Clash of Mountains

by Chloe Garner

  Maxim snorted.

  “Sex is sex. Business is business.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s all business to you.”

  He gave her a sideways smile.

  “I told you more than you told me, out there.”

  “Most folk do,” Sarah said, pickin’ up her plate. “I have a full day tomorrow, and things to get done tonight.”

  She nodded to the table, then took her plate to the kitchen and left it on a counter, takin’ the route through the sittin’ room to go upstairs.

  She sat down on the bed up there, no hat, no duster, just herself and a lot of trail dust, then stripped down as she ran the tub, goin’ to a mirror and pullin’ her hair down and pullin’ the worst of the tangles loose of it. She heard voices downstairs as the Lawsons left, then footsteps go by and Maxim’s voice talkin’ to Jimmy, tone easy like it always was. A door opened and closed, Peter’s old room, and then another, Thomas’. Funny how she knew ‘em all by their sound.

  She got in the tub and settled before Jimmy got to the room. He came to stand by the tub for a moment, then sat down on the bed like a puppet with cut strings.

  “Well, that was dramatic,” he said, tippin’ to his side but leavin’ his feet on the floor.

  “You were the one ‘bout to shoot him,” Sarah said.

  “You were right,” he said, and she nodded.

  “Damn straight.”

  “What happened out there?” Jimmy asked.

  “Lot you should know,” she said. “But you ain’t in the condition to deal with it tonight, so it’ll wait.”

  “Do I need to cut him off?” Jimmy asked.

  “Too late for that, anyway,” Sarah said. “But he had my back in the fight, and he kept a good formation. Reliable. I’d pick him over most of Lawrence, for that.”

  “He’s used to being inside a building,” Jimmy said. Sarah frowned, wonderin’ what kind of man-huntin’ they did in Preston, then shook her head.

  “He done fine. No worse than any of your other allies. You trust him, I trust him.”

  He grunted, and she turned her head to look over.

  “You don’t trust him?”

  “I do,” Jimmy said. “With my life. He was there when I needed him more than once, and I’ve done the same for him.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t like him here.”

  She smiled, rollin’ her head back onto her neck and rubbin’ at her arms to get the dust off.

  “He’s just fine in Preston.”

  “He belongs in Preston.”

  “So do you,” she said.

  “I do not,” Jimmy said, his tone tellin’ her that he knew she were teasin’, but that he didn’t like it all the same.

  “Intec, then,” she said.

  “I do,” he said. “Intec was good to us.”

  “You keep tellin’ me that,” she said.

  “If you could see what I want this town to be like, Sarah…”

  “I’d like as not kill you where you lay,” Sarah answered, smilin’ for her own benefit. “So it’s best I don’t.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Man’s name is Jeffrey,” Sarah said. “Small time. Don’t know if you remember him.”

  “I do,” Jimmy said. “That’s who was working for Pythagoras up in the mountains?”

  “I got a piece of ‘im,” Sarah said, scrubbin’ her legs with her hands. “Just not enough to put him down.”

  “And he knows where Maxim’s claim is,” Jimmy said.

  “Likely knows were a few more are,” Sarah said. “Ain’t like they’re movin’ targets. Wander about enough, you’re gonna find ‘em.”

  “It’s a lot of ground,” Jimmy said.

  “To a man like Jeffrey, just means more time. He ain’t got nothin’ else pressin’ him.”

  Jimmy sighed.

  “It isn’t just about keeping people out of the mountains, then.”

  “Never were,” Sarah said. “Mountains are too big, and you know it. We ain’t gonna keep everyone safe, make diggin’ absenta like goin’ to the store in Oxala. Our job to keep ‘em from diggin’ their own absenta and passin’ it off as their own. Everyone else’s job to not get dead.”

  “They aren’t going to like that,” Jimmy said.

  “’S why you gotta string up a man like Jeffrey, make ‘em see that it don’t pay to knock off claims. Punishin’. We gotta get that right.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said, his tone distant.

  “I’m gonna send Doc round to look at you, when I go down to town to get Sunny in the mornin’,” Sarah said.

  “Just make sure he waits until after Maxim is gone tomorrow to come,” Jimmy said. That he didn’t fight her on it told Sarah a hell of a lot.

  She’d’ve insisted on stayin’ on ‘till he were up on his feet again, if the trip to Intec had any push to it, but there were too good a shot she’d come back to a rail line underwater, as it were.

  Needed to keep movin’, no matter how many pieces were fallin’ apart behind her.

  “Gonna send Rhoda up to tend to you, too,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “You may trust the staff, but I don’t trust nobody but family to make sure you don’t die in your sleep to somethin’ other than what the mountain put in your blood.”

  “You think one of them is going to slit my throat and get away with it?” Jimmy asked. “If they were inclined, they could have done it long ago.”

  “All the same.”

  “Not Rhoda,” Jimmy said.

  “Thomas then,” Sarah said.

  “All right.”

  She nodded, then stood, sluicing water off her skin and gettin’ the towel from where she’d put it at the end of the bed. Jimmy tried to lift his head, but it fell back again.

  “I’ve never had anything knock me off my feet this hard,” he said.

  “Mountains are like that,” Sarah said. He should’ve bounced back by now. He’d been workin’ too hard, too little sleep, to have a recovery as weak as this. No sense pointin’ it out, ‘cause it wouldn’t change nothin’, but it were the truth, still. Told her he had too much goin’ and not enough hands.

  “Let Rhoda bring in the men for you to interview,” Sarah said. “And let Thomas oversee the buildin’.”

  Jimmy snorted.

  “Which place?”

  “All of it,” Sarah said. “If you can do it, so can he. Smart enough, and it don’t take the cunnin’ of killin’ a man in cold blood to do it.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Jimmy said, but nodded. “He wouldn’t prioritize his own house.”

  “Rhoda’s plantin’ flowers,” Sarah said dryly, findin’ her night gown and goin’ to sit next to him on the bed. The sweat on his forehead was worse, but his skin was cool to the touch.

  “You sleepin’ at night?” she asked.

  “Not so much, the last two,” Jimmy said. “I will tonight.”

  She nodded.

  “It’s time.”

  “You haven’t told me how Maxim’s claims are doing, or about his nephew that I just bought.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ to be talkin’ about tonight,” Sarah said. “It’ll keep better’n you will.”

  He sighed and pulled his feet up onto the bed, where she reached down to pull his shoes off, droppin’ ‘em on the ground.

  “Sleep,” she said. “Maxim’s right about one thing. You ain’t got power, this whole thing is gonna go bust.”

  “I don’t remember him saying that,” Jimmy said, but Sarah ignored him, rollin’ on her back and reachin’ for the lamp to turn it off.

  Weren’t but a minute ‘fore she heard soft breathin’ noises off of Jimmy and she stretched out on the bed, just watchin’ the ceilin’. She didn’t belong in this room. Still felt like intrudin’ on a story what weren’t hers. But it smelled of people again, after a long time smellin’ of empty, and Jimmy’s breath was familiar to her, one more noise that she coul
d have identified as his in a thunder storm.

  Intec.

  The LaVelle.

  She hadn’t ever thought she’d go back.

  Life with Jimmy was nothing if not unpredictable.

  --------

  She left instructions with Doc to head up to the Lawson house ‘round dinner time, then went to get Sunny.

  “Rich said you’d be here today,” Sunny said, standin’ from where she’d been sittin’ on a single, hard-sided bag. Sarah went to talk to Thomas as Sunny loaded her own bag into the buckboard, then turned the rig around and headed north for the end of the rail line where Jimmy’d told her to look for it.

  She could see the three-car train from a distance, up at the edge of the badlands, turned north and ready to go as they pulled up. A short man with a wide mustache came to greet them, shaking hands with Sarah and Sunny, then escorting them to the back car while a porter took their bags and loaded them. Sarah recognized the private car Jimmy had bought for traveling up and down the coast by rail - it took her handprint to open it, even for the porter. Sunny looked around at it dryly, then went to sit on the windowseat, staring out. Sarah raised an eyebrow at her, then went to go change.

  City clothes.

  Jimmy had insisted on shopping for on-trend clothes after they’d gotten to Preston, and while she didn’t really like to wear them, they weren’t as bad as they could have been. Capes were popular, just now, and while it didn’t do the same duty her duster did, it was better than nothing. She dressed and put her hair up, sleek against her head, and went back into the car as the train started. There were provisions, loaded from outside, and she got something to eat for herself and Sunny, laying out a meal on the table and sitting to eat it.

  “I ate breakfast,” Sunny said without looking at her.

  “Suits me fine,” Sarah answered.

  “Rich said there was a fight again last night,” Sunny said. Sarah snorted, scooping fried grain into her mouth. Jimmy’d put together the menu for the trip - she recognized it. Her favorites from Oxala.

  “When isn’t there one?” Sarah answered.

  Sunny turned her face to look at Sarah. There was never much expression there, but the woman was thoughtful and she was beautiful, in an odd way that Sarah hadn’t seen before and didn’t have words to describe. Her face was simple and it held an elegance to it that was brutal and capable.

  “You fight too much,” she said. Sarah tipped back her bowl and set it down on the table.

  “Is that a fact?” she asked. Sunny blinked, basilisk, and turned back to the window.

  “Fighting doesn’t change anything,” the olive-skinned woman said. “It just makes you feel like you’re changing something.”

  “Put a bullet in a man, things change,” Sarah said, and Sunny laughed mirthlessly.

  “Of course that’s what you think. You need to believe you have power.”

  Sarah crossed her arms.

  “But you know better?”

  Sunny shrugged.

  “I know that I don’t fight, and I’m sitting in the same train as you.”

  “Courtesy of Jimmy Lawson and a few others,” Sarah said. “I could have just as easily said no to you coming at all.”

  “You didn’t,” Sunny said.

  “And that proves your point,” Sarah said. Sunny shrugged again.

  “You call yourself an engineer,” Sarah said. “I met some of those, up on the LaVelle when I was there. You don’t act like any of them.”

  Sunny gave her a half a smile, cold.

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  Sarah nodded slowly, then shook her head and returned to her breakfast.

  She didn’t care.

  Didn’t care what went on between Sunny and Rich, why they’d ended up together.

  Even if she had no explanation that fit.

  She ate toast and drank a bitter, roasted drink with a heaping of caffeine in it, then looked over at Sunny again.

  It was almost a day to Magnum, by Sarah’s estimation, and it was going to be a long trip, if she was pinned in here with Sunny with nothing to do and Sunny holding the window.

  She wanted to go through gear, do repairs, inventories, that kind of finger-work that kept her mind occupied and at the same time freed her to think about other things. She had no gear, here. Just her supplies and clothes for the trip.

  She looked over at Sunny.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll bite. How did you and Rich end up together?”

  Sunny chuckled, bringing her foot up onto the seat to rest her elbow on her knee. It was almost too self-aware.

  Almost.

  “My mother,” Sunny said.

  Sarah was a fan of not needing to fill in space with words, but that was terse even for her. Sunny looked over, blinking and resting her head against the window.

  “My father was an engineer. Just like me. Just like his father. He met her at college and they both recognized a way to make their parents angry, so they wed. Without asking.”

  Sarah crossed her arms and sat back in her chair, waiting to see where this went. Sunny nodded, her eyes distant.

  “My mother conceived within weeks and discovered she hated my father almost as much as she hated her parents. I grew up with my father, but I spent six weeks a year with my mother and her family. When she decided it was time for me to marry, she arranged with Jimmy for me to marry a Lawson, because they were up-and-coming stars in Intec at the time, and Jimmy chose Rich, because he was out of control and needed someone to rein him in.”

  “Sounds like fighting, to me,” Sarah said. Sunny gave her a cool smile and shook her head.

  “No. Nothing of the kind. It isn’t about fighting. It’s about simply being who I am and waiting for him to figure out that he can’t get away.”

  Sarah drew her head back at this.

  From all evidence, it had worked. And she couldn’t see argument with it, either, at the outset. There was a way of breaking a particularly wild colt where you tied it to a small-size mule and just let it go. Didn’t matter how wild or powerful the cold was, the mule would keep bringing it home, and eventually the colt would go along, just to stop fighting.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Well, damn.”

  Sunny nodded slowly.

  “And you haven’t got a problem being a part of an arrangement like that?” Sarah asked. Sunny narrowed her eyes.

  “My father didn’t know how to have a child,” she said. “I’ve been who I am for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never really cared about what anyone else thought of me, or what they did. It wasn’t like I was going to end up with something better.”

  “And they say I’m cold,” Sarah said. Sunny snorted.

  “You’re about as hot-tempered as I’ve ever met a woman. Anyone who calls you cold is just afraid of you.”

  Sarah gave her a shrugging little frown.

  “Are you happy?”

  “I don’t understand the question,” Sunny said without any hint of confusion. “I am well-cared for within a family of adequate wealth, and my husband stands to become substantially more wealthy in coming years.”

  “But… Lawrence,” Sarah said. Sunny nodded.

  “Is it possible I have more faith in your husband than you do?” she asked. Sarah raised an eyebrow.

  “Sounds like just a lack of respect for the risks, to me.”

  Sunny sucked on her lips and popped them, then turned her face back to the window.

  “You went to school for something,” Sarah said. “You aren’t using it at all. How can you have put in that much effort and get nothing out of it?”

  “I got the knowledge,” Sunny said simply.

  “But… we’re doing all of this construction,” Sarah said. “If that’s what you’re good at, why aren’t you helping?”

  Sunny laughed. It might have actually been humor.

  “I studied programming languages and controls algorithms. I understand the technology that the LaVelle is
using to lift pods up to the ship and set them back down. I know nothing about building houses.”

  “Jimmy knows that, doesn’t he?” Sarah asked.

  “We spoke at length about my technical specialization before I even met Rich,” Sunny said. Sarah shook her head.

  “Can’t believe he’d go along with something like that,” she said. “Just marrying his brother to a stranger because it’s convenient.”

  “You didn’t see what he was like, at the worst,” Sunny answered.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Still,” she said. “That’s not how it works.”

  “Worked just fine.”

  Sarah twisted her mouth. Sunny seemed uninterested in any further conversation, and Sarah wasn’t interested enough to dig further into Sunny’s history, so that was it.

  The train rolled on.

  The day ticked.

  It was a long, long trip.

  --------

  They got off the train outside of Magnum, no station, just the end of the line and a loop for turning around the train. Sarah passively wondered how Jimmy’s car had ended up on the line, but it wasn’t like there weren’t methods for moving around train cars that didn’t involve rail. It was just… complicated.

  The train from Magnum to Tyrew, on the coast, was where Sarah finally set herself to work on the argument she would make to the shipping maintenance portion of the crew of the LaVelle for why they should sponsor a satellite launch. She’d seen presentations for all kinds of things during her time in orbit, some that made perfect sense that the crew had turned down and some that had been completely frivolous. What she could say for the crew was that they hadn’t taken anything that hadn’t had serious merit, presented by someone who was organized and who seemed to represent interests capable of fully utilizing the value of the shipment. She’d seen the inefficiencies on campus, people who had to spend every penny to make sure they got a bigger budget next year, people who showed up to work with nothing to do because no one had noticed their job had no tasks. An entire truck full of produce and meat that had been left, sitting in midsummer heat, for a day while the food services staff forgot to locate the man with the key to the shipping dock.