The canyon narrowed as the light failed, the sandstone walls closing in like the jaws of a slow-moving trap.

  Dorn felt the change more than he saw it. In the open flats, the wind was a frantic, directionless rush, but here it became a channeled thing—a cold funnel that twisted through the slot canyon, carrying the scent of ancient dust and damp minerals. His whiskers, sensitive enough to track a moth's wings in a storm, brushed the cold rock on either side. He didn't flinch. To a wildcat, the stone wasn't a barrier; it was a map.

  Behind him, the badgers moved with the grace of falling boulders.

  They weren't made for vertical country. They were low-slung and powerful, built for the heavy labor of the earth—digging, tunneling, and holding ground against things that should have known better than to challenge a badger's stubbornness. But slot canyons didn't care about strength. They cared about the tilt of a paw, the friction of a pad against slickrock, and the ability to breathe when the sky became a thin, suffocating ribbon of violet.

  "Keep your weight on the uphill side," Dorn said, his voice barely rising above the scrape of claws. "The floor is going to drop another six feet in the next hundred yards. If you slide, don't reach for the wall. You'll just lose skin."

  Vex didn't answer, but her breathing changed—a short, uneven burst of air that echoed off the stone. She was carrying the bulk of the weight, her barrel-chested frame straining against the harness of the lead-lined box. Flint, the younger one, was worse off. His limp had become a rhythmic dragging sound, a jagged line traced in the dust that made Dorn's ears twitch with irritation.

  A trail, Dorn thought. They're leaving a trail for anyone with half a nose.

  "We need to stop." Vex's voice finally broke through the rhythm of the march. It was low, tight, and carried the heavy vibration of a growl she was trying to suppress. She'd given him her name on the first day, along with half the payment in dried rabbit and no explanation for the box. "Flint can't keep this pace. His leg is seizing."

  Dorn didn't turn. He stayed in a low crouch, his tail counterbalancing as the floor tilted toward a dry wash. "There's a place ahead. An overhang. Another hour."

  "An hour in the dark?" Flint's voice was higher, frayed at the edges. "We can't even see where we're putting our paws now."

  "Unless you want to sleep on a forty-degree slope where the flash-floods drain," Dorn countered, his eyes scanning the shadows ahead. The light was almost gone—the sky above had faded from orange to a deep, bruised purple. "Move. In ten minutes, the wind will change, and we'll be moving by feel alone. If you want to live to see the Fingers, you'll find your feet."

  Silence followed, heavy and resentful. Then the scrape of claws resumed.

  They'd found him three days ago at the edge of the salt flats, where the white-crust desert met the first jagged teeth of the canyons. Dorn had been tracking a kit-fox, his mind focused on the next meal, when Vex had stepped out from behind a sandstone outcrop. She'd stood with her paws raised—not in surrender, but in a show of neutrality. Flint had been hovering at her shoulder, his eyes darting toward the horizon, the matte-black box suspended between them on a heavy leather sling.

  "We need a guide," Vex had said. "Through the canyons. To the Fingers. We heard you're the only one who doesn't report back to the patrols."

  Dorn had looked at the box. It was a relic, no doubt. Lead-lined, heavy enough to sink into the sand, and sealed with a mechanical lock that looked like it had been pulled from the guts of an Old One's vault. The air around it felt... thick. It was the "Source" smell—the faint, metallic ozone that set a wildcat's nerves on edge.

  "No," he'd said.

  Vex hadn't argued. She'd simply tossed a bundle wrapped in cured hide at his feet. The smell hit him instantly—high-quality dried meat, enough to last a lone hunter through two weeks of lean moon.

  "Half now," she'd said. "Half when we reach the Fingers. And we don't ask what you do with your share."

  Dorn had looked at the meat. Then he'd looked at the terror in Flint's eyes. He knew he was inviting the devil to dinner, but the hunger in his gut had outvoted the caution in his head. He'd picked up the bundle and turned toward the canyons without another word. "Stay close. Don't talk. And if I stop moving, you stop moving. No questions until I start again."

  The memory faded as the canyon finally widened into a shallow bowl. The overhang was a natural scar in the sandstone, weathered into a pocket that smelled of old ash, ancient bones, and the faint ammonia tang of packrats. It was protected from the wind and, more importantly, from the prying eyes of the Sky-Seers.

  "Here," Dorn said.

  Vex lowered the box. It hit the floor with a dull, resonant thump that seemed to vibrate through the very stone of the canyon. She sat beside it immediately, one paw resting on its lid, her posture defensive even in her exhaustion. Flint didn't sit; he paced the perimeter of the cave, his missing claw clicking against the stone in a frantic, metronomic beat.

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  Click. Scrape. Click. Scrape.

  Dorn settled against the back wall, his fur blending into the shadows. He positioned himself where he could see the canyon entrance and his clients simultaneously. He didn't eat. He wouldn't touch the payment until the job was done. Instead, he closed his eyes and let his ears do the work.

  The night settled in like a physical weight.

  Dorn drifted in that space between waking and sleeping that all solitary hunters learn—a shallow state of awareness where the scuttle of a beetle sounded like a march and the distant cry of a nighthawk was a siren. He listened to the badgers' heartbeats. Vex's was slow, steady as a drum. Flint's was a hummingbird's—fast, erratic, fueled by a fear that hadn't let go for three days.

  "You think he's asleep?" Flint's whisper was barely a breath, meant for badger ears, not the heightened senses of a predator.

  "I think he hears everything," Vex replied. Her voice was a low vibration in the floor. "Doesn't mean he's listening. He's a wildcat, Flint. They don't care about anything that doesn't have a pulse or a price tag."

  "He's a guide. Guides always listen."

  "He's a ghost," Vex corrected him. "Ghosts don't care about the living. They just watch."

  A long silence followed, broken only by the wind breathing through the slot canyon like a giant in deep sleep.

  "We should have done this alone," Flint said, the bitterness finally leaking out. "We're paying him to lead us into a grave."

  "We tried alone. Remember the Dry Settlements?" Vex's voice sharpened, the warning clear. "The Purists found us in three days. If we hadn't found this wildcat, we'd be iron-dust in the Bone Yard by now."

  "The box... I know." Flint shifted, and Dorn heard the soft, unmistakable sound of metal sliding against metal. The lock. "The mechanism is wearing, Vex. I can feel the spring thinning. Another few days and we won't be able to keep it closed."

  "Then we reach the Fingers before then."

  "And then what? We give it to him? The old one with the shaking hands and the stories about the stars?"

  "Mossback," Vex said, and for the first time, there was a trace of reverence in her tone. "She's the only healer left who remembers how the Old Ones built. She'll know how to neutralize the Source. She'll know how to stop the Preacher from tracking the hum."

  "She's a healer. What does a healer know about—"

  "She knows things the Purists want burned!" Vex hissed, the sound echoing off the overhang's ceiling. "She knows that the land doesn't have to be a graveyard, Flint. She knows things that might—"

  She stopped abruptly.

  Dorn felt the shift in the air before he heard it. Vex had turned her head. He could imagine her nostrils flaring, testing the air for any sign that his breathing had changed, any hint that the "ghost" was awake.

  "You think he's really asleep?" Flint asked, his voice trembling.

  "I think," Vex said slowly, her gaze fixed on the shadow where Dorn lay, "that it doesn't matter. If he betrays us, the Preacher kills him too. He's in the cage with us now, whether he likes it or not."

  Dorn lay perfectly still. He felt the weight of the box's presence in the dark—a silent, heavy thing that seemed to pull at the very air around it. He thought about Mossback. He thought about the Preacher. And he thought about the "Source" that was supposedly worth more than a badger's life.

  He didn't ask. In the Frontier, questions were a luxury the dying couldn't afford.

  Dawn came grey and cold, the light bleeding into the canyon like ink in water. Dorn was on his feet before the first ray touched the stone. He watched the badgers wake—Vex, ever the guardian, and Flint, looking like a ghost of himself, his fur matted with sweat and dust.

  "You move at first light," Dorn said, his voice flat and professional.

  Vex nodded, her eyes hard. "The Fingers. How far?"

  "Half a day. Maybe less, if the boy doesn't collapse." Dorn looked at Flint. "He's dragging that leg. If the Purists are behind us, they're following a map you're drawing in the dirt."

  "He'll keep up," Vex insisted, though she wouldn't look at Flint's leg.

  Dorn slung his pack over his shoulder. He felt the meat-bundles against his ribs. It was a good weight, a life-saving weight, but it felt wrong. It felt like blood money.

  "You're not coming the whole way?" Flint asked, looking up at Dorn from the floor.

  "No."

  "The deal was—"

  "The deal was the Fingers," Dorn cut him off. He pointed toward the canyon's far end, where the walls finally broke into the open wasteland. "Follow the wash. When you hit the third split, go left. You'll see the rock spires before the sun is overhead. If you hit the salt flats, you've gone too far and you're already dead."

  Vex stood, her massive frame casting a long shadow. She reached into her pouch and tossed the second bundle of meat. Dorn caught it with one paw, the weight solid and satisfying.

  "The Purists," Dorn said, the word hanging in the air like a threat.

  Vex went still. The silence stretched until it was uncomfortable.

  "You didn't hire me because I know the way," Dorn said, his Lead-Sight eye itching with a cold, phantom sensation. "You hired me because if they catch you, they'll find a wildcat's scent all over these trails. You're using me as a decoy."

  Vex didn't flinch. "We didn't tell you because—"

  "Because it's not my problem." Dorn turned his back on them, moving toward the canyon mouth. "It's still not my problem. The Fingers are that way. Don't follow me."

  He flowed into the shadows, his movements silent and blurred. As he climbed toward the high ridges, he heard Flint's final, desperate whisper: "We should have told him, Vex. If the Preacher catches him—"

  "The Preacher catches everyone eventually," Vex's voice drifted up, cold and final. "Dorn just has a head start."

  Dorn didn't look back. He climbed until the canyon was a crack in the earth below him, until the badgers were nothing but two slow-moving dots in a sea of orange stone. He headed for his den, for the safety of the high rock, while above him, the sky remained an empty, indifferent grey.