Inside, Nayeli was already awake. She was always already awake. He'd stopped being surprised by this. She had that quality some people have. The kind that comes from years of needing to be alert where sleep never fully takes her.
She rests. She doesn't disappear. She was standing at the window when he came back in. Her eyes went to his face first, then to the door behind him, then back to his face. You saw something, she said.
Not a question. Smoke on the ridge, two words, immediate. Her chin came up, which direction? North. Maybe 8 miles.
Tsula was coming down the ladder from the loft, careful with her ankle. She stopped on the third rung when she heard their tones, stayed there listening. How long? Nayeli said. I don't know.
I noticed it this morning. Could have been burning through the night. A silence. Nayeli's jaw set. And Hadley understood then in the specific way you understand something when you watch a person's whole body respond to a single piece of information.
That this wasn't news she didn't expect. This was news she'd been waiting for. The kind of news you dread but don't let yourself be surprised by because being surprised is a luxury and she'd stopped keeping luxuries. Tell me, Hadley said. She looked at him.
He looked back. Tell me, he said again. Same tone, not harder, just patient. Two weeks. That's how long it had been since the night everything changed, the night they ran.
Tsula came down the ladder the rest of the way and sat at the table. And Nayeli sat across from her and Hadley leaned against the wall near the window. Not crowding the table, not making himself the center, and he listened. Nayeli talked. She didn't talk easily.
It cost her. You could see it in the way she assembled each sentence, carefully, like setting stones for a crossing. Making sure each one would hold weight before putting the next one down. Their band had been moving south along a route they'd traveled before. A route they thought was safe.
Because they'd traveled it before, because familiar things feel safer than they are before dawn. That's when Briggs Malone came, not one man, not two. A group, armed, moving through the camp with a purpose that wasn't robbery, wasn't random violence. It was something more organized than that. Something that knew where to go, what to take, who to separate out.
Nayeli stopped. Tsula picked up the thread. "They knew our camp," Tsula said. Her voice was quieter than her sister's, more careful. Like she was handling something she didn't trust not to break.
"They came in from the right direction, knew where the horses were, knew where the" She stopped. Swallowed. "They had information. Someone told them." Hadley said, not an accusation, just following the logic.