"Warning shots just tell them where you are." She pulled away from him, angry now. "So what was I supposed to do? Let them find us?"
"Shoot them in the back, if that's what it takes to survive." "I'm not you, Rhett. I can't just kill people." The words hit harder than she probably meant them to.
Rhett felt something crack inside him. Something he'd been holding together with spit and stubbornness. "You think I like it?" he asked quietly.
"You think it doesn't keep me up at night? Every man I've ever put down. I didn't choose this. I chose to survive. There's a difference."
Ayah's expression softened. "I know. I'm sorry. I just... I don't want to become someone I'm not because the world's trying to kill me."
"The world doesn't care who you are. It's going to try to kill you anyway." "Then I'd rather die being myself than live being someone I hate." Rhett didn't have an answer for that.
Didn't know how to explain that survival had a cost, and sometimes that cost was the person you used to be. A sound from below interrupted them. Voices, rough and confident. The bounty hunters were regrouping.
"We need to go," Rhett said. "Now. Deeper into the canyon. Somewhere they can't follow."
"I'm tired of running." "I'm tired of watching people I care about die." He grabbed her hand. "Please, Ayah. Just this once. Trust me."
She held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded. "All right. But this is the last time." They gathered what they could carry and headed into the narrow passages, the places where the canyon walls pressed so close you could touch both sides at once.
Rhett led, Ayah following, and behind them he could hear the bounty hunters shouting, trying to figure out where they'd gone. The passage opened suddenly into a chamber Rhett hadn't seen before. It was massive, cathedral-like, with a shaft of sunlight coming down through a crack in the ceiling 50 feet up. Water pooled in the center, clear and still as glass.
"This is it," Ayah whispered. "This is the heart place where my grandmother brought me." "It's beautiful." "It's sacred."
She moved to the water's edge and knelt. "This is where we came to speak to the ancestors, to ask for guidance." "Can you ask them how to get us out of this mess?" She actually smiled at that.
"They're ancestors, not miracle workers." The sound of boots on rock echoed from the passage behind them. The bounty hunters were close. Rhett pulled his revolver and checked the chambers.
Six shots. Three men. Not great odds, but he'd worked with worse. "Stay behind me," he said.
"No." "Ayah, I said—" "No." She stood, and there was something different in her stance now.