Chapter Text
The morning clung low over the plains, a thin gray fog crawling along the grass like it didn’t want to be seen at all. The earth was damp from a night rain that hadn’t been generous enough to clean anything, only heavy enough to leave the ground smelling raw. Horseshoe prints softened behind Jack as he rode, the land already working to erase him.
Blackwater lay east, out of sight now, but not out of mind. Even from here, Jack could feel it—brick and iron and noise, pretending at permanence. The town had spread fast over the past few years, swallowing dirt roads and spitting out storefronts, hotels, banks. Gas lamps burned where stars used to matter. The harbor coughed smoke day and night, ships bringing in money and carrying something unnamed back out to sea.
Men called it growth. Expansion. Prosperity.
Jack had learned it felt more like death.
The ranch had been quieter ever since Uncle and his father were murdered. Too quiet after his mother let out her last breath, sickness finally finishing what grief had started. She hadn’t been the same after her husband died—his redemption taken the way government men take things. Without apology. Without care.
It was a stretch of land his father had tried to hold like something fragile and promising, knowing the grip alone might break it. It did. Fences patched and repatched. Fields worked hard but never cruelly. A place balanced between hope and exhaustion. It had been good enough, while it lasted. There had been that small mercy—his mother was given a few years of honest living before the world finished with her.
His father had tried.
Like lost men do.
Jack didn’t turn to look at it. He knew what would be there if he did—the house small against the open land, the corral leaning slightly to the left, the memory of his mother’s voice carried on mornings like this. The kind of memory that doesn’t ask permission before it takes something out of you.
Even the dog was gone now.
The road north was still mostly dirt, though the ruts ran deep now from wagons hauling equipment instead of families. Oil men, mostly. Their rigs had started appearing like bad omens—wooden towers clawing at the sky, black stains bleeding into the soil beneath them. The land groaned under it. Jack felt that too, through the horse, through the air. As if the ground itself knew it was being emptied out.
Telegraph poles lined parts of the road, cutting the horizon into measured segments. Wires hummed faintly overhead, carrying messages faster than men could outrun consequences now. Jack wondered who they served. Certainly not the land. Certainly not the people already moved off it, pressed into reservations or forgotten corners and told to be grateful for survival.
He passed a stand of cottonwoods, their leaves trembling in the early light. Birds lifted when he rode through, startled but not panicked. Animals still trusted patterns. People didn’t get that luxury.
The horse slowed slightly on an incline, muscles shifting under its hide. Jack leaned forward, steadying, his boots scuffed and worn thin at the soles. He’d grown fast these last few years, taller than his father ever was, but the weight he carried had nothing to do with bone.
Edgar Ross was dead.
That fact moved with Jack like a second shadow.
It hadn’t come with relief. It hadn’t come with peace. It had come with silence, thick and absolute, like the world waiting to see what he would do next. Jack understood now that killing a man didn’t close a chapter—it tore the binding loose.
What followed wasn’t an ending at all.
He was a fugitive now. Not that he’d seen a wanted poster with his face on it yet. No death sentence yet. Still, he’d asked questions where he shouldn’t have, lingered too long, kept his face uncovered while vengeance was still hot in him.
Ross had believed in systems. In order. In the idea that violence was acceptable as long as it wore the right uniform. Jack had watched that belief fail him—watched it flicker and die in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Jack didn’t regret it. He didn’t cherish it either.
That was the truth he carried with him, days of travel into higher ground and thinner air, where the plains gave way to greens and browns, and the road narrowed like it was thinking twice about letting him pass.
By midmorning, the fog began to lift, not burn away. It loosened its grip reluctantly, peeling back from the ground in thin gray strands that clung to grass and low brush. The land changed as he rode. The sky shrank beneath the weight of trees, pale light filtering through needles and branches instead of stretching wide overhead.
The air smelled different here—wet earth, pine, sap, cold stone. Hoofbeats sounded duller on the ground, swallowed by moss and soft soil. Somewhere water moved, unseen but constant, a creek or river cutting its way through rock like it had been doing long before anyone bothered to name it.
Ahead, the road split. One branch climbed toward higher ground and timber, winding and uneven, disappearing quickly into shadow and trees. The other cut east, straighter, already scarred by wagons and wheels, pointing toward rail lines, sawmills, towns growing loud with money and men who didn’t like to get their hands dirty anymore.
Jack didn’t hesitate.
He turned the horse toward the narrower road, the one that bent into forest and rain and quieter ground, where the land still made its own rules and a man could pass through without announcing himself.
He wasn’t running from the law exactly. He was running from being defined by it. The world was eager to turn men like him into lessons, into headlines, into warnings whispered to children before bed. Jack had grown up inside those stories. He knew how they lied by omission.
The West wasn’t ending.
It was being repackaged.
And like most things sold new, the cost was buried.
Jack rode on, the sound of hooves dull against the mud, the smell of oil faint but persistent on the wind. Somewhere ahead were places not yet settled, not yet stripped down to usefulness. Places where the land still spoke louder than paper and guns hadn’t fully given way to machines.
He didn’t know if there was room for a man like him in that future.
But he meant to find out before the past caught up.
--
Night came down on him just as the town came into view.
Strawberry. Or what passed for it now.
He’d been here once before, years ago, when he was barely twelve and his parents’ lives still sat somewhere between honesty and survival. Back when his father’s gun had come out easy, like an extension of the problem instead of its solution. John Marston had killed men. Too many to count. He’d tried, as the years went on, to make it mean something. To make it honorable. That effort had cost him more than the killing ever did.
Jack had never thought of his father as a good man or a bad one. Just a man shaped by the American way.
And the American way had always been about killing. Displacing. Erasing. Exploiting.
John had killed, yes. But he’d killed for people he loved. First for the gang, then for his family. If Jack was honest, there was more truth in that than in any flag or promise this country had ever raised.
Strawberry had grown since the last time he’d seen it. Not taller. Wider. Rougher around the edges. Timber had been cut back hard, stumps dotting the slopes like scars that hadn’t healed yet. Posters were nailed into trees and storefronts, calling for men to cut more of it down. Always more. Always faster.
One thing was new.
A bar and small hotel sat just past the bridge, perched at the curve where the mountain road began to climb. The place already looked tired despite being freshly built, cheap wood showing through the paint. It stood far enough from town to be useful. Fewer eyes. Fewer questions. No law lingering where it didn’t strictly belong.
Jack slowed the horse as he crossed the bridge, the water below moving fast and dark, swollen from recent rain.
This would do.
“Thank you, girl,” Jack murmured as he hitched the mustang.
He set out a pot of fresh rainwater and a bundle of hay, watching as she lowered her head, finally at ease. He’d taken her in when she was wild and young, barely two years old, still limping from a cougar’s claws. She’d shown up a week after his father was killed, the stable still marked by bullet holes, the ground not yet scrubbed clean of blood. Jack hadn’t told anyone what he thought it meant. Only the horse.
He’d named her Night Star. Dark gray, stubborn, unafraid. She’d been his work ever since.
She snorted softly at the promise of food and rest. Jack shouldered his bag, checked the weight of his gun, and turned toward the building.
Music leaked out through the doorway—thin, worn, played by someone who still believed in it. Inside, the light was low and yellow, smoke already hanging heavy in the air. A small crowd gathered near the bar. Working men, mostly. Mud on their boots, money in their pockets they didn’t plan on keeping long. Waitresses moved between tables. So did other women, quieter about what they were selling.
An older man sat near the center of the room with a guitar across his knee, fingers moving slow and sure.
Too much soul for a place like this.
Jack stepped up to the bar.
“A room for the night.”
“That’ll be two dollars, son.”
Jack nodded. “Make it a couple nights. I could use a bath, too.”
He slid a ten across the counter.
The bartender looked at the bill, then at Jack. “Upstairs. Room eight. Give it ten minutes or so for the bath.”
Jack took the key, nodded once, and headed for the stairs without looking back.
He checked the newspaper he’d bought a few days earlier as he sat on the bed.
Still nothing useful. No name. No mention of Ross. No mention at all of a man shot clean through the head on a quiet stretch of coast. More than a month had passed since Jack pulled the trigger. Long enough for the silence to start feeling deliberate.
The bullet had been quick. Square in the skull. No lingering. Ross had made too many men suffer under the language of law and order to deserve mercy dressed up as morality.
The Pinkertons weren’t protectors. Jack knew that much. They’d never been about safety. They were about control. About keeping the right people afraid and the wrong people quiet.
Jack wasn’t an idiot. He’d gone to school when he could. Blackwater was big enough to offer poor kids an education, if they stayed in line. But his real schooling had come elsewhere. From a gang that lived by codes because laws had failed them. From women who survived by giving up everything except their children. From men who taught him how to read, how to shoot, how to listen, how to think beyond what he was told.
Some of those men had betrayed each other and themselves, too. That cut deeper. It still did.
He knew life on the road. Grief. Death. Moving forward anyway. He understood the world well enough to know that killing out of vengeance was a kind of stupidity. A dangerous one. His mother had warned him about that particular flaw.
“Just like your Pa,” she’d said once. “Same smug face. Same temper. Same stupid honor when you’ve got a gun in your hand.”
She’d made him promise not to go after Ross.
“Over my dead body,” she’d screamed when she saw him wearing his father’s hat and vest, gun heavy at his side just days after John died. She cried then. He held her while she shook and he said his sorrys.
“Promise me,” she said.
“I promise, Ma.”
And he had.
She was six feet under by the time he finally watched Ross bleed.
His eyes caught on a small square at the bottom of the page. He hadn’t noticed it before.
RETIRED GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL GUNNED DOWN IN NUEVO PARAÍSO. NO SUSPECTS. LAW CITES POSSIBLE DEBT ENTANGLEMENTS.
Jack let out a breath through his nose.
Debt. That was what they were calling it.
Mrs. Ross hadn’t said a word about him asking after her husband before the killing. No grief worth noticing. No questions, either. Jack figured it meant one of two things: she hadn’t mourned Edgar Ross much at all, or she was sharper than the men paid to look into it. Maybe both.
Maybe the story they were carrying was simply convenient — clean enough to keep the law from poking where it didn’t want to. The lawman Jack had spoken to hadn’t come up again, not in print, not in rumor.
Jack folded the paper carefully.
He’d sold the ranch fast after his mother died. Too fast for anyone to question it properly. Told people he was heading east. Or south. Chasing gold. Opportunity. The kind of lie men liked because it sounded familiar. Let them think he was young and foolish and hungry for money.
Let them believe he wanted glory.
By the time Ross was dead, Jack was already gone.
It seemed to have worked.
For now.
He let out a long breath, stepped into the hall, and followed the faded sign that read BATH.
The water was warm at first, the stove beside the tub slowly coaxing it toward hot. Jack eased himself into it and stayed longer than he meant to, letting the heat work into his shoulders and down his back, loosening dirt that had settled there over weeks. Sweat. Road dust. The kind of grime that clings when you don’t stop long enough to be clean.
He hadn’t realized how badly he needed it until the ache in his muscles began to loosen.
“Need a hand in there, sweety?”
The voice came through the door, light and practiced.
Jack hesitated. Thought about it longer than he meant to. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing forced. He’d pay fair. It wasn’t like he was asking for anything indecent. Just hands. Just relief.
“Uh… yeah,” he said finally. “If that’s alright.”
The door opened and a woman stepped in, a few years older than him. Not young enough to be naive, not old enough to be tired. She moved easy, like she’d done this a thousand times without needing to think about it.
She asked him questions while she worked. Nothing that mattered. Where he was from. How long he’d be staying. Her hands moved under the water, careful, unhurried.
“You’re new around here,” she said.
“Yeah,” Jack answered. “Came down from Canada.”
She hummed, not quite believing him, not quite calling him on it either. Her hands drifted lower than he was comfortable with. He shifted, clearing his throat.
“Could you—” he started, then tried again. “My neck’s killing me.”
She paused for half a second. Then she laughed softly.
“Sure thing, hon.”
Her fingers worked into the knot at the base of his neck, strong and sure. It surprised him how much it helped. He hadn’t realized how tightly he’d been holding himself together until something finally gave. He closed his eyes without meaning to, breathed out as the tension eased.
She smiled at him — kind, maybe amused, maybe grateful he hadn’t asked for more. Probably both.
After a few minutes, he straightened.
“Thank you,” he said.
He reached for his pants on the floor and pressed two dollars into her hand. More than fair.
“Well, look at you,” she said. “A decent one.”
She hesitated at the door, then added, “Your Mama raised you right.”
The door closed behind her.
Jack looked down at the water, now clouded and gray, carrying away what it could. He stayed a moment longer, until the heat began to fade and the room cooled around him.
He missed his mother for nearly a minute.
Then he rose from the tub.
He dressed in the clean clothes he’d brought, breathing into the unfamiliar comfort of it. Cleanliness was a luxury he’d learned early not to expect, and never to take lightly.
He returned to his room long enough to set his things down, then turned back toward the stairs. A restlessness had settled in him, quiet but insistent. Not purpose. Not grief.
Something easier.
Whiskey, mostly.
Jack took a place at the bar and ordered two whiskeys. He drank them back-to-back. Then a beer.
The night settled in around him. Grew louder. Older. Some men were already past whatever counted as decent, voices thick, laughter coming too easily. Working women sat on their laps, singing off-key, laughing hard. It wasn’t joy so much as release — a brief forgetting carved out of long days and harder lives.
Men who spent daylight cutting the land open in the mountains, hauling timber until their backs gave out. Men who drank and paid for company at night, while wives and children waited miles away, stretching meals thin, scraping by on what was left. The same men who complained that money was tight, said it like a grievance, said it loud, after spending most of it on themselves.
Jack had heard these stories before.
His mother had told him those stories as both confession and warning. Saloons. Brothels. Men who mistook hunger for entitlement. She told him what it cost — how it hardened you, how it narrowed your choices, how it taught you to confuse want with need. She told him long before he grew into his shoulders, before the hair came in on his face, before he started looking a second too long at the girls in town.
It stayed with him.
She’d been one of those girls once. She spoke of it plainly. Old drunks taking what they thought they were owed, too far gone to remember faces or names. She told it without tears. Said she learned early how to take more from their wallets than they ever took from her. Uncle laughed when she told those stories. Sometimes she laughed too. And sometimes Jack did, when he was young enough to think laughter meant it was over.
His dad always swore or rolled his eyes.
Jack knew better now.
There was no use mourning her for things she’d survived. She would’ve hated that. She’d taken pride in fending for herself, in lasting long enough to find the gang, long enough to build something that almost held. Jack wasn’t about to strip that from her. Survival wasn’t shameful. Neither was knowing how to fight back with what little the world allowed you.
What stayed with him wasn’t the bitterness. It was the line she’d drawn.
He didn’t want to be a man who took.
He wanted to be a man who knew better.
And yet, he thought, he was still a man, with all the complications that came with it, when a woman stopped beside him at the bar and spoke like she had every right to be there.
“I’ll have a drink,” she said to the barman.
She looked close to his age, maybe a little older, her skin darker than anyone else in the room, black hair pulled tight and tucked beneath a worn hat that had seen more weather than fashion. She wore a man’s coat and trousers, practical and cut for movement, a revolver resting easy at her hip — not displayed, not hidden, simply there.
The sight of her brought Sadie Adler to mind for a moment, sharp and hard and quick with a gun, a woman who’d learned not to wait for permission. This one stood with the same balance, the kind that came from knowing how to leave fast if you had to, and knowing when you wouldn’t.
The waitress glanced at her and didn’t bother hiding the look that crossed her face.
“We don’t serve Indians here. Get out.”
The words fell flat and ordinary, the way they always did, like a rule no one remembered making but everyone enforced. A few men looked over. Most didn’t bother.
The bartender clicked his tongue and waved the waitress off, annoyed more by the interruption than the insult. “It’s Saturday,” he said, like that settled it, like time itself made allowances. Then, turning to the woman without quite meeting her eyes, “You want a drink, you pay for it. And no funny business.”
She didn’t answer him. She looked at Jack instead, took him in with a steady, measuring gaze.
“Better you order it,” she said. “And pay.”
Jack felt the pause stretch, just long enough to be felt. He didn’t rush it. Didn’t look around to see who was watching. A small smile tugged at his mouth before he could stop it. He’d always had a soft spot for nerve.
“Two beers,” he said at last, setting the money on the bar. “Another for me. One for the lady.”
He said lady the way he always did — plain, unembellished, without expectation. His mother’s voice lived in that word. His father’s too. Respect wasn’t something you rationed or withdrew once it became inconvenient. They’d known kinship outside the lines people liked to draw. The best man Jack had ever known was both Black and Indian, and the world had never known what to do with him either.
The bartender hesitated, then reached for the bottles. The waitress turned away, finding something else to occupy her hands.
The woman took the glass when it was set down and knocked it lightly against Jack’s.
“Cheers,” she said.
He nodded back. She took it as it was — not charity, not challenge. An offering.
She slid onto the stool beside him, close enough now that the noise of the room blurred around them.
“Name’s Bee,” she said.
“Bee?” Jack repeated, another small smile finding its way to his mouth.
“Yeah.” She took a sip, didn’t look away from him.
“Jack,” he said. Then, after half a beat, “Jack Marston.” Too much, probably, but it was already out there.
She tipped her bottle lightly against his and smiled — easy, almost playful.
Bee drank, eyes drifting back to the room, watching it over the rim of the glass like she expected it to change its mind about her at any second.
They drank in silence for a while, half listening to the guitar man who had wandered into another tune, the crowd taking it up without much concern for staying on key, voices rising and tangling together in a way that suggested no one was trying very hard to be impressive. It looked like everyone was in a decent enough mood, loosened by drink, women, and music, glad for the temporary forgetting that places like this offered, and Jack found himself quietly grateful for it. A room like this could turn sour quickly, but tonight it seemed content to let itself drift.
Their bottles emptied without either of them remarking on it. Jack noticed only when he tipped his back and felt the motion finish on nothing, the habit lingering a second longer than the beer. He set the bottle down and glanced toward her.
“Another one?” he asked, already knowing what the answer would be, his tone easy, like he wasn’t asking anything that mattered much.
“Sure thing,” she said. Then, with a straight face, “Long as you pay for this round. Since I paid the last.”
She hadn’t. The lie was thin and quick, and Jack caught it immediately. He laughed, not loud, but genuinely amused, because it felt like she was testing him and because he found he didn’t mind being tested at all.
He flagged the barman and ordered, eyes dropping briefly to his hand resting on the bar, the smile staying with him longer than he expected.
He’d had a couple of women in his short life, enough to know what he wasn’t and enough to recognize that this wasn’t that either. He found himself wanting to see where it might go, even if he wasn’t quite sure how to ask without stepping wrong.
“You, uh…” He hesitated, then went on anyway. “You working tonight?”
She frowned at that, just slightly, and took a long pull from her beer before answering.
“Ain’t that a rude thing to ask a lady?”
The words weren’t sharp, but she was. Jack felt it immediately. Heat climbed his face and he cursed himself for it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it is. Sorry. I didn’t mean—” He stopped, tried again. “There’s nothing wrong with that kind of work. I just meant… I’m not much of a man for buying company, is all.”
She studied him for a moment, then smiled, the edge easing out of it.
“Well,” she said, “truth is, Jack, working girls are more than just that.” She tipped her bottle slightly, as if weighing the words. “Tonight I’m not working. Other nights, I have. Depends on the weather. Depends on my mood. Depends on how the world’s behaving.” She took another drink, then added, softer, “Mostly I just wanted a beer. And some conversation. With someone who doesn’t look at me like I ought to disappear.”
Jack nodded, slow, careful. “That seems fair.”
He hesitated, then said it anyway. “My Ma was a working girl when she was young. Just so you know.” He kept his eyes on the bar. “Didn’t mean any disrespect.”
Bee studied him for a moment, longer than politeness required. Then she nodded once.
“Yeah,” she said. “I figured you weren’t talking down.” A pause. “Most men who do don’t bother explaining.”
She took another sip. “Your Ma must’ve been tough.”
“She was,” Jack said. And that was all he needed to say about it.
He shifted his bottle in his hand, rolled his shoulders once, then said, “So… where you from?”
Bee looked at him over the rim of her bottle. “From here.”
“Really?” Jack asked, a little surprised.
She smiled then, the kind that answered without answering. “From here and around. And further off than that.”
It explained nothing at all.
Jack laughed softly, because he understood the shape of it. “Yeah,” he said. “Same.”
“Nah,” she said. “You’re from where the boats were before they landed here. All of you are.”
Jack nodded, taking it without argument. “Maybe,” he said. “But all I know is this land.”
She studied him a moment longer than before. “Does it know you back?”
Jack frowned slightly. “The land?”
“That’s what I asked,” she said. “Does it know you back?”
It was a strange question. Still, it settled somewhere familiar. He thought of long roads and bad weather, of nights that should’ve ended worse than they did, of horses finding water when he hadn’t known where to look.
“I think it does,” he said. “I’ve traveled enough. And it’s kept me alive.”
Bee nodded, slow, like that was answer enough. Then she smiled again, small and knowing, and turned back to her drink.
More drinks came and went. This time Bee paid, sliding her coins across the bar with a quick wink that felt genuine and unbothered, and the whiskey worked its way through Jack in a way that made his shoulders loosen and his thoughts slow just enough to stop tripping over themselves. He had a few remarks lined up in his head — the kind that always sounded better before they were said — but he kept them there. He knew what drink could do to him. It had earned him a slap or two in the past, well deserved.
Her stool had edged closer without either of them moving it. She leaned her head into her hand now, elbow on the bar, looking at him like she had all the time in the world.
“You’ve got a few freckles I like,” she said.
Jack snorted softly. He’d never cared for them much. They’d come from his mother, same as his temper, and he’d learned early there wasn’t much use fighting either.
“Only a few?” he asked.
She smiled. “Yeah. Some of ’em get on my nerves.”
That caught him off guard enough that he laughed out loud, sharp and sudden, the sound surprising him as much as it did her. He wasn’t used to being loud. It felt good anyway, felt like something cracking open instead of closing shut.
He hesitated, just long enough to remember himself, then reached up and brushed a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. Uncle had once told him that was a move, said it like a joke, half drunk and grinning, but the old man hadn’t been wrong about everything.
“Well,” Jack said, voice lower now, steadier than he expected, “I like all of your face.”
The words surprised him as they left his mouth. Bold enough to earn a slap if he’d misread her. Bold enough that he almost braced for it. Almost closed an eye, ready for it.
But Bee just smiled wider, and that was enough to make him smile wider too.
For a moment, he forgot about newspapers and names and the way the world narrowed when it decided it wanted to take something from you. He forgot he might soon be a man people were looking for. The night had given him a little nerve, and he let himself keep it. Just for now.
It didn’t last.
A man moved closer, close enough for his nasty breath to carry, the cheer in the room bending into something tighter, uglier. “Who let her in?” he said, not bothering to lower his voice. “Her kind ain’t decent to be here.”
Another man laughed, already half gone. “Hey, girl,” he called after Bee, “come on upstairs with me.”
Jack felt it immediately — that old tightening in his chest, the quick heat behind his eyes. He’d always been fast with men like that. He liked the clarity of a fight, the way it stripped things down to motion and consequence.
But Bee was faster.
She slid off her stool and stood, smooth and untouched, already moving away. “See you, Jack,” she said lightly, like this was nothing worth lingering over, and she headed for the door with one of the men shambling after her.
“Andy!” the barman barked, sharp and sudden. “Get your ass back here, you sack of shit.”
The man turned, grinning, pleased with himself. “S’okay, old man,” he said. “Had her a few times.”
That was it.
Jack was on his feet before he thought better of it. One step, one clean swing. The punch landed square, solid enough to surprise him, and the man went down hard, folding backward and hitting the floor like he’d been dropped there on purpose. Jack braced for more — fists, boots, the room turning on him — but nothing came.
The barman swore. “Goddamn it.” Then, louder, to the room, “Everybody back to your drinks. Round’s on me.”
The place answered with cheers. Someone laughed. Someone clapped. The night kept moving, like it always did.
The barman caught Jack’s eye and jerked his head toward the body. “Drag him to the back. He’ll come around.” Then, quieter, “And after that, go on to bed.”
It didn’t look like the first time Andy had needed carrying. It didn’t look like it mattered much, either.
Jack hauled the man up and left him sprawled where the floor ran cooler and the noise thinned out. When he came back, his drink was still waiting for him at the bar.
For a moment, he thought about going outside. About finding Bee. About explaining something that didn’t need explaining. But he’d already made himself noticeable enough for one night.
He drained the glass, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and headed for the stairs.
Up in his room, the bed took him without argument. The alcohol and the hour pulled him under fast, before he could turn the night over in his head, before he could imagine how it might’ve ended if the world had been a little kinder, or he’d been a little smarter.
Sleep and dreams came quick.
Too quick for regret.
The night kept what it wanted.
In the dream, there was no ranch yet. No fences. No clean lines drawn to keep things in or out. Just land and sky and a sense of motion that could only be lived. Jack was small again — four, maybe five — legs unsteady beneath him, hands too light for the weight they reached for. He held a stick like it was a gun, swinging it wide, laughing at the sound he made with his mouth. Bang. Bang. Bang. His mother’s voice cut through it sharp and frightened, telling him to stop, telling him to put it down, telling him he was too young for ideas like that.
He didn’t listen. He never did.
The dream changed without warning. He was older now, taller, his hands sure of themselves, the gun real and cold against his palm. Arthur stood nearby, not sick yet, not tired, watching him with that look that was half concern, half something like hope. John was there too, alive and restless, arguing with Dutch about plans that didn’t exist yet. Javier sang a song of despair and loss in Spanish. The women told stories, laughing, as the campfire burned steady.
Then it folded in on itself.
Dutch’s voice grew louder, tighter, circling back on itself until it sounded like a trap. Arthur stepped away, his back already turned, already walking toward something Jack couldn’t follow. The fire sputtered. The ground softened underfoot. One by one, the figures thinned, stretched, vanished — not violently, not all at once, just gone, like smoke merging with the cold air.
Jack stood there, young again, then not, then both at once. He watched himself — a small boy with dirt on his knees, eyes too bright, mouth full of stories about being a gunslinger someday — and felt a surge of panic so sharp it stole his breath. He reached for that boy, grabbed him by the arm, tried to pull him back from the edge of whatever came next.
But the boy pulled free.
Or maybe Jack let him.
The ground opened. A wide, dark drop that didn’t rush or threaten, just waited. Jack felt the weight of years settle into his bones all at once — the ranch, Ross, the sound of a man’s body hitting the floor. He pushed the boy forward, because the dream demanded it somehow. Because someone had to go first.
As the boy fell, Jack fell too.
They went together, tumbling through moments instead of air — his mother’s hands gripping his shoulders, begging; his father’s back as he died; Arthur’s eyes the last time he looked at him like he mattered; the sound of gunfire echoing long after it stopped meaning anything. Jack reached for himself again and again, saving and condemning in the same motion, unable to tell where one ended and the other began.
Just before he hit the bottom, the land rose up around him. Sky full of stars.
He woke with his heart pounding, half his body tipped off the bed, the room dark and still, the dream clinging to him like something that hadn’t decided whether to let go. For a long moment, he lay there breathing, unsure which stretch of time he’d come back into.
Then the feeling passed.
He drew in a slow breath and reached for the water by the bed, taking a careful sip, grounding himself in the small, ordinary feel of it.
Morning would come.
And Jack Marston would keep going.
It was the only thing he was sure he knew how to do.