant form anymore, and perhaps there would again be, but the scars of the last century had now been imparted on the memory of Man. Maybe, she thought to herself, they could start it all over again right: the technology and surplus that had been of Space returned and forever working for Earth's benefit. Just maybe there could be a new start for all, without distinction. She just didn't want a part in it. That time for her was over.

Her implement hung fondly and idle in her hand, and she looked up into the stars for what she could capture, to take in their image into her book so that it may live forever, and the stars had answered her back very easily.

She put her implement into her book, and then she began again to draw Sophie Pulone as she deserved to be remembered.

Above her, a red comet falls and disappears behind the black mountains in the west, beyond all knowledge until time, time again.