We took off, and I threw all my focus into movement. I hadn’t gotten the valve setting quite right. The knee didn’t bend fast enough, forcing me to sweep the leg around in an arc with each panicked stride. I focused my fear into the desperate energy it took to keep myself upright. With clumsy control I managed to gather some acceleration, but Caryl was trying to run faster still, starting to drag me forward in a way that promised to topple us both. I could actually smell the horses behind us now.
Caryl looked over her shoulder, which slowed us abruptly. I couldn’t yell at her to keep steady; even taking the trouble to find words would have broken my rhythm. I just kept blindly flailing forward. Caryl was an idiot without her construct; when she saw how close the horses were, she tried to pull me along faster, as though she could help, as though she could give me back my body whole. I cursed fluently as my steps stuttered.
At last Caryl seemed to see the problem, and she tried to release my hand. But then she’d be dead for real, so I crushed her hand in my grip, refusing to let it slip away. The effort broke my rhythm, and I stumbled.
We both fell to the hard, hot ground in a tangle of bones and titanium, and the posse rode us down.
I heard Caryl screaming in my ear, smelled blood. I felt my bones snap, the hot, bright pain of muscle tearing like raw chicken. I entered a slow-motion adrenaline dream, flashed back to falling, catching in a tree, things tearing and snapping and piercing, not knowing what was wood and what was bone. I thought I’d forgotten the fall, but there it was, fresh as new bread, and I was screaming, and my heart beat so hard it made a sound like a chair scraping over tile; I could feel it almost exploding in my chest.
Then the riders were gone, and I was alive.
I could feel my broken and bleeding body, but I looked down and saw that I was fine, except that my thigh had been jarred loose from the socket of my AK. Once I saw that I wasn’t hurt, the pain faded. Caryl was curled in the fetal position on the ground next to me, gasping; her hand had slipped away during the fall. I reached over quickly to recapture it.
“Caryl,” I said. “You’re okay. Look at yourself. You’re not hurt.”
Her breathing slowed and she carefully sat up, wiping blood from her mouth and then feeling her own limbs experimentally. Dazed, she sat patiently and kept a hand on my arm while I forced my thigh back into the suction suspension. Without my powder, I couldn’t get a comfortable fit. I settled for “not going to fall off in the immediate future,” readjusted the hydraulic valve for walking, and then let Caryl help me to my feet.
“Shit,” I said. “I have no idea where the wall is now, much less the door.”
“I imagine that’s the point of the horses,” said Caryl. I still couldn’t get over the unsteadiness in her voice, the expressive way her syllables rode the currents of her emotion.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her.
“Perfectly fine,” she said, squeezing my hand.
“Well, I don’t see a Gate standing around, do you? So if it’s in here, it must be in one of those buildings.” I pointed to the little town.
“Do you hear something?”
I did hear it. The white noise of ragged breathing and feet pounding on sand. We both turned to see Teo sprinting toward us, followed by a wild-eyed Tjuan, who had thrown Gloria over his shoulder. They were being chased by nothing we could see, other than their own dust clouds.
“Oh hey, guys,” I said dryly as they barreled toward us, too panicked even to question our calm. “Those riders aren’t”—they sprinted right by us—“real.”
They managed to make it all the way to town and dive for cover on the porch of a dilapidated hat shop. Caryl and I eventually caught up to them, watching them recover their breath and turn their heads in unison to watch the nonexistent posse gallop by. Gloria winced and coughed as though the horses’ hooves had kicked up dust in her face.
“John Riven, you are a genius,” I muttered aloud. “An evil genius I am going to personally throttle to death if I ever have the good fortune of meeting you.”
The ghost town looked just as it had in the stills from Berenbaum’s postproduction office: at the far end was the clichéd town square complete with an old stone well, a plethora of hitching posts, and a chapel with a decaying bell tower. Stretching toward us from it was a single dusty lane two carriages wide, with saloons and feed stores and mining supply depots and other shops whose signs were too cracked and faded to read.
“Everyone okay?” I asked my comrades as we approached the porch.
“I think my heart actually stopped for a minute,” said Gloria, fanning herself with one hand. “My mouth tastes like an old penny.”
“I fucked up my ankle,” said Teo. “Didn’t feel it till now, but shit.”
“I broke a nail,” Tjuan deadpanned.
“Okay,” I said. “I think our best plan is for the three of you to search the buildings for the Gate while Caryl and I try to find a wall so we can dispel this ward and see what this place really looks like and where the doors are.”
“What do we do if we find the Gate?” asked Gloria.