Behold the girl. She rides among devils.

  Her name is Bernadetta, though none speak it. She is small, cloaked in a patchwork of tattered leathers, her figure drawn thin by hunger and the sun's long inquest. She clings to the saddle as if she might fly loose from the earth, her posture crouched, furtive, the nervous aspect of prey. The wind snatches at her cloak and brings no comfort. Her eyes flit ceaselessly, expecting the hawk's cry, the gun’s report, the sudden blow.

  The men she rides with are bearded and blooded, their faces carved from grit, their mouths full of dust and laughter without mirth. They speak to her only to wound. She is the lone woman among them, tolerated as one might tolerate a stray dog that does not bite, and only barely that.

  Memory is a sickness. She recalls a time before this one in fragments, visions spoiled by distance and heat. A chambered room. A silver spoon. A father’s hand raised not in blessing. These too are scars. By night she dreams of other lives—a girl behind shuttered doors, her every movement watched, her father’s voice a thunderclap that turned her bladder loose. A traveler fallen from grace, stripped of self and finery, dragged half-conscious through some nameless mire. In dream she lived them all at once—a chorus of selves, each unmoored, cast adrift in blood and silence.

  The desert did not care which had been real. Nor did the stars.

  When she woke, her breath came fast and shallow. The sky above was black glass, pricked with cruel constellations. The wind scraped across the earth like something ancient trying to speak, its voice fractured by time.

  Bernadetta did not understand its words. But still she listened.

  By the time the sun climbed over the shale ridges and burned the dew off the dead grass, the Glanton gang had made camp near a dry riverbed. Dust clung to their skin, to their guns, to their breath. The earth bore them no regard. They moved like men too long from home, though none among them would have known where to find such a place anymore.

  The Judge stood apart from them, his great pale frame hunched over a rifle, cleaning it with the patience of some ancient priest at a sacrament. His scalp gleamed like raw alabaster in the morning light. The men gave him distance. Bernadetta, hunched small as a rabbit in the brush, was not afforded the same.

  She knelt beside him, trembling, her face half-hidden beneath the ragged hood of her cloak.

  “Hold it steady,” he said.

  “I—I don’t want to,” she whispered.

  The rifle lay across her lap like a length of rusted iron, foreign and too large for her hands. She had never fired one. She had never meant to. But the Judge had pressed it into her grip with the solemnity of a man handing over a crucifix.

  Thirty yards off stood a mule. Ribs showing. Ears twitching. It chewed indifferently at a patch of thornbush, unknowing.

  Bernadetta’s voice broke. “P-please. I—I really don’t think—”

  The Judge knelt beside her. He moved slow, deliberate, like a craftsman sizing his work. His hands closed over hers—huge, dry things, as if carved from some primeval wood. He adjusted the rifle’s angle with a gentle care that belied the terror it inspired.

  “You fear the object,” he said, his tone even. “But the object is only a tool. It is the act you must fear. And to fear the act is to misunderstand it.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “You must look,” he said. “Else how will you see what must be done?”

  Her lids fluttered open. The mule still stood. Still chewed.

  “Steady now,” the Judge murmured, a breath against her ear.

  Her hands trembled. The wood bit into her shoulder. The trigger was cold beneath her finger. The world shrank down to the space between her and the beast.

  The mule flicked its tail. It had done nothing to her.

  “You wish to live, do you not?” the Judge asked. “The world is not kind to those who abstain.”

  “I—I don’t—”

  “Pull the trigger.”

  Silence. No birds, no wind. Only her own breath, jagged. Her heartbeat a frantic drum in her ears.

  And then something inside her yielded. It did not break. It did not scream. It only bent.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The rifle roared. The recoil knocked her backward. Her vision jolted. When she blinked, the mule was down—folded like a broken fence, legs tangled beneath it, its side heaving in the dust.

  Bernadetta gasped. Her mouth hung open. She dropped the rifle.

  The Judge’s hand came down heavy and deliberate atop her head. He ruffled her hair as one might a child’s.

  “You see,” he said. “There was nothing to fear.”

  Tears blurred her eyes. Her lips moved, but no sound came.

  The Judge smiled.

  And the mule, unseen behind them, bled out in the dirt.

  And the day bled into dusk.

  The fire was down to coals. The men ringed it with the loose slouch of long riders, their eyes hollow above the lines of their cheeks, mouths slick with grease or liquor. Bone and boot and shadow. The stink of sweat and blood and ash. They played at cards or sharpened knives against bootheels, muttering low. Now and then a cackle broke the silence like a gunshot, then fell back into the dirt.

  Bernadetta sat apart. Her knees were pulled to her chest, her cloak tight about her shoulders like a skin she might one day shed. She had grown practiced in stillness. Learned it as one might learn a dead language—haltingly, in terror. The men spared her little more than the odd look, a glance that slid over her like a blade over cloth.

  It was the Judge who finally spoke. His voice rose smooth from the hush, not loud, but meant to be heard. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, as if the fire itself had found a tongue.

  "Men are born to conflict," he said. "It is the first and final law. That which lives must reckon with that which does not wish it to."

  No one replied. The men went on with their murmured dealings. But the air had shifted, taut with a certain tension. The sort that comes before storm or sermon.

  "All things that draw breath must wrest it from the world. The deer eats the shoot. The wolf eats the deer. The hunter eats the wolf and calls it conquest. But the law is the same."

  Bernadetta did not look up, but her shoulders tensed. She could feel his attention turning toward her like the sun through a lens.

  He rose from his place beside the fire and stepped over to her. She flinched as his shadow fell across her.

  "In your heart," he said, "you believe there is kindness. A way of living that does not wound."

  She didn’t speak.

  "You believe it is possible to be good," he said, crouching down to meet her eyes. "I tell you now, girl. The world you dream of does not exist."

  He reached into the dust beside her and plucked up a scorpion. Small. Bone-pale. It curled in his palm, its tiny claws twitching.

  "This creature," the Judge said, holding it for all to see, "does not hesitate. It does not lie. It does not suffer the luxury of self-deceit. It strikes or it dies. That is its law. That is its truth."

  He held it up near her face. Bernadetta recoiled.

  "Would you call it wicked?"

  She shook her head, eyes wide. “N-no. It’s just trying to live.”

  He smiled then, a pale crescent of mock delight.

  "As do all things."

  And then, without pause or flourish, he crushed the scorpion in his hand.

  A gasp rose from her. He uncurled his fingers. The thing was pulp, nothing. He wiped his hand on his trousers, the smear of it vanishing into the dust.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "Mercy is not in nature," he said. "Mercy is the vanity of those who’ve never bled."

  Bernadetta was shaking.

  "You will learn," the Judge said softly. "Or you will be unmade."

  He stood. His shadow receded. The fire crackled.

  The laughter died, but the weight of the Judge’s words lingered like smoke in the girl’s throat. That night, the stars above her seemed hung by a colder god, and sleep found her only in fragments. That night the wind rose and moaned against the stone, a sound like old hinges drawn slow beneath the stars.

  Bernadetta lay curled in her blanket, eyes shut but breath shallow, the fire painting red shapes on the backs of her lids.

  In sleep, she wandered.

  She was a child again, though she could not place the age, the year, the name of the place. She wore velvet, her hair combed neat, and the hall stretched endless before her, full of gold light and shadow. Her father’s voice echoed down the corridor—not angry, not yet, but she knew what followed. She had lingered too long. She had spoken out of turn. She had laughed when she should have knelt.

  The door at the end of the hall opened. Not to him. To something else.

  A great shape stooped low to pass the lintel, its head shorn of flesh, or perhaps it had never worn any to begin with. Its skin was waxy, boneless, and its eyes glowed with a dull and patient hunger. Behind it came the sound of weeping. Not hers. Not yet. But familiar.

  It lifted a hand. Upon each finger danced little metal soldiers, and they moved though no strings bound them.

  “You’ve always been weak,” it said, in a voice that sounded like her father’s, and the Judge’s, and her own. “You were made that way.”

  She turned to run and found the hallway gone, replaced by a field of bones. A wind blew through the sockets and ribs like a harp.

  Her feet sank. The bones were wet beneath the surface.

  Then the sky cracked open and a flood came. Not water—blood. Thick, clotted. It rose to her knees, to her chest. Something brushed her leg. She screamed—

  —and woke, gasping.

  The fire was low, and all was still.

  She sat up, heart racing. Her throat was raw. Her limbs trembled beneath the blanket.

  The men were asleep. The wind had died.

  And yet in the dark, beyond the circle of firelight, she thought she saw a figure standing. Watching.

  She blinked, rubbed her eyes.

  It was gone.

  Just the silence now.

  Just the stars, impassive and innumerable.

  She lay back down.

  And did not dream again.

  She woke not with a cry, but a hush, her breath shallow and the dawn a red sheen behind the hills. They broke camp with no talk of the night, and the silence was its own kind of omen.

  The day broke like bone. Pale and bloodless, the light peeled over the desert and turned the dunes to ash. No birds sang. No dogs barked. The wind whispered in a voice not meant for men.

  They came upon the site in the dead hour of morning. The caravan lay gutted in the sand, stripped to its frame. Splintered wood and scorched canvas, the ribs of wagons bleached in the sun like the carcass of a beached whale. Buzzards rose from the wreckage at the riders’ approach, their wings black as the holes gouged in the earth. The scent of blood hung in the air, old and hot and sweet.

  Bernadetta’s horse skittered sideways. She yanked the reins with trembling hands.

  The bodies were where the buzzards had left them. Torn open. Burned. Scattered. Limbs draped across wheels, a man’s head resting in the lap of a woman with her throat cut to the spine. Children, too. Or the remains of them. Their bones no more than scattered sticks among the red-slick sand.

  Glanton dismounted first. He said nothing.

  The others followed.

  Toadvine made a low sound in his throat. “Raiders,” he muttered.

  “Apache,” said another.

  “Not Apache,” the Judge said. He was already kneeling beside one of the corpses. “Look at the cuts. Precision. See here—clean. No sawing. This was a blade honed for flesh.” He glanced up, eyes catching the sun. “A scalpel, not a knife.”

  Bernadetta remained in the saddle. Her mouth was dry. Her stomach roiled. She did not want to see any more.

  But she looked anyway.

  One of the bodies—what had once been a girl near her age—lay crumpled against a fallen crate. Her dress was torn. Her hands had been bound. Her face was gone, peeled back from the bone. And beside her, drawn in blood or something blacker still, a mark had been carved into the wood.

  The Judge rose.

  “The world will be redrawn by hands such as these,” he said. “You think this is the end of some story. It is not. It is the beginning. It is the foreword to a history yet to be written. And it is written in blood.”

  Toadvine spit. “You always got somethin’ poetic to say about corpses.”

  The Judge smiled faintly. “Corpses are the only truth.”

  Glanton stepped away from the wreckage. “Strip it,” he ordered. “Anything left, we take.”

  The men set to work.

  Bernadetta dismounted. Slowly. She walked like one half-dead, boots dragging in the sand.

  She came to a wagon missing both wheels. Inside, beneath a slat of broken wood, she saw a hand.

  She lifted it.

  There was a man beneath. Young. His eyes were still open. His mouth was full of dirt. She could not tell if he had died screaming.

  She knelt there a long time.

  She did not cry.

  The Judge passed behind her.

  “They were not strong,” he said.

  Bernadetta looked up at him. “They were just travelers.”

  “All who walk are travelers. The world does not care for destination. Only for endurance.”

  She said nothing. Her hands shook.

  The Judge looked down at the dead man. “He has no name now. No family. No country. But he is remembered. You have seen him.”

  Bernadetta rose. “I don’t want to remember.”

  “But you will,” said the Judge.

  And the desert went on watching.

  But the men did not. They did not speak of what they found. The dead were not buried. The wagons were not mended. The wind passed through the camp like a mourner who had run out of tears. By noon they rode again, their faces veiled with dust, their eyes narrowed to slits against the sun.

  Bernadetta rode hunched low, her cloak drawn against the grit. The world was colorless now. The sun hung like a white coin in the sky, and the earth beneath it stretched flat and cruel. Even the birds had vanished. The wind dragged at their clothes, and the hoofbeats were the only constant sound. Somewhere in the rattling wheels, in the shriek of old leather, in the moan of the heat, the girl thought she could still hear the dead.

  No one looked at her. Not even the Judge.

  The next town was spoken of only once, and even then, only as a name.

  They crested a low ridge as the sun began to fall, and there it was: a scatter of squat buildings, slumped against the red hills like bones in a shallow grave. Smoke twisted from the chimneys. A dog barked. A sign swayed in the wind. The place had no walls.

  Glanton reined in. He scratched his chin, looked back at the others. “Don’t get comfortable.”

  Then he rode on, the rest trailing behind like carrion birds following something not yet dead.

  Bernadetta did not ask what the town was called.

  They came into town like smoke through a sieve. Not fast. Not loud. Just there.

  The sun had burned itself hollow by the time they rode through the outskirts, and the first of the buildings rose like half-buried teeth from the dust. Some poor hovel of a frontier settlement, unnamed on any map that hadn’t been clawed together by rumor and gunpowder.

  Bernadetta could smell the place before she could see it—smoke, horses, sweat, and that hard tang of old liquor clinging to warped saloon boards like dried blood on a crossbeam. The men grew looser as they passed into the lighted heart of it. Shoulders unhooked. Jaws unclenched. They’d found water and vice, and for this kind of gang, that was enough to dull most any grief. The saloon was loud with talk, sour with heat and spittle. Two men played at cards while a third cheated both. Someone was coughing wet into his whiskey. A woman leaned against the bar and laughed without mirth. The place wore its filth proudly, like a dog with mange that had stopped scratching.

  Bernadetta slipped in unnoticed—or so she thought.

  She took a seat at the end of the bar, as far from the others as space allowed. Her hands trembled as she accepted the glass. She didn’t know what it was. Didn’t care. She wanted it to hurt. The first time she drank, a man from the gang—one no longer among the living—had tricked her into a half a glass of whiskey. Now she wanted something stronger than memory, sharper than thought.

  A voice beside her muttered low, deep in drink:

  “Brothel up in Jornada way got bought out. Whole place turned silent overnight.”

  Another voice grunted. “That so?”

  “Got ‘em out west, too,” one of the card players muttered, thumbing the edge of a bent queen.

  “Who?”

  “A madame. Been claimin’ brothels like they were strongholds. Fortified. Each one tethered to a regiment or two. Quiet-like.”

  “Horse shit.”

  “Nah,” the man said. He didn’t look up. “She don’t run ‘em herself. Has a hired man for that.”

  “What’s her name?”

  The speaker only shrugged. “Ain’t one they speak out loud, far as I can tell.”

  Bernadetta froze, her hand halfway to her lips.

  Then: a hand on her shoulder.

  She turned. A man grinned down at her through a beard that stank of tobacco and regret.

  He’d already stolen her drink. Now he meant to steal her peace.

  “Little lady,” he slurred. “Come all this way for a sip and forgot your nerve?”

  His fingers curled tighter.

  Bernadetta flinched, pulling back.

  He laughed, leaned in too close. “C’mon. Let’s see that smile.”

  Then came the kiss, brutal and sudden, his mouth pressed to hers with the insistence of filth, with a hunger that had never known love.

  She jerked back. The saloon roared.

  “Feisty!”

  He lunged again. She did not think. She did not scream.

  She grabbed the nearest barstool and swung it into his temple.

  The crack of wood on bone echoed. He reeled, blood stringing from his mouth like syrup.

  The room stilled.

  Bernadetta bolted. A trail of startled curses behind her. Laughter. Footsteps.

  She shoved open the doors, the chill night swallowing her, stars bare and pitiless above.

  The man followed, limping, cursing. “You little bitch,” he spat. “I’ll teach you.”

  He did not finish.

  A single gunshot split the quiet.

  He collapsed, the back of his head gone, blood turning black in the dust.

  Bernadetta turned. The Judge stood in the moonlight, rifle already lowered.

  “You handled yourself well,” he said.

  She did not answer. She could not. The breath in her chest was a hollow thing.

  He stepped forward. “But all things must have an end, young cub.”

  The saloon’s laughter resumed behind her, undisturbed.

  The Judge walked past her into the dark.

  She stood alone.

  Then she followed.