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The whole stack went up with a roar. Heat came off it so fast that the men on their knees flinched back from it. The fire lit up the whole airstrip, orange and huge, and threw our shadows a hundred feet across the dirt. Somewhere inside it the foam started to melt and the wood started to crack, and we all stood there and watched every rifle the cartel had been waiting for burn down to scrap metal that nobody would ever fire again.

Preacher stood in front of them with the fire at his back.

“You go home to Tomas,” he said. “You tell him exactly what you saw here tonight.”

None of them looked at him. They were all staring at that fire.

“His people put one of my brothers in a ditch and damn near killed him. He started a war with the Unholy Few.” Preacher nodded at the flames. “This is what that war looks like. Vega’s dead. His guns are ashes. And the pilot belongs to us now. Anybody comes near her, they get what Vega got.”

He let that sit.

“Tomas picked the wrong town,” he said. “Tell him that, too.”

Then he had them loaded into their shot-up trucks, the hurt ones with the rest, and sent them back down the road with no guns, no glass and no Vega.

I didn’t watch them go. I was watching Mya. This wasn’t her world. She’d just had the misfortune of crashing into it.

She stood a little away from the rest of us, right on the edge of the firelight with her face lit orange. She stared at those crates burning for a long time. Those were the guns she’d flown.

Then I saw her take a long breath and let it go, and her shoulders came down for the first time since I’d found her on this strip.

Gage and the prospects took care of Vega, and the two men I’d put down out there in the dark.

Lock was sitting up on the couch when we came in, gray in the face, his leg propped up on a cushion. He looked at the dust all over us, and at Mya, and at the blood on Deacon’s sleeve.

“Well?”

Preacher told him. All of it.

Lock listened without a word. Then he leaned his head back against the couch and stared at the ceiling, and his jaw worked.

“I missed it,” he said.

“You were bleeding out on a pool table,” Havoc said. “We’ll let you off this time.”

Lock looked at Preacher. “When we go for Tomas, he’s mine.”

Preacher didn’t argue. He knew better than that.

Deacon’s friend in Las Cruces called the next afternoon. The car outside Mya’s apartment building was gone. The men in it had packed up and left in the night.

With Vega dead and the guns gone, killing Mya wouldn’t get Tomas a damn thing. He had bigger problems coming down the road at him than one pilot.

Nobody in Salvation was all the way safe while Tomas Rivas was still breathing. But she could go home now, and most likely she’d be fine.

Which meant I had no reason left to keep her here with me.

That afternoon I rode to Las Cruces with Havoc. Her apartment was exactly what the photos had shown, every drawer dumped and the couch gutted. I took one thing out of it and rode home.

She came into my room that night and started folding the clothes Holly had brought her into a neat pile on the bed.

“I’ll need a ride to Las Cruces,” she said. “If that’s okay. Tomorrow, maybe. I need to see what’s left of my apartment. And I need to find a job. Somebody’s got to need a pilot somewhere.” She smiled at me. It was bright and cheerful and it didn’t fool me for a second. “You’ve been amazing, Shade. All of you have. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

She put a T-shirt on the pile. Then she picked it up again and folded it a second time. I’d come to learn her nervous habits behind the smiles.

Smoke’s question had been sitting in my chest since that afternoon by the bikes. You going to ask her not to?

I took the T-shirt out of her hands and put her logbook in them instead.