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."
"That means learning to live with people, not just survive them." She was right, though it grated on him to admit it. He'd spent so long treating the world as hostile that he'd forgotten there were other ways to move through it. Watching Kaya work, seeing how she balanced firmness with respect, made him realize how much he still had to learn. Lyra and Sani, meanwhile, were thriving on the freight runs.
They'd taken to the work with an ease that surprised everyone, including the freight company owner, who'd been skeptical about hiring women until they proved they could handle a team of horses as well as any man. Within a month, they were getting assigned the longer, more lucrative routes, and the money started adding up faster than Cole had expected. But the work kept them apart more than together. Days would pass where Cole barely saw Lyra and Sani except in passing, a quick meal, a brief conversation before one of them had to leave again. It started to feel less like a partnership and more like four people who happened to share the same address.
One night after a particularly long shift at the mine, Cole returned to the boarding house to find all three women waiting for him. They sat around the table in their shared room, and the expression on their faces told him something was wrong. "What happened?" he asked. "Nothing happened," Kaya said. "But we need to talk."
Cole sat down slowly. "About what?" "About this." Lyra gestured at the room, the space between them. "About how we're barely seeing each other."
"About how this doesn't feel like what we agreed to." "We're working. That's what we agreed to." "No," Sani said quietly. "We agreed to build something together."
"Right now, we're just working in the same town." Cole frowned. "What do you want me to do? Quit the mine? We need the money."
Kaya said, "What's the point of saving for a future if we're not living in the present?" "The point is having that future." "At what cost?" Lyra leaned forward. "We didn't follow you for ten years just to become strangers who share a roof."
Cole felt frustration rising in his chest. "So what's the solution? We all take the same jobs, work half as much, and save half as fast?" "Maybe," Kaya said. "Or maybe we find work we can do together. There's got to be something."
"Like what?" "I don't know. But sitting here arguing about it isn't helping." The conversation devolved from there, voices rising, old frustrations surfacing. Lyra accused Cole of caring more about money than people.