‘By the time I made it to the flight deck we were already too far up to help.’ Falco’s jaw works as she soaks a cloth in water from the pump. ‘We managed to reverse velocity, but then they opened fire and we had no choice but to get out. It was hours before we could land again. When we did, we found Joliffe gone, the place looted, whatever remaining Peacekeeper scum more interested in drinking than doing their jobs. We didn’t know where you were. Then we found Pec.’
Savagely, she rips open a dressing. We are gathered in the General Store, broken-windowed and ransacked as it is. The man who runs it does not like our being there. But he can see the head of Marshal Joliffe out in the sun, and so says nothing, only turns his dry, goat-yellow eyes on us from time to time as he sweeps up shattered plastic and gathers dead grubs to feed to the insects that survived.
‘The General?’ I ask weakly. The pain makes my head spin. I feel in the Marshal’s jacket for another bead.
‘We think they took her east someplace,’ Pegeen says, wan with exhaustion. ‘Horse told us, before he died. Said two Peacekeepers rode off with her. Alive, or he thought so.’
Closing my eyes, I remember the General’s strained tendons, the fever and frenzy as she disappeared into whatever battle she imagined she was fighting. If they beat her the way they had beaten me…
I try to stand, only to fall back against the wall, head spinning.
‘Stop it,’ Silas admonishes gently. ‘You may have got the bullet out, but that shoulder’s a mess.’ He’s been hurt too, his forehead patched up with sterile strips. I hiss as he eases the jacket away from my shoulder, exposing the filthy top and the tell-tale symbol that scars my chest.
‘What’s that?’ Falco’s eye is hawk-sharp.
‘It’s a special sign,’ Franzi says. His head is on his mother’s shoulder, his face bloodless. ‘We had one over the door. Ma Pec always said it was for protection. But it didn’t work, did it?’
Bebe strokes his hair with a grazed hand. ‘It protects us from Seekers, Fran, not from people.’ When she looks up, I see that she knows more than she’s saying. ‘Did it protect you?’
My hand creeps to the scabbing cuts. ‘Yes.’
Falco only frowns. I nod at her wearily as Silas cleans the wound and re-dresses it. There is more to say, but first comes rest.
When I wake, hours later, I find the others kneeling outside Esterházy’s place. From beneath the burned rubble in the yard, Bebe has dug up a strongbox. In it are credit notes: hundreds of them.
‘Enough to start again,’ she says, tears streaking the grime on her cheeks. ‘As if Pec knew.’
I turn away, uneasy. What had Esterházy seen in the presence of the Ifs, the moment before she told me to run? What had she seen all those years ago, during her first encounter with them as they raged from the Edge?
We bury the dead – Thrip and Horse and four Peacekeepers – in the rough plot at the edge of the settlement, where a handful of rusted metal grave markers cluster.
HERE LIES WRETCH BARKER, one reads, A GOOD FRIEND WHO DIED IN JUNE.
One grave in particular is better tended than the others, a faded plastic bouquet fastened to it by a ring. MARIOLA DUROY, AND CHILD.
Sand blows in sheets at those who dig the graves. Bebe says it doesn’t matter much if they’re deep; the dirt blows away too quickly for anyone to stay buried for long. The weather will eventually do the work the earth cannot.
There is to be no grave for Esterházy. Instead, a wind burial, which Bebe says the old woman would have wanted. Together, outside the limits of Angel Share, we construct a makeshift shelter through which the wind can howl. Here she will lie until the wind has dried her flesh to thinness and it comes loose and is borne away across Factus, across the Edge and out into the unexplored vastness of the Void.
Will the Seekers come to her? I wonder, as I watch as the first mutterings of the night breeze stir her grey hair. Was that the reason for burying her out in the open, far from the town? In death, would she rejoin them, at last?
I look to the horizon, imagining this moon as it must have been when it was newly terraformed, imagining Esterházy leaving behind the oppression of the prison hulks, to fly into the unknown.
‘She’s here,’ I murmur to Silas. ‘In another reality, she’s here.’
Carefully, he puts his arm around me, taking care not to bump my bandaged shoulder.
Bebe sings a song, an old one from Earth with half-remembered lyrics that speak of forests and mountains. Even the General Store man comes to witness the ceremony along with the other survivors, bringing with them what tokens they can spare. Falco makes another flower from protein wrappers; Silas drops a bit of scrap metal hammered into the shape of a crescent moon. Bebe pours a glug of mezcal into the dirt at the old woman’s feet.
And then it’s over, and people hurry back to their walls and roofs, chased by the gathering night.
In the shadow of the ruins of Esterházy’s saloon, Bebe pulls me aside.
‘She left this for you,’ she murmurs, handing me something wrapped in a rag. ‘Before she died, she said you were to have it.’
She watches me unwrap a scalpel; ancient by Factus standards, dented and tarnished, sharpened to thinness at its edge. The same sort of scalpel that hangs from the belts of the Seekers, that they wielded to take the Marshal apart with brutal efficiency.
We are all Hel.
‘You understand what it means?’ Bebe asks.
My fingers tighten around the blade’s handle. ‘I think
