The grain elevator had been white once.
Five years of Great Plains weather had taken it down to the grey of old bone — the concrete tower standing at Cutter's Bend's center the way old things stood when they had been built correctly and had outlasted everything around them. It was the tallest structure for thirty miles. On clear days you could see the Black Hills from the top, a blue-grey line at the horizon. Gerald Pruitt kept his office there. He had chosen it for the view and for what the view communicated to everyone below — that he was the highest point in the settlement and could see everything in it.
The walls were salvaged corrugated metal bolted to timber posts, the seams packed with clay and rags, replaced when the wind found them. The wind always found them. Inside the walls Cutter's Bend had arranged itself the way frontier settlements arranged themselves — around the things that mattered most, which were the forge, the grain store, and whoever controlled both. Walt Briggs controlled the forge. Pruitt controlled the grain store and Walt Briggs.
The forge ran every morning. You could hear it before you could see it — hammer on iron, the rhythm of a man who had been doing the same work for forty years and whose body had organized itself around the doing. Walt was sixty-three, a pipefitter and welder from before the Shroud who had kept Cutter's Bend's metalwork running through memory and stubbornness. He did not know what he had in the eight-year-old who came to sharpen tools at his bench three mornings a week. He knew the boy handled iron differently than anyone he had taught and had stopped trying to account for it.
Pruitt had the settlement tiered the way he had tiered his mayoral office before the Shroud — not through explicit declaration but through assignment, through who ate first and who was addressed directly when decisions were announced and who carried the water skins. He had been a medium-sized politician in a small South Dakota town before the world changed. The change had made him the largest thing available in his radius and he had not wasted the opportunity. Thorne had found him early — had found the ambition and the infrastructure instinct and the willingness to organize people in ways that served a hierarchy — and had put him to use. Pruitt had never fully understood what Thorne was or what the arrangement meant. He understood that certain things went his way when he made certain choices and had built his understanding of the world around that observation.
He watched the compound from the elevator top most mornings. Below him the settlement ran its daily operations — water carried, fires fed, the forge running its smoke into the plains air. He watched Gunnar train in the eastern yard with the satisfaction of a man watching an investment perform correctly.
Gunnar was fourteen and the best fighter in the settlement by enough margin that the second-best had stopped being relevant to the comparison. He was big for his age, fast for his size, and trained every morning with the driven quality of someone who had been told his whole life that he was the settlement's future and had decided to deserve it. He moved through the compound with the authority of someone whose position had never been questioned — not arrogance, the settled version, the weight of a boy who had been the front of every room he entered since he was old enough to enter rooms.
Brynhild trained beside him.
She was thirteen, a head shorter than Gunnar, and the settlement's security man had assessed her at ten with the flat attention of someone taking inventory and had found her useful in a category he had not expected. She had been training with the older boys since. She was not the strongest fighter in the yard — Gunnar was stronger — but she was the most precise, the one whose movements had the economy of someone who did not waste anything, and she had been better than everyone in the yard except Gunnar for long enough that the fact had stopped being discussed. Pruitt valued her for the same reason he valued good tools — she functioned correctly and without requiring maintenance. He intended her for Gunnar eventually, the political logic of it clean in his mind: the settlement's strongest fighter paired with its best warrior, the future locked down and consolidated under his management.
Brynhild was aware of this intention and had no feeling about it either way. She had no feeling about most things in the settlement. She trained because training was the closest available thing to what she was looking for, which she could not name and did not try to name. She was waiting for something. She did not know what it was. She ran the drills every morning and was good at them and felt the waiting underneath the being good at them like a second pulse.
Sigurd had been carrying water skins since he was six.
He was eight now and the yoke fit him better than it had — not because anyone had adjusted it for him but because his body had adjusted around it, the way bodies adjusted when they were asked to do things consistently and had no alternative. He moved through the compound with the yoke across his shoulders and his eyes on the ground ahead of him, reading the surface the way other people read faces — without deciding to, without knowing he was doing it. The packed earth of the main yard was stable. The section near the forge where the cooling water had been pooling was not. He adjusted his route before the thought was complete.
He checked the crossbeam above the forge door when he passed it. He always checked it. The crack in its upper left quadrant had been there since before he arrived and he had been watching it change with the slow attention of someone who understood, without the language to explain the understanding, what a crack in a load-bearing member eventually meant. Three more centimeters and someone would need to replace it. He filed this and kept moving.
His parents were laborers who had come to Cutter's Bend after the Cascadia collapse — one of the hundreds of family groups that had walked east when the coast went under, following the rumor of settlements that held. They were good people doing the work the settlement needed done and occupying the tier that the settlement assigned to people who had arrived with nothing and contributed with their hands. Sigurd occupied that tier alongside them. He carried water skins and sharpened tools and did not complain about either. He was quiet in the way of a child who spent most of his time paying attention — not withdrawn, not sullen, present in the full and complete way of someone for whom the world was constantly delivering information worth receiving.
He had dreams about the ground shaking. He had always had them. In the dreams he was somewhere else, somewhere with tall buildings and crowds and the specific roar of something enormous deciding that it was done holding itself together. He always woke before the buildings fell. He did not talk about the dreams.
He was on his third crossing of the compound with the full skins when the training session in the eastern yard broke its pattern.
He felt it through his feet before he heard it — the change in the ground's report when weight redistributed, the group in the yard moving from its established positions toward the yard's western edge. He looked up.
Brynhild was at the yard's fence line.
She had stopped mid-drill. The practice weapon was in her hand and the security man was saying something behind her and she was not listening to it because her attention had moved entirely to the compound path and the eight-year-old crossing it with a yoke and two full water skins. She was not looking at him the way someone looked at something interesting. She was looking at him the way a person looked at something that had stopped the room from making sense in the way the room had been making sense a moment before.
Sigurd stopped walking.
He had not decided to stop. His feet stopped and the yoke shifted and the skins swung their small arc and he stood in the path and looked at her. He was eight years old. He did not have the language for what was happening. He had the information — the same information his feet gave him about the ground, arriving without asking, complete and unambiguous. He looked at her for three seconds. Then he looked at the path ahead of him. He walked forward with the yoke and the skins and went through the cooking area entrance and did not look back.
Brynhild stood at the fence line for a moment after he was gone. Her chest had done something she had no word for — not pain, not warmth, something that carried both and was neither, the echo of a thing that had not happened yet and would not happen for years. She turned back to the yard. She picked up the drill where she had left it. She ran it with everything she had, which was considerable, and underneath the running of it something had shifted that had not been there this morning and that the running of the drill was not going to address.
Gunnar had been at the yard's far end.
He had seen the stillness. He had seen Brynhild stop in the middle of a drill she ran every morning without breaking pace and look at the boy with the water skins the way she had never looked at anything in the settlement — not at Gunnar, not at the security man, not at Pruitt when Pruitt came to observe. He had felt something shift in the compound's air the way weather shifted before it arrived — not pain, not threat, the interior adjustment of something that understood the geometry of its world had changed without being able to say how. He was fourteen and the front of every room he entered and the settlement's designated future and he had just watched an eight-year-old carrying water stop Brynhild in the middle of a drill by crossing a path.
He looked at the cooking area entrance. He looked at the practice weapon in his hands. He set it against the fence. He went to find the boy.
Sigurd was at the water trough behind the cooking area, filling the skins for the next run, when Gunnar came around the corner.
He heard him coming — the footsteps carrying the weight of someone his size, the pace of someone who had decided on a destination and was going to it without checking whether the destination was convenient for anyone already there. Sigurd did not look up from the trough. He kept the skin submerged and watched the air bubble out of the mouth of it and waited for it to stop.
Gunnar stopped two feet away and looked at him with the assessing quality he brought to everything in the settlement — the inventory read, the placement of a thing in relation to his own position. He looked at the water skins. He looked at the yoke leaning against the trough's edge. He said: "You carry for the west block too."
It was not a question. Sigurd looked up at him. He looked back at the trough. "The assignment is the east block," he said.
"The assignment is what I tell you it is." Gunnar said it with the flat certainty of someone who had never had the statement tested. "You carry for the west block after the east. And you sharpen my training blades before Walt's other work."
Sigurd looked at the skin in the trough. The bubbles had stopped. He lifted it and set it on the edge and reached for the second skin. He said nothing for a moment. Gunnar waited with the patience of someone who had learned that waiting communicated authority the way moving communicated urgency, and authority was what he was establishing here.
Sigurd looked up at him. Not a challenge — the same look he gave the crossbeam above the forge door, the flat clear read of something being assessed. He said: "I'll tell Walt about the blades." He picked up the second skin and submerged it. "The west block water goes to the Mercer family and the two families from the creek settlement. They need it the same time as the east block." He watched the bubbles. "I can do the west block after if there's time."
Gunnar looked at him. He had expected one of two responses — compliance or resistance, both of which he had protocols for. The eight-year-old had produced a third thing, which was a practical accounting of the situation that did not engage with the hierarchy question at all, the way a rock did not engage with the weather that moved around it. Gunnar looked at the trough. He looked at the back of Sigurd's head. He said: "After the east block. West block. Then the blades."
Sigurd lifted the second skin and set it beside the first. He looked at Gunnar with the same flat attention. "Alright," he said.
Gunnar stood there for a moment. He had gotten what he came for and the getting of it had not produced what he had expected the getting of it to produce, which was the confirmation of the geometry he understood — himself at the front, the other thing adjusted to account for it. The geometry was technically confirmed. Sigurd had agreed. But the agreement had the quality of someone agreeing to a route adjustment rather than acknowledging a superior, the practical yes of someone whose calculation had concluded that the request was manageable and had said so, which was not the same thing as what Gunnar had intended and both of them understood that even if only one of them had the language for the understanding.
He went back to the yard.
Sigurd brought the blades to Walt that afternoon.
The forge was the warmest place in Cutter's Bend in the late afternoon when the plains wind came down from the north and reminded everyone that spring was a condition the weather permitted rather than a guarantee. Walt was at the anvil working a hinge — not a complex piece, the daily work, the things the settlement needed constantly replaced as the settlement's equipment wore through its remaining life. He was a large man gone lean in the way of people who did physical work consistently into their sixties — the mass still present in the shoulders and the forearms, redistributed from where it had been when he was forty, the body having made its adjustments without his permission. He had a burn scar along his left forearm from an incident with a cooling tank seventeen years before the Shroud that he had stopped noticing sometime in the second decade.
He looked at the blades Sigurd set on the workbench beside the forge. He looked at Gunnar's mark on the handles — the groove Gunnar had cut into each handle with a knife to identify his equipment, which Walt found unnecessary but had said nothing about because Gunnar's mark on equipment was one of the things Pruitt had decided was acceptable and Walt had decided that Pruitt's decisions about acceptable were not the hill he was going to stand on. He looked at Sigurd. "Gunnar's," he said. Sigurd said: "Yes." Walt looked at him. "He send you." Sigurd said: "He asked me to bring them." Walt looked at the blades. He set the hinge aside and picked up the first blade and turned it in his hands, reading the edge the way he read all edges — with his thumb moving along the flat just short of the bevel, the information arriving through the contact. The edge was dull in the consistent way of training blades used by someone who trained hard and often. He set it down and picked up the second.
He looked at Sigurd standing at the bench's edge with his hands at his sides, not fidgeting, watching the forge with the focused attention of a child who found the forge worth watching. Most children found the forge worth watching for thirty seconds before the novelty resolved into boredom and they went elsewhere. This one had been coming to the forge for two years on his sharpening assignments and had not once resolved into boredom. Walt had noticed this the way he noticed things — without making a production of the noticing, filing it alongside everything else the bench produced.
He said: "Hand me the whetstone. Third shelf, left side."
Sigurd went to the third shelf. He found the whetstone without looking at the other stones on the shelf — went directly to it the way you went directly to something you had identified correctly without being told what identified it. Walt watched this from the corner of his eye and said nothing about it. He took the stone and began working the first blade.
Sigurd watched him work. He watched the angle of the stone against the edge and the pressure Walt applied and the way Walt's wrist made the correction that kept the angle consistent through the stroke, the adjustment so practiced it was no longer a decision but simply how the motion went. He watched it for two minutes without speaking. Then he said: "The angle changes at the tip."
Walt stopped. He looked at Sigurd. He looked at the blade. He ran his thumb along the bevel toward the tip and felt the change the boy had named — the angle opening slightly in the last three centimeters where his wrist had been making a small consistent error for long enough that the error had become the edge's shape. He had not noticed it. He had been working edges for forty years and he had not noticed it and the eight-year-old with the water skins had named it in two minutes.
He looked at Sigurd. Sigurd was watching the blade with the flat clear attention he brought to everything. He did not appear to understand that he had said something unusual. Walt looked at the blade. He corrected the angle and worked the tip again and felt the edge come consistent under his thumb.
He set the blade down. He looked at the boy. He said: "You want to try the second one."
Sigurd looked at him. He looked at the whetstone in Walt's hand. He said: "Yes."
Walt handed him the stone and stepped back and watched him work. The boy held the blade at the correct angle without being told the correct angle. His strokes were not practiced — they were a child's strokes, uneven in pressure, the wrist correction not yet automatic. But the angle was right and it stayed right through the stroke and when he reached the tip his wrist made the adjustment that Walt had been failing to make for longer than he wanted to calculate.
Walt watched him work the full length of the blade. He watched him turn it and work the other side with the same focused attention, the same correct angle, the same tip adjustment. He watched him run his thumb along the finished edge and make a small sound of dissatisfaction and go back over a section near the shoulder where the pressure had dropped.
Walt looked at the forge. He looked at the boy at his bench working Gunnar's blade with the attention of someone doing something that mattered because the doing mattered, not because the thing being done was his or the credit would be his or anyone would know it had been done correctly. He looked at the fire in the forge doing its patient work.
He said: "Come back tomorrow. Not for Gunnar's blades."
Sigurd looked up. "The sharpening assignments—"
"After the assignments," Walt said. "Come to the bench."
Sigurd looked at him with the flat clear read. He looked at the blade in his hands. He looked at the forge. He said: "Alright." He went back to the blade. Walt watched him work and said nothing more and did not look at the boy again with the self-consciousness of someone who had just offered something and was done making a production of the offering. He picked up the hinge and went back to the anvil and the afternoon ran its course in the forge with the fire going and the hammer working and the boy at the bench giving Gunnar's blade the edge it deserved.
Pruitt came down from the elevator top at dusk.
He did this every evening — the descent through the grain elevator's interior staircase, the concrete steps worn smooth in the center from decades of use before the Shroud and continuing to wear smooth from his own use after it, the specific ritual of a man who had organized his life around the fact of the view and understood that the view was only valuable when you eventually came down from it and applied what you had seen. He came down with the day's observations sorted and filed the way he had always sorted and filed the day's information — the water situation, the grain stores, the patrol rotation, the personnel positions, the specific inventory of assets and liabilities that running a settlement required you to maintain continuously if you intended to keep running it.
He was fifty-one. He had been a mayor for six years before the Shroud — a small town in the hills west of Rapid City, the kind of position that had felt significant within its radius and had not traveled well beyond that radius. He understood this about himself in the way that people understood the things about themselves that were not flattering but were true — clearly, without excessive self-reproach, and with the practical commitment to making the radius larger.
The Shroud had made the radius larger. The collapse of everything outside the radius had made him the most organized and connected person within his current geography, which was not a large geography but was growing and was his.
Thorne had found him in the years before the Shroud — had come in person, which Pruitt had not expected from a man of Thorne's position and which had communicated the seriousness of the arrangement before a word was spoken. He had explained what he needed Pruitt to build and what following the plan required and what the plan was working toward in the larger picture that Pruitt's mayoral radius had not previously been wide enough to see. Pruitt did not think in terms of divine architecture or celestial bonds or the machinery of whatever Thorne served. He thought in terms of what worked and what did not work and the plan worked, consistently, guiding his decisions toward outcomes that consolidated his position and expanded his resources. When Thorne died and the guidance went quiet Pruitt had managed by applying the same principles without the guidance, which had produced slower results and more errors but had kept the plan moving because the plan's internal logic was sound enough to run on its own momentum.
Then four years ago a man with an arranged face had come up the elevator stairs with a document and mercenaries and engineering equipment and a cup of tea he had brought himself, and he had re-zoned eight years of careful building without raising his voice, and then he had gone back to the outer settlement at the water source and left his people inside Cutter's Bend's walls like stones placed in a current to redirect it. Pruitt still had the document. He still had the gray wood of the table where the man's palm had rested — the discoloration present every morning when he sat down to his notes, unchanged in four years, a condition that did not reverse. The plan's momentum was still running. It was running now inside a cage someone else had built around it, and the someone else was at the water source four miles east with engineering equipment and mercenaries and an administrative structure that had superseded Pruitt's without consulting it. He watched the outer settlement from the elevator top each morning. He looked at the river below the eastern edge and turned it over the way he turned everything — looking for leverage, filing what he found, returning to it the next day.
He had not found it yet.
He walked the compound in the evening light, checking what the day had produced. The west wall's third panel had been re-secured — the clay seal repacked, the bolts tightened. The grain store's new shelving was half-built, the work paused when the lumber ran short and resumed when the lumber came in from the eastern settlement's trade. The water situation was stable. The forge had run all day. He stopped at the forge's exterior and looked at the smoke still rising from the chimney and thought about Walt and thought about the water-carrier boy who had apparently been given bench time.
He had seen it from the elevator top — Walt stepping back and watching the boy work with the attention he gave things he found worth watching. He had noted it. He had not yet decided what it meant in the settlement's accounting. The boy's parents were laborers from the coast collapse, competent and unremarkable, occupying the tier that the settlement assigned to people who arrived with nothing. The boy was eight and carried water and sharpened tools and had demonstrated no quality that the settlement's hierarchy required it to account for beyond the physical capability of the tier he occupied.
Walt giving him bench time complicated the accounting.
Pruitt believed in Walt's judgment about metal and fire and the things that metal and fire produced. He did not particularly want to believe in Walt's judgment about people because Walt's judgment about people operated on different criteria than Pruitt's judgment about people and the different criteria had produced different results on the few occasions they had been compared. Walt's criteria were something like: does this person handle the work correctly and do they care about the handling. Pruitt's criteria were: is this person positioned to produce value for the settlement's hierarchy and can they be managed correctly. The criteria overlapped imperfectly and the imperfect overlap had been the source of three disagreements in two years, all of which Pruitt had resolved by making Walt understand that the forge ran because Pruitt's resource management allowed it to run, which was true, and which Walt had acknowledged without conceding the underlying point, which was also characteristic.
He looked at the forge exterior. He thought about the boy. He thought about the tier the boy occupied and the tier Walt occupied and the question of whether Walt's interest in the boy was going to require management. He filed it. He moved on.
He found Gunnar at the eastern yard's edge where the security man was running the evening cool-down — the slower movement after the day's hard training, the deliberate winding down that kept the body from tightening overnight and losing what the morning's work had built. Gunnar moved through it with the easy authority of someone for whom physical capability was simply his natural condition rather than something he maintained. He was talking to two of the other older boys while he moved, the conversation running alongside the movement the way conversation ran alongside physical work for people who were comfortable doing both simultaneously.
Pruitt watched him. He watched the way the other boys oriented to Gunnar — the specific quality of a group that had one center and knew it, the small adjustments of position and attention that communicated the hierarchy without any of it needing to be stated. This was what Pruitt had been building for four years and it was building correctly. Gunnar understood his position with the complete confidence of someone who had been told the truth about it consistently and who had done the work to deserve the truth. He was not cruel about it. Cruelty was wasteful and Gunnar had been taught that waste was the enemy of a well-run settlement. He was simply the front of the room and organized himself accordingly.
Pruitt looked across the yard to where Brynhild was working the fence line alone — not the cool-down, the other thing, the additional work she ran after the official session ended, the edge she gave herself on top of what the security man's training gave everyone. He watched her move through the sequence. He thought about the pairing. Four or five years — Gunnar's authority established, Brynhild's capability recognized, the settlement's influence extended into the surrounding territory, the two of them as the face of what Cutter's Bend was becoming. The political logic was sound. He had built political structures on less.
He did not think about the eight-year-old at the forge bench.
He did not think about the way Brynhild had stopped in the middle of a drill she ran every morning without breaking pace and looked at the water-carrier boy crossing the compound path. He had seen it from the elevator top. He had not known what to make of it and had moved his attention to something he did know what to make of, which was the water supply situation and the west wall repair. The channel had not flagged it as significant. He operated on what the channel flagged and on what his own accounting produced and neither had produced a flag on the eight-year-old.
He walked back toward the elevator. The plains evening was doing what plains evenings did — the sky going the specific dark orange of a sun dropping below a horizon with no hills to catch it on the way down, the light lasting longer than it should because the distance was longer than most places had distance. The Black Hills were a smudge in the west. The creek that gave Cutter's Bend its name ran its thin spring thread somewhere beyond the east wall, inaudible but present. The settlement held its compound quiet — the fires going, the voices dropping as the day ended, the specific quality of a place that had survived enough days to understand that the surviving of one was the best available preparation for the surviving of the next.
Pruitt climbed the stairs. He reached his office. He looked at the compound below — at the forge's last smoke, at Gunnar moving toward the sleeping quarters, at Brynhild still working the fence line in the near dark, at the cooking area where the water skins were stored for the next morning's run.
He looked at his settlement. He was satisfied with what he saw. He had built this from a grain elevator and a channel and the specific organizational instinct of a man who understood that the world after the collapse belonged to whoever was willing to organize it. He had organized it. The architecture was sound. The pieces were in their positions. The future was taking the shape he had designed for it.
He did not see the crack in the beam above the forge door.
He did not see Walt at the bench in the last of the forge light, running his thumb along the edge of a test piece and thinking about an eight-year-old's wrist correction.
He did not see what was taking shape in the space between his three most important assets — the slow gathering of something that moved at a frequency below the political and below the administrative and below the channel's guidance, something that operated in the register of fate rather than the register of management, something that his inventory had not accounted for because his inventory did not have a category for it.
He looked at his settlement. He went to his desk. He began his evening notes.
The creek east of the wall ran shallow in early spring — barely enough to cover the stones at its center, the snowmelt still working its way down from the hills and not yet producing the full flow that would come in another three weeks when the thaw completed itself. Sigurd sat at the bank after the last water run with his boots off and his feet in the current and the cold of it running through him in the specific way that cold water ran through a tired body, which was completely and without asking permission.
He came here most evenings when the work was done. The wall's east gate was open until dark and the creek was twenty yards from it and the security man on the gate had stopped noting his departures because the departures were consistent and produced nothing that required noting. Sigurd sat at the bank and put his feet in the cold water and looked at the plains.
The plains in the evening light were the thing about Cutter's Bend that he had no adequate response to. He had been born farther west — his parents talked sometimes about the coast, about the city, about the morning the ground decided it was done holding itself together, though they talked about it the way people talked about things that had happened in another life and did not translate into the current one. He had no memory of the coast. He had the dreams, which were not the same as memory. What he had actual continuous experience of was this — the grass and the distance and the sky that went all the way to the horizon in every direction without anything interrupting it, the specific enormity of a landscape that did not require you to look up to find the sky because the sky was simply everywhere and always had been.
He looked at the Black Hills to the west. The last of the light was on them, the blue-grey going warmer at the edges where the sun was finishing its work. He looked at the grass moving in the evening wind — the long slow wave of it, the whole field moving as one thing rather than as individual stalks, the specific patience of something that had been doing this since before there was anyone to watch it and would be doing it after. He looked at the stones in the creek under his feet and felt the current moving around them and felt the ground under the bank and felt the compound behind him and the wall and everything inside the wall arranged in the configuration Pruitt had arranged it in.
He thought about Gunnar. He thought about the west block water run and the blade sharpening and the flat delivery of a boy who had been told his whole life that his delivery was sufficient and had organized himself around the telling. He did not resent it. He had thought about resentment as a possible response and found it unproductive in the same way that the wrong route through the compound was unproductive — not wrong morally, just not the efficient way to get from where you were to where you needed to be. He adjusted his routes around Gunnar the way he adjusted them around the pooled water near the forge. The ground was what it was. You read it and moved accordingly.
He thought about Walt. He thought about the bench and the whetstone and the edge running under his thumb in the way that felt correct before he had been told what correct felt like, the way the angle of the stone felt right the way the ground's stability felt right — information arriving before the reasoning that should have produced it. He did not have language for this. He had the information.
He thought about the girl at the fence line.
He had not been thinking about her — she arrived in his thinking the way the dreams arrived, without permission and without warning, fully present before he had decided to allow her. He looked at the creek. He thought about the three seconds of stillness in the compound path with the yoke on his shoulders and the water skins swinging their small arc and her eyes on him from the yard's edge with the quality of something that had stopped the room from making sense. He had walked forward because walking forward was what the route required. He was not certain the walking forward had been the complete version of what the moment required. He was eight years old and did not have the complete version of what the moment required. He had the information that something significant had happened and the understanding that the significance was not yet available to him in any form he could use.
He looked at the plains. He looked at the Black Hills going dark at their edges as the light finished. He put his feet further into the current and let the cold run through them and watched the grass move in the evening wind and did not require any of it to be different from what it was.
Brynhild was at the fence line until the light was gone.
Not training — she had finished the training when the training stopped producing anything new and had stayed at the fence line because the fence line gave her the compound's western view and the western view gave her the plains and the plains gave her the distance that the compound's interior did not have. She held the practice weapon loosely at her side and looked west and thought about nothing in particular, which was not how she usually thought. She usually thought with the focused economy she brought to the drills — directed, purposeful, the thought in service of the next thing the thought needed to produce. The not-in-particular version was unfamiliar. She was not certain what had produced it.
She knew what had produced it.
She looked at the compound path — empty now, the last of the evening movement done, the settlement pulling inward toward its fires and its sleeping quarters. She looked at the cooking area entrance through which the boy had disappeared with his yoke and his water skins. She looked at the plains. She looked at the practice weapon in her hand.
She was thirteen and the settlement's best fighter after Gunnar and Pruitt's designated sword and she had been waiting for something she could not name since she was old enough to understand that waiting was what she was doing. She had run the drills every morning for three years and been good at them and felt the waiting underneath the being good at them like a second pulse and had decided that the waiting was simply her condition and that the drills were the correct response to it.
This morning a child with water skins had crossed a compound path and the second pulse had lurched.
She turned from the fence line. She walked toward the sleeping quarters with the even pace she brought to most movement — deliberate, not hurried, the body moving at the rate the ground required. She did not look at the cooking area entrance as she passed it. She went inside. She lay down on her bedding and looked at the ceiling and let the day settle into her the way days settled — the training, the security man's corrections, the drills, the fence line, the plains at dusk. All of it present. The boy at the bottom of it the way the creek stones were at the bottom of the current — what everything else moved around.
She would run the drills tomorrow. She would be good at them. She would feel the waiting underneath.
She closed her eyes.
Gunnar found the boy at the creek bank.
He had not been looking for him — had been walking the east wall's interior with the evening energy of someone who had trained hard and needed the movement to finish rather than the stillness to begin. He came through the east gate because the gate was open and the creek was there and the creek was twenty yards from the gate and he went to it without deciding to. He found Sigurd sitting at the bank with his feet in the water and his boots beside him and his eyes on the plains in the specific way of someone who was looking at the distance without requiring the distance to produce anything.
Gunnar stood at the bank. He looked at the plains. He looked at the boy. The boy did not look at him. He looked at the creek and at the hills going dark at their edges and at the grass moving in the wind with the patient attention of someone who had been sitting here long enough that the sitting had become its own kind of work.
Gunnar said: "The west block water. Tomorrow."
Sigurd said: "Yes."
Gunnar looked at the plains. He looked at the boy sitting at the creek bank with his feet in the cold water and his boots beside him, occupying the bank with the quality of something that had been there long enough to belong there, the way stones belonged in a creek bed. He stood at the bank for a moment that was longer than the errand required. He looked at the hills. He looked at the grass. He looked at the creek.
He said nothing more. He went back through the gate.
The plains held their evening quiet — the grass and the distance and the sky going dark from the east as the light finished in the west. Sigurd sat at the bank with his feet in the current and watched the hills go from blue-grey to dark and felt the cold water running around the stones under his feet and did not require anything to be different from what it was.
Behind him the settlement held its fires and its sleeping quarters and its grain elevator standing at its center in the dark, the tallest thing for thirty miles, Pruitt's office at the top going dark as the last lamp went out.
The plains breathed. The creek ran. The three of them lay in their separate places in the dark of Cutter's Bend and carried what the day had put in them into the night without knowing what the carrying was for.