The slow strangle of the plains read on the country itself if a man rode it long enough to learn the difference between what the grass had been and what the grass was. Cutter's Bend sat at the elbow of the creek that gave the settlement its name, the corrugated walls bolted onto their timber posts the way a man bolted a thing together when he had to make it stand and could not make it pretty, the concrete elevator rising up out of the plain like a finger pointed at a sky that had stopped being civil to anything underneath it. Out from the elevator the new wealth went — the cleaner streets, the painted lumber, the kitchen smoke of three meals a day rising off chimneys that had not existed seasons ago, the bloom of a frontier town finding more than enough money to feed itself and not asking too hard where the money came from.
Eight settlements ringed the corridor now. Cutter's Bend was the oldest of them and the seven newer ones radiated out around it the way iron filings ringed a magnet — every one of them flying Pruitt's authority and every one of them feeling the long thumb of Gao Lin's overseeing press down through it from the outer settlement at the water source, and somewhere beyond Gao Lin sat Jiang Wu, the man behind every thumb on the table. Migrants came in every week. They came east from what the Cascadia event had left of the coast, north from the Texas line where Mikhail's territory bled out into open country, south from the empty Dakotas. They came with carts that had been dragged across more country than the carts had been built to cross. They came with children whose eyes had gone flat at things no child's eyes should have gone flat at. They came hungry and they came willing and Cutter's Bend took them because Cutter's Bend had become the place that took them, and the more of them it took the more the second ring of authority around the elevator thickened with bodies and the further the line of fences had cause to march outward across what had been open grass a year before.
The tribes felt the press of it the way a body felt a hand at the throat that was not yet pressing hard enough to choke. Their southern grazing was eaten down to dirt now by the cattle of the new towns. Their creeks ran low because the new towns' wells drew from the same shallow aquifer the old springs had drawn from for longer than the towns had been a notion in anybody's head. Their hunters came back empty more days than they came back with meat because every deer and every elk and every grouse within three days' ride of any of the eight settlements had been shot or trapped already by men who had never had to make a herd last through a winter and did not know how to stop until the herd was gone. And when a tribal well held up under the press, or when a tribal pasture grew back faster than the new arithmetic said it should — the well sickened in the night with a thing nobody could name, and the pasture caught fire from a lightning strike that came on a cloudless evening, and the hit-and-run squads went home before the smoke had finished going up.
What stood between the tribes and the long quiet end of them was a thin braid of two things. The first was the convoy line out of Sanctuary — the wagons of wheat and beans and salt and dried beef that had been running through Daniel Red Elk's corridor and Raymond Torres's corridor for years now, the food that did not depend on the dying grass and the dying creeks. The second was older. The second was the work Shane had walked into the ground a long time back — the Mescalero spring still running, the deep aquifer still answering when the tribal grandmothers laid their hands on its old places, the soil under the southern camps still giving back what it had been given. Between the convoys and the deep water, the tribes had not yet starved. They had not yet broken. They had not yet been crowded out the way the new arithmetic wanted to crowd them. But the air around the corridor had the feel of an old, slow argument that was being lost one quiet inch at a time, and every man and woman on either side of the fences knew the inches were being lost, whether they had the words for it or not.
Pruitt sat the elevator office most mornings, and most mornings he sat at the south-facing window with a cup of the bad coffee his cook made him and looked down on the yards below. The eastern yard was the training yard. It was already loud by the time the sun was a hand above the plain.
Gunnar was at the center of the yard, where Gunnar was always at the center of the yard. The boy had come into the years now where the body that had been promising at fourteen was beginning to deliver on the promise — broad through the shoulders, deep through the chest, the reach on him longer than the reach on most grown men in the settlement, the weight set into his stance the way weight settled into a man who had been training every morning of his life since before he had memory of mornings. He had a wooden practice blade in his hand and he was running the third drill of the morning against the security man's second, a hard fast sequence that went against the corded posts at the yard's center, and the wood of his blade hit the wood of the posts in the heavy regular percussion of a young man hammering at the same problem his stepfather had set in front of him since he was old enough to hold a stick. The boots came down in the dust at the end of every strike with the same small chuff. The sweat had soaked through the back of his shirt already and the morning had not gotten hot yet. He was driving himself harder than the drill called for. He had been driving himself harder than the drill called for every morning since the second-to-last season, and the only person who did not know exactly why was Gunnar himself.
Pruitt knew why. Pruitt watched it from the window and felt the old practical satisfaction of an asset performing — the stepson he had taken on the way a politician took on a useful nephew, the boy he had set up in front of the settlement as its future since the boy was small enough to set up in front of anything, the bet whose payout was beginning to come in.
Brynhild was at the eastern wall.
She was not striking the posts. She was running the bladework alone in the long narrow strip of clean ground that the security man had given her years ago because the security man had figured out early that what she did with a weapon was not what the rest of the yard did with a weapon and was best given the space to be its own thing. She moved through her drill the way water moved through a creek bed — without effort, without sound beyond the dry small whisper of her practice blade through the air and the soft contact of her boots against the dust, the line of her body going from one position to the next position without anything announcing the transition between. Her hair was tied back hard at the nape. The line of her jaw was set the way her jaw had been set every morning of every year Pruitt had been watching her, the small tight expressionless set of a young woman whose face had decided long before that it was not going to advertise what was running underneath it. She had grown into her height the way she had grown into everything, without making a production of it — a hand shorter than Gunnar and built lean where Gunnar was built heavy and faster, by a margin that the yard had stopped trying to measure, than anything else inside the eight settlements.
The security man stood at the corner of her strip with his arms folded and his eyes following her, and his eyes did not have anything in them but the flat attention of a man whose job it was to see what was in front of him and not have an opinion about it. He had stopped having opinions about Brynhild a long time ago. He had figured out, the way the security man had figured out most things, that having an opinion about her was wasted weather.
Pruitt watched the two of them work and the satisfaction held for the stepson and the calculation held for the girl. The girl was the second column of his architecture. The girl was the reason Gunnar's column would hold. He had not yet told Gunnar that, because Gunnar did not need to be told yet — there would come the season when Pruitt sat the boy down at the office and laid the marriage out in plain terms and Gunnar would receive the news the way Gunnar received most news, which was as the confirmation of a thing he had already decided he was owed. Until then, Pruitt watched her run drills he could not have run at his prime and felt the clean pleasure of a man whose two best pieces were going to be on the same square of the board when the board mattered.
His eye drifted, the way an eye drifted at the end of a long satisfied count, and the eye found the forge.
The forge sat at the south edge of the yard with its mouth open against the morning cold, and the coal smoke had been going up out of it since before any of the rest of the settlement had been moving, and the percussion that came out of it was not the wood percussion of Gunnar's practice blade against the corded posts. It was the high clear ring of a hammer on hot iron, struck and struck and struck in the steady close rhythm of a man working steel that had something to say about being worked.
Walt was at the anvil. Pruitt could see the long lean line of him through the open mouth of the forge, the burn scar along the left forearm catching the light wrong the way it always did, the man bent slightly over the piece with the bent posture of a tradesman who had been bending over the same posture for the better part of his life and had stopped noticing the bend in him. Walt was old now. Walt had been old when Pruitt had taken Cutter's Bend over and Walt had gotten older since, the mass that had been on his shoulders when he was forty redistributed onto his frame at the slow inevitability of bodies. He was not the man he had been. He was still the only blacksmith inside three days' ride who could put a true edge on a thing, and the steel that came out of his forge was the steel that the eight settlements paid in goods and labor and protection to get.
The hammer paused. The hammer started again, slower, the way Walt's hammer slowed when he was reading what the piece was telling him. And then the hammer paused again, and a smaller hammer started — a lighter ring, a faster pattern, the percussion of an apprentice hand at the secondary anvil where Walt let him work the smaller pieces.
Sigurd.
Pruitt knew the boy by the back of his head and not by much else. The laborer's son. The kid who had come in with the Cascadia migrants when he had been small enough that his mother had carried him in a sling for the back end of the walk east. The kid who carried the water skins through the compound in the mornings and patched the leaking sod walls of the lean-to his parents had built up against the inside of the corrugated south fence. He was twelve, maybe thirteen — Pruitt did not bother with the exact count because the exact count did not matter for a laborer's son. What Pruitt knew, and what Pruitt had filed without giving it much further thought, was that Walt had put the boy at the secondary anvil two years ago and had kept him there since, and that the steel coming out of the forge had gone from good to better over those two years, and that Pruitt had no reason to ask whether the improvement was the apprentice or the master because the master was the master and the apprentice was a laborer's son.
What Walt saw at the secondary anvil that morning Pruitt did not see, because Pruitt was at the office window and Walt was at the forge and the angle was not on the boy's hands. What Walt saw was the thing he had been seeing for two years now and had stopped finding words for because the words had not stayed adequate to the seeing. The boy held the hammer the way Walt had never held a hammer at any age. He held the tongs the way a man held the hand of a thing he loved. The piece on the secondary anvil — a hinge pin for one of the south gate sets, plain work, the kind of piece Walt had been forging in his sleep for forty years — was coming up under the boy's hands at a temperature window that Walt himself could only hit by judgment, and the boy was hitting it without seeming to know that hitting it was an accomplishment. The hammer came down. The pin took the strike and gave back exactly the deformation the strike had asked of it. The hammer came down again. The boy's eyes, Walt knew without looking up because he had clocked it a thousand mornings now, were not on the pin. They were a fraction ahead of the pin — reading where the pin was going next, where the grain was going to fall, where the shoulder of the piece was going to want to thicken before the piece itself had any way of telling a man it wanted that.
"That'll do," Walt said. His voice came out the way it came out most mornings now, a little dry from the smoke and a little quiet from the years, but the boy heard him and the hammer stopped at the next descent without overswinging, which was the part Walt had never gotten over, the way the boy could stop a hammer the way most men could not stop a hammer, mid-stroke, at the word. The pin went to the slack tub. The water hissed and the steam came up and Walt watched the boy lift the pin out of the tub in the tongs and turn it in the cold light from the forge mouth, reading the temper of it with eyes that had no business reading temper at twelve years of age.
"Carry the rest of the set to the south gate when you're done with them," Walt said. "Tell the gate crew the hinges are mine and they are not to make any adjustments."
"Yes sir," Sigurd said. The boy's voice had begun the slow drop into the next register a season ago and was still finding its place inside the drop. He set the pin on the cooling shelf with the other three he had already finished and went back to the secondary anvil for the fourth, and Walt watched him a moment longer and then went back to his own piece without saying any of the other things he might have said, because Walt had figured out a long time ago that the boy did not need praise to keep doing what he was doing and that praise might, in fact, be the thing that broke whatever quiet undisturbed channel the boy was working through.
The forge was the warmest place in the settlement and it smelled the way it always smelled in the cold mornings — coal smoke and the slow burnt tang of iron oxide off the scale, the sweet edge of the slack tub's water gone slightly metallic from the years of cooling, and underneath all of it the leather-and-sweat smell of Walt himself, a smell that the apprentices before Sigurd had learned to associate with the place and the apprentices before those had learned the same thing, the smell of the trade itself worn into the man and the man worn into the building.
Sigurd worked through to the end of the hinge set and racked the cooled pins and took them out the south door of the forge and went the long way around the compound to the south gate, because the long way around took him past the south fence where the lean-to was and he wanted to drop a hand against the patch he had pressed into the corner the night before to see whether the daub had set the way he had needed it to set. The patch had set. The wall would hold one more wet season. He kept walking.
The cold was already going off the day. The yoke was not on him today because the water runs were done before the forge work started, but his shoulders carried the shape of the yoke anyway, the small permanent compression of carrying a thing through years that he was still too young to be done growing under. He did not notice the compression. He was a boy who did not notice most of the things that had become him.
He delivered the pins to the gate crew. He told them the hinges were Walt's and were not to be adjusted. The gate foreman heard the message the way the gate foreman always heard messages from the forge, which was without comment, and Sigurd went back the way he had come.
He passed the eastern yard. Brynhild was in her strip running the second sequence of her morning, the long bladework sequence, the one she had built herself out of pieces of the security man's drills with adjustments she had never explained to anyone because she had never been asked to explain. Sigurd's eye crossed the yard's near corner the way it crossed any corner, reading the ground, and the eye caught on her for the length of three steps and then went back to the path in front of him.
She felt the cross of his attention. She did not stop the sequence. The line of her arm completed the cut and the body completed the rotation and the feet placed themselves where the feet needed to be placed for the next position, and underneath the completing of the sequence the second pulse that had been her second pulse for years now took one small lurch and then went back to being a second pulse, and Brynhild did not look up. She had taught herself a long time ago not to look up. The looking up was not going to deliver anything that the not looking up would not eventually deliver in the proper season, and she had decided in some quiet inner room a long time ago that the proper season would arrive when it arrived. She kept the sequence. The security man at the corner of her strip did not see the lurch because the lurch was not anywhere that showed on the surface of her. Nobody in the yard saw the lurch.
Sigurd went on through the compound to the east. He had a tool job to do for the cookhouse before the next forge piece, and he did not let himself think about the cross of his eye against the yard. He had figured out early, the way the laborer's son figured out early, what kind of thinking was free and what kind of thinking cost. The thinking about Brynhild at the yard's edge cost. He set it down and went to the cookhouse.
Gudrun had been watching him since the south door of the forge.
She had taken to coming out of the elevator at this hour because this hour was when the laborers' children moved through the compound between their first job and their second, and because Sigurd's route between the forge and the south gate passed within sight of the elevator's lower window, and because she had begun, the way thirteen-year-old girls began, to organize her mornings around the routes of certain other people without entirely admitting to herself that the organizing was happening. She was Pruitt's blood daughter, his only blood child, and she had her mother's red-brown hair gone redder in the plains sun and her father's jaw set into a face that was still working out whether it was going to be soft or hard. She was small for her age and she had been small for her age her entire life and the smallness had taught her early to make use of corners and doorways and the long sight lines of a settlement built up out of corrugated metal, and she made use of one of those sight lines now at the inside edge of the elevator door.
She watched him deliver the pins to the gate crew. She watched him turn around. She watched him take the long way back past the south fence. She watched him put a hand to the patch on the lean-to wall and pause for a beat and walk on. She slipped down through the elevator's lower hall and out the kitchen door with the bread she had taken off the kitchen counter that morning and the wedge of cheese she had taken with it, and she came out into the compound air at the cookhouse corner the way she came out most evenings, with the food in the cloth and her face arranged into the casual unconcerned expression of a girl who happened to be walking past for no reason in particular.
He stopped at the cookhouse door. He had not gone in yet. He had set the tool kit down beside the door the way he set the tool kit down most days, and he turned around when he heard her foot on the gravel, and his face did the small thing it did when she came out — the brief involuntary opening at the corner of the mouth that he had not yet learned to govern, immediately followed by the careful settling back into the careful undisturbed expression he had worn since he was small enough to learn that undisturbed expressions cost a laborer's son less than other kinds.
"You ate yet," Gudrun said. The same opening she used most evenings. She was holding the cloth at her hip the way she always held the cloth — not hidden, not displayed, the cloth simply there as a piece of the morning she happened to be carrying.
"Not since first light," Sigurd said.
"Sit," Gudrun said, and she came past him and sat on the long bench against the cookhouse south wall, the bench that the cooks used in the warm months to chop herbs on, and she unfolded the cloth on her lap, and the bread came out of the cloth and the cheese came out behind it. She broke the bread in half and gave him the larger half without saying anything about which half was larger because she had figured out a season ago that he would refuse the larger half if she announced it and would accept it without comment if she did not.
He sat. There was the small careful gap of distance between them on the bench that there always was — the gap a laborer's son left between himself and the politician's daughter because the gap was the safer choice, the gap a politician's daughter let stay between herself and the laborer's son because closing it would have been a thing somebody noticed. He took the bread. He took the wedge of cheese she pressed into his other hand. He ate slowly the way he ate most things, the chewing thorough, the small efficient way of a boy who had figured out that food eaten slowly went further than food eaten fast.
"Walt let you do the hinges this morning," Gudrun said, after a while. She had a way of starting conversations by saying a true thing about his day, as though she had been keeping up with the day from the other side of the compound and had no embarrassment about being caught keeping up. He had figured out about a season into the evening visits that he liked this about her and had not figured out yet that the liking was a thing he could afford to admit to himself.
"Hinge pins," he said. "He'll do the strap pieces. He doesn't let me on the straps yet."
"Why."
"Strap takes a hot weld at the lap. He says I'm not ready for the weld."
"Are you ready for the weld."
He thought about it. He was honest about it the way he tended to be honest about things with her, the way he was not always honest about things with the rest of the compound. "Yes," he said. "I am ready for the weld. He's making me wait because he's making me wait. He's not wrong to make me wait."
She smiled at that. The smile did the brief unguarded thing her face did when she was alone with him on the bench, the smile she did not do at her father's table or in front of the wives of the second-tier men in the second ring or at any of the formal gatherings at the elevator. It came up and went away and the careful expression came back over the top of it. "He's making you wait because he's afraid of how fast you're going," she said.
"He's not afraid," Sigurd said. He chewed the bread. He thought about it some more. "He's careful. Careful is different from afraid."
She did not answer that. She liked it when he made distinctions like that. She had decided about a season into the evening visits that nobody else inside the compound, including her father, made distinctions the way he made them — quietly, without announcing, the distinction laid down on the table like a tool and then the tool used.
A boot came down on the gravel at the cookhouse corner and the boot did not have the cookhouse foreman's weight in it. Gudrun's hand went still on the cloth in her lap and Sigurd's chewing went still in his jaw, both at the same moment, the small synchronized stillness of two children who had been raised in the same compound and had learned the same lessons about the weight of certain boots on certain gravel.
Pruitt came around the corner.
He did not stop until he was standing in front of them, which was a habit Pruitt had — not coming to a halt at the polite distance, coming to a halt close enough that the close was a piece of the conversation, the politician's old trick of letting his own weight be a part of the room. He looked at the bread in Sigurd's hand. He looked at the wedge of cheese. He looked at his daughter on the bench beside the laborer's son with the cloth on her lap and the small distance left between them. The face he wore was the face he wore in the office when he was about to tell a man a thing the man was not going to want to hear and was going to have to take anyway. The jaw was set the small tight degree to the right that Pruitt's jaw set when Pruitt was not having his morning go the way Pruitt had decided his morning was going to go.
"Sigurd," Pruitt said.
"Sir," Sigurd said.
"Get on to the cookhouse. Tools."
"Yes sir." Sigurd put the bread down on the cloth at Gudrun's knee carefully, because he was not going to take it with him and he was not going to leave it on the gravel, and he stood up off the bench and he picked the tool kit up from the wall and he went inside the cookhouse without looking at her again because looking at her again would have been a thing Pruitt noticed. The cookhouse door closed behind him.
Pruitt did not sit down on the bench. He stood in front of her at the same close distance. Gudrun did not stand up. She folded the cloth over the bread the way she would have folded it over the bread if she had been alone, and she set the cloth on the bench beside her, and she set her hands in her lap, and she lifted her face up and looked at her father the way her father had taught her to look at men he was negotiating against, which was without flinching and without giving anything away that she had not decided to give.
"Gudrun," Pruitt said.
"Father."
"He's a forge boy."
"He's an apprentice in the forge. Walt's apprentice."
"He's a laborer's son. The forge does not change the laborer's son."
"It changes him with Walt." She said it evenly. She had practiced the evenness for a while now. She had figured out the season before that her father's jaw moved to the right when she got loud and stayed neutral when she stayed level, and she had decided after some thought that staying level was the route she wanted to be on with him. "Walt does not apprentice laborer's sons. Walt apprentices the boys who can hold a hammer, and Walt has not taken on another apprentice in years, and you have not told him to take on another apprentice in years because the steel that comes out of the forge under his apprenticing is the steel the second ring pays you for. So the forge does change the laborer's son. In your account books it changes him."
Pruitt's jaw moved the small degree to the right. He held it. He did not let it move further.
"You sit with him out here in the evenings," Pruitt said. "Every evening. Don't tell me you don't. The cookhouse foreman has eyes."
"I sit with him out here in the evenings," Gudrun said. She had decided not to lie about it because lying about it would have given her father a piece of leverage she was not willing to give him. "Yes."
"Why."
She thought about how to answer. She had been thinking about how she would answer it for a season now, since the first morning she had come out with the bread and the cheese and felt the careful stillness of the boy on the bench beside her and decided that she was going to do it again the next evening. She had answered the question for herself in several different ways across the season, and she had arrived a few weeks back at the answer that was the most true and the most useful to say out loud to a man like her father, who had to be answered in a register that his ear could hear.
"Because he's polite," Gudrun said. "He's polite to me. He talks to me the way he talks to the cookhouse foreman and to Walt and to the gate crew. He calls me by my name. He does not call me ma'am and he does not call me my lady and he does not lower his voice to a soft kind of voice when he says hello to me the way the second ring boys lower their voices. He does not tell me my hair is pretty when he has not heard the colors of the words coming out of his own mouth. He does not stand up straighter when I walk into the cookhouse the way Reynold's boy stands up straighter. He talks to me. He is not afraid of me and he is not trying to win anything from me and he does not believe I am Daddy's princess." She held her father's eye. The evenness did not break. "I like talking to somebody who does not believe I am Daddy's princess. I would like talking to that person if he was the gate foreman's son or the cook's son or the boy who sweeps out the elevator stair. He happens to be Walt's apprentice. That is who he is. I sit with him because he is the only person in the compound who does not look at me the way the rest of them look at me."
Pruitt held her eye. He held it longer than he usually held it. He was running the calculation behind the holding the way he ran calculations behind most of his stillnesses — running her face against the leverage she had just laid down on the bench between them, the small unanswerable truth she had put in front of him about how the second ring boys talked to her, weighing what answering it would cost against what not answering it would cost, weighing the cost of pulling her off the bench against the cost of leaving her on it, weighing the steel coming out of the forge against the cost of disrupting Walt's apprentice's evening meal.
The steel coming out of the forge was a column in his ledger. The steel coming out of the forge had paid for the timber of the second ring's outer fences and the iron of the second ring's outer gate hardware and a long string of small needful things that Cutter's Bend could not have afforded to buy from anywhere else and that the eight settlements were starting to pay for in goods. Disrupting Walt's apprentice's evening meal would have a cost. Walt was old and Walt was, in his quiet old way, fond of the boy, and Walt would not say anything if Pruitt pulled the boy off the bench and would say less the next morning at the forge and the steel would, in some invisible incremental way that Pruitt could not have proven in a court but that Pruitt's politician's ear had been honed to hear, drop a small fraction in its delivery. The fraction was small. The fraction was real. Pruitt did not move the column unless he knew what the column was going to do.
He held his daughter's eye a second longer.
"You can talk to him," Pruitt said. "Out here. On the cookhouse bench. Where the cookhouse foreman has eyes."
"All right."
"Not in the elevator. Not in the second ring. Not where the second ring's wives see you sitting with him without the bench under you and the cloth in your lap looking like a casual route a daughter happened to take. Out here. Bench. Bread. That's the size of the thing."
"All right, father."
He held the eye a beat longer. Then he lifted his jaw off the right and let it sit straight on his face again, which was the small physical signal of a Pruitt decision having been made and being closed, and he turned without saying anything else and went back toward the elevator across the gravel at the unhurried walk of a man who had spent his morning the way he had intended to spend his morning, with one column adjusted by a fraction he could live with. Gudrun watched him go. She did not move off the bench until the elevator's lower door had shut behind him.
Then she folded the cloth into thirds and set it on her lap, and the cookhouse door opened the small amount, and Sigurd came out with the tool kit in his hand and stopped on the threshold and looked at her face and did not say anything yet.
"He says I can talk to you on the bench," Gudrun said. The evenness was still in her voice. The smile was not on her face yet.
"All right," Sigurd said.
She handed him the bread. He took it. He sat back down at the small careful gap on the bench, and they finished the cheese in the small companionable silence of two children who had just been told a thing by a man they had both been negotiating with, and the morning went on around them at the unconcerned compound rate.