Mk's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Mk swung the pick through the afternoon and watched the sun drop toward the ridge. Noon had passed. Wyatt Redstone had come and gone with the hide strip. That meant the message was moving. It did not mean it had arrived. Finn Jarro sat in the shade and marked nothing new. The gecko shifted on Mk's collar. Mk counted the hours between the claim and the dune and knew he would not sleep tonight without word. An hour before dusk a girl walked in off the flats. Braids, fringed dress, no horse. She stopped at the water jug and drank without asking. Finn watched her over the slate. She turned to Mk and said her name was Aiyana Redfeather. She said she had crossed the dune trail at midday. She had seen two men digging, and a third man come up on them from the ridge. She said the third man wore a braid and carried no rifle. Mk asked what happened. She said the three of them argued, and then the two with the spade rode off north, toward the canyon lands. She said the man with the braid stayed on the dune. Mk set the pick down. He asked if she was sure of the direction. She said north. She said it flat, once. She said she had passed a nomad teepee at the fork and stopped for water there, and an old man at the teepee had told her a rider had come through asking after Finn Jarro's claim, and she had followed that word here. Mk asked what she wanted for the news. She said nothing. She was looking for her grandmother's bundle and the raiders' trail ran north, and she wanted anyone who had seen two men on horses to know she had passed. Mk asked her to describe the two diggers. Tall one, thick one. Short-handled spade. She had it right. He asked about the man with the braid. She said he had shown the diggers something on the ground, drawn in the sand with a stick, and the diggers had spat and mounted up. She did not know what he had drawn. Mk knew. Running Wolf had shown them a hole with nothing under it, or a bearing that did not match theirs, or something else that made the spade not worth the hour. It did not matter which. The diggers had left. Mk gave Aiyana Redfeather a strip of dried meat from his pouch and pointed her north along the ridge trail. She nodded once and went. Finn scratched a mark on the slate for the day. Mk picked the pick back up. Running Wolf held the dune. The diggers were riding away from his sand, not toward it. But they were riding north, toward the canyon lands, and they had seen the hole. Whoever had sent them would hear where the hole was before Mk's debt ran out.