Chapter 12 Moab
Moab
Istood by the door and listened, hearing the clanging of swords against armor. The noise stopped several hundred yards from the hut. I turned to Scarlette and sighed. It was time to decide on our next move.
“Do you know what they do to women like me? In my world?” she said.
I looked at her, at the set of her jaw, the way her hands stilled on her lap. “I have an idea,” I said.
“No. You don’t.” She stood and joined me at the door.
“If Brother Tomas finds out what I am, he won’t stop at the river.
He’ll drag me back. Make a lesson of me.
The last time a woman was caught with the old books, they burned her alive.
Not just her, either, but her mother, her daughter, and her maid. ”
I didn’t flinch. I’d seen worse, but hearing it from her lips, it was different. It wasn’t history. It was a promise.
She shivered, but not from cold. “My mother, she taught me some of the words. The safe ones. The ones that pass as prayer. She thought—she hoped—if I learned to pretend, it would be enough.”
“Was it?”
“Once,” she said. “But then Brother Tomas came. He looks for the cracks in a person. He found the old books. He called a gathering, and the men took turns with the torch.” Her voice didn’t break, but her nails dug crescents into her palm. “My mother survived. Barely. She never spoke of it again.”
I let the silence draw out, long enough that the wind outside became a presence, pacing the walls.
She looked at me, eyes sharper now. “You don’t have to stay. You could go back to the circle and trees, leave me to it. That would be the safe thing.”
I barked a laugh. “I never cared much for safe.”
She almost smiled, but it faded quickly. “You’re not like the other men. Even the ones from your world.”
I thought of the club, the way we pretended at brotherhood and called it loyalty.
“Never fit in,” I said. “They tried to make me a soldier, then a machine, then a ghost. This”—I waved at the room, at her, at the fucking miracle of waking up at all—“this is the first thing that’s made sense in a long time. ”
She watched me for a beat, then edged closer, until her bare knee touched mine. “If we stay, if we try to hide, it won’t work. They’ll burn the woods. They’ll drag me back. I can’t survive that twice.”
I knew she was right. I also knew that the alternative, crossing back to my world, dragging her through the stones, trying to explain her to men who’d never understand, was almost as bad.
“We have until the full moon,” she said. “That’s when the circle opens again. I’ve counted the days. Two, maybe three if we’re lucky.”
I tried to picture two more days here. Eleven days of hiding, running, waiting for men with torches and holy water to sniff us out.
“What do you want to do?” I asked, keeping my voice even.
She shook her head, looking down at her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know your world. I barely know this one. I just—” She bit her lip, hard enough to draw blood. “I’m afraid.”
I reached over, took her hand. The skin was cold, but she didn’t pull away. “You don’t have to decide now,” I said.
She nodded, then leaned her head on my shoulder. We sat like that, pressed together, listening to the slow drip of meltwater from the eaves. The longer we sat, the less I wanted to let her go.
After a time, she whispered, “What is it like? Your world. For a woman.”
I laughed softly. “Depends on the woman.”
She elbowed me, not hard. “Don’t dodge.”
I thought about the women in the club who’d never needed anyone’s permission to take what they wanted. I thought about the mothers I’d known growing up, some broken by the system, some breaking it in turn.
“It’s better than here,” I said, “but not perfect. You can read, you can work. No one burns you for thinking. But you still get hunted in different ways. They just call it other names.”
She considered this. “Do they let you be wild?”
I grinned. “Some of us. Most are too scared. But yeah. If you fight for it, you can make your own place.”
She closed her eyes, breathing deep. I could see the wheels turning, the fight between hope and old fear. I wanted to tell her that I’d protect her, that she’d be safe, but I couldn’t make that promise, not in any world.
Instead, I brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. She looked up at me, a smile starting at the edge of her mouth.
“What if I don’t belong anywhere?” she asked, voice so soft I almost missed it.
I squeezed her hand. “Then we make a place. For both of us.”
She smiled for real this time, and the room got a little warmer.
We spent the day trading stories, each one a little truer than the last. She told me about the river, how she used to sneak away and watch the salmon leap upstream, how she’d named every willow on its banks.
I told her about the club, the endless road, the smell of rain on hot asphalt.
She asked if there were horses in my world, and I told her about motorcycles, how they were faster and meaner but had their own kind of loyalty.
She wanted to ride one, she said, and I promised her a ride if we made it through.
As the sun dipped behind the trees, we lay together on the pallet, her head on my chest, her breath warm against my neck.
“If we go,” she said, “will it change me?”
“Probably,” I said. “But maybe not in the ways you think.”
She nodded, as if that made sense.
“I want to try,” she said. “But only if you’re there.”
“Always,” I said.
“Moab,” she whispered. “Will you tell me more? About what it’s like, to be free?”
I pulled her closer, her skin hot against mine. “It’s loud,” I said. “It’s messy. Most people don’t know what to do with it. But if you find someone you trust, it’s worth it. Even when it hurts.”
She kissed me, slow and careful, as if trying to memorize the feeling.
“I want that,” she said. “Even if it burns.”
I smiled in the dark. “It will. But not the way you think.”
“Tell me something true,” she said, eyes fixed on the flames.
I considered the question, then said, “You’re the first person I’ve cooked for since I left the Army. Maybe ever.”
She smiled, the lines of her face softening. “Did you have anyone? In your world?”
“Not for long,” I said. “Didn’t know how to keep people around.”
She turned the question over, then reached into a fold in her dress and produced a small leather pouch.
It was worn to near transparency at the corners, the drawstring knotted and unyielding.
She worked it open with her teeth and thumbed out a pinch of dried leaves, blue-green and threaded with something that looked almost metallic in the firelight.
“What’s that?” I asked, even though I already knew.
She smiled, sharp and secret. “Insurance,” she said. “For crossing.”
She poured the herbs into her palm, then bent forward, blowing a breath over them, lips parted just enough to make the leaves twitch and dance.
“If we want to know what’s waiting for us on the other side,” she said, “we can ask. The herbs will show us. It’s old magic, but it works.”
I nodded. I’d seen enough to believe.
She arranged the herbs in a circle on the dirt floor, then took a sliver of burning wood from the fire and touched it to the ring.
Smoke rose at once, thicker than seemed possible, twisting in a spiral that hovered above the ground instead of dissipating into the rafters.
The smell was bitter, not quite pleasant, but alive in a way that made the inside of my mouth water.
She began to chant, words I recognized only as Latin, though the rhythm of them was different—less like the priest at a funeral and more like a mother lulling a child to sleep.
With each phrase, her voice gained strength, the syllables growing teeth and curling at the ends.
The smoke responded, tightening into shapes, the rough outline of a tree, then a house, then a cluster of houses, then a church with a bell tower taller than the rest.
Scarlette’s eyes went wide, the pupils swallowing what little color they had left.
She kept chanting, and the church in the smoke melted into something new, a building of glass and steel, too many stories to count, each window ablaze with light.
The structure shifted, became a corridor, then a door, then a room filled with a hundred people, all dressed in black, all looking straight ahead with the blankness of a congregation.
She faltered, the words catching in her throat.
I reached for her, but she shook her head, gritted her teeth, and kept going.
The smoke thickened, turning from gray to blue to a deep, bloody red.
I caught the shape of a wolf—my wolf, the head thrown back in a howl, eyes bright as coals—then a woman’s face, not Scarlette’s, but kin to her in a way I couldn’t explain.
The images blurred, overlapping, spinning faster until the hut itself seemed to shudder.
Then the smoke vanished, leaving only the faintest taste of copper and the echo of Scarlette’s breath, ragged and shallow.
She collapsed against my shoulder, the strength gone from her limbs. I wrapped an arm around her, holding her upright. For a moment, neither of us spoke, too wrung out to bother with language.
Finally, she whispered, “Did you see it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw.”
We sat there, foreheads touching, hands knotted together on her lap. The silence felt sacred, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath.
After a while, she looked up at me, her expression raw. “What do you think it means?” she asked.
“I think it means we don’t get to come back once we leave.”
She nodded, the motion slow and measured. “I’m not sure I could, even if I wanted to.”
We were close, closer than we’d ever been without fucking. I let my thumb trace the inside of her wrist, the pulse thumping wild and fast under her skin.
“Tell me the truth,” she said, voice small. “What’s waiting for me on the other side? Not the stories, not the legends. The truth.”
I thought about the world I’d left, the club, the bar, the city that never really shut up. I thought about the good parts—the nights on the bike, the music, the brotherhood—and then about the bad: the fear, the emptiness, the constant knowledge that you could be erased and no one would notice.
“You ever been to a city?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Only stories.”
“It’s loud,” I said. “Not just the noise, but the people. Always moving, always pushing. No one really looks at each other. Everyone’s busy trying not to be seen.”
She smiled, sad. “Sounds lonely.”
“It is,” I said. “But it’s also anonymous. You can lose yourself, if that’s what you want. No one cares what you do, or who you fuck, or what you believe. No one burns you for thinking.”
She considered that, then said, “But they still hurt you.”
I nodded. “Different weapons, but the same fight.”
She looked at our joined hands, then up at my face. “Will I fit?”
I shrugged, honest. “You’ll stand out. But I’ll watch your back. If you want me to.”
She smiled, a real one this time, the weight of the world slipping for a second. “I want you to.”
We sat by the fire, not speaking, just listening to the wind batter the eaves.
Eventually, Scarlette pulled her knees to her chest, arms wrapped tight. She looked so small then, a reminder that even the strongest women are still flesh, still breakable.
“I’m afraid I’ll forget who I am,” she said. “That your world will swallow me.”
I tilted her chin so she had to look at me. “You won’t forget. If anything, it’ll make you sharper.”
She shivered, then leaned into my chest, letting me absorb the fear she wouldn’t show to anyone else.
“What about you?” she asked, voice muffled. “What do you want, really?”
The question surprised me. I’d spent so long moving toward the next fight, the next score, the next patch of blacktop, I’d forgotten what it was to want something that couldn’t be bought or stolen.
“I want a place where I don’t have to fight every second,” I said. “Where the code is simple, and the people are real. Where I can wake up next to you and not have to count the hours until it’s all gone.”
She smiled against my skin. “You sound almost…hopeful.”
I snorted. “Don’t spread it around. I’ve got a reputation.”
The fire shrank to a handful of embers, painting the walls in restless shadows. I found myself tracing patterns on her back, idle circles that left her skin goose-pimpled and taut. She pressed closer, her breath catching in her throat.
I kissed her then, the first time since the night we changed together. This kiss was different—tentative, searching, as if we both knew that any wrong move might shatter what we’d built in the dark. She tasted of ash and herbs and need.
She broke away first, lips parted, eyes bright. “Is that allowed?” she whispered.
“In my world,” I said, “that’s just the start.”
She laughed, the sound shaky but real, and pulled me down for another.
“Do you really think we’ll make it?”
I kissed her forehead. “I think we already have.”