Shoving them into her pockets, into the front of her shirt, anywhere she could. Rhett knelt beside her and did the same. His fingers went numb within seconds, mud caking under his nails. It was pointless.
The water was already pooling in the furrows they'd dug, seeds floating away faster than they could gather them. But he kept digging because she was digging, and leaving her out there alone wasn't something he could do. A sound cut through the storm. Deep, grinding, wrong.
Rhett's head snapped upstream. Maybe a quarter mile away, something dark was moving through the water, not flowing, tumbling. A cottonwood, roots and all, ripped free by the flood, rolling end over end straight toward them.
"Move!" Rhett shouted, grabbing Ayah around the waist and hauling her backward. They scrambled up the slope toward the cabin just as the tree hit the garden plot with a sound like a cannon going off. Branches splintered. Mud exploded upward.
When Rhett looked back, half the garden was gone, churned into formless soup. Ayah made a sound. Not quite a cry, not quite a gasp. Rhett felt it in his chest like a punch.
"Come on," he said, pulling her toward the cabin. "We can't stay here." She let him lead her inside. They stood dripping in the doorway, breathing hard, watching through the window as the storm tore apart everything they'd built.
The fence posts went next, snapping like kindling. Then part of the barn roof peeled away, vanishing into the darkness. "I should have listened to you," Ayah said quietly. "You were trying to save something that mattered. Nothing wrong with that."
"It's gone anyway." "Not all of it." Rhett nodded toward her mud-caked hands, her bulging pockets. "You saved some."
She looked down at her hands like she'd forgotten they were there. Slowly, carefully, she emptied her pockets onto the table. Maybe two dozen seeds, coated in mud but whole. She stared at them for a long moment, then closed her eyes.
"It's not enough," she whispered. "It's more than nothing." Lightning struck close, close enough that the thunder came instant and deafening. The cabin shook.
Ayah flinched, and Rhett moved without thinking, putting himself between her and the window. "We need to get away from the glass," he said. They moved to the back corner of the cabin, the most sheltered spot, and sat with their backs against the wall. The storm raged on, relentless.
Hours passed. The water kept rising. Rhett could hear it now, sloshing against the cabin's foundation, creeping higher. "Tell me about Caleb," Ayah said suddenly.
Rhett glanced at her. "Why?" "Because I need to think about something other than drowning. And because you never talk about him except to say you got him killed."
Rhett leaned his head back against the wall. Talking about Caleb hurt in a way that felt both sharp and dull, like an old wound that never quite healed. "He was stubborn," Rhett started. "Thought he knew everything at 22."
"Drove me crazy. But he was also loyal, funny. Had this laugh that sounded like a donkey braying, and he knew it, so he'd do it on purpose just to make people smile." "Sounds like a good brother."
"He was better than I deserved." Rhett's throat tightened. "We were running a job down in Silver City. Simple thing, or supposed to be. Stage robbery."