by N. D. Wilson
Millie grabbed his hand and jumped.
The men on the galloping horses were whooping and laughing and pointing.
Sam didn’t need them to point to know what was coming. He could remember falling. He could remember the bridge blowing. He could remember being shot from above when his legs were broken. Being crushed. Being burned. Being sliced. He could remember the cold breath that meant death had come for him again.
The front of the train had to be faster to get across the canyon in time. But everyone in the back of the train was going to die. Unless . . .
He dropped to his knees and walked his hands carefully out onto the shaking iron hinge between the cars. There was a heavy pin—a rod—with a ring in the top. If he pulled it . . .
A bullet skipped off the iron in front of him, throwing sparks up into his face. Squinting, he grabbed the ring and pulled.
Hopeless. He might as well have been trying to lift a mountain.
“Samuel!” Millie’s scream cut through the roar of the rails.
A heavy hand grabbed Sam’s shirt between the shoulder blades, and jerked him up.
GLORY TUMBLED TO THE FLOOR INSIDE A ROCKING TRAIN car. The knee of her jeans tore open on a loose floorboard as sand rained down around her. People lined the windows, looking out. Gunshots outside. There was blood mixed with sand in the aisle. And Father Tiempo was lying facedown in the middle of it.
She pulled herself up onto her feet and looked around. No Sam. He was already gone. Glory raced forward, jumping over the priest’s body and banging through the little door at the front of the car.
Another old Father Tiempo was shoving Sam and Millie into the next car as bullets splintered the wall around them. Then he leaned down over the iron hinge between the cars. She looked back at the body in the car behind her. How could the priest still be alive? Bullets were punching into his shoulder, his ribs, his arm.
Father Tiempo touched the fat iron pin in the hinge, and it dissolved into sand. Glory’s car slowed slightly. The priest’s car jerked forward. He looked up at her, and surprise flashed in his eyes as he tumbled out onto the tracks. She bit back a scream and looked away. Now the old man had died twice.
The horses and the gunfire followed the front of the train. Glory watched it accelerating away toward the edge of the canyon. A big man pushed out of the car behind her.
“Go, Sam,” Glory said. “Go!”
“They gonna blow the bridge?” The man had to yell to be heard.
Glory nodded. “At least it looks that way in like a hundred and fifty years!”
The man wheeled back into the train car, bellowing as he went.
“Everybody get to the back of the train!”
Glory stayed, balancing on the front edge of the rattling platform, watching the approaching bridge. The outlaws on their horses veered away from the canyon. The steaming engine and five cars made it out onto the bridge. The engine and the first two cars made it across.
And then the explosion. Timbers sprayed up into the sky, riding on flame. The train’s back heaved and rolled. The engine twisted and fell, sliding, spinning across boulders and over cacti. Four cars tumbled after it. The fifth slammed against the canyon wall, hanging. The rest dropped into the oblivion of smoke and flame, sending up a shrieking crunch as they hit the hidden bottom.
The outlaws whooped and screamed and fired into the air.
Glory’s half of the train clattered toward the shattered bridge. It had slowed, but not enough. She stared through the smoke at the broken train on the far side, its carcass fiery and steaming and heaped up like an imagined monster.
She hoped Sam and his sister had made it across the canyon. But how could she hope that for anyone? The wreckage on the other side was horrifying.
As her half of the train reached the canyon, Glory stepped to the side of the platform and jumped. She landed hard and rolled clear of the following train. Car after car nosed down and dove into the smoke-filled canyon beside her, filling the desert with the crash and scream of iron thunder until the entire train had vanished.
The hooting outlaws didn’t care about one strange girl in strange clothes, breathing hard with her backpack on and blood on her knees. They circled their horses around and galloped back toward the crowd of passengers who had jumped from the rear of the train and were huddling together on the tracks.
Glory knew that Sam might be dead. And if another version of Father Tiempo didn’t come for her, she knew that she had just leapt into a time that she would never escape. Fear, cold and heavy, was filling her limbs and pooling in her gut. Glory swallowed hard and inhaled slowly.
Somehow, she had to cross the canyon.
SAM MIRACLE HAD BLOOD IN HIS EYES. HE WAS DANGLING from a net full of cheese, kicking and twisting against the ceiling of a suspended cargo car. When the bridge had blown, he had pushed Millie down between two bales of cotton. Then the train had rolled, slamming him into the ceiling. Every bale and barrel and box in the cargo car had hit the ceiling after him. For a moment, they had teetered on the lip of the canyon, and then metal had screamed. The car had tipped and fallen, slamming against the rock wall, hanging from the cars that had reached the other side.
The side of the cargo car had been crushed. The big doors had been torn from their hinges. Thick sour smoke rolled around Sam, singeing his lungs and mixing tears with the blood in his eyes.
Memory roared through him along with the burning taste of smoke. Millie holding him tight in a lightless crawl space. Thugs yelling downstairs, searching for someone . . . for him. Millie rocking him to sleep in the dark, singing their mother’s quiet songs when the thugs had gone, when their mother would never sing them again. The taste of the smoke while the barn had burned.
Sam spat and blinked and looked around.
“Millie?” No answer. The blood was coming from his scalp. Small cut, much blood. He hoped. There wasn’t any pain. No pain anywhere. Only fear. Had his sister fallen? Had the cotton bales crushed her? Was she burning with the bridge rubble at the bottom of the canyon? He would burn with her. He would find her. He would never let himself forget her again.
Sam scrambled against the ceiling, and then gave up, gasping. His body was warm, but he was shivering. And he smelled like he’d been dipped in whisky. Most likely thanks to the bottle that had cut his head.
“Millie!” Sam couldn’t yell any louder. He kicked and twisted, still dangling from the net full of cheese, scanning the remaining contents of the car through red stickiness and smoke. No cotton. Almost all the cargo was gone. Along with his sister.
Sam shut his eyes. His arms were shaking harder than the rest of him, but his fingers were curled through the net. He wouldn’t fall. Not by accident.
Sam’s father had been sick for months before he’d finally stopped talking. Sam was with him on the front porch, staring out at the fields that should have been planted, at the pen that would have been holding the sheep if they hadn’t all been stolen away by the mountain people. At the charred ruins of the barn. His father had always been as sure as sunlight, as full of laughter as the great gold maples in fall. But no more.
Before that moment on the porch, Sam was sure he had already heard his father’s last message. He’d felt the rough hand on the back of his neck, and a weakened arm had pulled him close enough for a leather-scented whisper.
Proud of you, boy.
So, sitting beside the leafless branches of his father in his old rocker, tucked under the three heavy quilts Millie had given him, Sam was expecting nothing more than his father’s slow painful breathing. But then . . .
“You left your sister?”
Sam jumped to his feet. His father’s thin unshaven face was hard and angry. But his eyes were closed. His voice had been as firm and clear as it had ever been.
“No, sir. I didn’t,” Sam said. “Millie’s upstairs. She’s here.”
“Better you died,” his father said. “Leaving my girl like that.”
Sam’s father didn’
t survive the afternoon. And it didn’t matter that he’d been delirious and ill and dying, those were the last words he’d spoken on this earth. And he had meant them.
It was time to let go. Sam took a breath and prepared to drop.
Sam.
It might have been Millie’s voice, but whoever it was wasn’t anywhere below him. Sam looked up.
“Sam!”
Sam held his breath. The metal in the train car was groaning. Fire was popping and gnawing on the timbers from the bridge.
“Sam!”
A gun fired.
Sam climbed without a plan. He scurried up the ceiling, grabbing at beams and chains as he went. He hooked his leg out the gaping door in the side of the car, and swung out into the hot smoke. Powered by panic, he clawed his way up the outside of the train car like a rat, too desperate to fail.
Rolling up onto the very top of the dangling car, he scrambled to his feet, ran at the canyon wall, and leapt for a jutting boulder at the lip.
The rock tore his palms, but he didn’t feel it. His father’s dying dream had been wrong. Sam would never leave his sister. He would never lose. He jerked his chin up above the boulder and then pulled and pressed himself forward until his chest and ribs were resting on stone. Then he rolled forward and stood, panting.
Steam and coal smoke from the crumpled train engine had swallowed the plain. Through the vapor, the sun was as small and dull as a white dime. Cargo was strewn around the edge of the canyon. Bales of cotton. Shattered cases of whisky. Fire.
“Millie?”
Sam threw his arm up over his mouth and nose and moved slowly into the wreckage with eyes streaming. Why had the outlaws done this? What did they want? Robbing a train made some kind of sense, but destroying it? Blowing the bridge? Ruining the cargo?
He rolled a bale of cotton over, revealing a shattered barrel of coffee beans. Coughing, he flipped over a wooden bench. A cowboy, badly broken and clearly dead, lay facedown on an obliterated cactus.
“Samuel Miracle!” The roar carved through the smoke and bounced back up from the canyon in a rolling echo. It was a man’s voice, rough and wild and full of violent thrill—like an animal sensing a kill.
Sam’s throat clenched at the sound of his name. He knew the voice. He hated the voice. But how could he? He’d never been in Arizona. He’d never been anywhere outside West Virginia until one week ago.
“Samuel Miracle, I grow bored of this game! I have won, you have lost, and once again that fool of a priest will dance you through time so that we might begin again.”
Sam dropped into a crouch beside the dead cowboy’s boots. His arms stopped shaking. His heart was pumping frozen blood, sharp with ice, cutting him with fear. The gash on his scalp thumped with the beat. The open tears on his palms began to scream.
Pain. Sam shut his eyes. SADDYR. Glory. West Virginia. His father on the porch. Train wreck after train wreck. His arms shattered and fused tight. Father Tiempo telling him to hide. To survive. Not to fight. No matter what.
“If you run,” the voice continued, “your sister will suffer again. Every time you have escaped, she has lived on through agonies you couldn’t even imagine. And every time you return, you set her back to the start—fresh, unbroken, ready for new torture, new pain, and another slow death. Have you heard of Prometheus, Sam Miracle? The titan chained to a rock, cursed to have an eagle tear out and eat his liver every morning, cursed to have his liver grow back every night?” Laughter rolled through the smoke, tumbling over its own echo from the canyon, and then dying slowly into a growl. “Your sweet sister is Prometheus, Sam. You and your priest have chained her to a rock. You regrow her liver every time I have eaten it. But I am no eagle, Sam Miracle. I am the Vulture. And I would rather eat you.”
Sam lowered himself to his belly, peering beneath the smoke for any sign of movement.
“Sam? Am I talking to myself, Sam?” The voice was closer. Boots crunched on stone. Whispers. And then: “We can end this. Millie can remain unchained, uneaten, unharmed. I can release her to whatever future she may find. Your life for hers, Sam?”
Sam looked back at the dead cowboy. He was wearing a two-gun holster. Sam slid his arm underneath him, reaching for the buckle. His hand crumpled paper. A note.
DON’T! STAY HIDDEN AND UNDAMAGED!
FT
So Father Tiempo was still alive. Somehow. Maybe. But the priest didn’t matter to Sam. Not right now. He threw the note away, slowly pulled the holster free, and rose to his knees. When he’d buckled it on, he cupped his hands to throw his voice off the still-groaning train wreckage.
“Fight me!”
Catcalls and hooting bounced off the rocks. Sam clenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Anger, hotter than the sun and the smoke, burned in his chest.
“Let her go and I’ll fight you!” Sam yelled. “If I die, I die, but let my sister go! Millie? Can you hear me?”
“No, she can’t,” El Buitre said. “But I can.”
Sam spun around. The man was barely more than thirty feet behind him. Tall. Slim hips and wide shoulders, shining black vest and no fewer than seven golden watch chains, heavy with pearls. His eyes were both hungry and happy—the eyes of an animal about to feed. Nose like a knife. Narrow black beard oiled into a spike. Black hair rolling back in waves down his neck. Teeth like piano keys. A holster with even more pearl than his watch chains. Two silver guns shining like the moon on black water.
Men flanked him on either side with revolvers drawn. There was Tiny with his motorcycle boots and bowler hat, now elongated and slender, with the facial scar he had been missing on the train. Rattles was there, but the mustache he’d had on the train had grown even larger and was now white. More shapes were lost in the smoke behind them.
Sam was alone.
“Where’s my sister?” Sam asked. “I’ll fight you for my sister.”
The outlaws fanned out around Sam.
“I will fight you,” El Buitre said. He rocked his head slowly from side to side and then bobbed it, like a bird. “But once I have cut your heart from your still-living body and ended this charade forever, I am still keeping your sister.” He grinned. “Someone has to look after her.”
Sam flexed his fingers. Fear and anger and smoke blurred his still blood-sticky eyes. His father had taught him to shoot, how to calm himself and aim. But that had been a little rifle and they had been hunting for food; this was quick-draw, he was facing a human, and his heart was kicking in his chest like a trapped dog.
“I’m supposed to kill you,” Sam said. He tried to drain his body’s tension out of his feet, the way his father had described. But it all got stuck in his lungs.
“Then do it.” El Buitre’s lip curled into a snarl. “Kill me. Put the world to rights and end my rule before it even truly begins.”
The Vulture drew out a gold watch and wound it slowly with long fingers. As he did, his six remaining watches slipped free of his vest on their own and floated in the air around him, gently rattling their gold-and-pearl chains.
Sam blinked and squinted, unsure of what he was seeing.
Three watches rose over El Buitre’s left shoulder and three rose over his right until the drooping chains had spread above the outlaw like golden wings. No longer winding the seventh watch, the Vulture grinned and let it float above his palm. A tiny spinning tornado of sand sprouted up from the watch’s face.
Sam ignored it all and focused on the chest of the tall man in front of him. He imagined his hands jerking the revolvers up faster than sight, faster than thought, faster than time. He envisioned two shots throwing the outlaw back into the smoke as his golden watch chains rattled down around him.
A slow breath. And then Sam Miracle’s hands snapped toward his holsters. And El Buitre slapped his little tornado watch straight up.
Sam’s hands weren’t faster than sight. Or thought. He suddenly felt like he was trying to move through water. Through invisible tar. And El Buitre was a blur. Sam’s fingers didn�
��t even close before the outlaw’s twin silver barrels were spitting fire. Bullets shattered Sam’s wrists. They punched through his forearms. They splintered his elbows. While El Buitre’s guns blazed, Sam’s arms snapped and swung like a rag doll’s. Five rounds in each arm. And one more for each shoulder. Sam slipped, staggered backward, hung in the air for an impossibly slow moment, and then slammed into the ground.
The world was a place of smoke and silence.
Seven watches floated back to their master and were pocketed.
Rattles stepped over Sam, pushing back his hat and drawing his long bowie knife as he did. The outlaw was grinning under his huge white mustache, and when he spoke, Sam heard nothing.
Cold wind ripped away the smoke and a column of swirling sand poured down from the sky above Sam. White-haired Father Tiempo arrived spinning in the storm, hurling wind and sand in every direction.
A dozen guns began to fire. Sam felt cold. And he couldn’t move. He wished the dime sun above him would shine harder. He wondered if death would bring a blanket, or if he could just borrow his father’s quilts.
Sam Miracle swallowed. His throat felt like torn paper and ash.
But he hadn’t left his sister. No, sir. Never. Not him.
He shut his eyes and waited for the blankets, but the words that came in his father’s voice were even warmer.
Proud of you, boy.
Sam Miracle smiled.
6
Arms
HOURS HAD PASSED, AND MOST OF THE SMOKE HAD CLEARED by the time Glory had crossed the canyon. Her water was long gone and her eyes felt like shattered glass. Climbing through the wreckage at the bottom of the canyon had left her with peeled shins and singed hands. Climbing back up the other side of the canyon had moved new pain to her knees.
