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.

5. IV

IV

---

Ad Stella 126 -

Spring night on the ranch -

Ritual of the witches -

Win takes them to dinner -

Devala Tarakhovskaya -

At the ballpark -

Win, on nostalgia, the future, and gives credit to the Group -

Do you need me? -

Briefed for journey ahead -

Baile returns -

Setting off to Comancheria -

Through grain fields -

Cold, on love -

Griffin -

The Comanche -

Meeting Elan -

Journey West -

Tempest -

Nearly killed by horses -

El Paso -

The Delivery -

Time off -

They enjoy some time together -

The burning cross -

No hay mal que por bien no venga -

Juárez -

Qeilla Biden -

What Could've Been -

Belly of the Beast -

Permet -

The Padre arrives -

The Padre, on the work of Cathedra -

Judgment returns -

Companion killed -

An Evening Redness in the West -

Escape -

Who else could it be? -

Who the hell are you? –

---

Forward

The year was Ad Stella 126, and Norea Du Noc crested a hill on the Blanca ranch as she had for three years upon her horse Tiberius and let stay for a second as the night wind journeyed over her. Her skin had been much tanned to the work she's done and settled on a glow far healthier than any in its life before, and her hair, as was usual with most of the women in that camp, had been worn in a pony tail that crested down to her upper back over the jean jacket she wore. She looked well accustomed to this life because she had been. She made her way over one of the many streams that criss crossed the early summer landscape as a small electric lamp hung off her saddle illuminating the space around her. Her saddle had been of Mexican craft, a charm of a rabbit's foot hanging off to her right that had been there for no reason in particular other than it had been rude to deny that charm as a gift from one of the ranch children. It had been a recent addition and only her need to stay civil in front of children had kept her face neutral and a thanks kept. She didn't talk to her horse in any real fashion with language, but the occasional stroke of its neck or pat had been communication enough as Tiberius slowly trotted her across the pleasant night landscape. She rode with a sporterized 7.62 Russian rifle in her scabbard, just last year after a mauling of a good deal of cattle that she had been allowed to carry a weapon finally again, and when she did the feel of a weapon in her hand had never felt so much like a breath of fresh air. She had used it, from time to time, especially out on the trail. She had about five cattle trains beneath her belt from there to across the desert where she had nearly died years ago to further north near that Montana that the traveler Reyes had resided and although nowhere near the natural in cattle herding of those born and bred there in that country, she had been comfortable now in its rhythm.

She had become a breaker of horses, though break had been a rough word for the gentling that she had brought to them, and she had ridden horses as if she had done so all her life on the range, training them up and sending them off to parts of that new world that needed them. In her travels slowly she became the only person she had known to ever go to space save for one exception.

She brought her horse to a stop as out in the darkness a cookfire glowed. Tiberius had beckoned its head back to her and she nodded, and they had trotted out together toward it like a distant dawn that came from the east, descending the plains to a small clearing where there sat the man known as Blondie. The young man had seen her coming from much far away, settling her horse near Jerusalem as the two horses regarded each other and poked at each other with their snouts and continued to graze. She swung off, a bag in one hand, the hat that still held the mechanical pencil gifted in Christmas past much more and sandblasted, but still there on it.

"Norea." The young man said fondly for the new company he had, wearing a sweater in the night, in one hand of his a night vision scope, with his own bolt action rifle by his side.

He had been that week on duty for coyotes at the far northern edge of the ranch, and there he had set up camp as if he had been continuing on that vagabond homelessness that they started in. His hair had been kept in check, not reaching much further out than to give it curls and some fluffiness, but by no means what it had been years ago when it had been in emulation of a dead man whose body had been found in the Crystal Congress, or a wild unkept mess. He looked alive in skin and form, and shared between the both of them the beginnings of what they were to look like as adults, fully formed and developed. She to her credit had grown a few inches more as if her body had been waiting for the time to cap off her development, and he had filled out, those arms of his formed by constant work shone at firelight as they were rolled up.

"Hey," she greeted almost as warmly, letting her backpack fall with its supplies meant for him. It wasn't as if he had been completely isolated. He had been very readily in radio range and indeed the radio did set nearby, occasionally piping up with the words of Win Nguyen narrating a ball game being played in Austin that night to all the coyote scouts in every quadrant of the ranch, but she had turned it off as she settled besides him in a camping chair folded out, waiting just for her. "Baile was back in the ranch today to pick up a few more colts. She says hi."

"Oh? Is that so? Well, I'll be sure to visit her when I'm next in town."

A year after they had joined the ranch as full-time hands Baile had left to join the Texas Rangers. Her heart aching for what was right in the world with more and more reports of a world returning to itself that could be explained away by the Benerit remnants that now in that year had totally disappeared save for rumors and rumors of rumors speaking of underground cities and entire cities in on conspiracies. She went off, and became a moral woman and Texas was better off for it.

"You know," the young man had been holding a book in one hand, a French novel, one of a man who stole bread and the whole ordeal after that, placing it asides as he had been rejoined by her after a week apart. "Whenever they send me supplies when I'm on this duty, it's always you. Not Win or Javier or Alice or Telly. Just you." He had stated it as if just noticing but he had done so in that airy way that he knew he was looking for something in it, and that she, like all things about him, had held that answer within her.

"Yeah seems like I'm the only one that can deal with you. Where's the beer?"

He smiled at her poke, going back to his tent and bringing out the cooler and getting out two cans, one for her, and one for him. He cracked both and he had tipped hers in silent toast and they began drinking. They looked between the fires and the stars. There were no coyotes about them to worry about because he had done much a good job, as in all jobs he did for the ranch. They sat and they sipped and there between them had been that silence that had all been too comfortable about them as above, the distant movement of stars that were not stars at all, but the continuing movement of Man up there to reclaim a lost frontier.

Just as then, before a mosque in Nacogdoches, a question had been asked.

"Hey, Norea?" The young man looked over to her. She looked back with her head tilted, half in a sip. "Are you happy to be alive?"

She didn't pause at all. "Something close to it."

Three years they've been living that life, and in them both the knowledge that it had been longer than perhaps they had any right to do so. "Every day, for me, at least early on, felt like a cheat you know." He lets her know, talking up to the stars above.

"Hm?"

"A cheat, as if I was cheating some sort of story or grand plot. It's what I was made for, after all. Being here feels like it's too good for me."

Every day was some sort of fulfilling, some sort of simple that kept him real to that world and not the plots of others. He had been no closer to any desire for God or Christian faith as prescribed by his blood than any other time in his life, but of the life he lived he could very much say that it had been a godly life. A good life.

She had seen his conflict every day and at first she had taken some solace and joy in it: that there had been conflict in him that meant that evil nugget of Spacian birth had been withering away and away until one day she had figured it dead. But there was still that turmoil within him, only beset by quiet nights like this, with her.

She passed her hat down off of her head, tossing it into the tent where she was to spend the night. Since Baile had left they had been afforded her room and thus had made habit of sleeping together. It had had its roots so far in practical need that if there was affection of it, if there was intimacy of it, it had been put away and hidden in habit. The kiss that they shared in that church, the moments of hand hold, to foreheads touching, all put away not out of malice but for the uselessness of even mentioning those things at all.

Cold had often sent for her out here because they had been initiated in a way that had been intimate without label, and familiar as natural. In those year since there had been those errant touching of hands, of shoulders, light graces between them that had been in the place of word at time.

"In part, maybe I'm just worried about whether or not your happy."

"I am happy. I am." She growled toward the end, insulted that that hadn't been known or that she needed to say.

"Don't say it for my sake." She threw the nearly empty can at him as he finished speaking. Her time with Cold as mentor had grown her an appetite or a deference for idle drinking.

"Don't be an ass."

"It's one of my better qualities isn't it?"

"Annoying ain't that much better than stupid." He laughed as he had gotten the can from where it fell in his lap and tossed it into a plastic bag meant for his own trash.

"I guess I've just got a strange notion on what life is meant to be."

"It's alright." She spoke. "I don't think you really know what it's meant to be until it's behind you."

"Hope it's not behind me. That'd be pretty sad if the meaning was in there."

"Last few years have been nice though. Quiet."

"Quiet." The young man repeated her word, and indeed it had been. This was peace, bonafide peace. And here they stirred uncomfortably. She looked at him and his profile in the firelight and he, for now, had been satisfied with that answer. This side of his face she looked at did not bear the scars of her on him. It was a nice look to him. He had caught her looking and she had looked away, down to the fire and glad that the light that had been reflected on her face blocked out what red had found itself there for any reason at all. Above his fire a large black pot had lay warming, and in it had been something sweet, but she did not pry.

He smiled at her still at her own profile, at the sun that had brought out her freckles and of her lips, but looked no longer as he leaned back and brought his hands together and looked up at the stars again. They had been in silence for a long time until he asked:

"You think this life is the only one we have?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean is that, all of our experiences, all of our life, our time here alive, is that it? Do you think when it's done, it's all over?"

She thought of this question long before she asked. Death had always been there for her promising her that answer which she would never want to hear. She didn't know what it was about death: the pain of passing, the violence, the absurdity, or the unfulfilled fact of her life that would be taken in death, she does not know. All she knows is that fear that once consumed her, that he had known and felt for too.

Nowadays, she is no closer to an answer. She looked up at the stars with him to see if the question had been asked of him of it, and in those twinkling lights that were beset by an eternal darkness, she saw no help. "It's nice to think if it's not. But it probably is."

"Probably?"

"I don't know. You think I know?" She rose an eyebrow at him, but he shook his head.

"I just like hearing your thoughts, Norea."

"Tch." Again he went with his annoying words that were put somewhere within her she was annoyed to deal with. She never stopped him, however. Never let him down as he looked at her with a knowing, smug look about him. Was that the Original's charm? Or was that his own? Or did it not matter anymore? She didn't know many things and she wouldn't be bothered by not knowing. "I don't even know if this is how I'm supposed to be living this life honestly."

"Well, what do you want to do then? I'm sure we can ask for some vacation time, coming up."

It was an intriguing thought put by him: that this world was not so far gone that people lived and died only on one continent. There was international trade and commerce, and every once and a while a passenger plane from Austin would fly its route above them to Asia beyond. That the modern world had been existent out there regardless of what they were: cowboys on a ranch, had been reminded of them day by day and each time one of the Ranch children or the older hands had browsed their phones or tablets on lazy days.

"I'm not the vacation type of girl."

"You sure about that? Maybe a trip to the Maldives would do you well? Paris?"

"On our salary?"

"Why not? Are we saving for anything in particular?"

They weren't, and they hadn't been spending much at all. Poverty and homelessness had made them frugal to now, and they only had bought the most necessary of things from the markets and co-ops of San Angelo: boots and clothes and gloves.

"You aren't a little doll in princeling's clothing anymore."

"I wouldn't want it any other way. But I think a vacation would do us some good. Maybe get these thoughts out of my head about this or that about life." He had gone out of his chair to the pot, peering into it and much settled, he closed it down.

"I want you to know that if this was the rest of my life, it'd be okay. Don't mistake that." She said in all of her seriousness that once had been her bar none. That unflappable, near cold hearted woman that had been numb to the world, melted down by good people and a good place. "If you got problems with it. We can go. Just like before."

"No. No." He said softly, slowly. "We have a good thing here."

He had returned to his chair after checking on what had been culminating in his pot, and he had grabbed another beer for her and for him and they sat there before warm fire.

She had no plans for her future, but without trying her mind had always imagined that this young man would be there, whether she wanted it or not, but more often than not she did not mind that thought at all. She followed him that day in Asticassia a lifetime ago because he had understood her, and that had meant so much. What else could she do? Where else could she go? Save for the errant kick to the skull by a horse, any banal threat to her that befell any in that line of work, she was going to live, and live long.

"Any progress on my name situation?"

"Probably something with an A. I feel like you're pretty close to an A-name. Alexander maybe."

"Alexander's pleasant."

"Well now I can't use it anymore because it is pleasant. You can't enjoy your own name too much."

"I really might just be called Blondie for the rest of my days with how it's coming together with you."

"I wasn't the one begging me with tears in your eyes saying you need me for "everything"."

"I thought you quite enjoyed that."

"It's a burden. An awful burden." She took a swig to hide laughter that was bubbling up but that too had hid nothing. "All today, people were just burdensome. You know that?"

"Oh I wonder why." He looked at her with a certain conniving look, his head cocked on the heel of his hand. "Oh Norea, one of these days you're gonna just have to accept that there can be people out there that would care for you without condition or a long childhood of prejudice behind you."

"Annoying. You're all so annoying." She said, she decried, but those words had no standing. "Now that Spacians are just…Gone, I've got to just, I don't know, start hating particular parts of Earthians now?"

"You don't have to do anything like that, dear Norea."

"Stop that. Also yeah, I do. Otherwise I'm just all…"

"You don't have to finish that." He said once, letting the motions of the beer in the can swirl about in its tin, feeling it whirlpool within. "I know. I know."

He knew what she meant long ago; that she had been cut from her strings with him.

"I'm staying the night, by the way." She said more of fact than request; more condition than question. "Want me in or out?"

"Well I've missed my personal heater this last week."

"Not my fault when they put you back together they made you run cold."

It was refreshing, in their loneliness that had not been often nowadays, even in their room in the bunkhouse that shared its wall with Win Nguyen, that they could talk so frankly and real. That for as little as they hid, they still hid from the people who took them in. Doctor Candy had disappeared in the following weeks after the young man had broken his arm, and his position replaced by another country doctor all the same. The secrets between them were stressed because they were kept, even when no one had suspected anything of them, it had been a part of them that rot.

It was a cloudless night, and so even without a fire they suspected they could see just fine in that big sky that Texas had been known for. A beautiful sight.

"I always remember, going closer to the cities, that the night sky would just blot out from the light pollution. I don't think that I've seen a polluted night sky in years at this point." Norea was lost above in them as a second beer had become three and a fourth into five and six. On his part the young man had just gone to his flash and for the whiskey there, and when that had come out he wordlessly passed it back between them, the nozzle still warm with each other as they passed, hand to hand, until the flask was half-full when it started topped off. A nimiety of warmth spooled between them in their gut, and it was comfortable, and it was nice, and it had been nights like these that had made them truly glad for where they ended up.

"They really bother you today?" The young man asked after a while.

"Lil bit." She responded. "Just gets real loud and you know how I am with people."

"How about with me?"

"If you've got a present somewhere around here I'm gonna leave."

"No. No. Have a little faith in me."

"I got faith in you, just wish I didn't need to keep reminding myself of that."

"Oh you really do still hate me." She threw another can at him, and it clunked harmlessly off his shoulder as she had caught a laugh in her words.

"Shut up. I don't. Don't say that."

"You hate me, Norea Du Noc, I know it in my blood and bones. Oh how I know that you must think me a Spacian, whose only God is Capital and always has four scoops of ice cream for every dessert and gold leaf with every meal."

"Keep testing me, cowboy." She liked the feeling that arose in her, being driven up the wall like this with a young man who had modeled some part of himself after a stubborn, obtuse man.

"Well, if you insist so…" He had gotten out of his chair one last time, peering into the lid of his pot, and the smell that came was a smell that could not be mistaken: deep and luxurious. He had taken the pot and, with his riding gloves, flipped it over onto a waiting plate, and she had covered her face and groaned.

"I should've just ridden off back to Nacogdoches. Should've just called up the American Dawn of Fold chapter you stupid dramatic idiot." She spoke into her hands, but it could not hide him for the efforts of the day, going into her supplies that she had meant for him and finding the can of whipped cream to be used, nearly half of it used up as she heard him walk from ground to her.

"Open your eyes."

"I open these eyes I'm giving you scars on the other side of your face."

"I'll risk it."

"You'll ensure it."

What she could not see the rest of her senses had picked up in the proximity of heat, the deep smell of chocolate, and that annoying young man in her ear that, despite everything, had reminded her as everyone else did that day that it had been her birthday.

"I'm not going away, Norea."

She sat there, eyes closed for a long time, and he did not move.

Eventually she did open her eyes, and there had been a rather crude, but well-formed chocolate cake before her the size of her head. Rimming the top of it had been a white bushy line of whip cream spread that in the center put out a number: 21. She placed the cake on her lap and she did not move, and its warmth had been very much appreciated as the night went on. He kneeled before her, and he began humming, humming a song that when the hands at the bunkhouse had started going along she had burst out running and saddled her horse and ran away from it to here as if it had been all calamity again. Eventually, vibration of his throat did turn into word, and in spoken song, he orated so very softly:

"Happy birthday, dear Norea, happy birthday to you." And the fires and the reflection of the fires had warmed their faces, burning brightly to those who had learned that days like this were worth living. She sat there silent, unmoving save for her face that twisted to the jury of her eyes, unable to find an emotion to show and left in turmoil. He looked up at her, and he waited for her.

When it was her turn for coyote duty, he had been waiting for her to return in the morning.

When he tried again to break a horse, to do it rightly and properly, she had waited for him at edge of the ring, looking, yelling out advice in a voice that she had not used often at all, but for his sake.

When she had come down with the flu, he had left the bed to her that week, sleeping in the stables with the horses and hay again, waiting for her to heal.

When he looked out at the stars some nights, she had gone out there and wordlessly stood by in solidarity for the existential war that he fought some nights, in his dreams with the many faces of those that came before him and those that might've been after.

In those three years they were held to account to work, to duty, to their fair ranch family, and, perhaps most important, to each other. All this unsaid but known.

As had been unsaid all those years ago in a room to hide in, when she had lashed out at him in anger and despair, it had been true now. No one would understand her but someone like her, and that had been true always vice versa.

He kneeled, he waited, and biding his time he had gone into his back pocket and taken a match, striking it against the rough strip of the book, and placed it in the middle of the two and the one of the age she had been now. Her body had blocked it from the wind, and eventually he did place his chin upon her knee, and reflexively one hand of hers had reached out to draw in an arm of his, running the curve of his shoulder beneath his sweater with her thumb.

"I should've expected something like this after last year." She turned her face up, snuffling once.

"I might not be as adept at drawing like you, but I did fair enough, didn't I?" Just as she had once gifted him a rendition of himself, he had tried to do the same to her. It was all too scratchy, too many strokes, and that she had appeared more shadow than figure in that sketch, but it didn't matter. It had been her, and it had been given for her twentieth, and she kicked him out of bed when he had revealed it and only five hours later, two hours before dawn and when they had to work the next day, she had retrieved him from his place at the stable and thrown him in bed to at least get some good sleep.

"Screw your name, we don't even know your birthday." She tried to put that harshness to her words but none would flow out, and he had rolled his cheek against her kneecap softly and shrugged.

"Let's call it today then. Easier for the both of us."

The match burned, longer perhaps than it had any right to, but it kept up as finally her form softened, and she had figured that at least one person, properly, in any festive manner, could wish her the best on this day. She didn't mind it from someone who had wanted nothing but the best for her on any day.

"Well. Shit. Happy birthday." She told the young man, and he had smiled as if it had been the first he had been hearing of it. It had been nice hearing those words.

"Happy birthday to you too. Now, blow out the candle, make a wish."

"Wishes are for witches."

"Magic will exist with or without us, what's a little harm away from prying eyes?"

A ritual then, done in the wilds of the world with no men other to see it. She wanted to be done with this already (not really). She wanted to at least eat the cake while it was still warm. She wanted to do so much in this life, despite it all.

She thought of a wish, a perfect wish, and then she blew, the smoke that came from its outing ghosting over the young man's face.

Norea Du Noc blew out the match, and then the world went dark.

The thoughts of what life they were living went on.

A week later, and they're on the way to San Angelo as the sun set and having allowed the young man to wish her happy birthday earnestly had eventually broken something in her to allow someone else to do so. At least Win Nguyen had been their age and understood a little better about what quantified as a proper celebration. She and the young man had rode Jerusalem and Tiberius alongside his own horse, a Belgian mare named King James, the sun off behind them in a beautiful orange glow. They rode that dirt road like the ancient myth that those that dressed and rode like them did, and in the howl of the land beneath Western skies had been the Comanche whispers in the north, and the gentle caress of a landscape that had survived generations of Man and would do so more into the end of that world.

"Nori, why drawing?" Win had swung his face over his shoulder to look back at the two of them as always they were together. "Me and Blondie were out on the range a few days ago and he doesn't ever want to talk about you, which is strange seeing as you two are dating."

"We aren't dating." The young man spoke calmly, perhaps for the dozenth time he had to clarify in his life and she twice that. He brought his hands over the horn of his saddle and rode it low, giving her a smile of some coy fielding. Win Nguyen was a chatter, and he had always been an entertainer of some kind, but the topic on that ride had been her. She twitched an eye at him before looking straight ahead unenthused.

"Coulda fooled me." Win looked forward again at San Angel in the distance. It'd still be some time before they arrived in town. "But I'm serious. Why? I mean we all got our own things to occupy ourselves. I got my books, Goldie here's got you, and you got sketching or some shit. So why? There gotta be a why to it."

She had a new notebook on her now meant for sketching, and in it had been horses, had been the ranch and its hands and sometimes the sunsets or sunups that had littered the horizon every morning or every night. They were drawings of eggs and the chicks that came from them, or sometimes even those breakfast cowboy meals they ended up as. They were of the world around her and its living and they had been sketches that she hadn't minded sharing at all. It remained on her now, tucked either in saddle bag or in jacket pocket or sometimes the sewn on pocket of that worn blanket-turned poncho that the young man wore still now.

She answered, "You can keep things alive sometimes by drawing stuff."

Win considered this as he rode on on his big horse. He wore no cowboy hat, he had looked more city dweller than cowboy in all his time out there down to the band tee-shirt he wore, grunge and rocking that spoke to a band named "Ghoul's Own" out from where he came from. He had been an expert rider despite it, taking his feet out of the stirrup and yet King James had gone marching on, he leaning back on the saddle as if it had been some sort of lounge chair, facing them both. He raised a finger up like a gun, firing off into the distant behind. "You can do that by taking a picture too, you know, but yaren't a photographer last I checked."

The young man rode in silence, watching between her and Win, not intruding, but it was his eyebrow raise that had mirrored Win's question in a far more tolerable way. She answered. "For me, drawing, sketching, that's processing. What's in my book might not be picture perfect, but what I felt about whatever I'm drawing, it's there, truer than anything. It's about intent."

"Intent." Win leaned back, looking at that orange sky above him. "You're sure some sorta special. Thinking like that. Like some warrior philosopher I tell ya."

"Quit picking her like a cactus, Win." The young man spoke up finally. "I believe she only tolerates it from me."

"Yeah I wonder why." Win snickered, pivoting back forward as they continued on.

Jerusalem neighed quietly as if speaking to the other horses, but they did not answer. Dust of the world kicked up beneath them, and they trotted forward like ghosts in their commute that nearly killed them a winter before. Now this had been just like any other night, idyllic and picturesque and temperate and comfortable. These sunsets were only of Earth. Nowhere in Asticassia had they been the norm, nor in any space station regardless of any artificial stand-in. Only the sun could bear sunsets, as it would for a practical eternity. This had been frontier country once, and perhaps it had been again; a frontier of the world having rubber banded back into itself, for as Space had become dead, yet to be rediscovered, those that remained had to turn back on in themselves. Every once and a while, land speculators and realtors would drive in their cars not fit for dust roads out to the manor at Blanca and they would meet with Rollings who often pitched him ideas to lease his land out for factories or warehouses, and despite the financial incentive the man had all denied them. He had believed the same as any who worked that land, despite his business mindedness nowadays: that this was good country and would remain so for as long as he had been steward.

Out there, wild horses rode, set loose to live freely for a while until their day of collecting came. They bowed their heads in the shadows like in prayer, feeding along green grass, and even if they could not be seen they could be heard in their running.

Tiberius had looked errantly out there toward the sounds of its brother horses, but did nothing of it as they continued the long travel down to San Angelo.

They arrived in San Angelo to a bustling evening, where cars and trucks and other horses fought for place on the road, and Texas Rangers devolved to traffic cops stood at intersections directing traffic. Throughout the town, those who knew Win or Norea or Goldie had waved and cried out, and they had all waved their hands or tipped their hats as they kept their reins on their horses tight. San Angelo had been a town of the west and a town of rising modernity all the same. They rode down those streets full of street lights and young men and women going about their evening; some rural approximation of any other day in any other modern city: a videogame store had been selling recently released consoles and titles, and many children gathered around it watching the photorealistic war that had often been the subject of those games. In another corner, a fried chicken chain had opened a location there, and people had marveled at Korean fried chicken in its crunch. Ride sharing cars had shared the lanes with their horses as in distant conversation someone complained about a social media streak being broken with a girl they had been talking to in Boston.

Win seemed much averse to it, but to all else it had been the reality of the world continuing without Space above to dictate its trends, its sufferings. Utopia was still far away, and perhaps would never be, but the world had seemed much freer now.

The governor out of Austin had been campaigning in a year's time for the presidential race for the American continent, and Texas had been his case for the country at large: A place of safety and splendor that had toughed out the years beneath Spacian oppression and proved that Texas Tough had been something that could apply to all Americans.

The three of them trotted down those roads until they got to the town stable, exchanging money for slips and boarding for their horses as they dismounted on the far side of town where the more well-to-do residents had spent their nights often. Before they had even left, a woman had appeared, rushing them down it seemed until Norea and the young man recognized her and got out of the way, she tackling Win into the ground amidst hay and near horse shit.

She spoke a different type of language, one even more disjointed than anything, and it was not what people expected out of someone who looked like her: dark skin and braids and well put together as if she had been more Victorian than Cowboy. Her name was Devala Tarakhovskaya; a black woman born and raised in distant Vladivostok, brought to this country by way of the Port of Houston and a cargo mariner family that had left her alone in San Angelo instead of on the waves. She had been a teaching assistant at the local middle school, known as Miss Tara, and she had been a wonderful teacher by all regards according to the ranch children who had been tended to by her, even if she had been no older than any of the three who met her that day. She had also been Win's longtime girlfriend.

A sweet ensemble of laughter and pecks had follow their collapsing on the ground as the barn manager opened his mouth to warn them about what had been on the ground, but said nothing and left them all. Norea had puffed her cheeks in slight annoyance at this PDA before her, but she was never one to call out these things. Eventually the couple rose from the ground, and brightly in a yellow dress Dev curtsied once. "Norea, Blondie." She greeted as Win hung off her arm. "How's my man been doing? Behaving?"

"He keeps asking to use my gun when we're out there, thinks he can outshoot me." The young man shrugged. "I think you ought to tell him how to be humble one of these days."

"It's not my fault you shoot like a burger king." Win brushed himself and Dev off as he groaned, adjusting his gun belt that held a silver and shining Colt's Single Action Army, more statement piece than anything to be used. Where Norea had been a good breaker of horses, the young man had been a good shot, if not the best on the ranch: courtesy of combat seen and training put in that many had theorized he might've had been brushed off. He had been too young to fight, after all. The fundamentals of marksmanship remained between mobile suit and man and he had brought it back to hunting game on the trail or deterring coyotes.

They were out tonight on Win's beckoning with the excuse of Norea's birthday, the four of them, off to dinner at a quite nice establishment. They walked there, and with the appearance of Dev on Win's arm the man had become quite civil and relaxed, tamed and pliant and agreeable in public as she had talked of her kids in class and him about theories on why children were inherently evil. Walking behind them Norea had long noticed how like a chain Win and Dev had been connected by arm.

She wordlessly rose his right arm, looking up at the young man, and he, after blinking several times in some confusion, wordlessly acquiesced with his small smile that she had long been amenable to. It had been very much her arm he had been hanging off of despite the height difference, but it worked well enough as they walked those roads as the sun overhead seemed paused in sunset. It would be at least another two hours before night took completely. In the far corner of San Angelo had been a baseball stadium that had been left roughly incomplete for its purpose as a baseball stadium, but the seating that it had accrued with its tiered platforming left it an ample blueprint for an outdoor theater, where a pitch would be instead host to a stage. San Angelo's dine in theater had been both a movie theater and a live performance venue based on the night, and more than that, a restaurant where its occupants had looked down from their seats at whatever was being put on. Entering through those front doors into what would've been a stadium did not betray its origins as a concourse and lobby for all of those looking for seats at a sporting game, but it had been spruced up and made polite, more homely, wooden paneling and soft warm lighting. They took off their hats and handed off their jackets and poncho to door staff waiting, being given a ticket for them as well. A waiter had approached the four of them, and before he had even made half that distance:

"Oh god dammit." All the cowboys and cowgirls from the Blanca ranch had been known in some measure. Even the young man and Norea had been recognized from their time as vagrants. For Win he had been, in all words, a personality. The waiter who approached them from his podium, an older Mexican gentleman, had nearly waved off Win as he went for the hug, Dev giggling all the while. "I thought I told you you're not allowed in here unless you pay your tab, Win."

"Well I'll be sure to right all wrongs and do that tonight, but hey I've got a small party here. Don't leave me hanging Luis." Win had given off his big smile, and suddenly the impression that not all Spacians had to have born on Earth crossed through Norea's mind. Win was a certain type of sleaze but he hadn't the Capital to do anything with it that would make him abhorrent. "Got us good seats on the balcony? But far enough away that we can talk. You know how I am."

Luis had groaned once, looking back at the other waiters waiting to go bring people to their tables that day before shrugging. "You're lucky we know where you live, hermano. You've somehow got the highest tab in the county right next to Ranger Dedman."

"You know I'm good for it here."

"Rollings is good for it."

"I gots my own cash. Don't you worry about that."

"Yeah no wild business tonight then. Speaking of Dedman he's supposed to be in house tonight for a show. Something about a tribute ceremony or something."

"We'll all be on our best behavior." Win had slid back, throwing his arms somehow around all three of his guests tonight.

Luis had led them all through the great openings to the concrete stands, the home field of what was supposed to be a national baseball team now offering an odd and grand open air amusement fare. They were taken up to another landing, the seats meant for spectators still kept as such as above them on the more flattened walkways had been made seating arrangements along railings, looking down on a stage where currently local singers had been making their folk music and light applause came from them as the harmonics of that space made their guitars sing a ghostly, airy sound. They sat, Norea next to the young man and Dev next to Win, and Luis did defer some of his misgivings with Win and instead spoke to Norea instead. "Alright my name is Luis I'll be serving you tonight, would you like anything to drink or start off with?"

She had ordered the ginger ale and whiskey cocktail and the young man had opted for a highball, while Dev and Win had both ordered five dollar milkshakes. "I can drink booze anytime on the ranch. But a good milkshake?"

"Oh the milkshakes here are incredible, you really should advertise them more Luis." Dev had spoken up as the rest of them had started unfolding their laminated menus. They had ordered fries for the table and then subsequently had found out what they had wanted to eat soon after before Luis had left at all. The orderings of the Blondie and Norea confounding Win especially.

"Jesus Christ I bring you to a restaurant that uses our grade A cattle and you guys order chicken and fish. Now I know you two are-" Win stops himself, leaning in, gesturing up to the sky and all that that meant. "You know. Lame."

The young man had ordered himself some fish tacos, and Norea for herself chicken cordon bleu. The idea she had been at a point in her life where she had been at a sit down restaurant, eating as if this had been her normal. And yet it had been now. It had been a relatively full house tonight, with others dressed not like them but more akin to city folk eating and wining and looking down upon the stage as a lonely cowboy sang his tunes, singing about his mama and what she was right about in life.

"So, happy birthday Norea." Dev had said in her thick accent, "How old are you?"

"Twenty-one, abouts. I'm not too sure but I'll say twenty-one."

"How does it feel?" Win asked, he had been not too far ahead of her in terms of age. "I swear I only felt twenty-one when I hit twenty-two."

"If I'm going to be honest I haven't felt any different since I was fifteen."

"You sure about that? What you going out to space and coming back over a whole ass ocean not gonna change you any?" Win pressed on. "Life simpler for you back then or no?"

"My life's always been complicated." She let her hand rest on the laminate menu, kept their for dessert's sake, slightly moving it up as if it was no big deal. But that's all that she could say on it for her past. Her past had been complicated filled with war and struggle and not exactly the dinner conversation that Win had been so set on having. "If anything it's simpler now."

"Ain't that the dream." The young man had been silent, very willing to just sit and listen as his ears had been otherwise focused out down toward the stage. "You know, some people tell me their childhood is what we all as we grow up want to go back to. Nostalgia. Shit like that. This whole thing," Win gestured up at the whole of it: of San Angelo, of Texas, of what they wore and the jobs they had. "It's some sort of traditional that people would like to imagine their childhoods being and if they got back here the world could be made right. But you know, sounds like you disprove that theory."

"I got nothing to say about that. The past is the past." She told him.

"Aye fair enough. I got more to say but I want my god damn milkshake first."

The singer continued to sing of old times gone by and the horses that ran and the sun that did set. He sang of his grandfather in heaven and his father in hell, and if any listened to him truly none did in that stadium. Luis had come back with their drinks, informing them that their meals would be back in short order, and as he left Win had offered toast.

"To Norea, twenty one years old and a hundred more to go."

She didn't mind Win at all, nor anyone she fell into on that ranch. They were all Earthians like her so that had meant something enough, but that designation could last for only so long without the distinction against those that had been in Space. She rose her glass too and began to drink. The young man all the while began to talk candidly with Dev and Win, on how work was going with Dev and how in all reality that being a teacher might be something he would've liked to do some day, when his bones got too brittle for the work of a cowboy or when something in him broke a little too hard.

"Oh, you'd be great with kids, Blondie." Dev had reached out and touched the young man's hand. "I know all the kids from the Ranch say you're their favorite."

"Yeah?" He sipped some of his highball. "I don't think I'm treating them any different from any of the other hands."

"You treat them like kids. Which is odd." Dev narrowed her eyes, more at herself and her inner thoughts. "They always want us at the school to treat them like adults, but they say you're fun about it."

There had been about six kids at the ranch younger than them, all still in primary school and all with varying opinions on wanting to stay on the ranch, and for his part he had told them of Space and what was out there and realized that perhaps he shouldn't be talking about that place so candidly, but the damage was done and the kids often came to him asking about zero gravity or Space food or sleeping in Space or what fun could be had up there and for all the stories he told he had to amend that he preferred being on Earth better.

"I guess I'll take that as a compliment then."

"You should." Dev pointed out as both she and Win took to their milkshakes at the same time. "Ish good to be in touch with children. Unlike Norea here, who they all say is scary."

"Good." Norea's eye twitched.

"You sure you guys aren't together? They say opposites attract." Win had jeered again some of the shake on the corner of his mouth.

The young man rose his hands passively. "Me and Norea are very close, but- all that stuff is sorta outside of us for now."

"For now?" Norea and Win had both said at the same time with varying forms of inquisition.

"Ah- Well."

Win had half laughed as he pulled back the conversation before Norea's raised eyebrow, that slight rosiness to her could be interrogated. It was too early into the dinner for that type of talk.

"When'd we become friends, Blondie? About two years ago when I came into the bunk house when you were doing that wisting thing you do at night, and you saw I had bust my head open." Win had moved some of his longer bangs to show the thin cracked line above his right eye. "I'd gotten caught out in the cold doing fence repairs and I figure I drink henny on the way back to get me warm and hell I got hammered as shit. Almost made it too but I fell off my damn saddle at the stables."

"I remember." The young man had been thankful for whatever tangent Win was going to go on. On the stage the singer had been shuffling out in exchange for another to light and polite applause. It had been a lady that came out, much in the white dress of Marilyn Monroe, a small stage band behind her beginning to ready itself for something more retro, more AD 50s. "Win have you always been like this or do you just think that having us around gives you more leeway to goof off?"

"Well I'd rather grab dinner with you two than with Cold's single word at a time ass."

"Oh don't be like that with Cold." Dev had sterned. "He just is very efficient with his words."

In the ride over Win had talked more than the both of them had heard Cold talk in all those years there but they figured in all groups there had to have been at least one chatterbox.

The thought that he and Sophie would've either been great friends or at each other's necks arose in Norea at that moment, and indeed, there was parts of Sophie in him that came from a crassness of enthusiasm or some sort of joy about being in some twisted, deranged way. Sophie would've been twenty one, she realized, right there with her, but in her sketchbook she had been immortalized at the age she died: at seventeen. Just like everyone else up there, frozen, never getting older, never realizing what could've been for them. She wonders what she might've looked like then and there at that age, but such thoughts were never ones she liked to entertain while her day was still ongoing. Above the sunset did darken more, the moodiness of the sky meeting her memories at that very moment and she turned away as Win and the young man continued to speak, to talk. They two had been friends in a far less abrasive way that Norea would admit to being friendly with him. Often times the two had been paired up if it hadn't been him and Norea for tasks of the day. Cold had taken a shining to Norea, just because they probably shared that efficiency with words with other people, saved for only one particular. They rode, and in Cold had been a man she saw Olcott in, and she wondered now what he was doing on this Earth without an enemy.

Marilyn Monroe's impersonator down there had spoken into the mic, introducing herself as none other, and if people had doubts about it, she had winked to all, why not just pretend for a little while she lived and breathed and had been there for them all. And when she started to sing to piano and cello and guitar backing it her voice had been like glass. They all four looked down, munching on fries delivered.

Win began to speak and all three braced themselves in their own way. "I come from Seattle, you know. Right at the heart of a little slice of Space on Earth. Lived right on down near the Seattle Art Museum, near Pill Hill. Seattle, just full of hills, you know. But, anyway, the entire city was turned into a space port a hundred years ago after Seattle got bombed out during the old wars, and part of the reconstruction effort, parts of the city were built up exactly as they were. Not like, these buildings were restored or anything, for everything was flattened. I'm telling you that these places were built up, ground up, to be old as shit at birth. The Space Needle? You know it? Destroyed, collapsed, entirely. Yet Benerit, or at least one of its companies, built it up exactly how it was a hundred years before. They only changed one thing."

"What's that?" The young man asked.

"The plumbing."

Norea nearly choked at the comment before slugging down some of her drink, bubbling away debris in her throat.

"But I'm telling you. People got an obsession with the past, the image of the past." He splayed his hand out past the railing he had been up against, the faded out blue paint that noted that their space had been for the handicapped below. He gestured to the crowd, to Marilyn Monroe below. "The closest thing most people have to a capital P past is their childhood and so that's where all those complicated feelings come from. As if there was something in that time that they knew they could change to set right an image of their future that was perfect. Load of shit. I tell you."

"Isn't that true though? That if our past went one particular way that we could have a perfect future?" The young man asked, and Norea much agreed with his musings. Dev had been on her phone, browsing her notifications and the news absentmindedly as her boyfriend had gone on with one of his many thoughts she liked to hear him go off on in bed about.

"That's assuming a false authority my friend. We always think our intended actions have intended consequences, but I don't think we can divine that at all." He shrugged. "I don't think we can speak of the past that wasn't because it's our notion that we can only speak about the past that came to be and the world of it. Yeah sure, I can think about say, what would I be if I didn't meet my beautiful Tara here-"

"You'd be a wreck, Win."

"Oh I love you too. But I'm serious. The past is barely anything. The past might advise the present but it advises me just as well as like, any of those billboards we see about town. How much can that really be? How much power does the past really have? Same as anything really that lives on in hypotheticals and theories and dreams. Oh dreams. I seen my father in my dreams and he's a stranger to me there." Luis had come over with another waiter, all three of them handling their dishes as they came, each spread out, and as he left Win had gone ahead and taken his trifold and stuffed some bills in his apron. "See I'm not that bad, Luis."

Luis didn't respond other than giving Win a shifting look, regarding the others at the table and telling them to earnestly enjoy. The food was looked, smelled, and had been by all accounts a good meal. "Finally something that isn't cowboy something." Norea whispered to his side, and the young man agreed with a small huff of his nose. Win had taken a a fork and his knife and stabbed it into his steak, bloody and wet, and left it off with this before they all dug in. Dev had spoken grace and the young man ghosted her words out of habit. Not all the hands said grace but when they did they joined in the silence all the same.

"What's left in the past is held in the past forever. You can't go digging it up without destroying what's here. I'll give the Group credit." Win said a name all so blasphemous nowadays. "They always looked forward. Always forward. While, say, even people like Cold or Rollings, a whole host of politicians in this state and all over the world, they keep looking back into the past for when they were greater then. But again, you just can't think too much of what was or what could've been as much as you should focus on what will be and will come."

"Do you know what that future is?" Norea had looked Win dead in the eye and he had much stilled by a gaze described as icy. He cleared his throat.

"Hell no." Win had shaken his head. "And I don't want to know, but I hope it's with my lil love bug here." He and Dev had sat out in another bout of couples loving of each other.

"Right in front of our food too." The young man muttered, and that had gotten a chuckle out of her.

They ate, they talked, and even Norea spoke more as the whiskey hit her.

"Children are evil." She said as a response to Dev asking if she would come visit one day and teach children how to sketch as she did. "I've seen it, they can do some wicked things and I want no part in it."

The young man had put the broad of his palm against her back and rubbed it down, and Win found it in him to agree. "If I'm going to die, I guarantee it's going to be a kid that's going to do it."

"Aw, you don't mean that, Norea, do you?"

"Well I was a kid I know I was messed up." The young man had rubbed her back just the slightest bit too hard, she looking over to him and the incredulous look he gave her the one that put her to stop, leaning back in her chair as cheese and fried chicken made its way through her.

The birthday cake was still better in her opinion.

A few singers deep, and the manager of the stadium restaurant had called them all to attention. "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to remind you that all of the proceeds tonight will be going to our local chapter of the Texas Rangers! Let's give a round of applause for San Angelo's own Carson Dedman! Carson, have you anything to say to our crowd tonight?"

At the near front of the seatings, where the VIPs and the more well to do had been had been a circle of Texas Rangers in their tweed coats and their large hats, the silver of their pistols and the gold of their badges seen even far and high up. A single man had walked up to the stage at the behest of some of the Rangers, and he had been an older man, a handlebar mustache extending well past his cheeks with its graying hair, and he walked as many who spent their life on a horse had: half bow legged and half shambling.

He took the mic as he sat on the stage, Marilyn Monroe doing well to be on his arm. "Well I thank you all for being here tonight, but I thank you more, all of ya, for probably not adding more to our workload these last few years." The crowd in attendance had given off a light laugh.

Dedman had not been an unfamiliar sight. He had been up at the ranch often enough with Cold and Rollings. The two of them had been sons to him in some distant way, all three of them sons of the West as it rested in that era, and he had respected them and their trade much, and perhaps more so that all the best colts had gone to the Texas Rangers from the Blanca ranch. Throughout all Texas the Rangers rode on horses broken by that Ranch, and they all rode against the dwindling and now disappeared and settled forces of Benerit's Earth Garrison Force that did not acquiesce to one official power or another. Like the bounty hunters of old the Rangers went out and hunted down Spacians, and this had been a good thing. Of those Rangers down there, Baile Frydin had been among them, but those from Blanca did not notice.

"These last few years have been a reckoning to some, and the Texas Rangers are not immune to that, because even if the sky went hellfire and those Spacians above all went and met their maker, we on Earth remained, and without anyone holding us back, we all were allowed to be moral men and women again without the fear of mobile suits above. It's been rough, filling in the gaps where our old boss's might've otherwise occupied, but as we go on, day by day, week by week, I think I'm right to say that this country is becoming whole and thriving again, and that's all thanks to you. Enjoy your meals."

He was well spoken and slow spoken as men of his age had been, but in the gravel of his voice had been a man of respect, both given, and had. This man had come from nothing and sought not to destroy the world but make it a good one. This had been a man who had known where to put his life to.

They ate dinner with casual conversation next, and by the time Win had run out of things to say they were done, and he had picked up the check and actually paid out in a distressingly big pile of singles that the young man averted his eyes from looking at.

With their well-worn hands they all shook goodnight with each other. Win had parted ways with Norea and the young man parted ways in front of the stable, Devola holding onto him fondly on top of King James. "What's a good cowpoke like me if I don't walk my woman home?"

Often under drink, the young man's voice often shifted into that light tone that had been reserved for another him, but it was a hard habit to break and only Norea noticed. "I understand. But you're on garden duty tomorrow. Remember."

"Oh I'll be fine." Win kicked up his horse, and Dev shrieked as he took off down the road in a full sprint. Speeding still existed, even on horseback, and if the sirens were for Win the two remaining did not fuss over it. They got back their horses and they started the long journey back beneath starlight, side by side.

"Good dinner?" The young man asked, halfway back.

"Good dinner." Norea repeated, a slight buzz to her mind that often came with her drink, the combination of her lithe and small stature combined with a strong drink not often doing her well. She privately enjoyed it, however. Better this vice than others. "Win talks a lot. I don't know why you get along so well."

"Well I usually just let him run his mouth. It tires him out and then he comes so much more tolerable." They trotted along quietly. "He's also occasionally funny."

"Oh is that all someone needs to do with you to become friends?"

"Mm." He rumbled. "Partially."

"Yeah?"

"The other one has to be if they get along well with you."

"Ugh shut up."

"It's true though."

"Shut up." She had put more bite into that last half, and it had stopped the young man very much, looking to her with a tilt in his head, beckoning her to explain, to tell him if he did err. All she could was stare forward, a scrunch to her face. "Why do you say these things the way you do?"

Through the years, little comments, little fair touches, little words that spoke to a fondness of the precious things between them. There was a reason why Win had assumed they had been dating, and it came from moments where they were seen, confiding in each other so deeply and intimately one had to assume. They came together, and many assumed that if they were to leave, they would go together. If nothing else they had slept together with hardly a complaint about it, if not a preference.

"Do you really find it annoying? Truly? I can stop."

"No. It's not that. I'd rather just know the… why of it."

"The why of it." The young man repeated. Jerusalem and Tiberius were often quiet together, enjoying each other's company. Raised together, broken together by Cold, they in their age had been silent witnesses to the development of these new farm hands and had been much pleased in their place. Even now they were audience. "Isn't us being alive an act of us trying to find the why of things? Why do we live? How do we live?"

"This is one thing," She wanted so much to call him by a name, but none had come. "One thing. I want to know why you're just so… you talk like- you act like-"

"Norea." He said once, and she let him speak. He had always said her name very preciously; the way he said it had been unique to him and it had been careful yet affectionate all the same. "Do you need me in your life, Norea?" The Earth was naked before them as it had been at its creation and it would be at its end, rolling in its infinite magnitude out to the horizon and beyond it in a way that Man could not ever replicate in the stars, or in a thousand years. The Earth had remained singular in its presence, and it offered all who ever lived a stage with which to go onto. Miorine Rembran years ago in the final days before the world had gone red and Space evaporated all that had made use of it came to the Earth and came to a stage she thought she belonged to. For all of her want to come to the Earth, to know its Gravity, she was not prepared for those that had been long on it.

"I-" She stopped herself. In a real sense. No, she didn't need anyone in her life. She could be on her own from now until the end of it and she'd be quite okay with that. She could do it. That's not what she wanted though. She let that one word drag out into the night, and then she answered. "I don't know how to answer that."

The young man paused, looking at the Earth and its infinite blackness, and he could hear them: the wild horses out there, kicking up storms where none could ever see, and in the morning only the ghostly apparitions of their clouds would remain on the land until they were blown away. It looked much like Space then. "I need you, Norea." He said. "Because in this life I've lived, I still don't quite know why I'm living it, but the actual act itself, I can't see myself doing it without you. And I say the things I say because you bring me to those words."

"You don't know what you're saying."

"…Perhaps, perhaps not. But I know what I feel."

Cultivating within her had been feelings of connection with a man that if she had to divine their origins they had been cast across a million things about him. Not just one. Not just the circumstances of their meeting or their continued survival. Not just the circumstances of their lives and how alike they were in their fears. Not just the fact he had been an agreeable young man who had looked an agreeable way. All of it in sum, and all of it, in some way, made for her, because of her, intended for her. In her had been those feelings reflected and they burned at her heart in fear and anxiety and annoyance that if he could just say something so blunt and definitive and not the eloquent that he had known best, maybe, just maybe, she wouldn't feel so put off by the idea that she, to him, might've been something so great, she would've held now a new fear of losing it. But yet that fear had already existed.

The young man pulled his horse alongside hers closer, and Jerusalem did so, and Tiberius allowed. He reached out, but not bridging it, keeping his palm up open. She had in some automatic impulse of herself took it, laying her finger tips at the hook of his own, and he squeezed once. "I can stop if you want."

"Please don't." she answered softly, but not before shaking herself out of it and cutting her finger nails into his own ridges. "But if some other girl or guy comes along and catches your fancy I don't want to hear it."

The young man smiled, weathering the cut of her nails before pulling away. "You know I don't think you'll find that a problem at all."

"Tch."

Before he had parted ways with her, she kept the image of him now in starlight to her memory; that soft warm face that had always been glad to see her, steely eyes that always settled on her. In his eyes had been that of a Spacians, but when she looked at her it had been as if her life had value to him beyond all Space could judge her for. She put it to memory, because had she had no control, she would've been putting him in her sketchbook every day.

"Being in between." The young man said once, looking behind him, at San Angelo, burning in its lights, and ahead, the fires of hearth and home, equidistant apart from them now on that path. "It's… nice, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Norea, gruffed, tipping her hat down to hide her face. "Sure."

She had taken the reins and held them tight, uttering a loud ushering with her throat that sent Tiberius into an immediate sprint ahead of her, not intent on spending another half hour with those warm feelings in her that didn't just come from booze. Not one to be left behind, the young man whipped the reins, and chased after her.

A week later they were back in center of the Ranch sitting in bunkhouse where Rollings had come out with a white board, nearly all hands brought to bear, another week of work under their belt as was standard with the spring. These meetings were rare, the last even being three years ago shortly before the young man and Norea arrived: the week that the Abuela had died and a plan had to be made on how the ranch was to be run in light of her passing. Cold and Rollings stood up front at the dinner table, the white board brought up with a crude map of North America brought up with four places listed out: the Ranch, Griffin to the North, St. Louis in the north east, and El Paso in the West. Some of the cowboys had known what was up immediately, tucking their shirts in as they crossed their arms and shared silent conversations entirely of hand and face with Cold, who shrugged. Win had been the last one in, taking a seat by Norea and the young man as they sat side by side.

"Alright, cowboys and cowgirls, stars have aligned for us." Rollings had announced. "We got orders from about 90% of our stock in everything but the god damn chickens in the coop."

The group muttered among themselves. "Cows? Broke horses? Hay?" Rose, the longtime cooking cowboy had asked, his thin mustache moving as he twisted his lips uncomfortably.

"Big three and then some." Rollings nodded. "We're only keeping bare minimum that we can use to build ourselves up again in the next few years, but it's for a good reason."

"You selling the place on us Rollings?" A cowgirl had asked in her slurred speech, she a mother to two wild boys that sat in school that day in San Angelo.

"No." Rollings had denied as he had for years. "But we are reorienting ourselves a bit toward horses and not cattle. I got word from an old partner of ours up in Detroit that the reclamation project for some of the agricultural Sides-"

"Sides?"

"The colony clusters."

"Oh, Space."

"Yeah. The US Government through the Beaners that acquiesced were able to lock down a few colonies that got banged up in the Blood Meridian. Those colonies were essentially giant factory farms the size of Texas." Of the news they listened to, not much had been about Space, but eventually some reports would come forth from that world that had been familiar: like the millions of dead cows floating in those colonies, perfectly preserved in the vacuum of Space. "The colonies ain't no good anymore but that gear and equipment is being shipped down in the next year or so, and if they get that tech running we'll be draining costs just keeping cows because the price they sell 'em at, pre-BM was of course as all of you know completely incontestable. We only sold to those sane Spacians who liked their beef Texas grass fed."

"So we're giving up on cattle?" Another cowboy asked.

"Not completely." Rolling sighed. "Always gonna be those who like their beef boutique, but at the size we got now? Best sell high."

"That means then," Cold had spoken up from his chair up front. In the last three years he hadn't changed much, but he had been among few men that had grown old at sixteen and would seem to stay there until sixty. "We'll be leaning into our horse trade a bit more, and I expect all you who aren't familiar to get familiar in the months to come. We're still cowboys, with or without the cows, and as long as the wells don't magically refill or them silicon mines come back to life horses will have a place here in this country at least."

Norea glanced at the young man, and his face had been in deep contemplation. He had been alright now at the working of horses, not the best, but nowhere near as bad as when he had first started out. In some moment of solidarity she had reached out to his wrist, squeezing once before drawing away. There was no protest with the rest of the group. Hard times had come before, the epoch of change nothing new.

Rollings pointed at the map once, drawing his finger from the ranch out to St. Louis and Fort Griffin. "We'll be splitting our herd in two for sales I've arranged in St. Louis and Griffin to the meat markets in St. Louis and then in Comancheria and the tribes people up there represented by a Mister E. Smith. The group that's gonna go to St. Louis, that's gonna be a good month, month and a half trip and I'll be riding out with you all." The crowd seemed much pleased or amused that Rollings for the first time in five years had been coming out, but he had shrugged. "You know how it is. Those going to Griffin? It's a bit more involved and Cold will be in charge of that group."

Cold had nodded, standing up, hands on his belt. "We're going up there, selling our cattle to the Comanche for cash. After that, we're gonna come back from Fort Griffin for a day and a night, and then set off west to El Paso and then down to Juárez. Selling off some of our less valuable stock to a Mexican farm for using or starting up their own thing."

"I thought we didn't sell to Mexico? Did McCarthy lift the trade protections?"

Cold nodded at the question from the crowd, as did Rollings, to the question asked from the hands. "If this trade goes well, we'll be selling horses to Mexico, among the first even, after half a century last I checked." Rollings affirmed. "Hell, they know about our horses because of all the Texas Rangers that have been riding up and raising damnation all across the country side or when they're chasing fugitives across the border. I've heard some people who would even ride up here to go take their pick and then do the trouble of driving them away for us. Saves us time and money and makes us a quite a bit better off."

"Just another spring?" A cowboy moaned, slumping in his chair.

"Just another spring in another year, brother." Cold crossed his arms. "By dinner tonight I'll have rosters for who's going what train, but if you've got a preference let me know. We'll be drawing straws for who's staying back here too."

"We'll be stepping off next Monday." Rollings had affirmed. "I'll be in San Angelo meeting with Baile about our horse situation, so if you need supplies or groceries let me know too. Alright, get outta here."

The three youngest hands had all stayed there in their seats, Win very badly hiding hickies beneath his half mask. "You know, I think I'll ask Cold if I can ride out to El Paso, and if I can bring Dev along. She's got a friend in Juárez going to school there I know she's been trying to make time to see her. You two ever been?"

They both shook their heads. "We've only been out on drives and trains out east or north."

"Shit really? Now you can really get your cowboy even more on. Yeehaw." Win said mocking, getting up and going to Cold immediately as soon as he was free, some of the cowboys lining up to him and making their requests.

"We're probably heading up to Griffin and then over to El Paso." Norea said calmly. She had her book with her, mechanical pencil ready as she looked up at the scene before her: of Cold and Rollings fielding questions among a field of waxed jackets and flannel and cowboy hats. She looked at it once in one long motion, and then brought her eyes down to the page to do her work.

"Yeah." The young man agreed. "Should be interesting." He was contemplative for a moment, shown on his face, but he had waited for her to sketch out the scene in her one linear, unceasing economy of strokes until before it in her book had been Cold and Rollings beset by their hands, and it had much looked like an old photo with that. He always liked watching her work in it, and she had, after a while, become used to the audience.

"Something wrong?" She asked.

He pursed his lips. "Just strange, having something about Space affecting life down here again."

"It was going to happen eventually." She closed her book, tucking it into her jacket and rose, Cold had looked across his heads and found her eyes and given that one singular nod that she returned, and then she and the young man were out the front door back to their work of hoofing and shoeing horses for the day.

They had asked of Rollings ammunition for the young man's 6.5 bolt action rifle, and then .410 for the break action pistol that he had worn for smaller game, his stores having been depleted in the coyote hunts of the last month. Norea had asked for nothing but some new possibles, but they on that ranch had been long used to the long haul. The chuck wagons that rode with them well stocked and well experienced. In the several days between leaving Blanca the great procession of readying the ranch for lower activity, making sure the horses and farm animals had been all taken care of and set up for easy maintenance brought to bear as a lone cowgirl in a duster and a long worn hat came rolling down the road besides Rolling. It had been Baile Frydin. She had become a Texas Ranger through and through, down to her black boots, and then the gleaming badge. Her horse Sweetie as if in great longing, arriving before the manor it had spent most of its life before, looked off to the pens and the stables and one of the hands had taken Sweetie and her saddle off to that stable.

She arrived to great fanfare and reconnection as the hands that had not the most pressing of jobs sat on the porch of the manor and listened to Baile and her stories out in the open country and the towns all around Texas keeping the law.

"Baile, babe," Win had leaned on one of the porch's posts. "You got notches on your pistol yet?"

She had drawn, sticking her tongue out at her junior, only to loosely spin her pistol along her finger in a flurry before holstering smoothly it to much the impressment of the children there. "More than I can count." Whether she was joking or not none could tell, but none had doubted Baile could take a life, and more than that if she had done so she was justified in it. "Anyways, I'm here to man the ranch while Roll' and Cold are out. Let me know if anything done change since I been gone."

The young man and Norea had been there at the periphery, but as the crowd dissipated and the day continued, Baile had found them out and kept them by the porch, her very unique smile kept, much pleased to see them still. "How you doin' youngins?" She opened her arms for a hug and the two had given them. "Holding down my room alright?"

"Baile when you have us the room you shoulda told us the mattress was worn down to the springs."

"Well if you're getting up to it in there I ain't surprised."

Norea had scoffed. "Even if we did I don't think the bed would last."

"We don't-!" The young man protested but the two women had taken much joy in flushing him red in the face and stammering his words.

"Oh relax. I'm glad to see you two still here."

They talked fondly with each other, catching her up on all that had happened, their duties on the ranch, what they had picked up and what they were still getting used to; small intricacies. Like how old Tess Harrel had been a smoker so bad that her voice had been continually being confused to a number of other men, or how Win had probably been growing marijuana somewhere on the property, or that those lingering looks between Cold and Rolling that all knew but none had been strong enough to point out to them about it. They told her if she wanted her room back to not mind the mess that they had made of her desk, a small laptop computer put there for the young man and a tablet for Norea. But she had scoffed at them. "I'm taking the big bed in the house, youngins. Even the apartment I got now in town still ain't as big as the one room up in there."

There had often been questions for newcomers on why more people hadn't been put up in the manor, but the answer had been simple if not vain. Those clients or customers often liked to be set up in that manor as if there was a fine line between the owner and his workers, and the manor reflected that in how untouched by anything but the aesthetic of the cowboys had been. Baile had risen to excuse herself, to get herself ready for the time she'd be back in the ranch, but Norea had stopped her, crossing her hands in front of her and holding them together.

"Baile, why'd you stick up for us?" She asked, and Baile frozen, taking off her hat and holding it in her hands as she kneeled down again to look at them both eye to eye. She seemed much solid in her form with her duster, her polite clothes that made her a lawman and the base of that country. She was a woman not even born there but risen and set right in those lands. She had come from as far east as Tennessee, but she was a Texan, through and through.

"Abuela took my family in on a whim, a whim even less than how we took you on. We were ranch peoples, my folks couldn't do any of that worth a damn but Abuela didn't care. She put us up in the house or made us cooks and cleaners and that's we got by. She didn't have to do that. That house no matter how much it gets dusted stays dusted, and we're a god damn ranch, nothing stays clean around here." She shrugged, looking back at this house that had been her childhood and her school. "If she didn't take me in me and my family woulda just been another bunch a poor folks skirting the edge of San Angelo. But she did take us in for no good logical reason, or at least far less a good logical reason than how we took you two in."

"See yourself in us?" The young man asked, bringing his arm and holding Norea by her shoulder, and she had much leaned in to him for a moment before standing straight again. Baile had seemed much embarrassed by the move, looking away, shrugging, rising herself up above them.

"I just got that faith in people. Is all." She was more than Texan in that moment. She was in the end an Earthian true, who had only other Earthians to believe in. Not Capital, not the idea of the seizure of the stars or in technologies so powerful they could very much be magic. She believed in people.

"Thank you Baile." Norea told her, and the young man nodded the same in agreement.

Baile stood there on the porch, chimes put up there ringing against the flow much like her hair that stuck to her face.

"Shit. If only I talked this sweetly to any of my boyfriends, I woulda had kids by now."

The morning of the start of the trains came a tradition of that ranch and ranch alone. Cowboys and their superstition of habit affecting all. Like a mass in that early morning cowboy and cowgirl and adult and child and man and woman walked out, to a flat clearing no more than a few minutes' walk from the house not touched by work or animal. There brewed wildflower and grass that had been alike ocean waves, beset only by the stones and wooden crosses of those that had lived and died there on that ranch, and remained there still. They each had once on that ground took off their hats in procession, and walked and came to all those names that had been but memory or history for those that remained. Muller, Poe, Stechshulte, Baker, Sala, Andrade, Thompson. Loving husband, loving wife, loving fathers and mothers and cowboys to the end taken before their time or having lived their life to the fullest in time, Ad Stella, or even before that. On those grounds from the farm came before had been graves going back generations, and of the newest now had been Carmina Salcedo, known only now by Abuela on that ranch by those who did know her as an abuela. Of those graves, there had been one there that only Norea knew, in a corner beset by wildflowers so pretty and full of life, that it seemed waiting for her and what she was to do. She did not know what had happened to Sophie's body, taken from her as she came into hiding in the house of Grassley. In reality: probably cremated, put away, unceremoniously dumped out in Space to erase any trace of her in Asticassia, and when Norea had thought of that she would not allow it. If there was desecration there that night, the first year there, as she dug a small hole, she hoped that those interred would forgive her. Her original sketchbook had gone in there, buried, and with her fingers alone she pushed the dirt back over it, and patted down it flat, taking her finger one last time and writing the name of someone she did not see living without, a year after her death. She sat herself before Sophie's grave, looking at that name written in the dirt that would never be permanent, and stayed there before the dawn. Memories of the life that had been lived with her passing by her mind as if she was still there, as if they could be so easily relived or iterated on in the days to come. But that would never be so. Sophie Pulone was dead, and Norea Du Noc kept on living.

The hands of that ranch came into the graveyard, filling it in as with a grave stone of marble and wood, Abuela found her resting place after nearly ninety-nine years alive. The young man and Norea had been to the back, never knowing her, but still paying respects to that woman which many there held fond memories of.

They came out here to pay respects, to ask for guidance in the trails ahead, and as they all stood there hats in hand it had been much like the day they all buried her again.

They were completely silent. Lacey standing there before her as his shadow cast over her name. Others still there had gone to other grave stones, speaking names, greetings, hellos and messages to some beyond those markers might carry to wherever people went after they died. Some had left flowers, some had left glasses of alcohol and filled to the tap. A young son no more than twelve walked to a corner, and said hello to his father, gone five years ago to cancer. Father and child, together again, at least for a while.

Rollings had gone to Cold, and he had stood by him for a minute in their quiet whisperings, and then the man had taken his arm and in one squeeze said all that he needed to, and then they left.

With the moving of so many cattles, so many horses, the world had been in constant motion as over twenty cowboys and cowgirls had taken to their horses, dashing around and opening gates as people spoke more to cows or horses, like a splitting cell a herd of one thousand had been split nearly in half, with only one hundred head of cows left to graze on the ranch. The cowboys and cowgirls had become the rim of the world for the cattle as the dogs of the ranch who had run like their own gang, independent of the cowboys, cut the edges of that one beast of a crowd prim and proper. "Norea!" Cold cried out over the cacophony of mooing, of other hands yelling to get the cows in line and in group. She cried out back she heard. "Find that line! Run it!" With Tiberius she had kicked her horse around to the center of the herd, dust kicked up so red that one could've mistaken it for the mist of blood, and in her she found the depression of it, where the cows had naturally begun to split apart in their communion and she had led her horse to it, several dogs going to Tiberius's feet and running alongside it as she became a banshee, growling and barking and yelling at the cows to make way, to go on one side or another as she rose over it all. Behind her had flood in other hands, making a barrier between the two forming groups that she split right through as if she had gone through a storm, disheveled and much enraged by the hysteria.

"Good shit girl!" Cold yelled out, running Junior large and imposing doing his own part to split the groups now in their inevitable directions of east and north. This cutting of that crowd continued until they were quite far away from each other, Rollings and Cold standing out from their respective groups and without ceremony each rose their hands to each other in the wind and disappeared down their plains to lead. Of the group that went with Cold, Norea, the young man, and Win had been among them. Ten riders forming a barrier by which that great mass herd had been pushed by forward, forward, along the terrain of the Blanca ranch until they had gotten to the northern gates of the property. With the rusty latch Cold had upped the gate, and several cowboys rushing through on their steeds before the first of the cattle began to be pushed forward into it, and starting, one by one, Cold had counted them with their tags on their ears. The three young hands had been at the rear, each beckoning the cows forward in hollering and shouting. For this they done each and every cattle train, their voices had been accounted for an octave lower in husk and grit.

"Come on! Now come on!" Win had darted his horse back and forth on the back line, cows mooing all as if trying to beckon for a bovine god that would never answer them, but they still tried. "Let's go let's go!" Win had been ideal at hollering, and so he had handled most of the back line, leaving Norea and the young man on his wings funneling cows into the gate and then sprawling out the other end like some gross approximation of grains of sand in an hour glass, spilling out to the wider world of Texas plains. This would be the plan for two weeks as they walked the cows up to Griffin, and then three days ride back to pick up the horses waiting for a month trip out to El Paso and Juárez. This was ancient ritual, ancient movements, that had created the cowboy hundreds of years ago, and here they had been on one of the last great migrations they would do for at least a few years. Norea had been the last one through, and she looked back on the peaceful ranch that she had been a home to her now in this life. Win had gone on ahead as the cattle moved ahead forward, and now it had been her and Cold and the young man, waiting at that divide.

Cold had looked at the two of them and then turned his horse away. "Lock up behind you, would ya?"

The young man had tipped his hat in recognition, and Norea had remained looking out at that perfect place kept from History.

"That place in your book." The young man asked after a while. "The lake."

"Where is it?"

Norea had imparted Blanca to memory, and then she turned to him. "Somewhere between Dublin and Moscow."

"Oh good, not too big of an area for me to search."

"I'll tell you when I want to go back there."

"Fair enough."

They turned Jerusalem and Tiberius away, and then they went on behind the herd. She turned on the radio attached to her saddle, and listened to the world for what good it would do to pass the time in their journey.

---

"Earlier today, European Alliance authorities maintained that Benerit Group assets in Western and Central Europe fell squarely into EA jurisdiction, with the Pacific Union's hold on contested territories in the Middle East and Asia Minor to debate, even with historical investment by Union assets in the Benerit Group's Earth holdings."

"Searches for Permet throughout the Solar System continue, however with the Mercury and Lunar deposits all but completely nullified, the only residual remains of Permet are within the bodies of persons involved in GUND technology and the often controversial, often illegal projects thereof."

"Seattle's mayor announced today that the reconstruction efforts of the Seattle space elevator are coming to a close, with Seattle poised to become yet again the pathway for Humans back into Space."

"Less than 30% of all known facilities derelict in space following the 122 Space Disruption Event remain unaccounted for, with the majority of those being in Side 7 and the Jupiter Sphere."

"We've had experts reevaluating alternative locomotion and energy sources for mobile suits, with of course Doctor Minovsky's being what is most popular advocated for, but as it stands now it will at least take a full generation for them be brought even to pre-pre-prototype phases, and public will isn't at the point where mobile suits, once an avatar of Spacian oppression, are able to be made again."

"Union organizers in Boston filed a lawsuit against the Mufford and Schultz Corporation when it was discovered that many anti-union votes were recorded to have been falsified upon urging by the Benerit Group across multiple elections in the last twenty years."

"The World Wide Web is once again at pre-SDE levels of stability once servers lost during the disruption three years ago were replaced by hardware clusters by Earthian ISPs that now have taken charge over the market after the collapse of Spacian networks. However gaps in the information network remain, with, according to experts, data sets and information hosted on the web entirely without physical record have become lost entirely."

"The Asticassia School of Technology has become the last of Front Sector 73's infrastructure to be broken down, clearing the front of all artificial structures. Materials of the Benerit Group's premier education facility were redistributed to Side 1, where a vast majority of repopulation efforts are taking place. Remains of the student population left behind there during the school's tumultuous final days have been returned to Earth after nearly three years unaccounted for, with many students still missing."

"Structural and bureaucratic remains of the Space Assembly League, reformed into the Earth Federation two years ago after most of its ministers were lost, were dissolved formerly beneath the Laplace Declaration in Jaburo."

"It's a shame, really. Say what you want about Spacians, but they were forcing the future of Mankind, and I can't help but think we lost more than just our chains."

"Users of prosthetics worldwide are facing the dread end of life crunch for much of their equipment, with companies, often entirely based in Space, dissolving with their staff and knowledge. For those with augmented limbs, more rudimentary options without GUND integration are available, but for those with more integral accommodations such as nervous system or organ replacements, the clock is ticking as the medical community scrambles to find documentation for this technology.

…

In Aleppo, a young girl, blinded at a young age and gifted eye prosthetics, has no more than five months of eyesight left before her vision begins deteriorating again without maintenance and care."

"We're talking about an 80% loss of efficiency in everything related to mobile suits without GUND or Permet, or any technology even related to it. Even Burion's Demi line, a relatively simple mobile suit that we would imagine could operate without the supplementary technologies, the difference is night and day."

"Japan marks two-hundred days since it's last Benerit Remnant-related incident, as the world over Earth Garrison Forces have more or less dissolved."

---

She listened for names she knew, in places she had been. She listened for the rumors and the murmurings that had been about the Dawn of Fold, but in those three years' time no news stories from any wire had ever spoken to the group she knew as her family for all her life. But she did not mourn their disappearance. What they had been fighting against, after all, had been destroyed. Their fight was over. There was no great battle they participated in, no great speech or final sacrifice.

It just happened, and it had been for the best she reasoned, for it was what she was doing, that they disappeared back into the world.

They sat around the fire that first night as cattle were deep around them, their sleeping bags brought out as Norea turned off her radio and let it charge, tucking her arms around her legs and looking idly into the fire as above them the Doppler effect of jet engines roared from interval to interval.

"That's some shit, huh?" Win had commented as he nursed his bowl of stew from the chuck wagon. She and Cold sipped on their beer as the young man lay out on his side by her. Other cowboys and cowgirls all around that fire in warmth's embrace in that Texas night. Above: the sound of jets.

"American military." Chalk, who had once again his scope around his neck and his great white beard now formed, gestured up to the sky. The shadows had taken his face. "Been decades since they've flown uncontested."

"That's how it was way back when, old partner, wasn't it? Before Ad Stella?"

"Aye." Doll Chalk said. He caught Norea's face in the fire looking at him, and in her eyes he had seen something not often seen on their ranch. He recognized the eyes of another soldier in there, just as she to him, the shadow of his skull illuminated by fire and stars above. Old Chalk had looked at her, the scope around his neck dangling until he took it in his hands and he had looked at its etchings long familiar to him since the last drone wars that pacified Earth into subservience. He began to talk, and he began to talk across the fires to Norea. "I fought in the First Sunday Division, out of Roswell. Where I was born, and when I die, I told Cold here that I want to be buried there.

About thirty years ago I was a young spry man no older than you are now, Miss Du Noc. My father was a steel worker, and my mother nurse. Back then we knew what was coming with Space, and we saw the Earth itself recede from our control to people who lived up in the sky like Gods of old, and even when I was a kid that never sat well with me. I reckon you know that feeling too, don't you?"

She nodded and said nothing more.

"Me and a whole lot of other people in this part of the country thought so too, and we identified that the only way for Earth to remain for Earthians, for us to even have a place to live that wasn't in the control of corporate managers who would never step on that dirt, was a general strike. Yes sir. We called it the First Sunday in the year of 92'. This entire part of the country went on strike, from the mine workers to the call centers to the truck drivers, and on that day the world stood still for us and we made the Spacians listen. We told them everything, about how it wasn't right that company towns and company script was being paid to us instead of any universal currency, about working conditions in this place where the wet bulb point was still scorching, about all that they were doing to this world that would kill it. We wanted fair compensation for fair work, health care, pensions, a support structure from people that knew Earth as a place to be and not a place where resources came from." Chalk talked with much pride about those days before the time of many here. Norea like many children her age born of Earth grew up in the shadow of the drone wars, and yet Chalk here had been at the cause of it. "Our general strike caught traction down in South America where silicon was being mined, to China where cheap labor was still being used to make parts for the Sides. Everywhere the world was people were tired and upset after a hundred years of Capital ruling the world and not nations, not peoples of those nations, and as we all were on strike we all saw something worth fighting for in some far distance that got closer, day by day. We was all united: Liberals and Communists and moralists and working people and the poor. Oh it was beautiful, a class together, standing in defiance of the stars."

Cold pursed his lips as he listened, taking a glance at those stars once filled with dread, and now empty. Norea had been entranced. This man had been one of her own. Not of the Fold, but the progenitor of them in some way.

"The police, the security forces, they came for us first, beating us down in the cities, burning our crops of commune farms when the groceries run by the Benerit Group," he said the name with such vile anger, "were closed down to us." On his horse had been a rifle older than him: It was a wooden service rifle from centuries ago, which had stormed Europe to do away with the fascism that came over that continent in the dark ages. Eight rounds. Thirty-aught-six. A slot for his scope. "They came for us, and therefore, we fought back. We organized. My first job was to roll with protesters in the larger cities while armed, to show them all they meant business."

"Have you killed people?" Norea asked in her blunt way. Chalk didn't hesitate.

"I've never killed any people. Only capitalists. Only those who tricked themselves that something as grand as Space and the stars above could be owned like land." He seemed much distant now, tucking himself in, an old flask bearing a hammer and sickle on it at his side always. We was a people's militia out of all New Mexico. Not too different from the Rangers, but we ain't gots no history other than that long class war. We were just towns people trying to do our best to keep the Benerit Group out so we could live our lives free and rightly. The governments of the world did nothing to help us, but that wasn't surprising." He seemed much amused by this fact. Above, the vestigial armed services of a country they were on, but yet so distant, roared. "Then the Benerit Group came for us. They established the Earth Garrison Force in order to "protect assets" on Earth from "terrorists". A million men, across the world, who were promised something better, all in the name of making things worse for billions.

They came with tanks, with planes, with bombs that have never before been used on cities. They flew helicopters dropping bombs on apartments, and assassins shot labor organizers in the street. Everything that happened to the Witches," the young man perked his head up. "Happened the way it did because they did it to the working class."

One of the cowboys drew the sign of the cross on him at the uttering of that certain word, the camp stirring uncomfortably as if saying that word would summon Witches there.

"We all became soldiers that day, however, when the mobile suits descended on Albuquerque, here in America. We had heard rumors from the other organizers across the oceans that the EGF had been deploying mobile suits before Benerit shut down international communication, but we didn't believe that they'd go that far until they came down on my steel mill my father worked at. We was threatening to destroy the machinery in there, all vital for the construction of space stations, and when that happened they came from the sky like vultures." He became very distant, and then his eyes were like stones across the fire which Norea held. "They destroyed Albuquerque. Leveled it to a man save for the factory. Forty thousand people dead, my father among them. I don't know what happened to Ma', still don't know, but she stayed behind while us protesters and fighters rode down the Rio Grande to safety."

Norea knows where this story is going. She had heard it from Olcott, because Olcott had been there the day the EGF came to Earth, and after that day the man had never been the same. He had been one of those mobile suit pilots.

"We hid out in the Rio Grande for months, doing hit and run attacks against EGF troops as they took the cities. Word from Taiwan about the massacre on that island, in Iraq about the gassing of Baghdad, it told us that all pretense had been dropped. That Earth and all people on it was nothing more than cattle to them, fit only for consumption and work. The Benerit Group had no message to send, no negotiations to be had. They would break us or kill us trying."

History had turned out a certain way. History had gone the way of the Benerit Group. There was no twist, no good ending here. They had been living in the aftermath of that great struggle.

"The drones." Chalk looked up to the sky. "When they couldn't have mobile suits anywhere, the Benerit Group deployed drones. It's been years, but- shit. I still some days look up at blue skies and think about the wrath of God. A good day for me is a cloudy day. It meant that we'd be able to hide from them… But they still came in the end. Thousands in number. Cluster bombs and mustard gas and neutron bombs. Would rip right through your DNA, all of that, leaving the world standing but you dead in the ground half-melted.

I saw it; the people who believed in a better future for all Mankind, cut down like meat before the Benerit Group. Hope and ideas and joy for life, all reduced down to flesh and blood, and then dust.

…

That's when we got the fight kicked out of us, after the battle of the Sierra Nevada. I left to come to Texas to try and hide, waiting for my time to go back in it. But you know I think God had other plans for Spacians, it seems, and if it were a war as I was waiting for, that war was won by powers other than me."

"You think the war was won? In the end?" Norea asked.

Chalk nodded once but didn't answer immediately. "I seen the EGF levels towns just because they thought there was one of us in it. A million innocents at hazard, just for one they sought. The wrath of God was usurped by Man in their technocratic cryptofascism, and whatever Deal they made with the Devil, it seemed rightly that He collected three years ago."

Cold said his only words that night: "I thought Class War never ended, Chalk?"

"You been doing some reading behind Rollings' back?" Chalk smirked, and Cold had shaken his head in some lecherous smile and turned over to sleep.

"War." Chalk had said once, more name than subject. He leaned back against his blanket, ready to put himself to the dark, but that word had been heavy and it hung in the air as one by one the cowboys and cowgirls went to sleep. "I know it's out there somewhere: War. For years now, War has been at the serving of Capital, but now, War has been cut free again." He spoke to the stars, and they had been witness then as in eternity. "I hope this peace lasts a long time, because I've had enough of fighting. I hope we're all able to build up while we can in this New World while Capital is gone. But I know it: War will come again."

Above them, American jets crossed across the night sky for purposes unknown to the cowboys, and in the night they left scratches upon the clean night sky that stayed there like stretch marks upon the surface of skin.

In the days they navigated the tall fields of untaken wheat. Farms that had long been gone but yet somehow those golden wheat fields remained, cycling through every year from death in the winter to alive and uncollected in the spring and summer, courtesy of Spacian GMO strains. These fields could go on for a hundred years in some condition, and they had been just but a landmark now. In the close distance helicopters and crop dusters flew over to other fields managed, surveying no doubt and appraising the land for it to be taken back into the fold of ownership, but for now they had been open land for the herd to go through, if not minorly appreciated with the slight boost in manure. These wheat fields had been done up in the image of agricultural organization and yet none to tend them.

This was the image of American splendor of yesteryear: gorgeous blue skies with white clouds above so soft they seemed churned up by heaven itself, and below had been those amber waves of grain. All of it abandoned for Space above. They drove their cattle with the great stalks of wheat as barrier, and it had been easy going driving them along that line, but little could be done as one of the surveying choppers had swung its body over, its nose pointed directly at them.

"Lock it down!" Cold yelled back, and he had held down his hat as did all of them, clamping themselves to the horses as over the herd the black helicopter rode over and in their gusts, the beating of the blades from callous pilots throwing straw debris from the ground and nearly the riders on their horses. Norea had locked her arm in the reins, and Tiberius dug his hooves into the ground, her other holding her hat for dear life as she closed her eyes from the biting draft.

The beating subsided, the horses stayed put as the dogs, valiant as they were, held the gaps between horses closed as the cows roared out in stimulation from above.

"Got dang fly boys!" One of the cowboys cried out, nearly drawing iron.

"Steady 'em! Steady 'em!" Cold cried out again, and the cowboys had all risen up as soon as they could as reared their horses to keep that ball of cow whole, dogs in their barking and men in their yelling replacing one storm with another. Several of the riders had brought out from their saddles leather tools, long tails, the whips of their trade, the young man among them as by cracking sound the cows were brought into line the strike and break of air itself, whistling and screaming and hooting like Native Americans until their voices ran hoarse and tasted bloody. A single calf had broken free from the wide crowd, and then another, more and more cows breaking line as the whip cracks continued and went on, several breaking through and out into the wheat fields. "Hold it! Hold it on come on!" A stampede had been brewing, a thousand eyes looking out back at them wild and crazy, reminding the hands that these had been animals first, and to keep them there they had to show that Man was but another type of animal, far on top of the chain. This yelling, this cracking, proceeded for a half hour at least beneath that blue sky until the cows had settled, and now the riders had been panting, wheezing into hydration carrier tubes or spitting on the ground phlegm. The dogs were tired out but growling at them all to keep line.

"That was a right and proper goat rodeo." A farmhand named Vorelli had wiped down his brow, holstering his bull whip like a gun.

"Yeah we ain't done yet. Win!" Cold called back and Win in an unusual no nonsense reply called back. "Get the drone up! We gotta get our wanderers back before they get too far out!"

"On it!"

"Norea, Blondie, Vorelli, Carthwright! Drop the line, put ears on, and then chase!" The riders not going out to hunt had tightened up their spread best they can as those called out backed out of line, going to their saddles and putting in their ears buds that ran down to a radio, all put down and fed back to Win as he had scrambled off his horse and into his saddle bag, reeling his arm back and tossing up a small plane that fed back to a tablet he controlled.

With one look across all those called out, the riders pulled their horses to the stomped paths in the wheat the loose cattle had gone, and then they had rode into it.

"Alright I count seven loose, seems like two are long gone, best go for the five." Win's voice came over the radio as rider battered themselves against wheat, their horses snorting and chuffing in discipline and in hardiness as they punched through, chasing lines. "Nori and Blondie, push about forty degrees straight, looks like you've got a calf and a cow."

"Rog'." The young man reported. Even with no more than a few yards between them they were both obscured by the wheat's density, but the two ahead of them could see as they pulled the two cattle.

"Push 'em back!" Norea cried out, and the young man had yelled out some guttural affirmative as he kicked his horse forward and finally met the two runners that had been assigned to them in their stomping. Black cows, the red tags of the Blanca ranch hanging off their ears, more than likely stamped on by either one of them. The young man pushed his horse wide right and then in front, the cows veering left as Norea had already been doubling her horse around to run with them, back out the way they came. The young man followed, punching all the way through those golden waves until at once, they had come back out to the clear fields next to the wheat, behind where the main herd had been at. The pair of cows had veered right, but in a straight away Norea had them, she rode fast and hard, raising herself off of her saddle like the jockeys of old, in her right hand rope to lasso with. The combat awareness dormant those last few years had been purposed to herding. To her right had been the young man on her tail, and as she closed the distance with the running cow she had let fly the lasso up, the ring made levitation with the practiced motion of her wrist as she tossed it ahead of the adult, it running right into it and the lasso cinching. Before the tension broke her wrist she had wrapped it around the horn of her saddle. She shouted a word without language and Tiberius slowed its roll, letting the tension hit the saddle as the cow fought against an animal bred for this work, jerking and slowing and wheezing as around its neck the rope tightened and it had been brought to a stop. Around the cow the small calf ran too, but it had been easily overtaken as the young man cut it off, rolling his rope in the air once and throwing it over its head, bucking Jerusalem to a stop, nearly in a drift, and flying out of his saddle onto his feet just as the slack on the rope went tight on Jerusalem's saddle. The calf had been off of its feet, and the young man wrangling the calf on its side as he cut from his pocket another rope to tie one of its front forelegs to hindleg.

She was a breaker of horses, a breaker of all animals, she could do a manic cow too as she started barking her own rabidness at it as it struggled against the pull of Tiberius until she jerked it back once more and the cow gave beneath its own legs, coming to the ground a she pulled Tiberius back to further wind it down. She did not speak the language of Man to animals. They wouldn't understand or respect it. What all those who struggled understood was the push and the pull, and that's what she did as she nearly stood in her saddle against the sky and looked down on the runner.

This life had done her good, done her well, and if this was her next one hundred years would've been like, much like Abuela, she would've been okay. At twenty-one years old her life was barely starting, and yet had been all too full.

The young man had approached her, calf gathered up in his arms as she gentled the cow, Jerusalem behind him. He looked from bowing cow to who it had worshiped at that moment and standing like that he saw merit in its god. He looked up at her with his borrowed eyes and borrowed skin and borrowed face and he had regarded her as how she deserved to be.

"Get down from there," he told her eventually as the calf writhed in his arms. "I don't want to see you hurt at the top of your game."

She looked down on him, dirtied and muddied and much disheveled by his wrangling, but he had looked of the Earth and it was a good look for him. They brought the the runners back to the herd and they had melted back into it just as easily as they left, and before everyone got too settled in Cold had waved out his hat and beckoned them all to get going, rounding the rim of the herd and the riders until he had gotten to the back. He had looked to Norea and only given her pleased nod, and she gave a proud one back.

Life was good.

Amber waves curried them on, and so they rode till the fiery dusk took them all down.

They took night's rest near a pond where the cows lapped up at its brown and murky water, and the smell of wet cows and their mooing extended out into the night. Half of them had been up and out abouts guarding for coyotes and predators in the night, the rest around their fire getting rest, but for some no rest could be had.

The young man sat beside the fire with Win and Cold and they stared into the fire and its private dancing for them as the others on slept, their shapes like stones in the ground.

He figure of all those there with him that those two would be the best to ask. In his hand had been the canteen given to him years ago by Reyes, and it still served its purpose, albeit more beat up now. One day he would've liked to return it, but for now it had been too useful and he too stingy to buy another canteen for himself. He sipped at it, and water on the range had never been so fulfilling, like liquid gold that soothed his throat from days of yelling and calling. Half-heartedly Win smoked a cigarette, for he only smoked when out on the trail. (Enough time for the tobacco to wash out of his taste for Dev's sake.) Cold sat there, one of the cattle dogs resting on his thigh, no name to them, but he had harbored all of the dogs as well as he did the hands that worked with him.

The young man poured some of the water from the canteen into his palms to wash his hands, and then to his face to clear it momentarily.

"So what is it like, to be in love?"

Win and Cold sat there, as if no word had been spoken by the young man at all until they warmed up and shifted to glance at him before staring back at that primordial fire out on the range, the same fire that had been burning in the West for a thousand years and beyond that to the accounting of those that had been half the young man's blood.

"Why you asking me, Blondie? Don't you know?" Cold had taken a piece of grass fallen upon the border collie in his lap and threw it into the fire as offering.

Win had winged Cold once. "Don't you?"

"Boy, you're lucky I'm run raw tired."

They sat there in silence again at the fire and it spoke back to them.

All fire had been the same fire born out of the first reactions of all time, all reality. The fire that they stared out now had been of the same sort in the Big Bang and the start of everything and nothing. It was the same fire made of striking rock for the sake of their evolutionary ancestors, the same fire which lit the world and kept the dark at bay, the same fire which burned down the great library of Alexandria and ignited the weapons which leveled Japan, the same fire which propelled man to Space, and kept the stars burning for eternity. This fire was all fires to come and to be, and as the cowboys looked into it they hoped to divine their futures in what was eternal. Flames may die, but not fire itself. Encompassed in itself was everything that could ever be and could very much as easily take everything away, and in the light the young man looked at his hands and he thought he saw those ghostly canals that marked him as something other than his peers.

Win as always, had been first to talk, but his voice had been soft and distant, but warm as the fire that colored them. "I love Dev. I do, right and sweetly, and perhaps I always have since I met her that one day when I was being an ass in a cafe down in San Angelo and she called me out on it, but I do know that's what that feeling I got for her is. She's beautiful, love the way the light comes to her, the way sweat goes down her skin, that smile of hers. Always constantly asking myself how a runaway street rat like me got in with her, but she told me, and I still can't believe this, is that she needs me." Cold's eyes flickered in the firelight, and Win spoke on. "Loving her is the easiest thing in the world right next to letting her love me."

"Got anything technical, on love?"

"Shiet, you asking for what valve in your heart supposed to open? What synapse in your brain to fire? That's sick coming from you, you and Nori walking abouts joined at the hip that it took longer to find out that you weren't dating or a thing in the ranch than it had been in the assumption that you twos were." Win's volume rose and habitually the young man looked back to see if she had been close or at hazard to hearing. He settled down at the young man's distress, the part of his brain that did wonder into asshole blowhard being quieted by the woman who had become his conscience in his head. "If love had a definition, I'd give it over to you, Blondie, but love has as many definitions as there are people to feel it. But don't tell me you don't love that girl out yonder."

"There are… many ways to love people. So yes, I do love her."

Win had groaned as the young man had said it put together. "But if it were that simple kinda love that you can so easily say to us as you just did, I don't think you'd be asking us right here, right now." Win leaned forward, head on his knees looking across Cold to the young man as he sat, contemplative, his bangs drifting in front of his eyes. For a moment he had resumed the visage of someone else. "How'd it feel though, saying that out loud?"

He didn't answer and Win snickered as he continued nursing his cigarette.

"Winnie's right." Cold said after a while, a beer can had been cracked and he sipped at it before placing it in the dirt by the dog, taking a cigarette from his front shirt pocket and with hands long numb put it to the fleck of the flames to light. "Love's on a case by case basis, but I'll tell you my definition, Blondie, if it help any."

"Shoot."

"Man will work hardest when he's doing it for someone he loves."

Win sniffed. "That why you work so hard Cold? When was the last time you took a personal day?"

"Every day I'm working is a personal day." Cold had sent an uncharacteristically childish wing back at Win, and the boy giggled again. But he settled, smoking cigarettes together with him and beer until he followed up. "I see you and Norea working hard, harder than sometimes this piece of work, but it's your all, and that gotta come from somewhere. Being homeless and hungry otherwise might be a hell of a motivator, but once you got locked down here, you didn't stop. Not then, not three years later, and I reckon if I had to guess you're both working hard for each other."

The fire snapped a few times as Cold took a drag from beer and cigarette, not so used to talking so much.

"She's had a hard life, and I don't want to burden her at all with annoying feelings. Is all." The young man said finally after Cold's words settled.

"Sound like love to me." Win tossed the stub of his cigarette into the fire, laying back on his sleeping bag and looking up toward the stars above. "Look I don't know Nori as well as I do you, Blondie, but I do know you, and you're a standup act yourself. Polite and well-mannered and not half bad looking. So you ever wonder if she loves you?"

"…I don't try to discern people's feelings. Doesn't seem right."

Win shot up all energetic. "You're a god damn choir boy ain't ya."

"Win shut the fuck up." Came the tired groan of a cowgirl across the fire before she rolled over and faced them all groggily. "Blondie, speaking as a woman, you're sweet as Abuela's cream corn. If Miss Du Noc doesn't feel something for ya I don't got any idea why she always looks at you the way she does when you come on in a room and you don't see her first, or why whenever she checks the schedule boards she asks people to trade out shifts so she's working with you. Now shut up, go to sleep."

"Thank you Lia." Cold flatly said across the fire and Lia had spat at him and tried to go back to sleep despite the churning wist in one man's heart.

Win and Cold both laid back on their bags, but the young man remained sitting. Cold murmured out into the air. "Go to sleep, boy, you got the rest of the trip to think it over."

"I just wish I knew what this love is, or where it's coming from, or where it's going or-" His words faltered. In the dark, the cowboys and cowgirls all listening awake had borne witness to him. For some it had been the most he spoke of himself, of the nature of his other half. How comfortable had he been now with all of them to even say, that in itself was not something he wanted to miss. So for their mercy he had shut up, leaning back to his bag and staring up at those stars.

Cold spoke one more time, and then no more that night. "Suppose love is just about finding out about stuff together, and even if there's no answer to it, at least you are together, even if love is the thing at question."

They rose early for breakfast from the chuck wagon and Rose the usual cook for them had been mercifully with Rolling's group. It had been Lia instead cooking up scrambled eggs and bread and bacon, and devout woman as she was she had gathered all hands in grace with their hats off and spoke it. She thanked the heavenly father for the meal that had been provided to them and for strength for the coming days. She thanked that if there was such thing as love in that world that it could be found in all of them easily, and that for once they were having breakfast that wasn't just "cowboy" affixed to it.

"Amen."

"Hey Blondie, what do you think that middle thing was about?"

"You're annoying, Win." He smiled at him.

They rode for another week pushing the herd north, the flat plains going out to the horizon with the forever distant images of plateaus and mountains in the like mirage kingdoms far from their reach. They eat, they herd, they sleep, they talk of the past and the futures of the world and everything in between, and at nights Win Nguyen talks again of his hundred stories about living in Seattle: of hill bombing down many roads of that world, of eating Sushi one moment and then running from Benerit Security the next as they tried to tag Space bound cargo containers with graffiti. The cowboys at times view him as alien with where he comes from, but he is much entertaining for it. He tells them of that city at the edge of the world, with its link to Space, and there, Win Nguyen told them, that he saw a place in the world where one could not know where they truly were and so they floated from glass to glass like ghosts, unable to plant themselves fully before other people because in that space all movement was transitory and all people were unbound.

Here in Texas plains, all there had known where they had been, and they were a day out from Griffin. They knew it so because the bones of those battles now ancient, the ones fought by Chalk, had been around them like monuments to another civilization. Mobile suit stood half in the ground as if shoved their by grander hands, APCs and trucks burnt down to a crisp, whose occupants were now melted in the frame lay amidst filled in craters of a battle fought their for the future of Mankind, now left not as memorial but as parts of nature and the world whose definition could be defined by what was left. The herds and the riders moved around them, the dead did not reach out to them, to tell them of their mistakes or their paths to come. The dead were testament upon that land, and Norea had resisted the urge to take her book and put them there forever. On the dusk of that last day, Griffin rose below them in the bowels of the plain, built upon a fort destroyed in war before their time, it now stood as the meeting place between Texas, and an inner demarcated territory known as Comancheria, where beyond Griffin in the ruins of the Western man's war, arose the original inhabitants of that land.

Up from Griffin came the figures, the horse-backed riders of another world, and before the herd and the cowboys could come to Griffin up from that town whose structure had been built upon ruins, host now to a demographic more akin to the Old West than the Modern World. The riders that answered came storming up, dozens in number, vague apparitions of the worst fears of cowboys centuries ago, kicking dust, thrusting in their riding that stayed the cowboys of Blanca to receive them. So came the Comanche, who in that dark of the world were indistinguishable from their legend, horse and man, man and horse, together in one shadow. The cowboys all tightened the herd around them, as they themselves felt herded by the running of the horses, dark men wearing suits and and jackets, wardrobed like princes of the plain. None of them spoke, but they were there to receive as one single man brought his white horse slowly meet with Cold. By his side the young man had been there and the Native American looked from him to Cold. He was not much older than the young man, his skin dark of the sun and of his blood, black hair long and braided. When he spoke, he spoke with the regimented accent of his kind, speaking in the lingua franca of the White Man.

"Hello, I presume this is the herd from Blanca?"

Lacey Cold nodded his head, reaching across to shake the hand of the receiver. "Yes sir. Name's Lacey Cold, representing Glow Rollings."

The Native American seemed much amused by Cold's old fashioned formality. He had no hat to tip, and instead settled with returning his words. "I see. My name is Elan Smith, representing the Numinu."

Coincidence had been no stranger to the young man, not as he sat and store a man that held a name so familiar, but of a different language no doubt. Here, the young man had seen and bore witness to who he might've been.

The Comanche received the herd, and the cowboys and cowgirls of Blanca parted ways with their cows that they had pushed on for weeks up to Griffin in their drive, and silently flasks had been popped and hands shaken amongst each other for at least a part of their work load completed. The Native riders with skill and in hollering beckoning the herd past the town, into the dark.

"Mister Cold, if you'll follow me, the money is in town in our offices, and we invite you and your cadre to stay the night. The tavern was expecting you."

Those of Blanca had begun congregating around Cold and Smith, much eager for a night on beds and drink. "I don't see the harm in that." With one motion of his hand, he let his party out, and like raiders, the cowhands had descended down onto Griffin like bandits.

The young man and Norea had trotted down at a slower pace, finding themselves before a town entirely of dirt and wood, copy and pasted out of historical texts of the Old West where electricity lay only in sparse street lamps. Horses had been rampant, men with spurs walking plank ways as ladies of every color looked out from their dimly lit windows down on them all. What was old was new again, and they had fit entirely the part.

"That man, talking to Cold up there, you wouldn't believe his name."

Norea's eyes brightened. "Something familiar?" She hoped, but not in the way that had been.

"His name's Elan."

It'd been years since he had said his name, and Jerusalem beneath him nickered as if that name had been its own. The young man patted the horse's neck as they looked for stable in that place. From the corners, the inhabitants of the town looked them all up and down, both Man and animal, and Tiberius stared them all down as each passed before Norea had centered where it walked.

"Was the Original an Indian?" She asked.

"We're not really sure where he came from, but if that was his real name, then maybe. Maybe." They stabled their horses with the rest of the Blanca's in a barn midtown that was ran, like many businesses in Griffin, by a Native family. This town had been of Comanche, through and through, with those of other colors simply visitors and business makers from other ranches and farms. Of the news that Norea heard on her radio had been the formalization of Comancheria from region to possible state itself beneath the federal government. The recent buying of cattle had matched the intentions of a people to start again anew.

Inside the tavern those of Blanca had been already well underway taking up tables and counters as the names of drinks were called out to the bar man, he too a Native. Along the second floor balcony had been rooms, and in between the railings dangled the legs of children looking down on them all as if they were to be reporting to an authority that relied on them. They took off their hats and approached the bar. The old man at the bar had looked at the two of them with a raised eyebrow before squashing it. "What'll it be?"

"A room," Norea answered as the young man sat on a stool, looking out in that structure of wood and tapestry, done up in the artistry of a people's so opposite from Spacians. "But before that, two whiskeys."

"Whiskeys up." The bar man poured two whiskeys and left them be. They clinked glasses together and took down that cool, burning sip.

"I never took you for drinking this hard after all this time." The young man let the gold in his cup swirl, she taking to a stool and leaning back against the bronze bar that went the length of the counter. Those of Blanca had settled in their post-drive routines of either boisterous celebration, too loud for some, and others simply sat drained nursing what drinks they ordered with cigarettes burning between teeth. They were the rodeo, come to town, obscenity and bets and stories, threats toward helicopters and their pilots, spoken aloud as above a simple chandelier swung.

"It sucks, my body burns through booze too fast." She groaned as she had taken long sips after long sips. "I don't get to enjoy it."

"Could always go for absinthe. Or that stuff in our medical supplies."

"You want me drunk, cowboy?"

"I want you to enjoy yourself, Norea."

"I'm enjoying myself just well and fine, thank you." she said, slightly leaning into him, and they both had been much satisfied with this. Gradually he had brought his arm around her, their backs to the bar, and simply sat there as they saw a scene out of spaghetti westerns play out as playing cards were brought out and coins were thrown, dares of eternity for all cowboy honor brought to bear. "Hey," she spoke the closest thing for a name to him, he looked down upon her. "If things changed between us, you think when we do… things like this, would they become more or less… whatever?"

His hand had softly held her shoulder and did not move as she mentioned it. He considered the thought, taking another sip, letting the ice touch his teeth once as if to center himself. His thumb roamed up and down the curve of her shoulder, and she had brought the cold glass of hers up to the faint line where she had once tried to kill him.

"I think," the young man started. "Us doing this," he squeezed her shoulder once. "Would be just the same. I don't think we've been shy about it, you and me."

"Hm." She considered, dropping the glass, leaving a streak or perspiration where the lip of the glass had been at his cheek. "You said you like being in between?"

"There's a certain… benefit for something unspoken, isn't there?"

"I guess." She breathed out, and in her airs had been dreams. "The only thing I want to hear out of you really is just something I don't think I've had to worry about for a long time."

"Hm? What was that?"

"Don't worry about it."

"Even you can be annoying sometimes, you know?"

She looked up at him and all was right in the world. "Aren't we the same?"

Circling thoughts between them, ideas implacable. Her lips had looked so nice beneath sheen of ice and alcohol, and he had been very handsomed by the world, the life he lived: as an Earthian. Whether witnessed or not, she had leaned over, leaned in, and he had closed his eyes and waited for what may. She brought her face to the side of his head, and whispered what she had wanted him to say, but in it was a promise that he knew needed no affirmation of its terms. She pulled back.

"Never." He answered, and she settled back well satiated, and he well-served of at least a part of purpose in his new life.

She took out her book, took his gift from her hat, and began to do as she was when she was most at peace: she began to draw the scene.

She sketched Win Nguyen sitting like a lunatic on his chair, his ass on the back of it and his feet in the seat as he held out his cards and told Lia Io who had been accusing him of being a no-good city-slicking cheat. Doll Chalk had put his back to the corner of the room, looking at all those who came in and all the older guns sat next to him in some low simmering of a night that they had been at least glad to be alive in. Vermillion Vorelli and Hack Lorentz had been going shot for shot in front of a table of local ladies, all of them goading them on for their benefit of for their failure, and a man and wife pair of Mister and Missus Dullthorne who had been married only in those last five years but known each other all their life around San Angelo sat in the window learning of marital wisdom from an old Native widow come here to at least be around people in the night, instead of a home now lost of all sons and all fathers. Norea captured them all the moment before Cold had walked in with Mister Smith, a thick leather briefcase in Cold's hand as he walked to the bar, ordered one shot of a clear spirit, downed it, and walked up to the rooms of the tavern for the night. Norea could swear that she could hear Cold collapse into the bed above them.

Elan Smith had remained, wearing a grey suit that fit very well on him, with vests and a pocket square that had been of the geometric designs common to his peoples, on his ear lobes lay gleaming gemstones, subtle, but twinkling all the same. Riding his lapel: a polished stone, in its lines had glowed with a type of quartz or howlite. He moved with a familiarity, going to all of the Blanca's and then to the Native men and women who had made up the bar's population otherwise, switching to English to another language of another time before at last coming to the bar and sitting beside Norea and the young man. He ordered no drink, instead taking out his pipe, filling it, the bar man wordlessly coming over and lighting the bowl. He smoked. He bundled up his hair to something more manageable, and then he turned to Norea and the young man.

"Elan Smith." He had greeted the two of them after a few indulgent puffs, extending his hand to the young man and then Norea. Norea shut her book, tucking it away in particular wonder about hearing that name again. "First time up in our country?"

"Not quite." The young man couldn't help but slip. He sat between Elan and Norea, speaking more at the walls and the tapestries upon there: pressed flowers, arrows like artifacts speaking to histories uncorroborated on. His words bore invitation for question, and Elan with one of his thick brows rose, and beckoned him on. "I'm from this country."

Elan had narrowed his gaze upon him, his pipe puffing with each breath until he took the pipe out of his mouth and spoke words that had belonged him and his people alone. When the young man had begun to shake his head Elan had continued smoking. "Don't mistake my age for lack of knowing. You don't quite look of this land."

"I am. I was taken from here as a child. All of this," the young man gestured to himself. "Knife work, surgery. Stuff like that. Sorry." He didn't know why he apologized but he had. Elan had looked at the young man with a sudden raising his eyes, opening further the whites of them, craning his head like a bird to take his entire image in. This, as had happened to the young man, was one of the oldest stories of pain for Elan. "I was in… in my village. I lived in a village with my mother. On a river. She collected salt from the river. My father, I think, was a White man. I'm sorry I shouldn't be bothering-"

"No, no." Elan had listened, raising a hand to stave off his worries, his anxieties. "Go on. If it is as you say, and I know this world is very strange in what it does to people, you are of the Numinu too." He puffed again. "You've not had much in the way of others like us, have you, Mister…?"

The one Native American man of the ranch had been Sioux, and much detached from his culture. He was friendly enough, but he had just been another man.

"I don't know my name."

Norea had peered around and nodded to confirm, and Elan had been sorry to hear it.

"I see." Elan had said, nodding to himself before trying to smile in light of it. "They tell me men with no names are quite famous in the West."

The young man took a sip. "My life isn't a movie, unfortunately."

"I'm sorry to hear." Elan looked out to the same room they were in, and the cowboys and the Indians that had made it that night their own with artifacts and decorations of Native aesthetic looking down on them. "For a while, me and my people, we thought the world was going back to where it started. In this century we all saw it happen: the Benerit Group take itself from the Earth and left it behind up in Space. Everything that hadn't to do with space seemed to reel back: planes would stop flying, soon trucks would stop rolling, the modern world receding back because it wasn't profitable. Not long after that, all of Texas at least started to see how we had to live on the Reservations with what was kept from us. It was almost as if everything we didn't have was preparing us for a world where those around us began to lose what we had lost centuries ago. We thought the world was going back to how it was in the Old West, and we were looking forward to it: Going back to a time where everyone rode freely, and the economy was existent only in the needs of families and tribes. A simpler life, one where the Earth was allowed to heal and the animals returned to us to live in harmony instead of being treated like… factories within themselves. When the Blood Meridian hit, we thought that was going to pass, and I, in a college in Austin was brought back to here as if they were getting the war bands ready again to finish the job."

"Take back what was lost?" Norea had asked.

"Something like that." Elan had been unapologetic, one hand of his cutting through the smoke in front of his face. "But that was just some momentary madness of the elders here, and we seem to be circling back around into modernity with formalization of Comancheria as a state, not some collection of reservations. Hence why we're collecting heads of cattle. The Government is offering subsidies for the expansion of cattle ranching in Comancheria."

"I see." The young man responded, turning back to Norea, what they were doing at odds, and the exact opposite reason why Blanca had been selling its herd. They said nothing. Those matters that went above them, wandering into political, hadn't been their providence anymore.

"But I suppose if we were going back in time, all the bad would've come up with the good. Boarding schools kidnapping children. Cowboys and Indians duking it out because there was no common law between us. Frontier justice. All of that too. Seems like we skirted a bit too close, and you were put as offering for it." Elan Smith pulled out his pipe again and with the mouth piece swirled designs in the air, absent-mindedly, before turning over to face the young man and making a frame of smoke across his face. The young man stared on, through the frame, eyes to eyes. "You know anything about what it means to have the blood you do?"

"No." The young man answered, his answer blowing the frame away.

"Would you like it to matter?"

The young man wasn't sure. "If I knew what I was, maybe it'd help to find out what type of life I'll be living."

"If it were only so easy."

They sat and watched that old way of life exist for just a moment, in that building built up to play host to that ritual of men and women who knew nothing of a modern life, and existed in moments of time as if they would be safe there forever. Even they, as witnesses, had been part of that picture too.

"Elan, is that a name of your people?" The young man asked eventually, as the night was ultimate outside and all began to retreat to a place of rest for the night after much drink and conversation.

"Our people." Elan said, and he nodded. "And yes it is."

"What does it mean?"

"It means, friend." With that he rose from the stool he sat on, going into his pocket and sliding out a metal card holder, a business card brought out and offered:

Elan Smith

Development and Growth Leader

Comancheria

Confederated Tribes - Agricultural Authority

The text had been in gold and beset on that black card had been the design of a headdress and the rolling plains, many animals below it.

"Call me if you want to talk. We have a service that reconnects missing children to any parents or relatives, especially in your case… I don't know how you were taken, but it still happens: White parents in the coastal cities taking pity on us. And can we do? Deny our kids a better life than what we could've offered?"

"I'm not quite sure if I have the heart for it. Showing up, looking like I do."

Elan had looked at him for a long time as he stood, pocketing his hands. Norea's eye of concern had been squarely on the young man, who he himself could not bear the world around him as if he had no permission to live in it at that moment.

"Do you know what I tried to say to you earlier?" The young man looked up to shake his head. "I asked you if you knew who you were."

He stood there for a little while longer, waiting for his eyes to meet his. But they never did. Turning on his heels Elan Smith walked out of the door back to his business.

They slept together that night on a bed three times the size of their usual sleeping accommodations, and although they had much room to be physically apart, when they woke up they had done so tangled with each other, and whoever woke first did not move until Cold in the morning had banged on all of their doors to get going. Even then, there had been five minutes more, of her on his chest, and he threading fingers through her hair unfurled. They spoke nothing of it, even as they lingered in their touch of each other until that very last moment when they needed to get ready for the ride back to San Angelo and the Blanca.

As they mounted their horses for the ride back, Cold had approached the young man, bearing a letter, thick with its contents, addressed to him: The Man with no Name. "I think we'll just keep calling you Blondie for now."

He opened the letter, and out had come out a web of fiber, of string and rope and beads that sprawled over his palm like a spider. Holding one end of it up he discovered it as a craft: a dream catcher. It came with a letter, a short note: The subconscious is older than language, and in dreams it communicates to you your deepest truths. This should help you along.

He shared it with Norea, and she had seen it, those blue beads the same color as her hair. "It's nice."

On his belt had been space for it, and in it, it rode like a charm, like her own rabbit's foot.

They rode back the way they came from Comancheria much lightened and quickened in pace, two days riding out and two more to go on horses finally let riding in a long line of cart and horse and rider, and for meals they were supplemented by food from the land.

The young man had in the early mornings after nights of rest gone out into the world on his own, rifle in hand, and peered out into the long plains. What signaled breakfast had been his gunshots, and then the haul of rabbit or deer.

He never missed.

"You know, ole Chalk here might've liked to have you in the fight back then for the revolution." Win had chewed his skewers, and the young man had only smirked at Win and what way he showed his fondness.

When they returned to Blanca it had been much the same as when they left it, right through the gate they had shut. The ranch had been much quieter, its sold population like ghost noises in the ears of those that rode back by the time the sky had begun to go from its daylight to a bold orange. Baile and her company of hands left to tend the ranch greeting them all.

"Baile," Cold called out to her. "I figure this is a vacation for you from your Ranger work. How's it been?"

"Same shit, different day." She called back, the hands who remained taking and stabling all the horses from those who returned. "You staying the night?"

"That's the plan." Cold affirmed.

Off several days of straight riding Norea and the young man had gone back to their shared room in the bunkhouse and collapsed again onto it and each other until the showers had been free from others that had opted to go their first instead of rest their feet. A dinner of tortillas and beans and cheese with bacon; not for taste but just for sustenance and calories. The TV had been on but they all had been out of their minds except for Win: he had something to look forward to come in the morning. On the TV had been a nightly variety show hosted out of New York City and the host had been chatting with a celebrity guest, an actress who recently only starred in movies produced beneath the Benerit Entertainment Wing, staring in movies with the messages that fell beneath the Benerit line. The celebrity described her movie: A dramatic film about a fictional sole survivor of a luxury space cruise liner after the Blood Meridian wiped the stars clean, and how she was to adjust for life back on Earth and the fresh and unique ingredient of the planet under a love interest chef at a new restaurant.

"Now you're actually one of the few actors to have lived on Earth before 122, how did you approach- or rather what's your impressions of being an Earthian as opposed to a Spacian, as someone who's been on both sides of it?"

"That's actually a really interesting question, Seth. As a Spacian living on Earth for a few years, I had, and forgive me if I'm speaking out of term, but Earthians are able to dream. You have lives where you want to dream, that's not like us Spacians, who had no reason to dream. I was very fortunate to come to the realization before 122 that if you were in Space, you had no dreams because you could just like, more than like just do what you wanted, you know? If you wanted to live in a place that was all beaches, there was a colony for that, or if you wanted to rent out a space station that was like, a wooden preservation so you could write your novel, you could find one. You don't really have to dream if you have everything you could ever want."

The ranch slept dead that night, awoken by the roosters in the morning hours from then, the whole process brought to bear again. In the morning Baile and her hands had rounded up the horses. Eighty heads packaged and ready to go to follow the riders.

"They just got to Nacogdoches." Baile had reported to Cold in that early morning. "From the looks of it they're gonna be getting back here to the ranch by the time you leave El Paso."

"Thanks Baile." Cold had said warmly, mounting Junior as she stood by. "Not regretting leaving?"

"I got no regrets for going where my heart goes. You should try it."

The only tease that could ever be leveled toward him. "See you at Christmas Baile."

Devala Tarakhovskaya had arrived on the ranch shortly before they had all gotten underway on a horse of her own, dressed very much more like frontierswoman than polite teacher she had been. Cold had taken one look at her and remembered that he had let Win bring her along. She had no doubt in Dev. No partner of those who worked at the ranch hadn't gone through, just by exposure or experiential osmosis not known how to ride a horse or go on a drive, and Devala had been a tough cookie. She had come, and it was Win now that had nearly tackled her off the saddle, much excited to have her along to El Paso and then Juárez.

The young man saddled his horse and Norea had been waiting. He uneasily looked out along all the horses before them, much corralled by the riders there with a more serious deference than the cattle before them. "Guess I'm going to have to get used to more horse play, coming up."

"You'll be fine."

"Maybe." He said with much anxiety. "Maybe."

They rode into the West, further west than the two had ever been with their convoy of horses. They drove into a land yet known to them for their years in that country. Dry, arid land, another desert encroaching on rolling hills with each grain of sand a soldier in the desertification of America that was at both a long war, a losing war, but not one without hope. They carried with them a hundred hooves to stamp down on the land as they followed the sun on its eternal path. All horses there had been broken in some measure, the ground work for further training with future owners germinated within them like children, and all who rode had been parents to them, but if it were Man following horses or horses following Man it could be told as in that convoy of rolling thunder they all were beholden to that land, West Texas, where the sky had ruled even more completely across all that it swallowed up the land and what it carried into a bowl of a region, swallowing up all who came if they did not know where to go. Even in the spring it was scorching, their shadows drawing miles in their cast across dried shrubbery, and the skeletal remains of derricks and metal machinations meant for the exploitation of that land, all now left to rot beneath the sun. In that land wrangled by Man and Nature, none had won as both the skeletons of beasts and the failed projects of Capital had been felled by the unending sun above and the elements. There was no relief for anyone there but to ride on. They went on this journey full well knowing its toughness, knowing that others before, weaker than them, had traveled it, but as the world turned it refreshed its frontiers and they became alien again for those who dared. None spoke, only the hoarse shouting and corrections of the horses back into a line, a group, for the journey was going to be long, and speech was left for the civilized. Extirpated of what made them Man and not animal, the riders rode on as the formations of the Earth had rose before them in canyons they ducked into where foreign wilderness hunkered down from sun, and the sighting of Man. Upon all surface even rock sizzled, the stool from the horses as they rode cooking as they lay on the ground even in the shadow of natural angles. The horses waned, what could otherwise be recognized as natural came to be bent now by shadow and by crag artificial, geometric angles like a demented church in those canyons, and they pilgrims going further, deeper, into a land mythic made in eras past.

They passed upon an orange wall, on it the paintings made of Native American hunters a thousand years ago, the color of it baked into sediment and layer for all time, the eyes of Oxen forever looking out to those that passed before them like a forgotten God. The horses waned, at the bottom of the canyon had been a small stream that crawled along the surface of basin in its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. The horses all tried to dip into it, licking the surface of that terrain so much that they disrupted the stream, and when the horses had passed some of the riders trying their luck had gone to the floor as well and licked those desert rocks of their water before spitting out the grit.

Their way followed through a long curve of Texas, in day and in night, where in the night the cold overtook them as around them horses huddled for warmth as did the people.

Nothing moved in that desert bloodland that promised nothing but death. When they awoke they awoke to a stony country where in the distance, a radio tower put there by the Benerit Group had toppled over, the great glass and silver of it gleaming off the desert, blinding birds that came past to madness, an offering of corpses upon those that fell upon those magma-hot surfaces, sticking to it until the flesh evaporated.

Some of the horses had failed, and when they did Cold had doubled back around with Junior, observing the horse as it suffered, broke hoof, broke leg, and whispered to it sweetly before a gunshot rang out.

Every drive had its losses, its bloodletting.

Another horse had toppled over, the bone from where it tripped mid leg showing, sheared through flesh as the horse reeled and screamed. It was a big horse, a draft horse. As Cold passed over to deal with it as it fell, its flesh scorching where it fell upon heated rocks, he motioned for the young man's break action pistol. The young man gave it, and when the shot went off it had been loud, and the horse's body seized once before becoming part of the land. It was done in less than ten seconds, the pistol handed back as Cold moved back to the front of the drive. The young man had swung the action open, the single spent cartridge still in, he spilling it out into the hand of his glove and seeing it glow with its burnt tips in the sunlight.

In days to come they would continue, chasing the shadows, making what felt like merciful, meaningful progress only on days where the clouds had come out, but then those clouds had come down with torrential rain. Their scramble to get out of the canyon they had traveled frantic, panicked even, as the water in it rose to the ankles of the horses until at the last second all had forded out onto higher ground, waves of wash sweeping where they had come from. Their sunburned skin was much pained by the droplets of rain, the size of hailstones, and the horses whined beneath the pelting for the two days that this had gone on.

The young man's poncho, now three years old in its usage, still remained on him doing its duty diligently even as the fibers of it frayed below. Where it's been, what it was made for, all opposed, and yet carried on against blasts of the wind.

"The god damned sand," a cowboy bitched. "It could blast the skin right off you."

They passed found the Benerit solar panel project, glass littering the ground, twinkling the stars back at themselves in defiance of what was meant to be. A recent notice from the State of Texas, nailed along the gate, cut through by the riders, stated that this had been now property of the state, yet none had held it accountable. That night they camped underneath those endless solar panel fields, where the crystalline trees that had been frozen in development and left to rot had provided ample cover from the rain. Everywhere, horses found their own shelters under such trees. Some of the riders had taken the time to put their masks up and enter into the control buildings, each of them smelling like burnt batteries that promised cancer that quickly beat them back.

The moon rose full behind the rain clouds, each solar tree an outpost of reprieve. The young man wrapped Norea in his poncho, and they sat beneath their own tree with Win and Dev. No fire could be made, and all four them huddled together like wet dogs, Win trying to say something funny but his jaw locked in vibration.

"He- hey Dev, baby."

"Yeah, hunny?"

"It'd be really funny if if- if I asked you to marry me right now."

"Yes, real funny." Dev had seemed much annoyed and if not for the fact that, between the four of them, Win had been generating the most heat he would've been kicked out. Instead he had to sustain a string of Russian curses. "When you ask me I want there to be flowers, I want my parents there, I want it to be on the coast, and it has to happen in the winter so we can do the wedding in the spring."

"Babe you seem so sure you're going to say yes."

"You know I've never been able to say no to you."

Perhaps it had been hell to Norea and the young man, sharing such a close space with their two equals, but it had to hold for that night.

"I think I also want these two there as well."

"Oh yeah baby?"

"Just to show them how it's supposed to look."

Never had Norea been so close to returning to what she had once been; where life had been chaff and she a reaper in her own right. But the young man had only settled her, pressure put on her side in a little extra appearance of presence and warmth. She looked out to the site they found themselves; a broken world left behind: the inheritors that of the Earth. Broken bones, skeletons, of a project that, regardless of who it was intended for, might've given a better life through its usage. What was true of this, was true of many things that belonged to Capital, to Benerit. Earthians, huddled like animals, borrowing these remains to sustain the judgment of the world. The spirits of those who worked on these places now beheld a desecrated holy ground in service of nothing, and long after they would leave, this place, and all that it meant would remain dishonored at its end, as it had been at its start.

"You know, Texas will probably have to go to a private company to get this place back up and running." Win said, following Norea's gaze. "Do you think that it'll all start over? That war of Spacian vs Earthian, except it is just all Earthian?"

It was a question posed at her, and she hadn't realized until all three of them looked and sat in silence. "I- I don't know."

"Probably will." The young man remarked. "Someone will always be ready to take one's place if presented." His wet face hid much of those words, but not from Norea. His eyes had been empty and thin, distant and somewhere else. She looked at his face and saw him looking for answers as he had in their years there in the broken world.

"Human History is cyclical, but not people." Dev had said, her voice considerate like that when she spoke to her children. "People change, they always do, but History lives on its own path, and it takes more than any one of us can bare to put it down a different direction."

Above, thunder and lightning, rolling in approach, and as soon as they realized it had meant, from God, a white line appeared an acre away, and for one fraction of a moment, the whole world was lightened. Nothing to hide, nothing could be hidden. For one second, the canals upon the skin of two witches glowed, only to go out as the world broke out into cacophony. Norea had thrown herself over the young man as the flash blinded them all, their teeth and bone rattled as in the middle of the night, Hell came for them as lightning and thunder arrived. The horses in their screaming kicked up all at once, the solar tree that the lightning had connected to exploding, sending glass and metal shrapnel through the entire property, bouncing off metal poles, other trees, blunted only by the thick jackets they all wore. Men and women were screaming and panicking in the dark, yelling, getting away from what had once been cover as the four young riders too scrambled out from their sanctuary turned target. Around them the horses were whipped up into a frenzy, pounding trails into the Earth with destinations known only to the mad. Lightning struck again, just outside of the compound, and here they had been trapped with fences all around, a tempest of horses and the storm itself. If Cold had been yelling for order, he could not be heard over the swell of wind and rain and horses. Four metal stomping hooves had passed by their heads as they lay in the alley between trees, and Dev, covering her head, had only been hauled up by Win.

Everywhere, the cowgirls and cowboys had taken flight, their horses unable to be drawn up, so instead they had gone for the fencing, however far it may be, between stampeding horses rolling over glass, the sound of rain and thunder and lightning and cracking permanent in that night. They were four of them, alone, running hand in hand like ducklings toward the closest way to the fencing where horses rode up against brewing in that condemned place ruination and trampling. They had seen what horses did to the land, and bone and body had been much softer, each of them baring pains from old wounds of bucking and breaking. They waited for a group of horses to pass in their madness before Dev had gone to the fence first, scrambling up it with Win to her back, when the horses passed wind waked in their path, blowing harshly, the tip of one's head catching Dev's boot and sending her over the top in a spin. Win had cried out, going to the fencing as horses actively passed, his body battered as he held on, scrambling to the top and over to Dev, the back of his coat torn and ripped by contact.

Norea waited for horses in their running to sprint by again, but at their back had been more. They had gone for it scrambling up like monkeys wind breaking upon them.

As they crested the top a gust of wind in that storm had blown upon Norea, and as she jerked to stay on, her hat had flown, the writing implement on it gleaming in lightning. She had tried, but too late, to try and snatch it, and it had been sent back down to ground within the enclosure.

The young man went after it, jumping down before Norea realized what had been happening, throwing himself onto the hat to stop it from blowing away. She had no name to call him, so she screamed instead. He had looked up and saw a black horse coming to trample him, so he had rolled over as mud flew onto him, scrambling to his feet surrounded by horses, and nothing but horses and the broken world. Somewhere: a gunshot, and then several, cloaked in lightning. He ran back to the fence where Norea had still been at the top, looking down on him with wild, worried eyes as Win had been on the other side climbed back up. He stepped forward, but the broad of a horse had spun him around, back to the ground. He held her hat and the mechanical pencil with iron grip as he took up again and ran toward the fence, jumping as more horses came behind him, pressing him to the fence in great pressure. At his scalp he felt Norea clawing for a hold on him, and he dragged himself up, only to be dragged back down, pulled and hinged upside down.

The strands of his poncho had caught on the fence, and now he stood in a world revolved, as bait for horses that charged around him. He could die, snapped neck, crushed head, severed spinal cord, beaten to a pump on the rack like meat. He could die, for something as silly as a gift. But it's the right place, the color of the world: the storm came for him and he had been a hanged man. In all scripture however, none had told the story of how the criminal saved Christ. He felt the rope come up from his hair to around his arms, and then the great shuffled of the swivel back. Win Nguyen held the rope that caught him and in a great tear, a great pull, he threw the length of rope behind him to Nore and Dev and he had shouted with hell raising tones to pull. The poncho that kept him tore, and he had been dragged up the fence up to Win who received him in his arms.

"Gotch you!" In one pull the young man had been yanked over, falling onto Win's chest, arms across the women also in their pull. All of them panting, shaking in fear. Win had bundled up, holding the young man by his shoulders. "God damn, Blondie, you're a crazy motherfucker aren't yo-" Win hadn't anytime to finish as the young man had been dragged off him. It had been Norea, now putting him on his back, straddling him, a wide and wet slap coming across his face once as her face had been wild in fear of all shades.

"You idiot! You absolutely idiot!" She grabbed his collar. "You could've gotten-!"

He drew her in, arms to her back and keeping her there. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"You could've…"

"Yeah. I know. I'm sorry." He breathed into her. "Just wanted to save this."

She had taken the hat and its implement, torn from his hands, and shoved it crushed down to his chest, beating him with her bare fists weakly, and then weaker. "Save yourself! Isn't that what you made me do?!"

Win had rolled back over a wild man, Dev dragging him to his feet. "Blondie! Norea! Come on let's fucking go!"

The four had ran, putting their troubles of each other aside in favor of worry for the world around them, and they had ran until they found a depression upon the ground some several hundred feet away and threw themselves into it. In the far distance, the earth had grumbled like a beast, hungering for sustenance that could not be provided, and if it was lightning above or the ground above moving they could not tell as they all huddled together and shut their eyes.

"Hey, Blondie!" Win had said over the wind's howl, curling Dev into his chest as Norea held onto the young man's back, he and Blondie basically face to face and yet still there was difficulty there in hearing. "Your half-Indian ass is Mormon or some shit right?!"

"Sure!" He yelled back.

"Pray it up then! God doesn't listen to me anymore!" Win reached out, and his hands had been on his side like in partial embrace as Dev did so too, pulling the man further in to them as Norea had always held true. But he could say nothing, and in that storm he realized more than anything, not of his life, but of himself, he knew nothing. He didn't know himself as part of the Numinu, he didn't know how to beg the Christian God for mercy. He knew nothing, and had been nothing, as words were torn out of his very lungs and he was a failure. He couldn't pray at all, not for himself, nor for his friends. All he could do was beg in madness and in gibberish to that distant Other that they be spared, even if he had been the price.

He begged that the eternal plan of Almighty God did not end them there, and then all said amen.

When they next opened their eyes an eternity later, it had been the morning, and the birds chirping upon Texas plains, the enormity of plateaus around them that had once been shrouded by storm clouds and darkness. They awoke ruined, covered in the Earth, but very much alive.

In the bright, four souls rose from their ditch, wide eyed and twitching, the ground where they had lain wet from water pooled there. They were like savages, transported beings from another time, summoned up by misfortune to paradise. They made their way holding onto each other back to the fence where they climbed, finding it having been struck by lightning in the night, the young man's poncho fried to it forever like flesh left out to jerky. Unwilling, with no strength, they doubled back around to the gate they first came, and in front of it had been the chuck wagon and its singular operator: Lacey Cold, looking like a wild man himself. In the storm, he had pushed the chuck wagon himself to the gate, keeping the horses in, and he had spent all the night awake at that guard, not knowing what had become of his party. With shaking hands, the man naked down to his trousers, he slowly had been sipping on a full bottle of whiskey, much rattled, despite himself. When the four approached him he had looked at them with those same eyes they had, hand moving to tip a hat that hadn't been there, and said, quivering.

"Shit. I love my job."

One by one, the party had emerged from the Earth like a crop harvest, all taking flight from that enclosure, scrambling over fences and rock barriers built around to ditches for cover from lightning strikes. Some had even climbed on top of the control buildings, risking lightning over trampling, but even then as the morning rose and the smoke from the chuck wagon's stove signaled that life had still been going on, it was revealed none had died: a miracle, given. But not all had been unscathed. Chalk and Lia had tended to the rest, shrapnel wounds of solar panel and flying pebbles and even battering by horses had been there, the worst injury being of Hack Lorentz, a child of the ranch now full grown man, whose parents had been part of those left back at the ranch. He had been run over by horses and black and blue all over, his arm dislocated, but fixable at that very moment as even at breakfast, the whiskey was brought out, and he given a shot.

"Yeah just do it Lia." Hack had gutturally burped after throwing back the drink.

"Love you, Hackie." Lia had prepped, and then she pulled upon his arm and the bone popped back into socket. The scream had been better than coffee.

They all sat there still much close to each other, huddling for warmth as the horses in the enclosure of the solar farm had much settled, and went about the way of grazing what grass lay inside there not pestered with shards. Breakfast was arranged in the form oats and coffee, no one quite in the mood to fully make a meal.

"Makes me reconsider going to church." Vorelli, a cut across his forehead from shrapnel barely missing his eye, sat against the chuck wagon shirtless.

"Shit." Hack spoke as Chalk had dressed his own wounds. "When I get to down up there to El Paso I sure as hell not visiting a church first."

Asides, the young man and Norea had been together, shoulder to shoulder as, around the corner of a rock outcropping they sat again, Win and Dev had been much in the process of celebrating a rough night with a rough riding morning. They had been far enough away from the chuck wagon that most of the moaning had been kept hidden by the percolating of the coffee and the stove. Norea and the young man had been so exhausted they didn't care to move, and if they to listen to two young lovers love, it would be okay.

"Sorry." The young man said again, Norea still holding her hat and the mechanical pencil close to her. "I shouldn't have done it I just-"

"I'm going to be mad at you. For a little bit. I know you know why. Just let me stew. Okay?"

"Fuck, baby, if I'd known you're like this after every storm I'd go ahead and move us down to Florida."

"Yes- oh fuck- Yes!"

"Understandable." The young man said, head back against the rock and, trying to feel deeply in what heat it was soaking in from the sun.

"Just don't go putting your life out there like that. I thought we were over dying for… useless causes."

"I know, I know. It's just force of habit, I guess."

"It's not a habit." She bit back, unable to look at him. "You were just being an idiot."

"I'm sorry." He said once again. He didn't want to fight. He knew he had been wrong. But that gift had meant everything to him, and to her, at that time in their lives where nothing seemed to be going right. To lose it was to lose a piece of that hope of a better life, and the life they found themselves in. He closed his eyes to the sky, and imagined he would only open them again when it was time to work, to clean up, to get the horses together again.

What had made him open his eyes, however, had been a pair of lips, pressed against his cheek; long and meaningful, and by the time he opened his eyes, Norea had pulled away. "Thank you, though." He looked at her with wide eyes, but what had been shock had turned over to a smile of complacency; peace. "I'm not doing that every time you almost get yourself killed, by the way. Just- Just. Yeah."

"Yeah." The young man repeated fondly, letting what was unspoken remain so.

"Yeah! Yes!" screamed Devola.

And then they moved on from that rock.

It was Cold's horse that, much like a battered lone survivor of a battlefield encounter, had walked up to the chuck wagon from its side of the enclosure, straw and dirt and the spit of other animals on it. It was silent in approach, bowing its head before Cold as he slid in the gap of the fence between chuck wagon and solar farm and putting his hand upon their nose, holding it like a child. "Hey, Junior. Long night?" The horse chuffed as if speaking back, and for Cold, perhaps it had been. Out of his own bowl of oats he had fed the horse, and soon after he had climbed aboard the still attached, but wet and soaking saddle. He looked at his phone kept in one of the saddle bags, and it had been nothing but a dead brick in its soak.

They walked alongside Cold back into the solar farm, all almost naked as they left their clothes on racks by the chuck wagon to dry, their possibles with their horses out there in the enclosure, all of them huddled in corners or prancing around. Lying dead in the middle had been three horses. The gunfire in the night erupting out of the guns of Mister and Missus Dullthorne. None of them had been owned, thankfully, but Mister Dullthorne had explained as they stood over the bodies: "We got backed into a corner last night. There ain't nothing else we could do."

Cold had nodded, no more explaining to do. "You two alright though?"

They both nodded. "All that matters." He looked out along those silver trees and saw the horses, finding those meant for riding. He saw Jerusalem and Tiberius and Win's King James. He saw Chalk's Rosebud, and Lia's Bethany; Hack Lorentz's Old Man lay standing with his saddle askew, looking at the riders from a distance, as the horses of the Dullthornes, Concrete and Black Ludwig seemed very disinterested in everything with Vorelli's Lusitania near and grazing. The last horse, belonging to the last of the Blanca riders, an older Mexican gentleman by the name of Jose, whose horse he had named after an ex-wife constantly walked the barrier of that farm until it like Junior found its way to the chuck wagon. "Gather your horses, gather your things, saddle back up and we'll see about herding out of here."

Dev's Sukhoi lay shaking in her hoofs, but Norea had already gone forth to her to try and steady. The horses, wild of storm, found again their center in their breakers, and one by one the horses were gathered up by riders on their half-ruined mounts.

Win had rode up besides Norea, ruined looking but in quite a good, glowing way. "You think-"

"Win don't talk to me when you're five minutes off from fucking Dev. That's disgusting."

"Shit alright, I was gonna ask you something philosophical." Norea had guided Sukhoi to King James and Win had taken it as Dev recovered back at the chuck wagon, making tortillas for the road ahead. If they had rode hard they could get to El Paso by nightfall. "Don't want to hear it?"

Norea groaned, Tiberius not too far away and she retrieving him, a procession of brushing and pats to his mane and neck following to calm both her and it down. "Go on, then."

"You think God hated the Benerit Group so much that he wants to get rid of any trace of them? It'd explain last night. I ain't never seen lightning and thunder like that. Like the end of days, I swear."

She settled into her saddle, thinking on it for a moment and the destroyed project they had sheltered in.

"They spent so much time trying to erase us, maybe it's swinging the other way." she said, dismissively.

"I see, I see." Win had agreed in his own way, turning King James and Sukhoi off to the chuck wagons as the riders gathered their horses and began the processing of herding them, Cold standing like a reaper of some accounting and watching all the horses come by to the funnel by the chuck wagon, and with his finger pointed each out that had been wounded in the night: shards of solar panel, cuts and scrapes, the worst being one that had lost an eye it seemed. The cowboys tended to them as best they could with patch and lacquer.

"Hey, Cold, you think the buyer's gonna mind some beat-up horses?"

"They know what this country's like, and it's still a good deal." Cold answered. "Only lightning outta the sky can take these horses down, and even then it's gotta strike twice."

"Don't tempt Death, on your account or on other living things, Cold." Chalk had called out from his horse, he, accustomed and had known Death well. "You dare him enough he'll come collecting."

"Death's a woman, Chalk." Cold cooled his face with his hat in swooping motions. "Because she won't have me."

They had passed the horses back through the gate after their mending, and then they moved on again.

They forded over the Pecos River past noon, a thin strip more stream than river but the horses all found their hydration in it as they sipped, and then moved across it. Mexico had been so close to the south, distant glimmerings of the Rio Grande in the distance drew their eye to that country where long ago many migrants traveled across to get to the blasted country they traveled over now. The rusted remains of great fences, great walls, put there by peoples unwilling to share had been dissolved like this peoples themselves and the pride of this country in the face of Capital and Space, where Nation had not been as holy as value and asset. The dust they rode had been a crumbly red from stone broken down after generations, the clouds they made in their trot phasing them into mirages, storybook people for storybook horses for a storybook role. They smoldered beneath the sun as the world became the color of blood, and it was in their ride and in that dusty mirage they became a part of the world, close to its ground, mixed with the ferment of the Earth. They rode like souls drawn in instinctual migration to the West, to see where the sun set and to confirm that bright thing's destruction at the end of the world so that it may be born again in the morning, each of them belonging to an order, a membership, that had gone back legions in their generations upon that very same frontier. Space had been so far away from them now.

In three weeks' time, they had made it to the cities on the plain, on the border, upon the old American highways populated more with other vaqueros like them than car or truck, that highway swirling through the city of El Paso like a vein before it had turned south and cross over the old bordering cross between Mexico and the United States, depositing those from El Paso out into the Ciudad Juárez. Two sprawls much alike in composition, building off each other but always separated by a line put there long ago, where the American Federal government remained as stewards, and where the Texas Duty Dorce and the American Military shared a base in El Paso, large and imposing and quite busy with the resurgence in the years before of a Spacian threat in Benerit Remnants. The Military Base known as Fort Bliss lay along El Paso's North, with the Franklin Mountains to its back, it hosted an airfield which ran wild with planes bearing the stars and stripes of a nation resurgent alongside the single lone star of Texas's own military. All along the Rio Grande green and city had erupted, like a growing scar upon the desert.

Dev had looked out across the border, Juárez and saw in its center a silver block of a building amid the natural growth of the city: a modern building hosting a technical college where her friend had been, and she looked at it with much excitement as the cowboys and cowgirls all stood on that upper ridge, looking down on their destination. Cold had told them all to keep it tight, and that they'd have to go through the city: the other side of it hosting the export/import livestock crossing where the buyer would oversee the the transfer.

As they descended down, a familiar sight common in all Texas: A Ranger, come riding up to meet them. "Senor Predawn said that there was going to be a horse drive coming through." The Ranger had been typical of his creed, a man born in that country whose voice dripped with the authority and the moral righteousness of law. He had been friendly, coming up to Cold on his own horse and shaking hands. "We'll clear the way for you. Don't want to disrupt no more traffic or the mayor's gonna have my ass."

"Lead the way, pardner."

Nearly a hundred horses in their convoy descended upon the city of El Paso in the evening, sky bleeding up in its color as true cowboys came alive again in a town much like San Angelo, and yet missing its central Texas charm.

If there was a private indulgence for Norea there, it had been that she loved being seen like this: a woman in charge, on a horse, dictating duties beyond the bounds of most others, and down the streets of El Paso to stalled cars and bypassers they walked beneath the shadows of concrete buildings and shops, bearing burdens and scars of their journey, walking into town like victors of private, unsung wars. A young boy from his parent's shop had come up to Norea on the side walk, and held out a nice cold plastic cupped drink of agua fresca. The color of it too pretty, but its refreshment just well enough for her to take and thank the child, and after draining half she had turned over to the young man in his riding, and despite how annoyed she still had been at him, three weeks had been enough, and she had reached out and over with the drink and he had taken it with his polite, gracious look about him which he had held all his past life.

Not lost on them, however, were the others they had once been. Not too long ago they had been homeless, and vagrants, and the eyes of those still left behind in the world looked out at them from alleyways and sidewalks, in shade with their much distressed faces of a life not accommodating to them. They stared up at them, and they stared back in what solidarity they could give.

They passed through the town by Ranger escort, and in that place that Cold had been only twice in his life he rode like a cowboy from the past with all the paranoia of new lands that came with it. He didn't trust this place, at the intersection of so many things, that it boiled in his gut warnings beyond him.

At the Santa Teresa station where livestock were counted and weighed and passed between American and Mexican, the shredded remains of a Benerit Group logo upon the walls of an office building there, cattle and horse and goat and animals of all farm life groaned as the local caballerosbegan to join the Blanca hands had motion for the horses into lines for accounting and weighing as Cold had taken some well protected paperwork from his saddle pack and handed it to the gerente who with his sharp, plucky eyes read the formal lines of what they were, who they were, and where these horses had been going. He nodded, taking and stamping the papers before taking his copies and returning into the office of Santa Teresa, the hands and caballerosorganizing horses as other ranches, other farmers from places beyond Texas all organized in madness and chaos the necessity of trade and commerce of livestock.

Out from Santa Teresa had been an older Mexican gentleman, his suit bottoms held up by suspenders as he wore a white shirt even in the heated, hazy evening. Cold unmounted Junior and shook his hand.

"Gracias." The gentleman had said in the shake. "We can speak English."

"Como le convenga." Cold had responded, and the two had talked about their plans that would come from that sale of horses. The gentleman had said that his familial land in Coahuila was due a revival, and he would lead it, introducing horses to its range, and Cold had been honest about the conditions of the horses, all good and the groundwork given to all, but that they might've been a little beat up from the journey over. The gentleman had been understanding, but requested that, if this was the case, that he stay in town to resolve any issue that would arise in the condition of the horses, not out of suspicion, but principle, and Lacey Cold had understood as a man of principle himself, despite the twin cities and its darkness around him.

The caballeros had taken the situation well in hand, and soon the Blanca riders found themselves on their horses around Cold. "I'm going be heading down into Juárez to square away this whole deal, make sure everything's square. Might take a few days so go lodge up in town and come down to Juárez by the Hilton down there on Friday. You should be fine, the border's only really for commerce anyway."

"Mister Cold, do you mind if me and Win come down with you now? I have a friend in Juárez." Dev had spoken up from her horse and Win had been beholden to her. Cold shrugged, looking back at the gentleman waiting in his truck for him to follow on Junior.

"Yeah, sure."

Dev had brightened, looking to Norea and the young man and wordlessly saying good bye for now as the Blanca riders already began to peel off.

They stabled their horses in a place besides the historical Hotel Paso del Norte, its lobby and interior design of New York City Tiffany glass and Chicago language, just down the street from the Bridge of the Americas where US Federal agents waved down and inspected trucks and cars going back and forth, taking the receipts of the week stay that they would be there for and keeping it for Rolling's accounting and reimbursement. They, after an hours long shower that they each took separately, they had wandered onto the rooftop terrace where they had been alone, at the top of the building and all of El Paso save for one cowboy much like them, who had come in from ranch in New Mexico to deliver pigs to his customers in Sonora, and was now on the journey back. His name was Boyd, and he seemed much youthful with light colored boots and a white hat, nursing a martini as he sat on the rim of the stone wall between him and a ten-story drop, but he seemed not bothered by it. He looked out to the south, to Jaurez and that peaceful urban night amidst the desert, and he told them that, in every revolution, from the drone wars to the Mexican Revolution centuries ago, people often came to the top of that very hotel to look at the fighting in the distance, and that this very hotel had been defended by Benerit mobile suits in the drone wars because its owner had been much in favor by the executives.

Norea had asked how Boyd had known this, and he answered that his father and mother had died trying to assault this building to get those executives in the war, and for each time he had made this journey, he came back here and made sure his boots were dirty and muddy and he drank as much as he could as pilgrimage.

"I was going to go off, join some group called the Dawn of Fold off in Europe when I was ready, but you know the stars and their fires seemed to burn all of them out first. So I'm left hauling hogs." Boyd shrugged, downing his martini, and bidding farewell to the two forever. He stood on the stone wall of before El Paso, and the young man and Norea knew not what he intended as he took off his shirt, and let the wind blow over him as he held out his arms ready for crucifixion. Behind them, a staff from the hotel yelled in shock, and Boyd had turned in a half-wild face and stepped down. "That always gets them. Happy trails." He left as the two lounged in the cool night, going through drinks like adults two times their age and five times their misfortune, but it had been a happy buzz that carried them through their first night of rest and relaxation that they took into bed together.

He groaned in the morning as he picked her up and adjusted her slightly on him in a more reasonable fashion. "I'd gotten so damn used to sleeping with you I don't think I can do without." It was a good, peaceful night's rest.

"Shut up." She said again as had always been when he said stuff like that, but she didn't disagree.

They called up breakfast in the morning to their rooms: French-style omelets with orange juice and toast and garlic spinach and one ripe cherry tomato, and when they had it delivered on carts the housekeeper had called them Mister and Missus Du Noc. Norea had kept in some chortle at that, but the young man didn't seem to mind at all, and as they ate he had put this to her: That although his first name might've still been at odds to be found, he wouldn't have minded at all if he took her last name.

"Slow down there, cowboy." Her eye twitched. "I just got over you nearly committing suicide by horse."

He breathed deeply in the tired morning, nursing a partial hangover. "If you insist, Miss Du Noc."

They had relaxed and traveled the city on their feet which had in those years not become as used to walk for travel as they had been on horses, but it was a change of pace from even San Angelo in its half-rural charm, for here had been a city where modernity had been of a different, gritty shade. On the first day they had split off and explored on their own that city, hotter than the desert because of the heat radiating from other people, the buildings, but in cover they found shops and restaurants that had bled of other cultures, for tourists and for visitors of one land or another. The young man had sat before an art gallery well air conditioned, showing off Canadian art pieces alongside Navajo artifacts, sitting on benches as he let his mind wander in those summer color, the fabric of tapestry again weaving texture into the world, yet no feeling in him could be evoked. For she, she had wandered the markets underneath the brim of her hat, her pistol, a flat dark earth combat pistol she had bought for fifty dollars in San Angelo, rode on her hip as it always did in the two years she's had it. Many wore their irons hot in that place as well, and she was not a stranger as she had gone from peddler to peddler until she had found a seamstress, and behind her in her stall lay layers and folds of fabric. She toiled away like a smith at her sewing machine, orders written down in scrawl, her skin olden, bronzen like medal, but she was very much alive.

Her own mother was a seamstress. It was the only fact she knew; not her face, not her voice, just what she had been. Norea looked at this woman, and the woman looked up, and she spoke Spanish.

"En qué puedo servirte?"

Norea had taken to Spanish well enough, her first tongue that of French. There had been enough cross over, enough logistical pathways in her mind that lent her the language to at least basic conversational. Rollings had taught her, and although he had been an American he found Spanish very useful in their trade. Still, she used her hands, looking at a nice cool green fabric overhead, motioning around her shoulders as she made her request.

That night they ate an American diner drinking milkshakes and speaking about what they observed of El Paso, and the young man had told Norea that toward the end of the day he had met up with Hack Lorentz and the two had seen an old, archived movie from before Ad Stella in a theater about a financial crash in New York City, and how the fate of billions of dollars and millions of people had been decided by men and women in suits inside of a singular conference room. "It reminded me of what my life might've been like if it all went on, and if that whole… business, at Asticassia never got as complicated as it did."

"Regretting it at all?" She drank her milkshake as they sat at the counter facing out, watching people their age still in their own separate adolescence come and start the night or ending it depending on pregaming or where they had already been. Both of them at twenty-one, and here they had been with multitudes between them. The young man picked at his calloused fingers as he held the straw in his mouth, recounting movie, then his life, and then the trajectory if nothing had changed.

He sucked in the shake through a large straw in consideration. "I got a feeling that I would've been gotten rid of eventually." He shrugged.

"Even among Spacians, there are disposable people." She said rightly.

"Don't speak ill of the dead, dear Norea." He teased, and she had simply slurped her milkshake down.

It was the start of a weeklong vacation that had been gifted to them by coincidence and in the end, one much deserved.

In the May of AS 126, Norea Du Noc and the young man roamed El Paso at their own leisure. They set out on the town and ate well in restaurants that brought recipes from Tokyo to Cape Town and Manila. They saw at the edge of town a rodeo, where gunfights had been staged with smoke wagons and caps, and those actors replayed the brutality of another world amidst show tunes and Johnny Guitar, at the night El Paso shone and brightened like the long buried city of Las Vegas, where slots and craps were passed by in small dramhouses and gaming rooms. Horses raced at the edge of town on tracks, and they had watched those slim horses and light riders go through dust and dirt as the crowd bet their dollars on them. As they walked the town their old traditions had come up, and other travelers from as far away as Boston or Rio De Janeiro came bearing news from before the Blood Meridian: of kings arisen by blood moon consecration who now this long been dead in the grave by revolution, assassination or suicide. A fisherman from Alaska spoke of how the seas were slowly recovering from Benerit fishing vessels, and that maybe one day he could afford to eat the crab which he caught. Congregations in parks for picnics and share beneath misters had become repositories of stories in town and out, and the young man and Norea listened and heard travel of an Earth blooming in its own spring, dark as some stories of them may be. Such histories and their progression had been removed from what world birthed them, and they were quite satisfied with that, small as they were together. El Paso had been loud and noxious, and so too had been its people.

They saw children bused to school in yellow machines, politicians promising benefits more or benefits less depending on the demographic, Rangers sort out public disturbances like that of a horse who had been accused of shitting on the rims of a sports car, their owners duking it out as the Ranger sat there and noted down all details. Men from China, their language like the scratching cries of cats, stood in freshly bought clothes of cowboy aesthetic and marveled in that novelty as they ate snow cones and discussed the business that they had been brought to El Paso about as good ole boy locals stared at them with knowing eyes. Oasis squares which gallons of water were sacrificed upon from the Rio Grande rose up in the city scorching, and although they had been soft, the grass had been solitary in that concrete jungle as people crowded to feel it beneath their feet.

Halfway through, Norea had brought the young man to the market and the seamstress, and there she had unveiled the dark, cool green poncho made for him, simple adobe designs rimming the bottom that he wore, and the seamstress had clapped as he did a twirl in a way far too trained to be a fluke. Norea had grinned at how much of a fool he had been. But he was her fool.

"You are a dancer, yes?" The seamstress asked him.

"In another life." He answered.

At night, wearing his new poncho, they sat before an open air concert, a singer spoke her stardust memories in ballad.

---

"Somewhere in the milky way,

Somewhere deep in outer space,

As he travels all the galaxy,

Does he feel as lonely as me?

Out there where the comets fly,

Out there where worlds collide

As he chases all his wildest dreams

Does he ever dream of me?

Star bright, shining so high above,

How I wish he could hear me,

Star bright, send me the one I love,

Make my wishes all come true tonight. "

---

They held each other close and enjoyed that moment for as long as it lasted.

At the El Paso Zoo, they saw animals of Africa in their exhibits, elephants staring out with black eyes so Human that they had to turn away and think of them no longer as above the sun had been hot. The great wolves kept their hiding in the shade looked at them as they passed, grey in their coat, lobos lost of their freedom. Norea had imparted them to her memory, and that night she drew wolves in her book.

They had lunches with their horses often, for as much as they had been tools, they had been companions to the both of them, and Jerusalem and Tiberius imparted on them familiarity as they grain and sugar from their palms very calmly and knew that they had many years left with them.

On the last night before they were all due back in Juárez, they had walked the rim of El Paso together, and on its outskirts they found a midnight revival.

They saw them in their number floating above the desert grass and ocotillo as the moonlight above shared the color of their robes, several dozen in number. They were led by a man in red, he holding upon him a Bible, as others behind him bore a wooden cross of Christian faith. They were all singular in appearance and left in their trail themselves across the land until they found a place on the Earth to which to erect their cross. The sect had all gathered around this cross as the man in red spoke in holy terms, too distant for them to hear, but as they approached to listen, the cross had been afire, and in one chanting the hooded white robed members cried out that this world had been theirs, and would be theirs soon, for their fathers and their nation and their race.

The young man and Norea turned back and in their direction spooked, a group of Texas Rangers with guns drawn had passed.

The last one, a young lady Ranger, had apologetically whispered. "Sorry, we're not all like this."

They left before the shouting, then gunshots, and then the fire in the night.

Packing up their things and taking the small complimentary bottles of soaps, they left the Hotel Paso del Norte earlier than the rest of the other hands in that noon, who had been heard and seen getting drunk at bars around town or doing as they did and relaxing. They had wanted to meet up with Win and Dev earlier in Juárez, and with their papers denoting them as employees of the Ranch at Fortaleza Blanca, and that legally, the young man's name had been officially John Doe. They had gotten their IDs early on in their tenure via the San Angelo town hall, and as the American Federal Agent and then the federales from Mexico looked over their cards they had let them pass through on their horses to Juárez and Mexico. On the Bridge of the Americas they passed over the canal of the dryly running Rio Grande, where trash below had accumulated on the American side, but cleared up toward the Mexican areas. They were waved through by well-dressed federales, going from the bustle of El Paso to a city connected, yet different. It had been quiet, peaceful immediately and orderly, vaqueros passing them by tipping their hats and they returning the gesture as young children roamed the streets freely with balloons and ice cream cones. The world seemed much slowed in Juárez as they made their way through on their horses, and everywhere from the shade of umbrellas or ancient European buildings the locals all looked out at them and waved and spoke Spanish to them, inviting them to sit and stay a little while and not let their pale skin get cracked, for they were very beautiful, they said.

The two of them had only thanked them for their hospitality and rode on toward the campus of the Universidad Mariposa de Ciudad Juárez. They roped their horses on a lamp post by a car parking lot, hoping that that had been allowed as they waited at the key card locked entry way of one of the dorm buildings. On that same campus, that silver glassy box of a building stood over all. They stood out of place as students went about their day with books and folders and bags to them, awkward in their boots and jeans as others walked in shorts and hoodies and tank tops like people their age were supposed to be doing. This campus had been a campus like they imagined universities to be. Even Asticassia's in its grandness could be recognized as school grounds, and in that place they couldn't help but remember what was to be. For Norea, her visitation had been excuse, and had not been there for a few more days in the disguise of a transfer. For the young man he had more time to settle back into the role the Fourth had left him, and thus had attended classes and done what was expected of him as part of the student body.

"You know we could go to college someday. I'm sure we'd be pretty good students." The young man observed what youth like them should've been again.

"I've been to school once and you know how that went." Norea had said sorely, and before the young man could egg her a little more on about the future, Dev had appeared with her friend. She was a short Texan woman with curls and red hair befit her Waterford ancestry, and she had been constantly burning for it, but she had been happy.

"Oh my god, you look exactly how I thought you would." She said in her Irish accent out of place entirely. Devola had tilted her head in simple greeting. "I've been hearing about you two for three years about how all came outta nowhere, told Blanca you came from space-!"

"Shush you. Norea, Blondie, this is Qeilla Biden, we grew up together in San Angelo!" The young man had shaken Qeilla's hands and she had been much vibrating about it, enamored or impressed by both he and Norea. A legend of the two had come up.

"I can't wait till tonight! I've got something to show you two if you're really from-"

Norea had squeezed her hand tight before she finished. "Don't say that too loudly. What's your problem."

Qeilla squeaked and that had been that as Dev brought them all into that dorm and they had been led up to its third floor to a cramped room meant for two, Win Nguyen sitting on one unsheeted bed in his boxers and a tank top. The door had been opened and passing students in that female dorm had marveled at the two rough necks that had come up, one of them a boy and much entranced by his looks about him, but Norea had shooed them on with her own glare back.

"Blondie, Nori! Oh I missed you. Get up to some fun in the week?" Win exclaimed from the bed, arms up and out.

"This and that, Win." The young man answered.

"How about in bed?"

"Dev what do you see in this guy?" Norea had groaned, moving into that room, window up, a fan blowing air as best it could.

"He's quite charming and polite, one on one. Believe me."

"Mwah, babe."

They closed the door behind them, and the two seats meant for desks had been brought out against the closet for the young man and Norea as Qeilla sat in her own furnished bed and her side of the room while on the bare side laid the temporary accommodation for Dev and Win. "I was supposed to have a roommate but she at the last second dropped out to go help her parents. It's a shame, but I don't mind having a double all to myself." On her side of the room and on her desk had been graphing paper and numbers running the wide length of their space, complex and full and beyond the knowledge of any there, but it did not hide Qeilla's competency.

"Why'd you come all the way down here to Juárez, Qeilla?" The young man asked her, and she had let her curly hair down from its bun before answering.

"I came to study metals and material science, and the programs back in Texas were so expensive my parents couldn't afford it. So I came here to Juárez instead." She shrugged. "My parents thought this city was a gangland but, honestly, it's pretty nice, and the program and facility is also REALLY advanced for what it is."

"Why this line of study though?"

"Well, to be frank, everyone who was working in the industry died three years ago, so I figure by the time that we start really going back out into space, they'll need people like me."

For the next few hours they Qeilla had descended in a line of questioning to the two who had been in Space, and for Norea's part she had thrown the young man to the dogs saying that she had only been there for two weeks, while he had lived there most of his life. It had been like those first few nights at the ranch all over, but Qeilla's questions had veered into the matter of things, of if he knew whether or not certain space stations had felt colder than another, or how those stations were built, or if he knew what color the embracers on various superstructures had been, or if he had ever seen Mercury and its operations there. He had rode those questions as best he could honestly until the sun had gone down, and a single lamp lit the space like campfires of a more whimsical time. Norea sat backward in her chair, glancing at her watch, but in all of Qeilla's questioning brewed one of her own, one that she had to ask:

"Why are you so excited to Space? We know what's out there, and what it's gonna be like in the end, right?"

Qeilla had considered the question, leaning back on her pillow that had been a cartoon cat. "You're talking about like, that entire System, right? Spacians and Earthians?" Norea nodded once. "You worried I'll be the start of it all over, huh?"

"No…Just, anyone who would hire you."

She seemed much considerate of Norea's question, and Qeilla had in that short time proven herself to be smart, and someone that it'd make sense that kind Dev would be friends with. She was not callous, not at all, so she had taken her time and looked up at her ceiling, in the dark revealing stickered stars that glowed green.

"What do you know about Gundams?" Qeilla had asked. That dirty word, not often said, that even soured the look on Win's face.

"Nothing but bad news." Norea answered.

"You sure about that?" Qeilla had risen up. "Or was GUND technology, of which the Gundams are known by, misused?"

"Does it matter?" Norea tilted her head. "A gun is still a gun, and when it's all you have, everything looks like a target."

"Don't be so set in that kinda view of things. Gundams, those mobile suits of wars that the witches used, of course they're terrible and they cannot be used in any way to help people that doesn't involve war and killing. But pull it back, what do you get that goes into Gundams? GUND."

"GUND?" Win hadn't known any better.

"GUND." Qeilla repeated. "The catch all term for all technology that neuro-electronic systems based upon the integration of Permet for body-function augmentation. It turns out Humans were never able to live in Space, and so we had to be modified for it for any long term sustainability, at least until that next step in Human evolution comes that is, whatever that it may look like."

"And GUND was then integrated into mobile suits, right?"

"No no no no." Qeilla had risen her hands in a flurry at Dev. "Just stay there, at that step. The one where GUND remained as just a way for people, all people, Earthian and Spacian, to live better lives. The one where we could program synthetic articles, programming even, in order to replace or enhance those that needed new lungs, new skin, new eyes, new organs, everything! In fact that was what was being done with GUND and Permet, but then all that it ever became known for was how much better it let people use mobile suits."

In those three years, mobile suits had still been existent, but they had been awkward, creaky machines, no more mobile than cranes or excavators or other machinery, and perhaps even more dangerous without Permet, now all examples of which discharged of their fettisan attributes. There was no need for mobile suits when existent vehicles could do the job they once excelled at, but no longer. In San Angelo, the Jolly Green Giant, a Demi-type mobile suit meant for construction work, lay idle in a car park as monument for what had been. Throughout the Earth Sphere, the machines made in man's image fell silent, even as those tried to adapt. This had been the reason why the Benerit remnants had fallen: their mobile suits all fallen victim to Earthians, used to fighting without them for generations.

"Don't you think that genie is out of the bottle?" The young man asked. "Using GUND and Permet for anything but war?"

"Well it's not a binary system, I think. I don't think it's just a genie in, or a genie out, because now we have an option that exists where the genie is dead."

"Dev," Norea groaned. "I think all your friends and your boyfriend have got screws loose."

"I know," Dev said sweetly. "It's why I am their friends. You and Blondie too are a little crazy but is okay."

Qeilla had gone on, and this had come from some science heart of her, who looked for answers in the world to problems. "Uranium on Earth could've fueled this planet's energy demands for a million years, but people got so scared of it because of accidents or Big Energy propaganda back then that when Ad Stella began, they were more than happy to just give the people who would become Spacians all of our Uranium to power those stations. All Uranium on Earth, more or less, when we were able to mine it, went up there to serve a million instead of billions on Earth, all because people were scared of it, and instead we ended up fighting for dwindling oil resources, all while solar and wind energy came to fall underneath the ownership of the Benerit Group. By rejecting what could've saved us, we starved ourselves. It's the same way with GUND, and I believe that once we're back to what was, go back to the very beginning, we can go about it all the right way." She dug around in her backpack, pulling out a tablet, thumbing through a messy home page until she had pulled up a single video file and showed it to the young man and Norea:

For all that Norea's drawings and their subjects had remained frozen in time, and all that Win earlier had said about how it might've been more prudent to take a picture if preservation had been the goal, it had been born out literally as a video played, and a girl in an Asticassian school uniform ran to the center of a backdrop of that school, right next to a mobile suit; that accursed white mobile suit.

Suletta Mercury had never aged a day.

"GUND-ARM! GUND-ARM! A RAY OF HOPE! FORWARD TO THE FUTURE!" Suletta Mercury, with a face far more serious than the two had ever known her by, sang in chorus with what was unmistakably Earth House. The mobile suit standing and dancing like a puppet in the background until, all at once, the pitch was made in that advertisement for GUND-ARM Incorporated. "It's safe.. To pilot! It's reliable… To use! It can fly! It can dance! Aerial!"

Transfixed, a message from the past, from another life.

They never knew what became of Suletta Mercury, who all of their lives seemed to revolve around with Aerial. Dead, most likely. Like everyone else.

The young man had looked away from Suletta in the screen. He wanted to apologize for her, but the dead cared little for words from the living. For Norea, she felt, at its faintest edge, some vague connection to that girl, after so many years. For all that Sophie seemed obsessed with that Mercurian bumpkin, she finally understood now: she was a witch, just like them, and more sister to her than she could imagine. She hoped she died quick.

Dev had hummed that tune all the while before putting away her tablet. "This was a company who, in the final months before the Blood Meridian, sought to bring the GUND Format back to its roots as a medical technology. And you know, since we're right back at zero anyway, I feel like we can follow up on it. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

The young man had owned a portion of the company. "No." The young man said, distantly, before realizing something else. "How would you? All Permet in the Earth Sphere was discharged of its properties after the Blood Meridian?"

Qeilla had smiled a knowing grin, and she had gotten off her bed and into some moccasins. "Come on we'll go on an adventure really quick. Right across the street." Qeilla reached out, grabbing both young man and Norea by the back of their collars, and Win and Dev had followed without question. They followed Qeilla across the street, out of the dorm, it had been night now and within Norea brewed the idea that they should've been heading to the center of town to meet up with Cold and the rest of the Blanca's riders to start the trail home, but the young man had seemed to be enjoying himself as they approached the large silver cube that had been, as labeled by signs, El Centro de Ciencias. A crude, simple name for a facility that bore all the hallmarks of Benerit design, down to the doors, but had now fallen within the university's hold as labs, classrooms, and research centers for Juárez. Qeilla had waved her ID card in front of the doors and she enter, the procession of them entering halls that, for Norea and the young man, had become too familiar, too quick.

In all reality, it had been like being inside Asticassia again: a world of white and steel in its hallways as inside each door they passed had been machines, and machines to make the machines. Unfinished notes on white boards, projects ongoing, all abandoned it seemed.

"The university got this facility after Benerit was run out of town, but a few of the faculty are actually former Benerit members themselves, wanting to stay for their work. They've locked down the building except for the materials science students like me, because, well- I'll show you." Qeilla had went on, and suddenly aware to the four outsiders they had been trespassing.

"Oh shit, that why my hairs standing on end again?"

"Winnie, are you still on probation?"

"Nah. I don't think so. Blondie, Nori, you carrying?"

As they had rode into the school, the young man had put his hunting pistol and rifle away, hidden in scabbards and locked by magnetic ring around it. Norea, however, had always been a little more delinquent with the rules. She had a kydex holster made for within her waistband, and she had flashed her iron once silently.

"Carrying a gun on school now?" The young man had said with all of that implication.

"Relax." She answered instead. "Why would I shoot anyone tonight?"

"Yeah, Nori," Win had half-croaked his voice. "Who would bring a gun on campus?"

They descended down the stairs, to increasingly rougher and rougher looking floors as soon they realized they had been much underground. No one had been there, the lights blindingly on as they had been in space stations.

"Is it getting hot?" Norea had said, and she had not been dress inappropriately for that desert weather. The young man had felt it as well. Win and Dev had shaken their heads in a no as they continued to walk down those spiral staircases until. It was an impossible itch, and impossible burn within them that they had both felt on the creases of their skin, and yet nothing had seemed to happen of them as they looked at their arms, their faces. An impossible feeling, shared. A feeling so impossible that they both put it away from their minds as at last the floor settled, and Qeilla again swiped her ID card, and had been let in to a wide, cavernous room, below them, a river running.

"This is the Rio Grande Rift, or at least, the part of it that runs beneath Juárez, where the plates of the North American is subject to all those forces. This is just a small snippet of a mining project that Benerit was doing in trying to locate water resources in this region, but they stopped when Benerit fell apart in 122, only for the University to continue the project."

Below them had been a lake , deep underground that they were, and each of Qeilla's words echoed in that epic hole in the world where the sky had been replaced with rock with scoring marks, and to the sides had been mobile suits, specially made for the effort of digging, as metal platforms stood like oil rigs out in the ocean. An acre wide, at the least, and deeper than they could ever know, devices of scientific merit all set up where people could walk from walkways and railings.

"The water isn't what's important, however, look deeper."

All four uninitiated had looked down, further, beneath the surface of that still, cool water, and in it had been twinkling lights, mistaken at first for artificial, but as they focused in that hydrolic veil they saw the solid surface, the layer of sediment that had been entirely of a form thought to have been lost to Man entirely, and in it, it had been glowing red.

"Qeilla-!" The young man had spoken her name in shock. "This is-!"

"Yep." She nodded quite proudly.

This was permet.

"Not only the first ever found on Earth, but it first discovered to be potent after 122."

Norea and the young man knew why there had been that itch at all. It was a feeling they had not been used to anymore. It was the feeling, the resonance, of a naturally occurring data storm. Beneath those waters churned lost gods, lost arts, and here they had been beholden to something that had promised far more than just History itself. "Because Permet itself isn't perfectly understood, we're unsure exactly on why this deposit is still functional. And indeed, the only Permet left active at all are those test subjects with GUND tech, and all of them are claimed by either governments or hospitals now, not enough for any reason, practical use, but this? This is enough to start it all over and get at least all GUND-augmented peoples who need it set for the rest of their lives."

"Or an army of mobile suits." Norea had looked down in that abyss and saw every battle she had run away from, the life she left behind staring up back at her.

"Perhaps…. But, my hypothesis is that the water barrier and the massive amount of ground above us provided this deposit, in combination, some sort of buffer that it was able to hide out from the effects of what happened that night. Aren't we lucky?"

Win had whistled long, echoing. "Someone's gonna be really happy with their finder's fee. Who knows about this?" Win had leaned over the railing and Dev held the back of his clothes, keeping him from toppling over into those waters, shimmering.

"Just the university. Not even the Mexican government. We're waiting for Monday to reveal this, and I wanted you four to see up front what awaits us. Isn't it exciting? That we are letting back into our new age! That we can do it all over again if we just have the vision and control!"

"Blondie? Norea?" Dev, as tells with her children at school had been always looked out by her, she saw it in the young man and Norea. They saw them silent, shaking, staring below, until, in deep breathing, the young man had looked to Qeilla.

"You said former Benerit employees work here?"

Qeilla could give no answer. Above them, deep hollow reverberations, the distant breaking of glass. Norea by habit alone drew her gun. "Woah woah woah, Nori!" She cocked the hammer back, teeth bare, round chambered. All else looked up to try and discern what that had been, but the reverberations kept up, one at a time, in pattern, in motion, and then in multiple. "We've got to go." The young man said, and he had taken Qeilla's hand, her turn to be dragged, as Dev and Win proceeded up themselves. Norea had been the last to go, looking up and out that cavern, and suddenly found it within her: that rage, that horror. It had returned after so long, and so hard she had tried to bury it: the woman who would go for a weapon.

Nothing could ever stay buried. Not that world, not that Human race.

They ran up those stairs amid Qeilla's protests, but they all had felt danger, those who had worked for a living and dealt with a danger every day of death. They felt it now, sweating down their skin as the echoes got louder and they returned to the ground floor, sirens and yelling reverberating from outside that building as, through those glass walls as they ducked along the hallways out of sight, they saw it; it was real. The years had meant nothing to Norea now: Men in black, in combat armor, faceless men she had known all her life as nothing less than the enemy. They stood, their backs to the building as they looked out into the night at flashing red and blue, and so enormous had been the shapes beyond them in the parking lot of the science center they had not recognized them at all until that part of their brain, their training, their past lives, came up within them.

Mobile suits.

A man turned to scan his back but found nothing, but on his chest had been the emblem of a consecrated knight.

The enforcers of the Mobile Suit Development Council. Allies of the Group. Soldiers of a single creed: The destruction of Gundams. Cathedra and its Dominicus, had returned.

Descending upon a hand of a mobile suit, a single man had walked apart from the soldiers that appeared before the building. He was not an unusual man by his stature, he wore a simple, clean garments, fit for formal wear in space, his golden blonde hair slicked back to a still covering his eyes, even at that night, a pair of sunglasses.

"Padre." An officer of the troops addressed the man. The Padre had nodded once, walking in escort to the Federales of Juárez that had come surrounded the building and them, as the Doppler unique to mobile suits roared above. They walked until they came to a police chief, most shocked to see them, and before the chief could demand, he had proclaimed in a smoothly commanding, calm voice.

"I mean no disrespect for you by taking over this area, but circumstances have arisen here that cannot go unacted on." The Padre reached out his hand slowly to the chief, offering it, but the chief made no move to take it as words sputtered in his mouth. Hatred had been brewing, anger. The Padre saw it and retracted his hand and got straight to the point. There was no time to waste. "This area, by powers given by the Cathedra Agreement, backed by the Space Assembly League is being seized by Cathedra for the security of the Earth Sphere." The captain had looked at the Padre silently, and then the Padre had repeated what he had said in perfect Spanish. "Do not interfere. Call off your men. The eyes of Heaven have been blinded for too long."

Outside, the screams and panicking of students in the dorm across from the building were heard as they were dragged out, one by one, by the soldiers of Dominicus, their fear silenced as they stood before mobile suits once thought extinct.

The chief, looking from student to him, said nothing as he stepped back, and all his men, holding onto their duty weapons, remained. "My daughter goes to this school." He said defiantly, teeth grating.

"Well." The Padre adjusted his glasses. "What misfortune then."

He turned away, and the men in black rushed forward in barking and yelling, a perimeter formed around the building looking outward as cops and soldier yelled at each other to stand down, in a standoff. Above them, those mobile suits stood solid, like statues. The chief had turned back and in his radio he had called for all of his department and the military, but his words had felt ill and useless as he looked up and saw those same machines that years ago brought subjugation to that land, and one of them, with its one gemstone like eye, looked at him.

The Padre had flanked by several men gone to the glass, and the trespasser before them had ducked into corners as at once, the glass doors were blown open by a shotgun blast, followed by the lobby's entire glass ensemble in reaction, the walls gone down and the breeze come in, the muffled sound of chaos brought fully to bare to those inside.

Win had kept his hands over his own mouth as the young man kept it over Qeilla's huddling behind counters for receiving guests. Norea held her pistol tight. All were silent as on marble flooring, the Padre stepped in, and then his procession followed.

His black shoes were above even the boots in their transitory chorus until they were right in line where where the five had hid. The walking did not stop. They had all held their breaths as the shadows of soldiers passed over them, and Norea, training her gun up, held her trigger on the finger until those steps went from present, to echo, to stairwell.

Cathedra had returned, and they had returned because Permet, and the long curse, quieted for years, had been incanted again in the world.

They waited, and Norea had been the first to rise with her gun up, peering at the outside situation that left the inside empty, or, at least, unaccounted for save for the feet of various mobile suits, all Human eyes left staring out. The Padre had been gone, his guards too. She had hopped over the counter and the rest came with her in a crouched run. The young man's palm had been wet with spit as she finally unhanded Qeilla.

"What- what's happening?" She asked in whisper quiet. They came to the shattered glass of the wall and had stepped on the ridge of that scientific world, the parking lot, the sprint over to the dorms. Jerusalem and Tiberius remained, panicked and chained to the light post. The roof of the lobby kept the exact make and model of the mobile suits before them hidden, but it was no matter. In the dark, when not expecting it, the lower angles of any mobile suit had been a blind spot.

"You dug up something that should've remained buried." Norea grit, holding her gun so tightly the ridges of the grip broke into her palm. She turned. "Win, Dev, where are your horses?"

"There's a student parking garage we stabled them up in. Opposite direction."

"Go. Try to get them. Make some noise for us and we'll try to get to our horses too, and then we'll get out of here."

"What?! What if we get caught?!"

Norea had turned, seizing Win by his collar. "I've been fighting this god damned war since I was five years old. I know what I'm doing!" For the first time in three years, Norea Du Noc had returned, and Win Nguyen had been the first to see.

"Wh- what war?" There was fear in Win's eyes like none other could be put. This was not his world, but he was made to live in it now as Norea bore that gaze of her past. "Nori. Who really are you? Who's he?" His eyes darted to the young man.

She let go of him. She wishes she knew how to answer in any way other than this: That they had been Witches. "Just go. Get out of here with Dev. Don't leave us dead."

"Shit. Fuck. Alright. Qeilla come with us."

"No!" She whisper shouted. "If I'm running it'll look worse. Just get me to the dorm! I'll be safer that way."

"Stay with us then." The young man had said, eyeing Jerusalem and Tiberius. He could whistle, and his whistle had been known to both of them, but they had remained tied at the lamp post.

Dev had been shaking in her shoes, she dressed no more than in lounging than riding clothes, but the young man had reached out to her and held her hand. "Deep breaths. Deep breaths. One step at a time, and then another. Focus on that and you can make it out of here."

"Da, da." She said in her mother tongue. "I've never been in trouble before."

"We're not in trouble," the young man sucked in his spit. "Just in the wrong place, wrong time."

Win had looked out, toward the tiered parking garage that had been not too far distance away, looking over them all, finding a line where soldiers had not been looking, and in the shouting of the soldiers with the police, they could run. "Babe. I love you. Come on." Win took Devala's hand, and they had gone out into the night in a sprint.

"This is Cathedra, isn't it?" Qeilla had looked up, stepping forth into the dark to try and look at the mobile suits above beyond the frame of where they hid, but she had been dragged back by the young man.

"What're you, crazy?! Keep your head down."

Norea had counted each head there. Man and mobile suit. Forty soldiers, four suits. Five more on guard with the Padre, and then that man himself. She only had two magazines of seven bullets each on her. Run, hide, fight. Run, hide, fight. Somewhere, Olcott might've been proud of her, or upset for being in this situation again, after all this time. These remnants of Cathedra, obviously waiting for a cache of Permet to be found for their own goals and aims. This wasn't her fight, far from it.

Minutes later the length of hours, an explosion of car alarms had gone off toward the parking garage, forcing some of the soldiers to look across. Those dealing with the police could not go, leaving those that had been collecting the students in the dormitories to go rush over and check what it had been. Those had been the soldiers closest to the horses. An opening for the two, and for Qeilla. They ran for it, on their feet. If any of the cops looking inward had seen them they did not point it out as they ran below the shaded, feet of mobiles suits, those giants indistinguishable in their rush save for the color of dark salmon, dark red painting their feet.

Half-way through the parking lot, a flash had taken them: a beam from a light directly to their backs.

"Drop it! Drop the gun!"

They had been caught mid-stride, their shadows cast on the dormitory and the horses as they nickered painfully in the overly bright light: It had been the Padre holding the light on them, his guards approaching, rifles up.

Norea did not drop it, whipping around, pistol held to the floor instead.

"Drop it!"

"Fuck you!" She spat. The young man had made to keep moving for his horse but yells had turned from gun drops, to a complete stopping of motion that he had abided by as Qeilla had her hands held up, already on her knees. The yelling continued until the soldiers had nearly been upon them, but in one calm word: Stop. They did.

The Padre had walked across the parking lot, past his guards, his arms held wide in greeting, and then in lowering of their weapons, even as Norea still held hers. As he approached, orange streetlight and moonlight above painted a clearer picture of who this man was until, meters away, he stopped. Above, the mobile suits did not move.

She saw him, and she knew him. "I've seen you before." She spoke. From where she did not know. But she knew him.

"As I, you, child." He looked back at her and told her this. She started raising her gun but could not. Something had had her hands. It was fear. The man took off his sunglasses, and behind them lay icy blue eyes, a scar upon his head burned in shape of a lopsided cross. He looked down at she who kneeled, much shuttering, much in fear and frozen herself. Qeilla could not move away as the man took his fingers and held her face in a mutant feeling of concern and observation before he pulled away and stood. Qeilla's shaking had stopped, released, and all she had done now was breathe slowly. In his pocket his hand had gone, and from it, a chain, and upon that chain an object: a decapitated cross which he held by its body, flat among its top.

The Witches skin began to burn, and if they had been afire, they were already dead.

This burn had been familiar, morbidly, to the young man. "Who are you?" He asked, out of breath, dry mouth, looking from Norea to the man.

"I am the Padre." He answered. "The last charge of true Cathedra on Earth, carrying out the wish of Notrette Rembran, to whom I owe my life."

Delling Rembran's wife, dead in her grave for over a decade. Her death had, even in policy alone, aged Delling. The young man had seen it with his own eyes what bitterness had done to someone and their child. A talented botanist, a doctor. A name among many he never thought to hear again.

"Notrette? Not Delling?" The young man asked, his eyes darting everywhere, but there had been no escape.

The Padre nodded, quite pleased that they had been speaking from a similar plane of mutual knowledge, passing in his hand that cross from one hand to another, and he and Norea both could feel it in their skin pass from one side to another.

"Delling, saint as he was, failed to see that after so long, despite all the effort of Cathedra, its mission was flawed in the end. Notrette told me this as she died. I was there. I was the one who gave her her final rites, and she gave me one final mission when the stars aligned, as it did three years ago." A man on a mission, and how else do these things end? Students were cowering, police ramping up as guns became pointed at each other. "She wanted this world made whole through one connected system, and now we have found it after the great flood of false believers, false prophets, false winnowers."

"What're you talking about you Spacian?" For the first time in years she had said that word, Spacian, as she had nearly all her life. "Has whatever hole you were hiding in made you gone mad?"

The Padre shook his head once.

"We seek to use Permet to make the world whole, Earthian and Spacian, into one type of people. A new type of people that are deserving of the Home of Earth, and the Splendor of Space."

"Through Permet?" Qeilla had spoken in some sorts of disgusted awe.

"Through Permet." The Padre nodded. "If enemies can be destroyed by making allies of them, why can it not be the same for the methods of Devilry? Of Witches?"

"Permet, GUND technology, Gundams. All were given their power by those who feared them. If reverence defines faith, then the reverence I give is that they will not destroy us, but rather, they can save us. GUND can be used, for all Mankind."

Qeilla had on her knees, began to move to the Padre, and she had been now out of reach by Norea and the young man, and they looked in horror as it happened.

"Is that true?"

"I am the Padre." He spoke. "I do not lie to children: a better world is possible for your generation." He offered his hand out to the girl on her knees.

"Can, can you be trusted with it?"

"Qeilla what bullshit are you talking about?" Norea screamed out.

The Padre had seen her ID card, hanging off her neck. "If you are a student of science, I will tell you this: If Mankind fears the unknown, as had been the mission of Cathedra to quell in these twenty years, then what can eradicate the unknown more completely, its destruction, or rather its integration into a controlled system."

"A system?"

"A system. Consider Permet and its connection to the ever present, omnipotent data storm."

"There hasn't been a data storm in years!" Norea had spat back.

"What is faith but believing in what works without our knowledge? Permet is our connection to that Other. Notrette told me that in order to rid the world of its fear, we have to grow, and what would we grow into? She was a botanist, and she understood one of nature's most perfect systems was in plants, and their ability to, even within individuals, be connected within one system: the data storm. Much like the mycelium, fungi, of this world, each individual contains within them all, and in that unity we shall create a more unified world, regardless of where we came from, or where we lay. The healing of one, is the healing of all. And with the rediscovery of permet, of which we have so squandered in this century, we can-"

"Start over from zero." Qeilla said.

"Yes, my child. A quiet zero."

The young man had kept trying to find an out, but there had been none. For Norea: she had a gun, and when she had a gun, all that she had known was to shoot targets. "Qeilla don't believe this shit he's just another thug of the Group!" Norea had finally rose her gun at the man, her sights passing over Qeilla on the ground before squarely landing the Padre's chest, the decapitated cross held to his heart.

Qeilla stood, in the way. Captivated. In his words had been her own, and in her mind, it had made sense. Not to Norea though. Not to the young man.

"Cathedra had twenty years, and all the might of the Group behind it to try and make Mankind safe! You couldn't do it! And you think this small chunk of rock can do it!?" She screamed back.

"I know it so, child."

Norea had gone to shoot, but Qeilla had held out her arms blocking him.

"No! He's right, because it can't be done, logically. But with Human wisdom and a new outlook on permet, it can be done!"

The Padre had walked forward, placing his hands on Qeilla's shoulders behind her.

"What is true of natural law, is that its applications are universal. From root, to Man, to Space, to the conditions that define us. In these years since rapture, me and my followers have sought answers, and the only answer that was at all complete had been the enemy which we had once seen, falsely. We need to become better, and that process requires GUND, Permet. And when this bettering occurs, it will happen without distinction, because it is a process without distinction." He orated, much like a preacher, and in his words had been absolute faith. Norea had wanted to kill him. "The purpose of my Cathedra, True Cathedra, is that we will cure hunger, disease, and every tragedy of Mankind, because we will each feel this injustice. And when we are all of consequence of action, the only actions we can take will be the best ones. Actions, not defined by Capital or Fear, but empathy, solidarity, by way of what we will become: integrated with the Data Storm."

"There's not enough Permet in that hole for this insanity."

"What is true of each, is true of all. Explain what we stand before then?" They all looked up, and before them stood red Heingras, and before them in the sky, circling mobile suits on wave riders. A dozen or more. As they stood in Juárez, the Padre had the most formidable military force on the planet, men in black, all unquestioning, all adherent to a goal beyond themselves. "A key is a key. One key is all keys." He held the cross in his hand, and Qeilla stood defiant.

Norea was going to have to kill her too, and the young man knew it. He had put his hand upon her gun, the bore of it up, and looked at her. "I thought we came to Earth to live." He whispered.

Complete and utter animosity existed within her because she knew evil at its heart. She knew it by dead parents, dead comrades; Sophie, dead years before. She knew evil, and there it stood. She kept her hand on the gun, her breathing heightened, but the Padre did not move. Qeilla did not move.

With a whiplash crack, one of the soldiers behind the Padre fell down to the ground, and then another, concrete kicked into as supersonic cracks broke to their side. With his hands Qeilla had been pushed besides him beckoned away by soldiers as the Padre stood still, staring at the two. Out in the distance a glint of a scope: It was Win Nguyen.

"Norea! Let's go!" They were no longer the focus as gunfire rained from the top of the parking garage, the young man dragging Norea back to the horses. Fire hot tracers, erupting from the barrel, a boy from Seattle who ran away from home, sick of the world, shooting down on them. He'd never killed a man before, but today had changed as he stood like an assassin and aimed down. Below he had heard the rushing feet, of soldiers running up the garage to locate him, but it'd be okay. This was war. Some sort of war. He'd be the first soldier to continue it. With his semi-automatic rifle he laid it across concrete looking down, and that concrete had been chipped as return fire came. He had been shaking for it, but he held his breath and returned fire.

The Padre did not move.

"Cocksucker." The boy had pivoted his gun to that target: his silhouette against the concrete parking lot. In the background police had started running, either for cover or waiting for reinforcements. At the feet of the Padre, a man bled through his lungs, out his mouth, drowning alone, and he reached toward the Padre before his hand had fallen forever. The boy held his breath, but it wasn't enough.

A single shot tore against the shoulder of the Padre, but he did not react as red ran from the wound down his arm. He smirked instead, and his eyes could not be seen as he put back on his sunglasses.

Norea and the young man ran to their horses, bracketed by cars, and as tracers flew above them, the mobile suits above all pivoted in their direction to the parking garage, but none moved. In their rush the two of them untied their horses until in one swoop, the air whipped up in a tempest and all had stopped shooting to gaze out at what had summoned it up. The horses squealed, the young man, unable to fight, threw up his guts onto the cement below. When Norea had finally looked, she saw something that could stay the world. She knew it, because it had once frozen her own. She had seen this once before. She had been scared of it then. She had been horrified by it now: the machine she had hoped to never see again. A student, lined up against the wall, had fallen to his knees and had drawn the sign of the cross, as all around Man stood before a machine from Space in all of its finality, its body of stark white, dripping with colorings like the flames, flickering from Hell. The boy had been the last to see what all else saw, rifle empty, hovering above him against the moon.

He looked back, and Judgement looked down on him.

There, behold, as in nightmare, as in the dream of Prospera Mercury, a machine. A machine of all machines, not meant for Earthian eyes to bare upon. It rose above all mobile suits there as it was alone, alone in position and in material, veins of it in angles along its limbs running, beating, a fluorescent red that seemed to trace from those veins out to its body, its plating, drenched in that color of blood. All those who had been agnostic or atheist in their beliefs had felt the Gravity of the Earth, pull them into prostration by appearance, by presence alone of that figure, so much alike standing as Man, with wings that extended out toward the sky in their reaching. Green eyes, burned in the night, and they were the eyes of the God the Padre spoke of. Before them, the Padre had been nothing but a preacher, beholden to that Almighty that hovered above Juárez and promised reckoning, bearing with it a large implement, rusted and blackened by wear and tear, pointed tip held out, and flaring toward its back. Moon rays dripped from it, and so too did it drip red.

This God had another name, and her name was Aerial.

The Padre had looked up to it and in silent conference, turned his back on what was to come.

She had survived, and had returned to the Earth on Cathedra's behalf.

It landed upon the top of the parking garage, and it looked down upon the boy with the consideration of that Holy Other. He dropped his gun, clattering to the floor, awe struck, terrified, like a million Earthians before him. Aerial rose its hands, as did the boy reaching out toward where he had shot, looking toward the distance where his friends had been. In his fingers had spoken the wish, that if he could take one more step toward them, things might've been different.

"Win!" The young man screamed, and then the Gundam's hand came down onto the Earth, and Win Nguyen had been in its way.

It would've been a mercy if it had been dust that rose from the ground, but spurting, like an oil geyser, had been red, and red had come from between its fingers.

"Run!" Norea screamed, unable to bear her gun back on the Padre. She knew then what would happen if he was threatened, and that fear of dying returned in her. The Padre looked on at her, and she saw her nightmares again. They mounted their horses, ripping off, as they charged at the barrier between the soldiers and the street and kept their heads behind their horses as in their sprint they had jumped over them all like moon riders. They dared not look back at the Gundam or the Padre.

The drove their horses left in their maniac sprint, their hooves on concrete ground louder, louder than even distant explosions that set the night on fire, louder than the SWAT team that ran in the opposite direction of them toward the science center, louder than gunfire that erupted shortly after as the night glowed purple, illuminated by beam rifle fire, echoing in the steps of mobile suits. The entire city had come alive in its killing. Across the river, in El Paso tracers rose up in ribbons and growling from Fort Bliss. They kept their heads down as they sprinted through the street, but the face of the Padre could not escape them.

Their horses had taken them toward the center of town, but ahead of them were more horses, more horsemen: It was the riders from Blanca, Lacey Cold leading the group in a sprint themselves until they realized who had been passing in the night. Everywhere around them people on the streets were either running away from the epicenter, or toward it, rifle and pistol in hand.

"What in all tarnation?!" He yelled, in his arm crooked to the sky above and its machines in patrol his shotgun. Of those riders had been Dev, her eyes wide and scared.

"Where's Win?!" She pushed her way through her horse through the armed cowboys. "Norea, Blondie! Where's Win?!"

"Dev." The young man said breathlessly as a circle had been made about the two riders, panting heavily, sweating down through their clothes. "He-"

"WHERE IS HE?!" She clutched the reins of her horse tighter, and in his silence, they all had an answer.

"We need to get out of here." Norea had finally pulled out her Russian rifle from its scabbard, sliding down the safety and chambering a round. "Now!"

"Is this your causing?" Cold had looked from the sky, to the distant gunfire in the street.

"It ain't." Chalk had pulled up, calmest there. "This is War."

Devala, tears streaming down her eyes, had ignored all of this as she sat frozen on her horse. "He- he told me he'd be right behind me."

A crowd of people had ran from down the block, around the corner, yelling in panic at that midnight hour as at the rear of them men and women had been staring backward, waving guns, shooting off in those streets that echoed: What came around had been an armored APC, cloaked in black, soldiers following along it as they fired on those running, their bodies littering the street. On one end now: cowboys, the other, Dominicus itself.

"That ain't no god damn Federales!" Before Chalk could explain his rifle had been levied against his shoulder, and in a burst of eight rounds gunshots erupted in the street ending with only a metallic ping of his rifle ejecting a spent clip. They became men of another time, for all that they lived a peaceful life atop their horses, Norea and the young man aimed their rifles where Chalk had let loose, where three killers now lay dead among the innocent slain and fired upon the soldiers of Cathedra. They were the descendants of the cowboy, who had fought for himself, and for those that he rode with. There was no hesitation as rifles were whipped out of scabbards and brought to bear as a gunfight in Juárez of another world's war broke out. Nearly a dozen guns, all brought down the street from their horses as gunfire sparked from the APC and blew red clouds from the impact of their rifles as the turret of the APC came around.

"Cut!" Norea yelled, dragging her reins. "Cut over!" She in her rushing brought her horse down the street left, and in that movement she was able to drag the group as well, all of them on cerebral, visceral autopilot. The gun from the APC opened up, glass and cars shattering in its volley, and it had barely missed as the last rider made it past the corner. Above the skies were wild in contrails. Gunsmoke from hundreds of encounters rolled through the city like fog, illuminated orange in glow by street lamps. Somewhere a car had crashed.

"We gotta get back into Texas!" Missus Dullthorne had cried out, a bolt action in her hands as well, all alike smoking from their barrels.

"Shit." Cold had preemptively cocked the hammer on his pistol, all their horses settling as they heard the APC roll down the street they left. "We ride out the way we came, all the way home. Hyah!" He took the reins, and they had been whipped as with his call, and they all had gone down their sprint like a war party on a mission, and that mission had been to survive. Dev had remained there, left behind for a moment, as if waiting for a boy that would come in on his horse too, but Win Nguyen would never follow them again. She screamed to herself, she cried, but the APC had been coming closer soon to round, so she in clothes not fit for riding, eyes blurry, rode on after them in tears and in hysteria.

Throughout the city, mobile suits had landed, and beyond that, glowing in the distance, El Paso had burned. Explosions in the sky, war returned and hardly a notice. Distant explosions in the street rattled through their teeth as those stood on the street corners wondering what was going on, only to be answered as gunfire and explosions rocked homes built up over the ruins of the last war. The cowboys rode, through firefight arisen, through memories brought back alive of Spacians bringing the boots down upon Earthians. They stormed through Jaurez in that gun smoke fog as around them the world had fallen apart again. The young man and Norea scanned the skies for that one mobile suit; that one mobile suit, an obsession of their past brought back now in fear and in anger and in the mortal dread that, once again, it had been the enemy. Their horses sprinted like the wild beasts they had spiritually been, and from the sides, the dead, the dying, the scared reached out from windows and from the sidewalks and from the ground where they died, asking to be taken with them in languages on a degree that they did not understand. They could not, and so they sprinted on as missile trails filled the sky, a shrill wind up, and then the great sucking of an energy weapon, lighting up the sky where it had been fired, like a pyre of which the world was to be thrown on, green and sickly and intense. Norea shuddered again, and she had been again just a little girl, afraid to die. The cowboys rode on.

Distantly, American jets had been scrambled, and in their thundering above the clouds they had appeared, like a swarm come down to the South to avoid the coldest winter of all time. They had been out there, dots in the sky illuminated by that green pyre momentarily, angels five, then four, then three. Outside of Juárez, the Mexican military anticipating a different kind of war had summoned up in their tanks and in their war machines and come down from the distance, seeing Juárez breeding an old war, seeing El Paso on fire as the distant US military installation in it erupt in CIWS fire, trying to swat mobile suits all so agile like valkyries in their contrails out of the sky until their barrels had melted into scrag, and then descended upon as the local garrison had been caught out in this unseen trap. Beam rifle fire had electrified the air, and with each pulse of laser from cloud to ground, hundreds scream, hundreds died.

It was never over. Spacians and Earthians. The conditions of everything waiting for its time to return and set the world on fire again. Their shadows told the stories of people out of time, running over Juárez in their flight. Above, helicopters and shuttle craft had descended bearing the marks of the Spacian armies of yesteryear, and the adults who had been children during the drone wars had done again and averted their eyes and hid in their basements, fearful of the skies itself.

The cowboys had never ridden so hard, between wreck and machine, mobile suits between their legs when they had been in the way, tempting these giants who paid no mind as they leveled their cannons toward the horizon as shells from the Mexican Army landed near them, glancing off their armor meant for the rigors of Space itself. Shells, the size of cars fell from their rifles, ejected containers of plasma falling upon the ground. As they pass: a mother lay dead on the ground with her head caved in by a spent casing, a baby in her arms.

They went on through hellfire, their horses leaping over wreck and body and even soldier, who in their shock of seeing horses brought their guns to bear at them and could not hit them.

In that rushing convoy, going for the border, others had joined them with their horses: the same idea. Other American cowboys, other Vaqueros, with loved ones clutching onto them on horses not even saddled. They were silent in their journey, for no sound came from them that could beat out the chaos. A legion of refugees, pounding down the night of reckoning as debris rained from the sky, and missile, and gunfire and cannon fire and fire itself.

The American planes had been approaching, the Mexican Army encroaching.

With trails of stardust she appeared again high in the sky like rocket bound for destinations beyond that planet before being silhouetted by the moon again. Curling into herself, the Gundam had taken her hands to her core, the position of birth, of comfort, of safety, coiled like a spring in the sky. On distant vectors American attack planes saw her, fragile and stationary, and made to run at her: an entire wing.

As the young man and Norea rode they felt it for the third time that night: that itch beneath their skin.

On Cold's lead the horses had turned onto Avenida Benito Juárez. One half mile sprint down to the Bridge of the Americas where already Cathedra had been setting up roadblocks. Over two dozen riders, half neither ever meeting each other for the first time: Mexican and American, not intending to get caught by the Mexican Army in the south. There was nothing left to do as Cold drew his pistol with one hand and started to roll down the street with his horse, up to a full gallop. The cavalry came with him as they passed beneath a church, a haltered Christ over them all, watching. Watching a cowboy who had known this life for thirty-five years on Earth, who had grown up in the shadow of drone wars and Space, who turned his face to the ground below and the horses he rode; watching the husband and wife who had fallen in love in San Angelo, who wore even then still gold wedding bands despite how it chaffed their fingers in long, hard day's work. Watching the old soldier from another revolution take arms and horse again charging Spacians, his rifle given to him from a comrade died in his blood in the battlefields of Los Alamos. Watched a man who, lost his wife to a stroke, held his five year old boy in his arms on a horse three years past its riding age, one last time. A cowboy who had known nothing but bad luck. A woman who left behind the country for office work. A teenage girl who wanted to dance with horses and a boy who no less than ten minutes ago saw his parents dead by mobile suit. All this, and more, and then two: Riding with his poncho flaring the boy who wore another man's face, trying to carve with it another name, another life. Riding ahead, a woman who had remembered what this feeling was, having lost so many, and remembering that she had so much more to lose. She held her pistol at her side, and then aimed it ahead at Cathedra troops, and then she fired as she rode, signaling others who could to do the same as the soldiers of the roadblock in the customs gate took cover and then returned fire. A forest of legs and hoofs and rider came rushing up to them. A rider had been hit, his body seizing as his horse went on without him, he falling, the leg of his catching in the stirrup and his head ground to a flat surface by concrete drag. Another horse: hit dead in the heart, its body gave under it as a woman went flying out only to collapse onto the street as they all rode on.

The burn began within the young man and Norea Du Noc, this time to its completion. They, ahead of the group, upon Jerusalem and Tiberius, began to glow in the night in their skin. That shine of their veins, long unused canals, by incisions, and by usage ordained to them by their curse; rivers of what had been within them lit beneath even their clothes as Space, as it had done three years ago, turned afire.

Above, the Gundam had sprawled out like a hand and from its expulsion came a ring of fire, another sun of blood.

The American jets on their trajectory had locked onto the Gundam, but nothing could be done for them as below, as from the Gundam itself, beam fire ultimate erupted: from the mobile suits on the ground, from those that flew, and then from the Gundam itself as the world fractured and bled that deep, dark crimson, washing over all the land as explosions cleared out the clouds themselves.

The riders blew through the bridge, trampling over the soldiers, leaving the dead and dying from them and the soldiers in their wake as over the Rio Grande they rode into Texas, and it too had been under fire from above. Some of the riders had wordlessly split off, off to their own perceived safety, none could fully take in their minds what was happening save for the idea that once again the world had been ending. Up above: the Gundam looked down upon them as the riders of Blanca bloodied, their horses breathing deeply and raggedly, pulled east, through El Paso as police and Texas Duty Force members and Rangers ran for Fort Bliss and the battle brewing there. In several mile sprints the riders had made it to the outskirts of town, but then in the glow of two among them, like fireflies in the night, the Gundam saw them and descended.

On the plains outside of El Paso they were overtaken by the flight of the mobile suit, only the etchings of its original white beneath seen that close. Its hand had still been dripping of Win. It looked to them all with its neon green eyes in some alien consideration, finding those that had glowed in the night. Devala screamed as the horses all skidded in their hooves to a stop, with a slice the Gundam drawing its beam saber. It rose its arm, that bloody saber hand dripping, and the young man had flown out of his horse, casting his poncho to the floor as he did the only thing he could do.

Norea screamed for him, running to the machine with his arms held wide.

The young man knew of only one person that could pilot this. Who else could it be?

He knew. He knew it all so well.

He cast himself bare, his hat going to the ground, as all the riders stood petrified in fear and mortality and yelled out the only thing he could: "It's me!" He said, and he bore one more time that name buried in the past; the name that one pilot knew him by. He screamed up at her and all the world: "It's me! Elan! Elan Ceres! Don't you remember!? Can't you see?! It's me!"

"Blondie!" Cold yelled out as all the horses panicked and reared, being beat back onto their hooves by their riders. Chalk had gone to open fire, but as the Gundam swung down, it stopped.

"It's me! It's really me!" With all his throat, he yelled a truth of the world: "SULETTA MERCURY!"

Who else would come other?

He tore his shirt and bore his red birthmarks again, glowing on his chest, much like the Gundam before them. "It's me, Suletta." He said more quietly, as if to a person and not a machine. "Elan."

The Gundam's beam saber had deactivated, but it did not move until, again and again, the Fifth had repeated what he had been, and perhaps would always be. He was Elan Ceres.

Behind them the battle of El Paso and Juárez had gone on, and it had been a massacre as great explosive looms rose. No one moved but for Gundam and the Fifth.

It reached down, slowly, kneeling so gently for its size. With one finger much covered, much with the residuals of body and flesh and hair and blood, and slowly upon the ground, moved its index to within a feet of the Fifth. He had bridged the gap. With the hand that killed the boy, it reached a single finger out, and draped with blood, the young man reached out and touched metal that had been warm beneath it with his palm, the soak of Win Nguyen on his palm.

"What happened to you?" He whispered to her. But he had the answer. It was the answer true a million years for as long as there had been those with power, and those with command, and those who would sacrifice children upon its altar. Prospera Mercury was never the only one. Belmeria was never the only one. The painted ladies were never the only ones. He held his cheek against the blood and metal, and he breathed it in.

Suletta Mercury was silent.

Aerial was silent.

One in the same as they stood.

Out in the distance, a gloomy song played of wind and war, and eventually the Gundam had to take back to it, raising itself up. The Fifth had tried to hold on but the blood on her palm had been too slippery and he had fallen back to the Earth as she stood in moonlight and then launched off, leaving the riders of the Blanca behind and the Fifth blood soaked. Norea had gone to him immediately, taking him into her arms as he sat there mortified.

Cold had walked forward with his horse long after the Gundam disappeared into the night behind them, and together he and his people surrounded the two. He holstered his pistol, but with eyes that had never known lies, his accusation had been in them:

"What the hell are you?"