Lex Nelson's Arc

Chapter 13 of 13

They rode east through the cool hours, the white horse steady under their weight, the dog trotting at its flank. Lex's sister had not spoken since the pit. She kept one hand at her chest, closed around something on a chain. Lex did not ask. The courthouse was a day's ride still. The permit in her coat felt heavier than the rifle on her back. Near noon they came to a stone set beside the old track, names worn shallow by sand. Lex stopped the horse to let it drink from the canteen poured into her palm. Her sister slid down without being told. She walked to the stone and put her hand flat against it like she needed something solid. Then she opened the locket at her throat. "I memorized him," she said. Her voice was dry but level. "The man who sold me. I looked at his face until I could draw it." She pulled a folded square of linen from inside her shirt and smoothed it on the stone. Charcoal lines. A man's face. Lex looked once and her chest went cold. She knew the face. It was the man who had ridden with her partner the day her partner died. The man who had walked out of that bad ground alive and told her it was bad luck. The grave marker in the pit had not been a coincidence. The vendetta had not been about her. It had been about keeping a secret buried. "You're sure," Lex said. Her sister nodded once. Lex folded the linen carefully and put it in her coat beside the stamped permit. Two papers now. One named the buyer. One named the seller. They led to the same door. They reached the courthouse at dusk the next day. Lex left her sister with the horse and the dog in the shade of a wall. She walked in through the front with the permit in her hand and the linen portrait folded behind it. She found him at a desk stamping pages. He looked up. He knew her face the way she knew his. Neither of them spoke. Lex put the portrait on the desk between them. Then she did what the desert had been waiting on her to do for a long time. She rode west at first light with her sister behind her on the white horse and the dog running easy alongside. The permit was ash. The portrait was ash. The man was finished, and so was the courthouse door she had nailed shut on her way out. Her sister leaned her forehead against Lex's back and slept. Lex let her. The dunes ahead were only dunes now. Nothing was chasing them. For the first time in a long time, she was not chasing anything either. She rode toward water, and toward quiet, and she did not look back.