Epilogue #2
"Thank you. The witness is a man of few words and I intend to use every one of them.
" He raised his cup. "Now. I've known Emmett since we were nine.
I watched him carry this town on his back for six years and I could never once make him put it down.
And I want everybody here to understand what actually happened on that shelf, because he'll never say it and Malachi will only write it in a book none of you are allowed to read. "
The room went quieter than he'd planned for, I think.
"He said she's right," Cash said. "In front of all of you. Knowing exactly what it would cost. It cost him the gavel for eleven days and a friendship he is still repairing, and it is the reason every one of us is standing on rock."
He drank.
"Also she made him ask twice," he said, "and I want that in the book."
Mama Onyx, who is ninety-two and shows no sign of it, made three hundred people coffee and did not say one single word about it beforehand, which by that point I understood to be the highest honor she gives.
She said one thing afterward. She put a cup in my hand and folded my fingers around it and said:
"You said the word to his face and stayed standing."
"You said that the first night."
"I say true things more than once," said Mama Onyx. "Drink your coffee."
Here's the last thing, and then I'll stop.
We were on the ridge at the west end at sunset, which is what we do, because there's a rock there that's the right height and because after eleven hundred kilometers and a stairwell and a cistern and a pipe I have concluded that the two of us are only ever properly honest when we're sitting on the edge of something.
The plain was going gold. Behind us the flare was blue and the water bells didn't ring anymore because we don't ration.
"Say the thing," I said.
"No."
"Emmett."
"It's stupid."
"It's extremely stupid and I want it."
He sighed, at enormous length, like a diesel engine that has been asked to start in the cold.
"Bastion doesn't move," he said. "Bastion doesn't kneel. Bastion doesn't drown."
"And?"
"And I got one out of three," he said, "which for a promise made at a funeral by a twenty-seven-year-old is a hell of a batting average."
"Two."
"Two?"
"You didn't kneel." I counted them off on his chest, which is a thing I do now, and which he pretends to find tiresome. "And nobody drowned. Six hundred and fifty-one people and not one of them drowned. You only broke the one, Emmett, and it was the one about the concrete."
He was quiet a while.
"He'd have hated it."
"He'd have hated it and done it," I said. "He had range. You told me that."
"He wrote not decreasing on a sheet in a container and rolled it back up."
"Yes."
"That's the whole difference between us, isn't it." He was looking out at the plain. "He worked it out and put it on a rack. I worked it out and put it on a wall. And then a woman came through the gate and said it in a yard."
"That's not a difference in men," I said. "That's a difference in company. He didn't have anybody to say it to and you did, and the only reason you did is that I'm rude and my buggy broke down four hundred meters short."
"Four hundred meters."
"It's the most humiliating possible distance," I said. "I've never gotten over it."
I put my head on his shoulder.
And then a rider came up the road.
We watched him come for about eleven minutes, because you can see a single engine on that plain for a very long time, and by the end of it Ruin had gone from relaxed to not, in the small way he does that nobody else can see.
The bike stopped at the bottom of the ridge. The rider took his helmet off. Nobody either of us knew — young, road-dusted, a patch on his shoulder from an outfit two hundred miles east that we trade with and do not particularly like.
"I'm looking for the Dust Saints."
"You've found them."
"I've got a message for a man called Cash."
Ruin didn't move.
"From who?"
The rider hesitated — and it was a real hesitation, the kind you get from someone who's been told the name matters and hasn't been told why.
Then he said it.
I felt the entire body next to me change temperature.
"Say that again," Ruin said.
The rider said it again.
"Is she alive?"
"...Yes, sir."
"Where."
"I'm not to say. Not to anybody but him."
Ruin sat there on a rock on a limestone shelf with the sun going down behind him, and after a long moment he said, very quietly, in a voice I'd only heard twice before:
"He's going to want to hear that alone."
I looked at him.
"Emmett. Who is that?"
He watched the rider walk his bike up the slope toward the clubhouse, toward the bar, toward a man who was almost certainly at that exact moment telling three hundred people a story about Pike weeping in a yard.
"That," he said, "is the reason Cash has never once, in six years, gone north of the eighty-mile marker."
"You never told me he wouldn't."
"You never asked," Ruin said. "Nobody ever asks about Cash. That's the whole trick of him."
Down the slope, the clubhouse door opened and the noise came out — forty people, and somebody's fiddle, and the particular roar of a town that has stopped being afraid.
Then it closed again.
"Should we go down?"
"No," he said, and took my hand. "Not tonight. Tonight he gets to hear it standing under a stick with a brass plate on it, surrounded by every single person who'd ride ninety miles for him."
"And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," said Emmett Vasquez, "somebody's going to need a bike fueled."