Luca Orvane's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

The smelter town crouched low against the dusk. Luca and Rafe left the horses in a dry wash and climbed to a broken wall. Then the first gunshot cracked inside. Another followed. Men shouted over each other, angry, loud. Luca looked at Rafe. "They're fighting," Rafe said. His smirk slipped into something sharper. "New boss and his men. They don't know what they're doing without me." Luca checked the bundle of dynamite in his pack. The fuses curled like black snakes. "They're all looking inward. We won't get a better chance." He crept to a shattered window. Six men stood in the main hall below. Two had drawn guns. One nursed a broken arm against his chest. The new leader barked orders nobody obeyed. Luca struck a match and touched it to the fuses. A hand caught his wrist. Luca spun, gun half out. A young man grinned up at him from the dark, ginger hair, freckles thick as sand, a gap between his front teeth. "Whoa, easy," the stranger whispered. "Rusty. Rusty Turncoat. I rode with that crew till about an hour ago." He eyed the smoking bundle and whistled low. "That'll do it." "You with them?" Luca kept the gun up. The fuses hissed shorter. Rusty shrugged, easy as if they stood at a bar. "Was. Boss got shot. Figured I'd find whoever's winning." He looked Luca over, then Rafe, then grinned wider. "You two look like you're winning." Rafe stepped close. "He switches sides for breakfast. Don't trust a word." "Fair," Rusty said, unbothered. "But I know that hall. Side door's barred. One way out, the front. You blow the back wall, they stampede right into it." He pointed. "Window won't flush 'em. Just makes 'em mad." The fuses were almost gone. Luca had seconds. He trusted the easy grin for no reason he could name, and ran low along the wall to the back. He hurled the bundle through a gap in the stone. The blast threw him flat. Dust and timber rained down. Inside, men screamed and scrambled. They ran for the front exactly as Rusty had said. Luca rolled up, drew the short shotgun from his back, and met them at the door. The first man froze at the barrel. Luca fired over his head. The gang dropped guns and knelt, coughing, blind in the smoke. Rafe swept in behind, gathering their weapons. Five men down. One slipped out a crack in the far wall and vanished into the dark before Luca could turn. Rusty tied the prisoners with a frayed, knotted rope he pulled from his belt. "Had this forever," he said, cinching knots. "Lucky, huh." Luca counted the kneeling men. Five, not six. The new leader was the one who ran. He stood among the beaten gang with the smelter his at last, and knew the fight was not finished. The man who ran would bring the reinforcements straight back.