by Nico Rosso
Willoughby hurried along the creaking boardwalks as more and more people came out. On the far side of the town, Rosa’s parents were just stepping out of their leather shop. It was too far to see, but she could picture the worried and sour expressions on their faces.
Tom casually knocked his elbow against hers. “Fine shooting.”
“Told you.” This was far too comfortable, walking with him like this.
A flare of anger heated his voice. “So who would want you in a grave?”
“Put a few bad guys in prison, but no one with enough pull to pay for this kind of roundup.” Her mind spun, flipping through faces and possibilities.
Tom seemed to be following a thread of his own. “Or maybe not you personally. They just want the sheriff of Thornville out of the way.”
Only one possibility. “There’s a mining company that wants claims. . . .”
“Crandall.”
Was Tom caught up in all this? “How do you know?”
“Saw their rolling mining machine south of here when I was on my way into town.”
They reached the front of the jail, a one-room brick building that stood off by itself. Tom kept his gun trained on the hooligans as she unlocked the heavy iron door. Usually when she threw someone in the jail, it meant the end of trouble. But it seemed like things were just starting to get dangerous.
“Where was the machine headed?”
Tom glanced to the south. He was jumpy, with the same tension she felt. “This way.”
Rosa hurried the men into the jail and slammed the door shut, locking it securely. “Deak, the Doc’ll be here in a minute. Put your hand outside the bars so he can work on it. Don’t want you dying before you see the judge.”
Deak muttered a curse back at her, but she’d heard worse on the Santa Barbara docks.
With the bad guys locked away, she walked to the center of Main Street and gazed southward. “How far away?”
“Don’t know how fast that beast can roll. Day or two?”
“They’ve been trying to buy up plots, but no one’s selling. Guess they want to take it by force.” She ejected the spent shell from her revolver and replaced it with a fresh round before holstering the pistol. “Not without a fight.”
She turned and headed into town.
Tom didn’t follow. “Where’re you going?”
“To get my horse and ride out to the Crandall machine.” She hated that she still wanted him at her side. “Thanks for the help, mister. This ain’t your fight anymore.”
“Oh, hell.” Tom squinted past Rosa, to where her parents were coming down the street. “Your folks.”
He turned on his boot heel and headed in the opposite direction. This time, she watched him leave Thornville. She thought her heart had hardened enough not to break twice, but having him come back like this, just to disappear again, was almost too much to bear. It was almost as if he hadn’t returned at all. Maybe he was just a ghost, conjured by her late-night dreams and summer longings. All those wishes had been locked away so tight.
Let it hurt later. Right now she had the Crandall mine to deal with.
If she could get by her parents. They hurried across the road to the sheriff’s office, where her horse was tied.
“We heard a shot.” Her dad looked her over. “Are you hurt, querida?”
“I did the shooting.” She kept moving toward her horse.
“Was that Tom Knox?” Her mother’s gaze into the trees where he’d disappeared threatened to set the dry leaves on fire.
“It was.”
“That bastardo isn’t welcome here.” Her father balled his large hands into fists.
“You don’t need to worry.” She bit back on any more emotion before it consumed her. “He’s gone.”
Her horse greeted her with a nicker. She checked the cinch and bridle. Might be a long ride. Her mother gripped her arm. “You’d better not be riding after him.”
“I’m riding south,” she explained, “to stop the Crandall mining machine that wants to chew up these hills and us with them.”
“Alone?” Her father glanced south, as if he could see the threat there.
The question hit her hard. Since Tom left, every fight she’d been in, every struggle had been alone. It made her strong. She was respected. She’d had jobs many men couldn’t have handled. She came back to Thornville, and was named sheriff because she stood up when no one else was willing. But having Tom next to her, just for those few minutes, felt better than old times. They understood each other, like when they’d danced together on long summer nights in hot barns and grange houses. In his absence, there’d been no balance in dancing alone. With him backing her in this fight, all the steps were that much easier. This connection seemed deeper than the desperate young passion they’d shared growing up. And now it was gone.
“Yes, alone.”
A dark shadow slid across the ground, a swift bird skimming in front of the sun. But there were no wings. The shape was so strange—tall like a man in a hat—that Rosa had to look into the sky.
Her breath caught in her throat. She blinked and blinked, but what she saw was real. Tom rode through the air on a mechanical flying horse. She’d seen pictures of Sky Chargers before, lumiscopes from the front lines of the war, but never one in person. And nothing looked as impressive as Tom handling the craft, holding reins like with a horse, but levers at his feet. He took the charger over some buildings, then low to the ground, leveling off toward her.
Her parents were equally speechless—for once. Tom kept a wary eye on them as he came closer. The charger’s engine chugged in a steady rhythm and the metal pieces of the mechanical horse creaked against the leather saddle and tack. Tom brought it close to Rosa, hovering at the same height as if it were a real horse.
He turned in the saddle and untied the bedroll from the back. He threw the bundle down next to the sheriff’s office and put out a hand for her.
“This’ll get us there faster than your horse.”
She stared at his hand. “You’re not trying to stop me from fighting?”
“You the law, ain’t you?”
Her father ignored Tom. “If the problem is that big, go to the state authorities.”
Tom was unwavering, ready.
Rosa answered he father, “State troops are in the opposite direction. The trouble would roll over Thornville by the time we got back.”
“A telegraph,” he countered.
“They cut the pole. Lines are down.”
Tom’s hand was still outstretched to her. “Let’s go.”
Then her mother flared. “Not with this man.”
His hand curled to a fist and pulled away from Rosa. Tom turned on her mother, eyes growing cold. “I ain’t who you think I was.”
“You’re nobody.” Her mother’s anger boiled up. “Father dead, mother gone. You know what happened to that shack where you lived? The blackberries took it. You don’t even have any land to come back to.”
Tom’s mouth was a hard line. He spoke from deep in his chest, unwavering as he faced her mother. “Might not have land, but Thornville’s still my home.”
Rosa knew that he was right: he wasn’t the same man.
Her mother seemed taken aback, but hadn’t changed her mind. “You’re not welcome here, Tom Knox.”
“You made that perfectly clear three years ago. Even recall you threatening to call the state police and have me thrown in prison on fake rustling charges if I didn’t cut Rosa out of my life.”
Her mother barely listened. “It’s your fault she took this terrible job in the first place.”
The ice thawed in Tom’s eyes when he turned back to Rosa. “I think the job fits her perfect.” He looked her over, from face to star to the revolver on her hip and lower. Heat ran across her body, driven by the touch of his eyes. Whenever anyone else saw the star on her chest, they shrank away like she was the grim reaper himself. Tom put his hand out again.
Ignoring her parents, Rosa was almost rea
dy to take it. Then she saw the ring. “Your wife won’t mind me riding with you?”
A darkness flashed in his gaze, something she’d never seen in him before. He turned his hand over so she could examine what the ring really was. A bullet casing, hammered flat and curled around his finger.
“I’m married to Lady Lead. Rifle bullet, forty-five-seventy caliber.”
Reaching forward, she was inches from his hand. “And that peace and quiet you wanted. Applejack and blackberry pie?”
“I saw at least twenty Whisperers guarding that mining machine. You got no deputies, no riding party, but I can see you’re heading off there anyway.” He was dead serious. “Ain’t going to let you do it alone.”
Who else had ever said this to her? Rosa reached out and took his hand. He curled his strong fingers around her, not like a man protecting a bird, but like an ally, lifting her up to fight. Using his strength and hers, she swung up to the back of the charger.
It swayed in the air, rebalancing as Tom adjusted some controls. She gripped his waist to stay on. She’d ridden plenty of horses, but none that could fly, and the sensation of weightlessness was better than anything imagined in a storybook. An uncharacteristic giggle bubbled up from her.
Tom got control of the charger and glanced back at her with a wink. “It gets better.”
As her parents watched with anger and frustration, Tom kicked a lever on the horse and it rose higher into the air. Rosa held her breath. Wind whistled in her ears. Blue sky broadened all around her. The buildings and roads of Thornville shrank below. Her parents were as small as dolls, as if she could just pick them up in her hands.
Tom pulled on a pair of leather-and-brass goggles, then turned back to her. “There’s a spare pair in the right saddlebag.”
Keeping one fist balled in his shirt, she gingerly turned to the back of the charger. Hills and trees moved by. She finally knew what the birds felt like. When she looked down, her stomach flipped, then clenched. One hundred feet, two hundred? A long way down with nothing to stop the deadly descent. Her body went rigid.
“I won’t let you fall.” He reached back and patted her thigh, and quickly pulled away as if burned.
She felt the heat, too, shimmering where he touched her. It brought her back to motion. She retrieved the goggles from the saddlebag. Without the wind biting her eyes, she saw more details around her. Survey maps she’d studied of the area came alive. Mountain ranges and rivers. The bright Pacific to the west.
A glance back revealed the dollhouses that made up Thornville. “It’s never been that small.”
“Felt the same, coming back.” He turned back toward the front of the charger. “The way it’d been on my mind, should’ve been a hell of a lot bigger.”
“It’s grown,” she said. “More people coming through as jobs spread through the state.”
“Only natural that Thornville would need a full-time sheriff. You get elected or did you just pin that star on yourself?”
“Little of both. I was staying with my folks when a caravan of boat builders came through on their way from Los Angeles to San Francisco.” At first the town had felt lively with their presence. “They got a little drunk, got a little rowdy and no one in town was willing to stand up to them.”
“No one but you.”
“The crew was headed up by Theodore Lyde. The biggest and the meanest. So I challenged him when he was stinking drunk, let him wind himself chasing me, then knocked him cold with a knee to the chin.”
He clicked his tongue with appreciation. “Wish I could’ve seen that.”
“With their leader gone, the others fell in line.”
“And Thornville fitted you for a star because everyone else was too scared to fight.”
She tried to see the town through his eyes. A man with no family, no one waiting for him to come home. “When you were coming back, was I small, too?”
He shook his head. She noticed some scars on his left ear. A knife maybe? His skin was weathered and tough, tanned from the sun. Tom had developed into a hard man, a soldier who had obviously lived through a lot.
“Seeing you there.” He spoke without turning back to her. “Fighting like that, not backing down. You were more than I ever dreamed of.” Pain and loss spiked his words.
She couldn’t soothe him. Her own pain still ran deep.
“The Army know you have their horse?”
“No one rides this Sky Charger but me. I’m on leave from the front. Can show you the orders if you need them, Sheriff.”
“I trust you.”
“That the truth?” He sounded surprised.
“The sheriff of Thornville trusts you.”
He nodded his understanding. “I’ll take it.”
That was as far as she could let it go. Somewhere ahead was the Crandall machine and maybe another fight. There was too much going on to start dragging their emotions out of the graveyard.
“What division you ride with?”
He seemed glad to avoid the deeper talk and brightened. “Upland Rangers with the Third Cavalry. We fly scout patrols and hit the flanks of big fights. Too light to take on the Hapsburg airships straight on, especially the Man O’ Wars. We got armored Sky Trains and iron stagecoaches for that kind of thing.”
She patted the side of the charger. Instead of feeling the smooth hide and firm muscle of a horse, her hand hit against the metal skin. “It’s amazing.”
“All about the ether. And thank God for that.” He dove down and swooped the charger around a tall tree. “Actually, I should thank Franklin Song. He’s the inventor who came up with all this stuff for us. Common water hits the tanks, is catalyzed into ether and takes us up. Without it, we’d all be speaking German and the Hapsburgs would have all our soya fields.”
“Read some articles about Song. I’d love to see his workshop up in San Francisco.”
“Every invention he sends to the front gives us just a little more advantage.”
“But nothing like a Man O’ War.” That was the most frightening threat from Europe. The man-machine hybrids were a terror in battle: nearly unstoppable.
“America don’t have the telumium. And good riddance.” His muscles tensed. “It ain’t right, doing that to a body.”
“You wouldn’t volunteer, if they said you had the right aurora, or whatever they call it?”
“Don’t need it.” He turned and smiled, cocky. “I’m already the best.”
His confidence was appealing, but she wasn’t about to feed it. “Let me take the reins.”
Tom scoffed. “Already told you, nobody rides this Sky Charger but me.”
She pushed harder. “I’m riding it now. Let me try the reins.”
“I used to break the meanest horses in Thornville and it still took me months to learn how to control this beast. Ain’t like a horse, unless you’re talking about a bucking stallion balancing on a lit stick of dynamite during a tornado.” He reached to the side of the charger and unlocked the top of a rifle scabbard. “Here, this is something I’m sure you can handle.”
Reaching past him, her arm brushed against his leg. His muscles jumped. She yearned to lean harder into him. His body had changed, growing more rugged, as if it were cut from a quarry. But there were still traces of his old energy: a bit wild and so damn sure of himself. She’d spent the years changing as well. What would their new selves be like together? She’d probably never know. Instead, she grabbed the butt of the rifle and pulled it from the scabbard.
“Beautiful.” A Gatling rifle with six barrels, a complicated and exquisite weapon constructed from iron and brass and wood. It was unbelievably light in her hands and perfectly balanced.
Tom chuckled. “Knew you’d like it.”
“Can’t believe they just gave you this.” She sighted down the barrels at the passing landscape. “The Tom I knew would’ve used it to turn a whole orchard into apple butter.”
“The Army doesn’t give you anything. They issue it.” His voice grew flat. “The m
an you knew ain’t around any longer.”
He had changed, that was for sure. But it wasn’t a complete transformation. The firebrand was still there, inside him. She’d seen it when he fought the roughnecks in Thornville. It gave her that old thrill, like they were sneaking off to Porterville again for a barn dance and late-night lovemaking. But if he was only a rabble-rouser, it would be easy to bury her attraction under hurt and anger. There was nothing easy about riding behind him, feeling his body against hers and wondering about all the potential.
“How do I shoot it?” she asked.
“That key, hanging from the chain on the stock, it winds the tension spring.”
She fitted the key into the square nut on the side of the rifle. It wound like a clock, but much tighter. “Got that.”
“Then you flip open the breech, back to front, and load a belt of ammo from left to right.”
The steel breech opened easily. Tom took good care of this weapon. Small toothed wheels lined the bottom to grab the canvas ammo belt.
“Once she’s wound and loaded,” he continued, “you pull the trigger and set the whole thing spinning.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Dry fire it. Got to release the tension now that you’ve wound it.”
How right he was. But releasing the tension between the two of them wouldn’t be as simple as pulling a trigger.
She brought the rifle to her shoulder again and hesitated. “It can’t be this light.”
Tom chuckled. “Ask Franklin Song. There’s an ether tank in the fore grip. Keeps the weight down, but more important, it feeds the breech. A little ether pipes out with every bullet, lightening the air and giving you extra power and range.”
He turned and moved his hand along the rifle until their fingers almost touched near the trigger. The glass of his goggles obscured too much of his eyes for her to read them, but she knew he continued staring at her as he twisted a small valve shut on the rifle.
“Don’t want to waste the ether.” He slid his hand back before they touched, and faced front again. “Give her a try.”
Rosa steadied the rifle in her hands. Even though it wasn’t loaded, she calmed her breath and gently squeezed the trigger. She’d fired guns hundreds of times, but this beast buzzed like a hornet. The barrels spun and the clockwork mechanism chattered inside. The spring slowed and the rifle came to a stop.
