Cole dropped his gear in the corner of one room and sat heavily on the narrow bed, feeling every mile they'd ridden settle into his bones. Lyra appeared in the doorway. "You look half dead." "Feel worse than that." "Want to get a drink?"
"Want to sleep for a week." "Suit yourself." Lyra disappeared, her footsteps echoing down the hall. Cole lay back, staring at the water-stained ceiling. The reality of what he'd agreed to was starting to sink in, and it felt heavier than he'd expected.
This wasn't just four people traveling together anymore. It was something with weight, with expectations, with a future he couldn't see clearly. A knock at the door pulled him from his thoughts. Sani stepped inside, carrying a tin basin and a cloth. "Thought you might want to clean up," she said. "I can manage."
"I know." She set the basin down on the small table near the window. "But you don't have to." Cole sat up slowly. "Sani, we need to talk about this."
"About what?" "About how this is supposed to work. You, me, Kaya, Lyra, all of this." Sani sat down in the chair across from him. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything. How do we split a life four ways? Who decides what? How do we keep from..." He stopped, searching for the right words. "How do we keep from tearing each other apart?"
"The same way anyone does," Sani said. "We talk, we listen, we argue when we need to and compromise when we can. We figure it out as we go." "That's not a plan." "It's the only plan that works."
"You can't predict every problem before it happens, Cole. You just have to trust that when problems come, we'll face them together." Cole rubbed his face. "I don't know if I'm built for that kind of trust." "You've trusted us with your life a dozen times over."
"That's different. That's survival." "So is this." Sani leaned forward. "What do you think marriage is, if not survival? Just a different kind."
Cole didn't have an answer for that. He stood, walked to the window, and looked out at the dirty streets of Gravel Springs. People moved like ants below, working, trading, living their small lives in the shadow of the mines. Most of them probably had the same fears he did, the same doubts. "I'm going to mess this up," he said quietly.
"Yes, you will," Sani agreed. "So will we. And then we'll fix it. That's what people do." She stood, moved to the door, then paused.
"One more thing." "What?" "Stop thinking of this as something you're enduring. You chose this. We all did."
"That means something." She left before Cole could respond. He spent the next hour washing off the road dust and trying to organize his thoughts into something coherent. By the time he finished, the sun had dipped below the hills and the town was settling into its evening rhythm. He found the others in the boardinghouse common room, seated around a scarred wooden table with a map spread between them.
"What's this?" Cole asked. Kaya looked up. "Planning. There's work at the Broken Ridge mine."
"They need security for overnight shifts, and there's a freight company that runs supplies to the smaller camps. We could split up, cover more ground." "Or we could stick together," Lyra said. "Safety in numbers." "Safety doesn't pay as well," Kaya countered.
Cole sat down and studied the map. "What about that?" He pointed to a section marked in faded ink. "Says here there's a valley about 20 miles west, good water, decent soil." "So?"
"So maybe we think past the next paycheck. Start looking for something permanent." The women exchanged glances. Kaya folded her arms. "You serious?"
"I don't know. Maybe." Cole shrugged. "You're the one who brought up settling down. I'm just thinking about what that looks like."
"It looks expensive," Lyra said. "Land costs money. Building costs more. And we'd need livestock, tools, seed if we're farming." "I'm not saying we do it tomorrow. I'm saying we start thinking about it."
"Make it a goal instead of just drifting." Sani nodded slowly. "I like that." "Me too," Kaya said. "But we still need money, which means taking the work that's available now."
They debated for another hour, voices rising and falling, opinions clashing and merging until they'd hammered out something resembling a plan. Cole and Kaya would take the mine security job. Lyra and Sani would work the freight runs. They'd pool their earnings, save what they could, and in six months, maybe a year, they'd have enough to start looking at land seriously. It wasn't perfect, but it was a start.
The work at Broken Ridge was brutal. Twelve-hour shifts watching over miners who resented being watched, breaking up fights between exhausted men with short tempers, and keeping an eye out for claim jumpers who didn't care about legal niceties. Cole had been shot at, threatened, and once nearly stabbed over a dispute about who owned a particular vein of silver. But the pay was good, and Kaya proved to be better at handling the miners than Cole was. She had a way of talking to them that was firm but not condescending.
And more than once, Cole watched her de-escalate a situation that would have ended in bloodshed if he'd been handling it alone. "How do you do that?" he asked one night as they rode back to town. "Do what?" "Get them to listen. Half the time they look at me like they want to shoot me."
"That's because you walk around like you expect them to shoot you. They pick up on it." "So I should what? Smile more?" Kaya laughed.
"No, just stop assuming everyone's an enemy before they prove it." Cole thought about that. "Hard habit to break." "I know, but you should try. We're building something here, Cole."