Page 97 of The Drifter

Three years since she'd known my name on the first try. I know, because I kept the count, the way I keep every count that hurts. And on a trail in the middle of an armed and wired nowhere, with something deadly in her arms—she smiled at me like a Sunday morning, and pulled my name up out of the flood on the first cast.

"Yeah, Mama." My voice came out strange. I made my face do a smile and my legs keep walking, easy, no alarm anywhere on me, because she was calm and her calm was the most valuable thing on that trail. "It's me. It's Clint."

"Well, look at you." She looked me all the way up and down, proud, a little scolding. "You've been out in the sun."

"Yes, ma'am." I was close now. Close enough to see the pack clearly, and the good German steel of the cuff, and that her wrist under it wasn't marked—loose, like he'd said, padded, like he'd said, the monster keeping his promise. "Whatcha got there, Mama?"

"They gave it to me to carry." She said it comfortably. "The men. They were polite, but I didn't care for them." Her eyes went past me and found the dog, who had planted himself two feet from her hip and gone still as a cut stone, watching the pack. "Whose dog is this? He's a good dog."

"That's Cash's dog." I got my hands on the pack, slow, gentle, taking the weight of it out of her arms like taking a dish she'd carried too far. The cuff chain clinked. The weight told me things I didn't want to know—dense, packed, heavier than its size. "His name's Max."

"Cash." Her face lit again, another name up out of the flood, two for two, my mother running a perfect day at the worst hour of mine. "Is Cash here?"

"He's coming." I got the top of the pack open with two fingers and looked inside as I said it, keeping my voice in Sunday. "Cash is coming, Mama."

The inside of the pack was the end of the world.

A charge, molded, bricked, wired into a small, black module with a hairline of green light running across it. Everything about it clean and compact and expensive—the best that federal money buys, packed dense, cabled to the cuff chain. No screen. No count showing. He hadn't given me the courtesy of a number. The number was in my head, off my own watch, and my watch said⁠—

Under a minute.

"Mama." Sunday voice. Sunday voice with the sky coming down. "I need to take that bracelet off your wrist now, all right? And then, you and me are going to move quick. Like when you'd race us to the porch."

"Race you to the porch," she said, and laughed—she laughed, a girl's laugh, some old, bright day surfacing whole—and there was confusion swimming up behind it, her eyes going from me to the pack, the first cloud coming in. "Clint, honey, what⁠—"

"Wrist, Mama."

And whatever was left in her from a lifetime of raising soldiers—it answered. She held her arm out to me, steady, trusting, no more questions.

The key. My fingers were nothing but calm, which is a trick I know, the hands going quiet while the whole rest of you screams. Key in. Turn.

The cuff fell open.

Thirty seconds.

I had it built already: sling the pack, one motion, into the arroyo cut east of the trail, deep rock, take the blast in the ground's teeth—grab her—run west—cover the horse's distance—I turned, arm already loading, pack swinging back⁠—

And Max took it out of my hand.

He came off the ground in one clean arc, jaws closing on the strap, and the pack was gone out of my grip with a strength that spun me half around. He landed already running. East. Away. Straight down the trail away from us, the pack swinging under his chin, ears flat, body stretched into that same single line of purpose, running the way he'd passed the horse, running like the ground was helping.

"MAX!" It ripped out of me. "MAX, NO! DROP IT⁠—"

He was gone. A gold streak going away down the pale trail, and there was no calling him back and no catching him. I understood in one thundering heartbeat what I was watching. He wasn't running away with it.

He was taking it away from us.

I scooped my mother up and ran.

She weighed nothing. That was its own grief, moving through the middle of everything else—my mother, who used to carry two of us at once and a feed bucket besides, come to nothing in my arms, light as a bird, her arms going around my neck out of pure old instinct, her voice at my ear saying my name, a question in it now, the cloud all the way in. I ran west, back up the trail, the ground hammering up through my boots, ten strides, fifteen, the rise ahead. Behind me, I heard nothing, no bark, no blast, nothing but my own blood, and I thought—maybe—I thought—run, Max, drop it and run, you good, dumb, holy animal⁠—

The world came apart.

It wasn’t the blast that pack should have made. I've been near enough to enough of them to know the arithmetic in my bones, and this was wrong, this was huge—something concocted in a sadist’s lab, Craine's real gift underneath his little one. It came up out of the ground behind us like the earth itself had been fired. The sound arrived as a wall. The pressure picked us both up off the trail and threw us.

I turned in the air.

It was the last thing I had. No thought in it—just the old program, the body spending its final tenth of a second on the only job left. I got myself around and under her, my back to the ground coming up, my arms a cage around the bird-light everything of her, my hand cupping her head into my chest.