Chapter 9 #3
Harlan tried Walter next. "Gate seems to be working," Walter said, which pulled the corner of Grace's mouth despite everything.
Then Harlan's eyes landed on Luke.
"You're letting boys stand watch now?"
Luke opened his mouth, but Grace got there first.
"I'm letting people I trust stand watch."
Harlan didn't have an answer for that either.
He tried once more. "If trouble comes, you may need my settlement."
"If we need help, we'll ask."
"And if it's too late by then?"
"Then it'll be our mistake."
"Stubborn," Harlan said.
"Probably."
Grace shifted the rifle slightly, not raising it, just enough to close the conversation the way a door closes without anybody needing to slam it.
"You came to see David," she said. "He's gone."
"You going to tell me where?"
"No."
"When he'll be back?"
"No."
"How many people did he take?"
"No."
Harlan's face hardened with each answer. "You know, Grace, eventually you're going to have to trust somebody outside this place."
"Maybe." She let that sit a beat. "It won't be because they demanded it."
He looked at her a long moment, then at the others behind her, and seemed to understand that pushing further turned a political argument into something neither of them wanted it to become.
"This isn't finished," he said.
"It is for today."
He mounted, turned his horse south, and rode back the way he'd come without another word.
Nobody moved until horse and rider had shrunk out of sight down the road.
"Who told him David was gone?" Russ asked.
"Good question," Grace said.
"Somebody could've seen him leave," Luke offered. "A traveler. Somebody passing through."
"Could've been the man from yesterday too," Walter said. "If he didn't go far after Grace turned him away."
Grace considered that. It fit well enough to worry her — a man denied entry, wandering off in whatever direction suited him, mentioning what he'd seen to the next person willing to listen.
Or it could have been nothing so deliberate.
A farmer at a market somewhere, a rider on the road, gossip traveling the way gossip always traveled, faster than anybody meant it to.
Nobody had a better answer than that, which was its own kind of problem. Grace turned to the gate watchers.
"From now on, nobody tells anybody who's here and who isn't. Not travelers, not strangers, not anybody we don't already know well."
"We weren't," Luke said.
"I know," Grace said. It wasn't blame. It was tightening something that needed tightening regardless of who'd let it slip.
She asked how many people outside the Hollow already knew David had left.
Nobody could answer that either, and that bothered her more than Harlan's visit had.
A man like Harlan finding out was one thing — he had reasons of his own to pay attention, and a settlement close enough to hear things quickly.
But if word had traveled that far that fast, there was no telling who else already knew, or what they intended to do with it.
Before everyone drifted back to work, Grace held Luke back a moment.
"Yesterday was good work," she said.
"You already told me."
"I'm telling you again."
Luke didn't quite know what to do with being told twice.
"Your dad would be proud of you," Grace said.
"You don't have to tell him everything."
"Oh, I'm telling him that."
She glanced, just briefly, toward where Billy Jean stood a little ways off.
"Don't," Luke said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
"I was thinking."
"That's worse."
Grace let him have that one and didn't push further. He'd earned some dignity today, and she wasn't going to spend it teasing him in front of the girl who clearly mattered to him.
Grace stayed near the barricade after the others went back to work, watching the empty road a while longer than she needed to.
Two people had tested that gate in two days.
A stranger with bad manners and too much interest in what lay beyond the gate.
A man she'd dealt with enough to know better, using politeness as a crowbar.
Different shapes of the same question — what happens to the Hollow when David isn't standing in the middle of it.
She wasn't trying to become David. She'd never wanted that job and didn't want it now. But the answer to the question was clear enough after two days of testing it: the Hollow didn't get weaker just because David had ridden east.
Luke and Billy Jean were walking back toward the interior together, shoulders bumping every few steps. Russ had already started talking about the fence he still needed to finish. Walter headed for the barn like nothing about the day had been unusual at all.
Grace looked south, toward where Harlan had ridden.
It wasn't that she thought he'd come back tomorrow with worse intentions. It was that he'd known David was gone before she'd told a single soul outside the Hollow, and she had no idea yet who'd handed him that information.
Russ lingered a moment before heading off. "You think he'll be back?"
Grace kept her eyes on the empty road. "Harlan?"
"Yeah."
"Of course he will."
"You sound sure."
"He didn't get what he wanted."