The bouncer's skull cracks against the saloon floor before he even registers I've moved.
I step over him, not fast, not slow, and let the doors swing shut behind me. The whole room goes quiet. Cards freeze mid-deal. A bottle stops halfway to a mouth. Eight people hold their breath and decide, one by one, that they are not getting paid enough for this.
I'm not looking at them. I'm looking at the man behind the bar.
Silas Vance. The Plague-Smith. Thin as a fence post with wire glasses low on a beak nose, and he's trying very hard to look like a normal apothecary and not like a man who has been cooking a mass-casualty toxin in the cellar for three weeks straight.
The Hellfire Ledger burns on my forearm like a coal pressed to the skin. It always burns like that near a target.
"We're closed," he says.
"I know." I walk between the tables and nobody moves to stop me. "I already checked the cellar."
Something flickers behind his glasses. Not fear exactly. More like a chess player who just watched his opponent take a piece he didn't think was in play.
"You're the one they sent," he says.
"Nobody sent me." I reach the bar. He smells like sulfur and something rotten-sweet. "The Ledger sends me. You're on it."
"The Hellfire Ledger." He says it like he's reading a sentence he doesn't believe. "That's a myth."
"Sure. And so's the vanguard coming at dawn." I put both hands flat on the bar. "Three hundred dead men on dead horses. Your plague-seed opens the gates for them. Every man, woman, and child in the next four towns drowns in their own lungs."
Vance's jaw tightens. "You don't understand what I'm building. What it takes to survive out here."
"I understand exactly," I say. "You made a deal. They promised you'd be on the right side of the wall when it went up." I tilt my head. "How's that working out?"
He goes for the shelf behind him. Glass vial, green, steaming before he even uncorks it.
I catch his wrist before it reaches his face. His bones are bird-hollow under my grip. I slam his hand into the bar. The vial shatters. The green liquid chews a hole through six inches of solid oak in four seconds.
We both look at the smoking hole.
"That was for me," I say.
He looks up from the hole to my face. Something's broken in his composure now. He looks old.
"You can't stop it," he says quietly. "The formula's already copied. Other men have it."
"Maybe." I pull the LeMat from my hip and press it under his chin. "But you won't be around to check."
"What are you?" He's genuinely asking. Not stalling. "The Blight should have taken you months ago. I can see it in your skin."
"It's working on it," I say. And I pull the trigger.
* * *
I search the cellar alone.
His lab is meticulous. Notebooks in three different handwriting phases, earliest entries almost elegant, the last ones crammed and frantic. I read enough to feel sick. Not because of the science. Because it's good science. Vance was brilliant.
The vanguard didn't hire a hack. They hired the best.
I find a vial tucked behind a false brick. The label says GRAVE-ROT EPINEPHRINE, Class-E Combat Stimulant. Underneath, in red ink: DO NOT INJECT WITHOUT VEIN PREP. GUARANTEED RUPTURE. I pocket it.
Upstairs I grab his saddlebags. Tools, notebooks, glass vials wrapped in canvas, things worth more than the horse they were tied to.
I roll up my sleeve and check the Ledger.
BOUNTY CLAIMED: Silas Vance. +72 Hours Cellular Stability. 500 Blood-Iron. LEDGER BALANCE: 119 Hours, 42 Minutes.
A hundred and nineteen hours. Almost five days.
Before the Ledger, I had maybe three weeks left before the Blight dissolved me from the inside out. Now I have a hundred and nineteen hours and a lab full of notes about a plague nobody else knows is coming.
I go to the window.
The horizon is moving. The dust cloud is the biggest thing I've ever seen.
Three hundred of them. Still a day out, maybe less. Far enough that I have time to run. Close enough that I know what happens if nobody does anything.
I throw the saddlebags over my shoulder and walk out of Blackwater before anyone comes back.
I don't have a plan. I have a timer and a dead man's notes and a vial that'll kill me if I inject it wrong.
That'll have to be enough.