Jack Allen released Ethan’s hand. The man climbed from his stool, vibrating with rage, but he placed his hat on his head with his usual lazy aplomb. He made his way to the door of the cafe. He turned back to give Ethan a final tight smile.
He said, “See you soon, Mister Cross.”
THE SILVER GLAREKYLA
4:00 p.m.
Even in her dream, she remembered. She remembered this afternoon, Lance’s house, her boyfriend getting the call from Frank about Fernanda:She’s been taking pictures. She’s been taking pictures of everything. Kyla remembered the trouble on Lance’s face.
Take care of Fernanda, Lance. I can’t do it myself.
Take care of her.
Kyla remembered Lance leaving his house, making up some excuse. She remembered standing in their bedroom, her keys in one hand, her shoes in the other.
For the last six months, Kyla had lived and worked in Fort Stockton—worked for the worst man in town, lived with one of his finest soldiers—and she had done nothing. Kyla knew the sort of work these men did. She knew that they moved people across the border like cattle. She knew that Frank O’Shea ruined lives on a weekly basis and made more money than God in the process.
Kyla knew all of this and had done nothing. First, she had blamed her grief: she’d arrived in Stockton a shell of a woman, her father barely buried in his grave. Kyla had wandered into this desolate corner of Texas where her grandfather had vanished and half hoped to do the same thing to herself. As the grief had worn off and her senses returned, Kyla had blamed her inaction on the corruption and duplicity rampant in the borderlands. To whom could she report Frank’s crimes? How did she know whom to trust?
Then, as Kyla had grown more accustomed to the glances and signals of the steakhouse and the bars, she had come to know the good cops from the bad. She had identified the people trying to bring down the operation, and she had known she could help them.
But by then, she had convinced herself she’d been here—in Fort Stockton, in Lance’s house, in Lance’s bed—too long to make a difference. To scrub the dirt from her soul. To escape, if the outfit decided to come after her. Kyla had told herself there was no point in being a hero. She’d trapped herself here, an orphan girl alone at the sharp end of Texas, and one day soon she would wake up like any of the other flinty waitresses and housekeepers and barkeeps in this desolate town and feel nothing at all. Like them, her guilt would build up over her, layer by layer, a lacquer, until it had completely separated her from her own heart.
Take care of Fernanda, Lance.
Take care of her.
Kyla saw all of this through the windows of the dead city. In her dream, she walked the silver streets, peering into the towers and houses, crossing the empty plazas, beneath the everblack sky. Kyla saw herself, through a window, hesitate for a moment longer in Lance’s house, knowing that she had seconds—mere seconds—to make up her mind. Kyla didn’t know Fernanda terribly well, had only spent a few awkward afternoons with her in Frank’s house under the eye of his housekeeper, but Kyla knew this: the woman deserved better. She didn’t deserve to die here.
And if Fernanda had been taking pictures, maybe Fernanda and Kyla could do something about this operation—all this violence and pain—after all.
Here, in the dead city, Kyla took a turn. She saw, at last, that the streets of this place were paved with the same strange silver substance as the mirror that she and Ethan had discovered in the old house last night. Beneath the streets, threads of silver light—silver energy—pulsed under her feet like a beating heart.
That energy was growing dangerously unstable. The air almost hissed with it. Everywhere she went, Kyla tasted it on her tongue, felt it burning her nose with a smell like hot ozone.
Kyla passed a long, low building of grooved white stone. It might once have been a market, a restaurant, a cafe. The building’s front window stretched far enough for Kyla to see herself in a single, unbroken shot as she walked by.
She saw herself pull on her shoes in Lance’s house. Pull on herjacket. Squeeze her keys tight. She saw herself step outside, into her car, and follow Lance to the safe house at the edge of town.
The safe house’s door was unlocked. The sound of Lance’s voice came from the back.
A spare gun had been left on the kitchen counter. Loaded.
Kyla saw herself arrive in the room in the back where Lance was reaching for the cuffs on Fernanda’s wrists. Fernanda was lashed to an exposed pipe in the wall. She was terrified. Lance was murmuring something in Fernanda’s ear. He sounded like a man trying to calm a horse.
Fernanda saw Kyla over Lance’s shoulder. She gasped.
Lance turned.
Time stopped.
In the window, Kyla stepped past the end of the window, the end of the building, just in time to hear Fernanda whisper,Help me.
The shot echoed out behind her. Kyla could almost smell the gun smoking in her hand.
Kyla kept walking. She saw—she knew, at last—that the past is the past is the past. She rounded a final bend in the silver street. She was almost there.
Up ahead, the column of silver light released a sound almost like a scream of fear, maybe a moan of pain, or maybe just the future waiting to be born. A shock wave pounded the air. The buildings trembled. A great crack climbed the grooved stone wall beside her. The energy in the air burned hotter.
