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“I’ve got another question for you,” I say as I pull the glass and metal contraptions we stashed here months ago out of their hiding spots. Water is life anywhere. In this desert, it is everything.
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Like how you came to be out here all on yer own.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she says casually. “My father found out I wasn’t a boy and threw me and my mother out.”
“Would have been fairly obvious you weren’t a boy at some point after you were born, surely?”
“Not to him. He’s an asshole. Or was. I don’t know. My mother was young when she married him, and he was old even then. By the time I was born, he could hardly see me. Wasn’t until I was a teenager he found out she’d been lying the whole time. He threw a fit and had my mother and I thrown off the farm. She died from the stress of it, I reckon.”
For a moment, I don’t quite know what to say. There’s plenty on this rock who’ve had hard lives, but it’s not common for men to abandon their daughters just because they’re girls.
“Yer Pa sounds like a real piece of work.”
“I guess,” she shrugs. “I never had much to do with him. He wasn’t interested in me. Just in keeping the farm making money. He sold most of his produce to the Imperium. Was the first one to strike up a supply deal with them. So it’s no wonder Atticus thinks the place should be his. Was theirs really from the beginning.”
I feel an impulse to get up and hug her, so I do. I grab her right up off the ground, wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight enough that she lets out a little yelp of surprise.
“What are you doing?”
“Just giving you a hug.”
“Orion Steelbane, terror of the Imperium, and giver of really good hugs,” she quips with the cutest damn smile. I hold her a little longer, not wanting to let her go. Our agreement determines that at the end of this, we never see one another again, but damn if I don’t want to keep her. Everything I learn about her makes me want her a little more. Every passing hour, she worms her way a little further under my skin.
I release her and step back. “Your father was a fool,” I tell her. “You’ve been very brave for a long time, haven’t you.”
“I’ve been as brave as I’ve had to be,” she says. “I can’t wait until I’m on another planet. A civilized one.”
Josie
“So this is what we’re going to do?” I look around at this predicament we’ve found ourselves in. When we first talked about going to get Pa’s ranch, I didn’t bet on being followed the whole way there by people trying to shoot me full of holes. I should have, but I didn’t. Or at least, I didn’t think about the reality of it, having to dart off in dangerous directions, not being able to take the main routes.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re just going to run for the ranch? They’ll catch up with us. They’ll cut us off. If Atticus knows who you are, and he probably does, then the prices on all our heads will double. Every bastard with a slingshot is going to be angling for us. They’ll all join forces, the bounty hunters looking for me and for you will join forces, more and more of them until there’s an army of them behind us, and then what…”
“Easy girl,” Orion says, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “We kill Atticus, the bounty goes away, and the army you’re afraid of scatters like sand. They want money. When there’s no more bounty, there’s no more money. It’s simple economics.”
“Killing an Imperium sheriff has consequences,” I sigh. “That’s why I want to leave, get outside Imperium territory. I want to be free of all of this. I don’t want to be a peon to the Imperium, with a percentage of my labor skimmed every time I do something productive. I don’t want to feel like everything I do is just an economic activity, waiting to be taken advantage of. There has to be somewhere in this universe where I can just be myself and do for myself and not have anything taken from me just because I had the audacity to earn it.”
“Hear, hear,” Orion says, raising a glass to me. “That’s the outlaw spirit.”
“No, it isn’t. I’m not a criminal.”
“Oh yes you are, little lady,” he smirks. “You have a feud going with a sheriff, that’s as outlaw as it gets. And you want to avoid the Imperium’s taxes, and you’re prepared to flee the country to do it.”
“I am not an outlaw,” I repeat. “I’m just a girl trying to survive.”
