"I know." "And you still want to go?" "Yes." She set the ledger down carefully.
"Because if we don't, nothing changes. Coleman keeps selling people. Vickers keeps buying them. And everyone in this ledger becomes a number that gets forgotten."
Rhett looked at the documents spread around them. Hundreds of names. Hundreds of lives reduced to transactions. He thought about Caleb.
About how his brother had died believing Rhett would do the right thing even when it was hard. About how he'd spent four years running from that responsibility. "All right," he said. "We go to Washington."
Ayah's face lit up. "Really?" "Yeah. But we do it smart."
"We rest here for a few days. Let the heat die down. Gather supplies. Plan a route that keeps us off main roads."
He picked up the ledger. "And we make copies of this. Hide them in different places. Because if something happens to us, someone needs to know what's in here."
They spent the next three days preparing. Rhett hunted, dried meat, filled waterskins. Ayah carefully copied the most damning pages of the ledger, her handwriting small and precise. They hid one copy deep in the cave system, wrapped in oilcloth and tucked into a crevice that would survive floods and fires.
Another they sent with a message to Hank, asking him to hold it until they returned or until news came that they wouldn't be returning. On the morning of the fourth day, they were ready. The horses were rested. The bags packed.
Rhett had cleaned and loaded every weapon they owned. Two revolvers, a rifle, and a knife that Ayah wore strapped to her calf. They were saddling the horses when they heard it. Hoofbeats.
A lot of them, coming fast. Rhett and Ayah looked at each other. They'd been careful, covered their tracks, stayed hidden, but somehow someone had found them. "How many?" Ayah asked.
Rhett listened. "Eight. Maybe 10." "We can't outrun that many." "No."
He checked his revolver, felt the familiar weight of it in his hand. "But we can try." They mounted and rode deeper into the canyon, looking for high ground, defensible positions, anything that would give them an advantage. The hoofbeats got closer, echoing off the rock walls, making it impossible to tell exactly where they were coming from.
Rhett spotted an outcropping, a shelf of rock about 20 feet up with a narrow path leading to it. Good sight lines. Limited approach. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than being caught in the open.
"Up there," he said. They dismounted and scrambled up the path, leading the horses. Rhett took position behind a boulder, rifle ready. Ayah crouched beside him, her own rifle, the one she'd fired at the bounty hunters, gripped tight.
The riders appeared. Ten of them, led by Coleman himself. The territorial officer sat his horse like he owned the world, that same cold smile on his face. "Callaway!"