“The owl. I bet he sent that ridiculous owl of his. Have you been to the museum? Have you searched it? Where else would he have sent it? He must have sent it there.”
“He might not have sent anything. The graffiti might be pure invention meant to cause this very response.”
His fingernails are long enough to staccato the tabletop. “What’s the answer, then? Enlist more deputies? Promise them food and water and we’ll have a wave of volunteers ready to serve and protect.”
“Done.”
“Punish anyone who so much as whispers anything treasonous?”
“Done.”
“Good.” Thomas leans back, his face escaping the sun, retreating into shadow. “Then there’s only one thing left to do.”
Chapter 36
CLARK FOLLOWS THE tracks in the snow—through the woods, through a ruined neighborhood—until she finds her brother. His body abandoned. Still warm but already dead. She has her revolver drawn, but nothing to fire at. She hears a deep-throated huffing—what sounds like laughter—chasing through this frozen world, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular. Some of the windows are broken, some shuttered with ice. They stare at her. She blasts a round into one of them for no reason except to unleash some misery.
Silence follows. She drags her brother into a brick house with half its roof collapsed. The walls are cracked and so water damaged they appear molten. She collapses in the living room and somehow day becomes night as she hugs and rocks his body. His skin grows hard to the touch, marbled many colors of purple and blue and white, like a winter sky just after the sun sets. His tears, or maybe her tears, have frosted white trails down his cheeks. And his carved-out stomach is a crystalline red.
It takes her a long time to realize she shivers from cold and not grief. She kicks apart a wooden chair and sparks a fire in the stone hearth that casts an orange glow. She does not move except to feed it more and more rotten wood. Thick gray smoke ghosts the air. Her mussed red hair falls across her face, matching the flames before her, as if she has caught fire.
Whatever she told York to do, he did, and now, because of what she told him to do, he is dead. It was a mistake. It was all a mistake. Her brother is lost and so is her confidence. She doesn’t know what has happened to the others. She might care in the morning, but she doesn’t care now, not in this cave of light she shares with her brother’s body. She feels momentarily numb to them, as she did when she stood over Reed’s grave. But York is her blood. York belonged to her. His death is like a diseased limb that has reached its rot into her heart.
She tries to sleep. At least then she can escape making any sort of decision. Or maybe she will wake to find this is all a dream. She clenches her body up like a big fist. But after only an hour or so, the fire has gone dead and she wakes, shivering. Even at this simple task, staying warm, she fails.
Now another storm has swirled over Bismarck. The wind carries sleet in it, whipping and tinkling the house with what sound like glass shards. She stirs the embers and tosses more wood in the hearth. A blast of steam escapes her mouth as a sigh or sob.
In the distance, over the noise of the ice storm, she hears grunting and chuffing, what must be the bear, and she cannot help but feel it is singing a hateful, mocking song for her.
Dawn comes. She stands over her brother’s body for a long time. Then she begins smashing chairs, splintering tables, ripping off cupboard doors, gathering whatever wood she can find to crush into the hearth. To this smoldering pile she adds his body.
She tells him she’s sorry. She should have taken better care of him. She turns to leave just as the flames catch his clothes.
*
They kneel in the snow, the cold creeping through their pants, with their wrists painfully bound behind their backs. Lewis twists against his restraints, testing their strength, until their guard comes by and kicks him in the back of the head hard enough to send him sprawling forward. He struggles upright, with snow powdering the side of his face.
The guard watches Lewis—as he takes a deep, steadying breath, as if swallowing a barbed string of curses—and then backs away.
Clark is gone. So is York. The doctor is hunched over in exhaustion, her eyes closed and her arm bloodied. Colter crouches beside her, still and watchful. And Gawea has been knocked unconscious. Wrapped up in their furs, masked by their scarves, their guards have no recognizable builds or faces, so they seem like replications of the same person. They skin and butcher the bears and load the meat onto sleds.
An hour later, as instructed, they rise and trudge against the wind, punching their boots through the snow. Some of their captors walk before them and some behind, keeping them enclosed. They drag sleds, one carrying Gawea, the others stacked high with slabs and ribbons of meat. The sun dips lower, merging with the hellish glow of the oil fires on the horizon. The shadows are gray, the clouds even grayer.
The doctor collapses. Lewis tries to help her, but the guards push him away. They prod her with a bow, then kick her softly, and she says, “All right, all right,” and rises, and they continue their march.