Book II of the Unified States of Texas
A fractured republic. A missing sister. A checkpoint that won't let her through.
Everything on the shelf and everything still being cut from the slab. Pick your poison.
Four Books · A Fractured Republic
The flagship series. Book I — My Name it is Sam Hall — out now. Book II — The Psalm of Katie Hall — drops 5/5. Books III and IV — In the Pines and Dayspring — coming soon.
Enter the Series →
Anthologies · Essays · Collaborations
Short stories published outside the Bolton catalog. Latest: Player Two — a high-stakes arcade tale featured in Insert Coin, the Raconteur Press anthology of retro-gaming adventures. Pockets full of quarters, real consequences, and a boss that won't go down without a fight.
Grab Insert Coin →
Drafts · Outlines · Half-Cooked Ideas
What's currently being written, revised, or stewing in a drawer. Subject to change, as all good things are. Peek behind the curtain and see what's coming down the pipe — including the stuff that doesn't look anything like the other shelves.
See What's Cooking →
Features · Pilots · One-Acts
Four features currently on the market — sports drama, psychological horror, paranoid thriller, and a heist. Some optioned, all ready to read. Shown here: The Last Season.
Read the Loglines →Picture Books for People Who Shouldn't Be Reading Them
Taco Jones is absurd. He writes picture books the way picture books probably shouldn't be written — and somehow that's the whole point. Two titles out in the wild: Shut Up, Dog! A True Story and Animals are Yummy: A History Lesson. Grab one. Gift the other. Explain nothing.
See Both Books ↓
Side Quests & Experiments
The catch-all for everything that isn't a novel or a script — experiments, side projects, collaborations, and the occasional weird idea that demanded a home. Things aren't always what they seem here. That's the point.
Take a Walk →Get early copies of upcoming Bolton releases weeks before they hit the shelves. In exchange, you promise an honest review on release day — good, bad, or ugly. No sugar required. If you love the Unified States of Texas, if you read fast, if you can tell the truth in public, there's a seat at the table.
Apply to the ARC TeamWhat's currently being written, revised, or stewing in a drawer. Each one is alive on the desk right now — shifting, growing, occasionally fighting back. Subject to change, as all good things are.
A Novel
a mythic campaign of vengeance
A devoted mother, left for dead after cartel violence destroys her family, rises as the legendary La Llorona and unleashes a mythic campaign of vengeance against the empire that took everything from her.
A Novel
gods, assassins, and the system that hunts them
Living in secret as a mortal man, Thor is pulled back into a covert world of gods and assassins after his family is massacred — forcing him onto a revenge path that could bring down the very system he once enforced.
A Novel
the first book in a new series
When the Rapture shatters the world during his niece's birthday party, a U.S. Air Marshal must fight through riots, wreckage, and the first wave of martial law to gather his scattered loved ones before civilization gives way to chaos.
There's always something else being plotted, argued with, or rescued from a drawer. Sign up for the newsletter to catch the next announcement before it hits the shelves.
Back to HomeFeatures, pilots, and specs on the market. Some are already optioned, some are looking for a home, all are ready to be read. If you're a producer, manager, or agent — reach out. If you're a reader, enjoy the loglines.
Feature · Drama · Sports
A dying body. A viral phenomenon. A father who has to carry his daughter one last time.
When Claire Holloway, a senior volleyball player with arthritis and immune deficiency, pushes her body through her final season in Dominguez, Texas, her little sister Ellie's TikTok videos transform her struggle into a viral phenomenon. As 3,000 people converge on a state semifinal to watch her play, Claire must decide how far love of a game is worth going — and her father, a man who has asked God why his body works when his daughter's doesn't, must find the strength to carry her when she finally cannot carry herself.
Feature · Psychological Horror
Face your nightmares. Or die in them.
Six chronic insomniacs volunteer for an experimental sleep study at an isolated mountain research facility. When a new medication causes them to share each other's nightmares while awake, they discover they're all dreaming the same terrifying figure — a young woman named Nina who died during the trial's first phase. As reality and nightmare blur, the participants realize that their leader, Sara, was actually "Participant Zero" who killed Nina two years ago during a medication-induced fugue state. To escape the shared nightmare and free themselves, Sara must confront her suppressed guilt and relive the trauma she's forgotten.
Feature · Thriller · Paranoia
He didn't put it there. But now it's his problem.
After finding a gun in his trash, a struggling writer on mental health leave becomes trapped in a web of paranoia, manipulation, and digital deception as an unseen predator turns his unraveling mind into the perfect frame job.
Feature · Heist · Drama
A brother in a coffin. An empire built on their suffering. One last con.
When their brother-in-arms is found dead, a fractured group of former cadets must put aside old wounds and pull off an elaborate, high-stakes con to take down the man who built his empire on their suffering.
For producers, managers, and agents: full scripts available on request. Reach out and let's talk. For readers: thanks for coming this far. There's always another one being written.
Email for Scripts Back to HomeAdvance Reader Copies of multiple books are available for readers willing to leave an honest review on Amazon and/or Goodreads at launch.
No obligation to be positive — just honest.
Confirmation's on the way to your inbox. Watch for the first ARC drop in the next newsletter.
Texas voted to secede from the United States in 2020, becoming the Unified States of Texas — a five-spoke republic built on nostalgia for a prosperity that never returned. The United States responded with a full economic embargo, a naval blockade, border closures on all sides, and a deal with Mexico that denied Texas citizens entry. Isolated and economically collapsing, the USTX became vulnerable.
In the years that followed, a Militia coup removed the elected government. Politicians who resisted were publicly executed. Those who opposed the new leadership were imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, or killed. The five spokes — Bowie, Tarrant, Houston, Crockett, Gonzales — were placed under the authority of the Militia, with the District of Austin serving as the regime's administrative capital.
By 2036, the regime is at its height. The rebellion has been largely quashed. What remains is an underground network of smugglers, ferrymen, coyotes, resistance cells, and ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things to survive — or to get out.
The USTX universe follows the people caught in that machinery. Not supervillains. Not chosen heroes. Just people for whom the wrong choice was always on the menu, and who made it anyway, or didn't, and lived with what that cost.
Texas wins independence from Mexico.
Texas annexed by the United States.
Texas secedes from the United States and joins the Confederacy.
Texas readmitted to the United States during Reconstruction.
Barack Obama wins the presidency.
Secession talks begin in Texas political circles.
Obama wins a second term. The whispers turn into a roar.
Secession talks move from fringe to mainstream.
Hillary Clinton wins the presidency.
A serious movement toward secession takes hold across the state.
Hillary Clinton wins a second term. Texas votes to secede. The Unified States of Texas declares itself independent.
The U.S. embargo begins. A Militia coup removes the elected government. El Paso is destroyed by a nuclear bomb. No one is allowed to leave Texas. The Militia draft is enforced.
A Unified States of Texas Ballad. Spans the regime years from the rise of the Militia to its height.
Available Now
Set inside the regime years, two before the events of Katie Hall.
Coming Nov 2027A Unified States of Texas novella. Set at the height of the regime — at the checkpoints, where the rules don't bend.
Available 5/5
Same year as Katie Hall. Different corner of the republic. Different way out.
Coming Nov 2026The regime at its height. The cost of holding it together — and the cost of breaking it apart.
Coming March 2027Side glimpses from the USTX universe — some named, some anonymous, all caught in the machinery. Free to read. Ordered by where they land on the timeline.
In a dystopian Unified States of Texas, a hardened border coyote must confront his past when the son he once abandoned rejoins the run — forcing him to decide what (and who) he's willing to carry this time.
Veteran border runner Diego guides a silent thirteen-year-old girl and her father across the deadly northern border toward Oklahoma. When his presumed-dead protégé Isaac suddenly reappears with dangerous cargo and unresolved betrayal, the crossing becomes a reckoning with guilt, ghosts, and the weight of every soul left behind.
Read the ReportAn exhausted teenage girl fleeing through a deadly eastern border forest, hunted by a relentless Militia tracker, must decide whether to keep running or turn and fight if she wants to reach the mythical Ferryman waiting with his lantern on the river to freedom.
Sixteen-year-old Mara flees through moonlit pine forests after her companions are killed, pursued every step by the taunting Militia tracker Mercer. Exhausted and haunted, she sets a trap in a muddy gully and fights for her life — and reaches at last the dark river, where the legendary Ferryman waits with his lantern to carry her across.
Read the ReportThe republic is open. The road is closed. Pick a book and find out which side of the checkpoint you're on.
Buy Sam Hall Back to HomeIn a dystopian Unified States of Texas, a hardened border coyote guiding refugees across the militarized northern line must confront his past when the son he once abandoned rejoins the run — forcing him to decide what (and who) he's willing to carry this time.
He didn't know their names. Didn't want to.
Names made things heavier than the packs on their backs. He'd learned that too late. On this trail, weight killed.
The girl was maybe thirteen, though her face had that wind-swept hollowness that made kids look older. Her shoes didn't match. The left one was held together with rusted baling wire and cloth torn from a flag Diego didn't recognize. The man — her father, probably — walked like he hadn't slept in days. Carried a duffel that sloshed with each step. Water, maybe. Maybe something worse. Diego didn't ask. He reached out once, without looking, and adjusted the strap of her pack where it was biting into her shoulder. The gesture was automatic, ancient. Then his hand returned to the duffel, and his eyes returned to the dirt.
He walked ten paces ahead, always just out of earshot. Not to lead. To separate.
They were three hours from the border — or what passed for it now. A stretch of collapsed fencing and repurposed oil field sprawl that marked the edge of the Unified States of Texas. Beyond that: Oklahoma. The blockade zone. Officially sealed. Unofficially porous if you knew where to cut and when to run.
The land here didn't believe in mercy. Just rust, dust, and time. What trees hadn't been burned were wind-twisted and brittle, holding vultures like ornaments. The ground was cracked open in places, as if the earth itself had tried to flee and failed. The only sound was the crunch of footfalls on gravel and the dry whisper of wind combing through barbed wire.
Diego's boots were old, but broken in. They didn't make noise anymore.
The girl coughed behind him — a high, dry snap, like a branch splitting in fire. Too loud.
He didn't turn around.
Noise is a flare out here. Might as well shoot bullets in the air and wave a flag.
He scanned the sky automatically. Still too bright for drones. That didn't mean they weren't watching. The new models were glitchy — relics from before the embargo — but sometimes the broken ones were the most dangerous. They didn't follow patterns. Just static and guesswork and gunfire.
They passed a collapsed fence, one post still standing, angled like a broken finger pointing nowhere. Diego reached out without thinking and touched it — quick, reverent. A ritual. Years ago, someone had burned a mark there. A circle inside a square. A scavenger glyph. Safe trail.
The mark was gone now. Time or fire had eaten it. Or worse — someone had come behind and scrubbed it clean. Erased the message.
He didn't use symbols anymore. Too many had turned into traps.
The land changed slightly after that — rising, then dipping into a long stretch of hard clay and scattered limestone. An old dry wash. A natural funnel. Good cover if you were being followed. Bad news if you weren't alone.
He raised a fist. The signal to stop.
The pair behind him obeyed immediately. Trained. Or just terrified.
Diego crouched at the lip of the ravine, one hand in the dirt. No prints. No movement. The sand was still layered from the last windstorm. That was good. That was something.
But his spine itched. A twitch he couldn't name.
Run it or reroute?
There was no reroute. Not anymore. Half the northern lanes had been shut after the Crockett incident. Militia had started welding steel plates over the back routes. Too many rebels had gotten through.
He stood and turned to the girl. She was watching him with eyes too still for her age.
He looked away.
Then stepped into the ravine.
He didn't like the feeling pressing behind his ribs. Not the heat. Not the ache in his knees. It was older than that. Sharper.
The feeling that something had shifted.
Not in the trail.
In him.
The ravine narrowed as they went, winding like a scar cut into the skin of the earth. Dry roots jutted out from the clay walls like grasping fingers, some charred at the tips. Old fencing wire dangled in loops, clinking faintly when the wind caught it just right. But the wind didn't reach down here often.
Down here, it was still.
Still enough to hear your own pulse if you let it.
Diego didn't let it.
He moved without speaking, eyes tracking the ridge line above. The sun was behind them now, angling low, casting long shadows across the cracked basin ahead. It would be dark in under two hours. He wanted to be past the drop zone before then.
Behind him, the girl and her father followed in silence. Their footsteps were uneven. The girl dragged one foot slightly, her makeshift shoe flapping with each step. The father's breathing had changed — shorter now, edged with strain. Diego clocked every detail without turning around.
Weak lungs. Old injury. Not my problem.
He was here to walk them. Not save them.
He used to tell himself that part. Now it just echoed.
They came to a shallow bend where the path opened into a scorched rail bed. It was an old loading line, long since gutted and burned. Railroad ties still dotted the dirt in places, their surfaces blackened and blistered. A few twisted metal bolts stuck out like rusted thorns.
The fire had been at least five years ago, maybe more. You could still smell it — soot and ash baked deep into the bones of the land. No birds. No bugs. Just heat radiating off dead stone.
Diego froze at the edge.
The next stretch was exposed — sixty yards of open kill box, high ledges on both sides. A sniper's dream. A tactician's trap. No way to cross it without feeling like a target.
He raised his fist and dropped into a crouch. The others halted behind him.
He ran a hand through the dry sand near the tracks.
Not boots.
Not prints.
Scratches. Long, shallow drag lines. Four parallel grooves. Something with weight and panic behind it.
Could've been wind. Could've been an animal. Could've been someone else making the same run.
And not finishing it.
You don't pause in a place like this unless you want to die, he told himself.
He waited anyway.
Then stood. Looked back at the girl.
Her face was unreadable. She didn't blink.
He hated the quiet ones. Not because they talked less. Because they saw more.
He waved her forward.
She and her father started across. Head low. Feet light.
Halfway through the crossing, the girl tripped — hard. Her wire-wrapped foot caught on a bolt.
She didn't cry out.
She landed hard, palms scraping stone. The duffel in her father's arms sloshed — something heavy, something glass — and Diego's hand went to his belt on instinct.
No drone. No shot.
The father helped her up. She shrugged him off.
They kept moving.
But something behind Diego's ribs twisted like a knife. The same feeling. That day.
A hand. Blood down the wrist. A creekbed full of screaming. A gunshot. A girl with wild eyes, holding a stuffed animal by the neck. No shoes. No words. Just that look.
"Don't ask questions, Don Diego. Just take her. Go."
And he had. He had taken her. He had gone.
Hadn't he?
The girl ahead of him glanced over her shoulder.
Just a flick of her eye.
That same stillness. That same look.
Not suspicion.
Not fear.
Just weight. Like she knew. Like she remembered what he hadn't told her.
He blinked, hard, and stepped onto the railbed.
Dust shifted beneath his boots. Too soft. Too quiet. Like walking on unmarked graves.
He didn't look at the ledges. Didn't look at the sky. Didn't check to see if someone, or something, was watching from above.
He knew better by now.
If you stare into the ridge, it'll stare back.
They reached the scrubline on the other side. Diego paused beneath the low brush and wiped the sweat from his brow. It streaked red-brown with dust.
The girl was already watching him.
Her eyes were too old for her face. Not hardened. Just… done. Like the world had shown her everything worth knowing, and none of it was good.
Diego looked away.
His hands ached. He hadn't been holding his rifle. Why did they ache?
He thought of the tracks. The scratches. The blackened wood.
He thought of the silence.
And he thought again — not for the first time — that someone was watching from behind.
Not from above.
Behind.
Something was wrong with the wind.
It had been shifting all day — sometimes from the north, sometimes the west — but now it just stopped. Stilled. Like the world was holding its breath. Diego felt it hit the back of his neck, not as a breeze but as a presence. Heavy. Expectant.
That's what triggered it. Not a sound. Not a movement. Just the absence of both.
They were approaching a ridge that looked no different from the dozens before it — burnt cedar husks and the wreckage of an old irrigation pump lying on its side like a sun-bleached carcass. But Diego had learned that patterns lie. It was the familiar places that killed you. The ones where you stopped scanning because you knew what came next.
He didn't know what came next.
That realization made his fingertips ache.
Diego lifted a hand and signaled for the girl and her father to stay back. He stepped toward the ridge alone, rifle angled low, his eyes tracing the dirt.
Then he saw it.
A brass shell casing, half-buried, still clean enough to shine.
Too clean.
The wind hadn't coated it yet. That meant it had been fired today — hours ago, maybe minutes. And from the angle of the imprint, it came from the east. From the top of the ridge they were now standing beneath.
Ambush spot. Elevation, sightlines, no cover. Textbook trap.
Diego's mouth dried. His teeth felt too large in his jaw.
He crouched over the casing and touched it with one gloved finger.
Standard Militia. Close-range round.
He looked up slowly — scanning the lip of the ridge, the bleached horizon beyond, the skeletal silhouettes of dead trees curled by heat and age.
Nothing.
Just silence. And dust. And that feeling again.
That feeling he hadn't let himself name in years.
It wasn't fear. Not exactly.
It was the feeling you get when you realize the game is already over, and you're the only one who didn't know it.
And then, the figure stepped out.
He didn't appear with fanfare. Just a shadow moving out from behind the edge of a rusted-out water tank, maybe forty feet away. Dust clung to him like it was afraid to let go.
He didn't wear Militia gray. Not rebel scraps either.
Worn jeans. Canvas coat. Boots too big for his frame.
And a face Diego hadn't seen in six years.
Isaac.
Diego's knees almost buckled, but he didn't move. Didn't speak.
Just stared.
The girl gasped behind him. Her father muttered a curse.
Isaac kept walking, slow, measured steps down the incline — like he belonged to the land and it was simply returning him.
It was his shoulders that made Diego's heart stutter. The tilt. The weight. The quiet fury in every movement.
It was him. The boy he'd trained. The kid he'd once called his son before the world burned that meaning away.
Isaac's face was sharper now, more angular, sun-scored and cracked at the lips. But it was him. A scar ran beneath his left eye — a memory Diego didn't have. The rifle slung across his back was civilian, beat to hell. The satchel under his arm was military. Newer. Out of place. He held it not like a burden, but like something fragile.
But what struck Diego hardest wasn't the gear.
It was Isaac's eyes.
They looked through him like glass.
They stopped five paces apart.
Diego opened his mouth but nothing came. He didn't know what to say to a ghost.
Isaac filled the silence for him. His voice had dropped an octave, but the cadence was familiar. Calm. Too calm.
"Still running ghosts across the border?"
The words hit like a shovel to the gut.
Diego's throat burned. "Didn't know you were still breathing."
Isaac gave a smile, humorless and dry. "Didn't plan on it. But here I am."
The world tilted just slightly. The dust seemed to hover midair.
Diego blinked.
Last time he'd seen Isaac was — what? — six years ago? Maybe seven?
It was on a run gone sideways.
A refugee family. A Militia perimeter. Chaos. Fire.
Isaac had been with him that day.
But when the smoke cleared, he wasn't.
There was no body. No cry. Just static on the radio and the sound of boots retreating. Diego ran. He'd told himself there wasn't time to search. That staying meant getting caught. That maybe Isaac had made it out another way.
But in his bones, he'd known.
He'd left him.
He'd chosen someone else.
A girl. No name. Just a face covered in soot and a voice begging him not to leave her alone.
He never told anyone about her, either.
"What's in the bag?" Diego asked, nodding toward the satchel.
Isaac shrugged, eyes not leaving his. "Names. Photos. Proof of life. Insurance. And maybe a reason to keep walking."
Diego's hand hovered near his belt. Not for his gun — he wasn't sure if this was confrontation or confession. Or something in between.
Isaac took a step forward.
"I need to cross. Tomorrow. With or without your map. Doesn't matter."
Diego stared at the ground between them.
"Adding another weight changes everything. The pace. The shadows. Timing's off."
Isaac tilted his head. "And yet… you haven't told me no."
He was right.
Diego hadn't moved.
Because deep down, he already knew he would say yes.
Isaac studied him with a look that wasn't cold or angry.
It was measured. Like weighing the man in front of him against the one he remembered.
"You left me," Isaac said quietly.
Not an accusation.
Just a truth.
Diego's breath shuddered out. "I left… everything."
They stood like that, the wind finally daring to return between them.
Isaac nodded once.
"So let's see what you're leaving behind this time."
Diego didn't answer right away.
He turned his back to Isaac and stepped a few paces up the trail, boot soles grinding against loose dirt. The sun had begun its slow descent into a copper haze, casting long shadows across the scrub. Everything looked stretched thin. Like the land itself was being pulled apart by time.
He looked toward the horizon — past the next ridge, past the busted water tower leaning like a drunk against the sky, toward the crooked line of fencing far in the distance. The line. The place where Texas ended and… something else began.
He'd walked people toward that rusted threshold dozens of times. Some made it. Some didn't. All of them disappeared. That was the deal.
Get them to the wire. Turn around. Forget their faces.
Simple math. Clean hands. Or at least hands he could convince himself were clean.
This time didn't feel like math.
Behind him, Isaac hadn't moved. Just waited. Still as a shadow. Like he knew the silence was part of the test.
The girl and her father stood under a skeletal mesquite tree, its limbs bone-white and curled as if reaching for something long gone. The father clutched his duffel tight against his chest. The girl… she didn't look scared. She looked settled. Like whatever came next, she'd already made peace with it.
But her eyes were on Diego, not Isaac.
That stare again — the one that pinned guilt to your ribs like a badge.
She saw him. Really saw him. And he hated that.
He turned to Isaac.
"You cross with me," he said, voice low, clipped, "you move at my pace. No breaks. No complaints. If I say drop, you kiss the dirt before the echo fades. If you hesitate, you're dead."
Isaac nodded once. "Wasn't planning on a reunion tour."
Diego looked away again. Something between relief and dread rolled through his chest.
The rest of the hike was tight with silence. Not the kind that bonded. The kind that built pressure.
They moved single file through a narrowing gully carved by years of storm runoff. The earth had split in places, exposing layers of shale and fossil-gray roots. Vultures circled wide overhead, drifting lazy circles like they could sense the math had changed.
Four now.
Diego felt it in the rhythm of their steps — the syncopation thrown off. Too many bodies. Too much sound. Shadows overlapped. Footfalls doubled.
Every shift in weight became a risk.
Four isn't a run. Four's a broadcast.
They reached a long stretch of cracked highway, warped by heat and time. Sun-bleached road signs jutted up from weeds like headstones. One still bore letters: KEEP RIGHT — a bitter joke, Diego thought, considering what they were doing.
They walked without speaking for an hour.
When they made camp, it was under the collapsed remains of a maintenance bridge. One end had fallen into a washout, the other barely held up by rust and prayer. The ground was dry. The air was turning cold.
The silence stretched.
Ration bars. Warm water. The girl stared at the sky while she chewed. The father sat cross-legged beside her, staring at nothing.
Isaac hadn't sat down at all.
He leaned against one of the tilted concrete beams, arms crossed, eyes on the horizon. Watching the line.
Finally, Diego spoke.
"You should've stayed gone."
It came out harder than he meant.
Isaac didn't flinch.
"I tried."
He said it like a fact. Not a defense.
Diego looked down at his hands. Rough. Scarred. He flexed them, but they didn't feel like they belonged to him anymore.
"I didn't know if you made it out," he said. "I told myself you did. That you were faster than me."
Isaac gave a soft, almost-smile. "You didn't believe that."
"No," Diego said. "I didn't."
The girl shifted. Just a small adjustment of weight, but Diego noticed.
Isaac looked past him toward her. His voice dropped a half-step.
"She made it, you know."
Diego frowned. "Who?"
"The girl. The one you carried out. The one you picked instead."
A pause.
"She made it to the Dome. Lived two years. Malnourished. Didn't speak. Ever."
Diego felt something collapse in his chest. A beam giving out under too much weight.
He didn't ask how Isaac knew. He didn't want to.
The fire they'd made flickered and hissed. Shadows danced over their faces like restless ghosts.
He stood and walked a few yards away, lighting a cigarette with hands that remembered how even if he didn't. He'd quit a long time ago. Said it was for his lungs, but really it was because every puff tasted like regret.
He watched the smoke bleed into the cold air.
Behind him, the girl finally spoke.
Quiet. Sharp.
"How many did you leave behind?"
It wasn't a question. Not really.
Diego didn't turn around. He just flicked the ash into the dirt and stared out into the dark, where the fence waited like a line drawn by a god who no longer cared which side you were on.
Tomorrow, they'd run for it.
Tonight, Diego lay in silence, under concrete and stars, beside the three people he might doom by morning.
And in his dreams, there were always five.
They moved before dawn.
Before the sky could decide whether to give them sun or storm.
No fire. No food. No words.
Only the sound of dry fabric brushing against skin and boots breaking crusted dirt.
The stars hadn't faded yet. They blinked faintly in the east, drowned by light pollution from somewhere they'd never reach. Diego led the way in silence, his eyes low, his breath slow. The old trenchline curved north like a trail carved into bone.
This was it — the final stretch.
Beyond the ridge was flatland. Beyond flatland was the fence.
And beyond the fence…
He didn't know.
No one ever told him what came after.
He reached the rise before the others. Dropped to one knee.
The wind was sharp now — not strong, but slicing. It carried that coppery scent that could've been dust or dried blood. In Texas, you learned to stop guessing.
He scanned the stretch ahead.
Just as he remembered: a wide-open sweep of earth, flat and brittle, broken only by the black remains of old utility poles and rusted fence posts sunk halfway into the dirt like forgotten warnings.
A hundred yards of nothing.
A hundred yards of everything.
The old border fence lay ahead, collapsed in some places, sagging in others. Beyond it, Oklahoma. The blockade perimeter. The illusion of something better.
Diego's throat tightened.
This was always the part where people got loud.
In breath. In panic. In dying.
He turned to the others.
His voice came out like dry gravel.
"We go now. Fast. One breath, one push. No breaks. No turns. If I go down, you do not stop."
Isaac gave a single nod.
The girl stared straight ahead.
Her father tightened his grip on her shoulder.
Diego's pulse slowed. He stepped forward.
The first fifty yards passed like smoke — there, then gone.
Boots pounded rhythm into the dirt. No words. Just heartbeat and friction and the occasional jolt of pain from Diego's knee that he ignored by force of habit.
He counted steps like prayers.
Twenty. Thirty. Forty.
Almost —
CRACK.
Gunfire, sharp and fast, punched the silence like a fist through glass.
The dirt near his leg exploded.
Diego dropped low, rolled behind a concrete post base half-buried in weeds. A second shot cracked air.
Then a burst.
Automatic.
From the south ridge.
Shouting followed. Men's voices. Clear. Controlled.
They'd been watching.
They hadn't missed the movement.
They were never late. They were already here.
Diego spun to yell, but the girl was already down — not hit, just frozen. Her father lunged for her, dragging her behind the remains of an old fencepost.
Another burst.
The father screamed.
He slumped sideways, blood blooming fast across his shirt. His fingers still curled around the duffel, but his eyes were wide. Distant. Unmoored.
The girl shrieked — a single, guttural note — and tried to pull him. He was too heavy.
Diego's body moved before his mind caught up.
He ran to her, low and fast, his shoulder blazing with fire from the weight of the rifle and the years he hadn't been young.
"Let him go!" he shouted.
She didn't. She was still trying.
Isaac shouted from the ridge behind them — a warning, maybe. Diego didn't hear the words, only the urgency.
The girl screamed again.
Another shot rang out — closer this time. Tight grouping. High caliber.
The father twitched. Then stopped.
Diego grabbed her.
She fought him — not out of rage, but refusal.
Her hands weren't fists. They were anchors.
He yanked her up anyway.
She weighed nothing. Skin and bones and shock.
He threw her over his shoulder and ran.
The world narrowed.
Time fractured.
He didn't think.
He ran.
The fence was thirty yards ahead. Barbed wire tangled like a crown of thorns. One section had been clipped. Isaac's work.
Isaac was there now, shouting, moving, covering — firing controlled bursts into the ridge.
They'd practiced this, once. Years ago. Before the fall. Before the dome. Before the girl he left behind and the boy he'd failed came back wearing each other's shadows.
The wire sparkled in the early light. Some of it was still live — the Militia had rigged certain sections to electrify randomly, a cruel trick designed to keep people guessing.
The wrong guess meant death.
Isaac raised bolt cutters and sliced the final strand.
SNAP.
"Go!" he barked.
Diego didn't slow. He ducked. The girl's hair caught a barb and ripped free. She didn't scream.
He threw her forward.
Isaac grabbed her, pulled her through.
Diego turned.
And saw the Militia cresting the ridge.
Four men. Gray uniforms. Glasses glinting.
One dropped to a knee. Scoped.
Diego saw the man line up the shot.
He dove sideways through the fence just as the crack split the morning.
He hit the ground hard.
Pain burst through his thigh. Heat bloomed, fast and wet.
He rolled, gasping.
Isaac pulled him, one hand on his vest, the other on his satchel. The girl helped too. Small hands, fast, steady.
They crawled behind a low rise.
Breathing.
Just breathing.
Blood pooled beneath Diego's leg. The bullet hadn't passed through.
Isaac was already working. Stripping cloth. Pressing gauze.
"You're lucky," he said, voice tight. "You're still here."
Diego looked at him. Really looked.
Isaac's eyes weren't angry anymore.
They were tired.
Like someone who'd stopped waiting for the apology and just wanted the silence to end.
The girl sat beside him.
She wasn't crying.
She just sat there. Watching.
Just like before, he thought. Just like her.
He looked toward the fence.
The wire still rattled in the wind.
The sound of it reminded him of breathing.
And of the time he told himself he'd stop crossing lines he couldn't come back from.
He reached for Isaac's arm.
His voice was raw.
"I left everything behind."
Isaac didn't flinch. Didn't look away.
"Not this time."
They sat together in the dirt, behind the line.
Behind the ghosts.
Behind the guilt.
The sun was rising, pale and slow, across a land that wasn't Texas.
It wasn't freedom.
But it wasn't where they started.
And for now…
That was enough.
They didn't speak again until the sun was full above the horizon, stretching thin gold over everything. The wind had shifted again — softer now, but still cold. It stirred the dust in slow spirals across the open field.
The girl sat beside Diego, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her face was blank, not from fear or shock, but from something older. Something practiced. She'd stopped crying before they crossed the fence.
That silence — that readiness — unsettled him more than the gunfire.
He wondered how many other crossings she'd survived before this one.
He didn't ask.
He'd stopped asking questions a long time ago.
Isaac stood a few yards away, scanning the landscape with steady hands and half-lidded eyes. Not relaxed, but alert in a quiet way. He wasn't looking for enemies.
He was looking for signs.
Of patrols.
Of safehouses.
Of something human beyond this field of wreckage.
He'd taken the satchel off and laid it carefully in the dirt beside him.
He hadn't opened it again.
Diego still didn't know what was inside. But whatever it was, it mattered enough for Isaac to cross the border under fire to carry it.
Maybe information. Maybe medicine. Maybe names.
Maybe a future Diego didn't have the right to touch.
The wound in Diego's leg was still bleeding, but slower now. Isaac had packed it with gauze and wrapped it tight with the torn sleeve of his own shirt. The pain was distant. Like it belonged to someone else.
Diego watched the girl absently sketch circles in the dust with her finger.
He wondered how long it would take before they turned into symbols. Messages. Warning signs. Children in this world didn't draw suns and trees.
They drew routes.
Escape paths.
Graves.
He looked down at his hands.
Callused. Weathered. Still shaking.
There was blood under his nails that wasn't his.
How many did you leave behind?
The girl's voice echoed in his skull.
She hadn't asked it like an accusation.
She'd asked it like a statistic.
A number.
Like every adult was a ledger, and their total had already been written.
He thought of Isaac's words:
"Not this time."
He didn't know if that was forgiveness.
Maybe it was just a truce.
Either way, it was more than he deserved.
Diego looked past the girl, past the barbed wire behind them.
The fence was still rattling in the breeze, humming softly — like a memory that refused to die.
He watched it for a long time.
It didn't matter that they'd crossed.
The sound followed you.
He closed his eyes.
In his dreams — the ones that would come tonight, and every night after — he'd still be at the fence. Still carrying someone. Still hearing the shot that came too late or too soon.
But he'd also see this morning.
This air.
This silence.
The girl.
His son.
The blood-soaked field behind them.
And this time…
This time, he'd remember what he carried out.
Thanks for reading. If you want more from the Unified States of Texas, the newsletter drops new reports and release news direct to your inbox.
Join the Newsletter Back to USTXAn exhausted teenage girl fleeing through a deadly eastern border forest, hunted by a relentless Militia tracker, must decide whether to keep running or turn and fight if she wants to reach the mythical Ferryman waiting with his lantern on the river to freedom.
The trees crowd close and the night is colder than she thought it could be. Mara runs with her hands out, palms tasting bark and slick moss, the air like glass in her throat. Breath fogs. It floats, glows, disappears. Her ribs feel wired tight.
Two hours since the gunshot.
She doesn't say Jonah's name in her head. If she names it, it will break her. She keeps the count instead — steps, breaths, the throb of blood behind her eyes. She counts pine trunks. She counts the spaces between them.
Left. Down the slope. Careful. Roots like knuckles. The ground gives, then hardens. Leaf rot. Stone. A slick of mud that makes her foot skid and her knee bite. She stifles the sound against the back of her teeth.
Moonlight knives through the canopy and lays a silver stripe across the ground. She stops before she touches it. The light is blessing and betrayal. Out there she's a shape with edges.
She waits for the woods to settle. She waits for her pulse to climb down from her throat.
The forest breathes around her: a single owl, too far; the fizz of insects, steady; the slow tick of cooling metal somewhere behind — no, not metal, the memory of it. She drags her sleeve across her face. The sleeve is stiff with — don't think it. Don't.
He said her name once, an hour in. Calm, like the beginning of a conversation. He said it like he knew her kitchen, like he'd seen her carry in groceries. Mara. Not shouted. Placed. As if a hand on the shoulder.
Now the voice is gone. Or swallowed. The pines hold sound and return it when they want.
She eases sideways, bent low, staying in the dark band. Needles crackle under her boots, too loud. Every crack feels like a signal flare. She crouches and slides a palm along the nearest trunk until her fingers find it: a shallow cut in the bark, a crooked arrow. The mark catches a sliver of moon and winks back. Scavenger script. Not hers, not her hand — but kin enough. Jonah had sworn the river lay that way, always down the fall of the land, the water drawing even when you can't hear it.
Jonah's laugh, quiet and small, as if he was afraid to wake the dark. You let the ground tell you. It wants to.
She pushes the thought away the way she pushes breath — out, fog, gone. If she holds it, it'll pull everything else in.
Keep moving.
Branches reach for her. They snag at her jacket and whisper across her neck. She moves with the grain of the trees, not fighting, not forcing a straight line. The cold finds every wet patch and turns it to ice against her skin. Her hair is a net of twigs. She had a hat once. She doesn't remember losing it.
In the dip between two ridges, the night is deeper, closer. She tastes damp and iron. Her lungs hitch. She keeps her head low and lets her eyes adjust until the dark becomes shape — trunk, rock, the cupped black of a hollow. The moon clears a tear in the canopy and paints the hollow's lip in a weak halo.
Don't go there. Open ground. She slides along its edge instead, boots soft, breath counted.
There — behind her, far, then closer, the brush of something heavy through low growth. Not hurried. Not lost. The weight of a man who knows where to put his feet.
She presses into a seam of shadow and goes still.
Silence folds. The fizz of insects falters. A twig pops and she feels it in her teeth.
His voice doesn't come. The absence of it is worse. Her body wants to run. Her legs tremble with the wanting. She keeps them quiet. She pictures herself like a stone in a stream, water going around. The night slicks over her.
Two hours since the blood ran warm over her fingers.
A flash — Sullivan's mouth opening, not a word, just shape. The weight in her hand, not heavy until after, then too much to lift, then impossible to set down. The world had narrowed to the small circle they stood inside: the crate, the lantern, the scuffed dirt. Then widened like a pulled stitch, tearing.
Stop. Stop.
She lets the memory pass like a cough she refuses to let out. Her eyes burn. She blinks until the trees are trees again.
She moves.
The slope turns to a long, slow lean and her calves start to shake. She drinks the air in quick, careful sips, like too-cold water. The mark on the last tree repeats on the next — a reassurance, then another, lower, almost lost under a blister of sap. Someone carved these in wet weather and didn't come back to clean them. Jonah would have. He would have run his thumb over the edges and smiled that small, stupid smile —
No.
A thin thread of sound rides the night. Not his voice, not yet. A click. Something mechanical. She flattens. The click does not repeat. It might have been a beetle. It might have been a safety. It might have been nothing at all.
She wants to crawl. Crawling would be quiet, low, safe. Crawling would be too slow. She forces her thighs to lift and place and lift, feeling each foot meet the ground as if her soles had eyes.
The moon slides behind a cloud. The dark grows kinder.
A cold drip touches her wrist and runs under her cuff. She bites the inside of her lip until it hurts. Pain is a handle. She holds it rather than the other thing.
When the ground flattens, she risks a longer stride, just one, then two. A bramble tries to bite her ankle and she steps high, too high, and the branch snaps back with a whip-crack.
Silence answers.
Then, at last, his voice: "You're getting sloppy, Mara."
It comes from a direction that makes no sense. Not behind, not to the left; the trees throw it and the night delivers it back from above, like the moon spoke it.
Her heart flips. She sprints three steps and stops herself, palms on bark, mouth open, no sound. The taste of sap is sharp and bitter on her tongue.
"It's colder in the bottoms," Mercer says, conversational. "River air. You'll feel it before you hear it. That's how you know you're close."
She swallows. Her body wants to believe him because her body wants anything that sounds like a map. She sets her jaw until it aches and watches the dark.
A beam of light slices the pines two ridges over, thin and searching, a false moon dragged by a careless hand. He's not as close as his voice. Or he is, and the light is a lie, and she will die because she believed the wrong brightness.
Keep moving.
Mara folds herself along the line of a fallen trunk, steps in the black water pooled in its belly, and lets the mud take her sound. The cold climbs her legs like hands. She doesn't shiver; shivering is noise. She watches the beam drift and cut and vanish. She waits for the bugs to come back, and when they do, she takes it as permission.
Down. Always down.
She finds another mark, almost missed: two small cuts, then a third beneath, like an uneven arrow. Someone in a hurry. Jonah would have slowed, would have centered it, would have said — Stop. She presses her thumb to the mark until it hurts and moves on.
The air changes. She knows it before she understands: something opens. The tight sap-thick breath of the woods thins and there's a slip of something colder, wider. Her chest stutters. Not wind. Not yet. A promise of wind. The ground under the needles feels damp in a new way.
The moon frees itself from cloud and lays a blade across the world. It glances off something ahead, low, a scatter of pale among black. Stones? Water? Eyes?
She crouches so fast her knees complain. She waits. The pale doesn't blink. Stones then, or water, or bones. The word bones arrives with a weight she refuses.
Mercer hums, somewhere to her right, off-key, a nothing tune. The hum has the shape of a smile.
Mara puts her palm flat to the earth. It is cold and faintly trembling.
River.
Relief surges so strong it scares her. It feels like standing up too fast. It feels like turning your back on a fire. She clamps it down. Between her and the water, there can still be a mile. Between her and the water, there can be a man.
She skims the edge of a thicket, lets the thorns comb her sleeve, counts ten, twenty, thirty steps. She chooses not to step into the next wash of moon. She goes under it, around it, a shadow refusing to be cut.
When she can't help it — when the ground drops and the trees fall back and the silver lays itself out like a dare — she runs. Three strides. Four. The open bites her skin like wind. She dives into the next dark and nearly kisses the dirt.
The hum stops.
Silence, then: "Almost there," Mercer says softly, pleased. "I can smell it too."
Her teeth ache with the want to answer. To say No. To say You're wrong. To say Sullivan bled because I made him, and I'll make you bleed too. The words crowd her mouth and she swallows them until her throat burns.
She breathes. Counts. Breathes again.
Down. Ferryman. Lantern.
She moves.
The woods narrow until walking feels like moving inside a ribcage. Every tree is a bone, every branch a finger. Mara keeps her body low, one hand on bark to keep the night from turning her sideways. Her breath makes ghosts in the cold and the ghosts hang there as if they might point the way she went.
Two hours since the gunshot. Don't count it. She counts anyway.
The last mark on the tree was almost gone to moss. A crooked arrow, shallow cut, a hurry in the hand that made it. She pressed her thumb into it until the bark bit and her skin stung. Pain is a tether. Pain tells the truth. She wants the marks to be Jonah's, steady and centered, but these are not. These are from someone else who survived only long enough to carve and keep moving.
A dry snap. Behind. Too clean to be accident.
"You were quieter when Sullivan was alive."
Mercer's voice does not arrive so much as it is placed in the air. Calm. Light as dust. The trees receive it and offer it back from the wrong direction.
Mara's back flattens to bark. She holds her breath until it hurts and then some. Her fingers itch with the memory of weight. The lantern. The wood. The skull that was not stone until it was.
"He was green," Mercer says, unhurried. "Still thought a rifle makes a man taller. You didn't kill a soldier, Mara. You killed a farm boy who borrowed a shirt."
Silence folds around her like a heavy coat. Even the insects tuck in their wings. She counts the beats in her throat — one-two, one-two — until the hush loosens enough to move.
Downhill. Always downhill. The ground turns slick and greedy, roots clutching at her boot soles like hands under a sheet. The air is thicker here, wetter. Her mouth tastes like a rain barrel left too long in shade. River-close, her body whispers. Or Mercer-close, her fear answers. Believe the ground, Jonah had said. It wants to tell you.
She keeps her eyes where the dark is a shade lighter. A seam opens through the undergrowth and she slides into it, shoulders brushing needles. A strand of hair plasters to her cheek; she leaves it. Hands have to stay free.
A beam of light licks the trunks two ridges over — thin, white, careless. She drops flat, belly into cold, and the pine needles press their points through her jacket as if counting her ribs. The mud soaks quick and the chill climbs.
She does not move. Does not breathe. The false moon drifts and paints stripes on bark and then moves on.
"Jonah was braver." A notch of silence. "Ran his mouth like it could stop bullets. That's why he got one first."
Her teeth find the soft place inside her lip and bite until iron blooms. She swallows the memory that surges — Jonah's knees buckling, the sound his body made when it forgot how to be held up, her own voice cracking open into something she didn't recognize. She stuffs it back down with blood and breath and numbers.
She slides on her elbows until a fallen trunk shields her, then rises into a crouch and waits until the bugs dare to buzz again. When they do, she takes it like permission and moves.
Another mark. This one is deeper, cleaner, angled to catch a seam of moon. She presses her palm to it, holds it there, as if contact can transmit steadiness. Jonah would have run his thumb along it and said something too soft for a night like this. She refuses the shape of that thought. She will not let softness be louder than trees.
Mercer hums. A nothing tune, off-key. The sound rolls through the pines as if the forest itself has decided to mock her. He isn't panting. He isn't winded. He walks as if along a fence line he's checked a hundred times.
She wants to answer with nothing. Wants to make him small, make him not matter, make him a voice she can fold and put away. But even refusing him takes effort, and effort makes sound.
"Ferryman won't help you," he says, a little longer now, almost companionable. "Never has. You brats pass the story along like a quilt, and you pull it over your heads when the wind picks up. But the river isn't a bed, Mara. It's water. Cold. Dark. It'll take you under before I have to lay a hand on you."
Her body leans toward the words because they sound like certainty and certainty is warm. She catches herself and leans back into cold instead. Cold is honest. She breathes in counts and lets the counts crowd out the promise of rest. One-two. One-two. Don't think. Don't stop.
Branches claw at her sleeves and she lets them. Scratches hide better than cleared paths. The moon rips a tear in the canopy and spills silver across a stretch of ground ahead — a clean stage. She does not step into it. She waits in the wings until the light drifts and the curtain of dark falls again.
"Sloppy, Mara. Sloppy."
Near. Or not. The pines bend sound as water bends light. She imagines him smiling without showing teeth.
She slides sideways, keeps the hill on her right shoulder, fingers finding grooves and knots that anchor her in place and time. A beetle ticks along the skin of a log. In the distance, something yips and is answered. The forest has its own speech, and tonight it speaks in chitter and hush.
The air shifts — subtle, a change in weight rather than temperature. The sap-thick breath of the trees thins. The damp in the needles is different. A wider dark opens ahead, not emptier but less crowded. She feels it in her knees before she knows it in her head.
The ground slides under her like a tilted plate, always down, never level. Her calves are a fire of glass shards, her throat rubbed raw by breath and cold. She wants to fold where she stands, curl into the leaves, vanish into the soil. The thought is loud, too loud, so she smothers it with another: downhill means river. Downhill means lantern. Downhill means Ferryman.
But each step costs more. The woods are winning, and Mercer knows it.
She finds another mark. This one steadier. A long slash, then a shorter one, then the arrow tail beneath. Scavenger script carved true, deliberate. She presses her thumb into it until splinters rise against her skin. Jonah had shown her how to read them — brief, low voice, as if speaking to bark instead of her. See the weight of the cut, Mara? A man tired would carve shallow. A man sure would dig deep.
Jonah was sure. Jonah is gone.
Her legs tremble as if the memory itself steals strength. She leans her forehead against the trunk, cool bark grounding her, but the memory won't go. The lantern glare in Jonah's eyes. The Militia's steady hands. The sound when the bullet spoke. His mouth half-open, as if he still had words, even then.
Mercer's voice slips in, the echo of that moment twisted cruel: "He thought he was clever. Thought he could bargain. They always think that, until they see the barrel."
Mara's stomach knots. She jerks herself away from the tree, breath sharp. He wasn't there. He hadn't fired the shot. But he talks like he owns it, like Jonah's death is his story to tell. Rage lifts in her chest, quick and hot, but she shoves it down before it can become sound.
She pushes on, following the marks, but slower now. Her body is losing. She knows it, and worse — Mercer knows it too. He doesn't hurry. His voice drifts in snatches: a hum, a word, a scrape of boot. Always where she isn't looking.
She wants to cry. The pressure is there, behind her eyes, the sting waiting to break. But tears are water, and water shines in moonlight. She can't risk the glow on her face. She bites the inside of her cheek until iron steadies her again.
At the base of the ridge, the woods close tighter, forcing her to crawl under branches slick with dew. She drags herself through, palms sinking into damp loam. Each pull is agony, each push a prayer. She imagines Jonah crawling ahead of her, steady, muttering keep low, keep moving. For a breath, she believes he's there. For a breath, she isn't alone.
The illusion dies with the next sound. A whistle. Three notes. Not a song, not quite. Enough to freeze her blood.
"You're tiring, Mara." His voice carries clean through the whistle, as if it was all one breath. "River won't wait for you. Neither will I."
Her lungs rebel. She clutches the earth, heart pounding so loud it feels like she's the one whistling. Her muscles scream to run, but she doesn't. Not this time. She stays low, lets the voice pass like a storm wind. The whistle fades.
That's when the thought hits: she won't make it like this.
Not with Mercer dogging her steps. Not with her legs breaking piece by piece. The Ferryman is still ahead, but Mercer is too close. The math doesn't work. She'll reach the river and collapse into his hands before she ever sees the lantern.
She crouches there, cold mud seeping through her knees, and the truth lands: if she wants the Ferryman, she has to stop Mercer.
The realization frightens her more than the chase itself. She's sixteen. She's tired. She's no soldier. Jonah should have been the one to fight. But Jonah is gone, and Sullivan is gone, and there's only her.
Her mind pulls up Sullivan's face without asking. The O his mouth made. The weight in her hand. She doesn't want it, but it's there. A ghost on her palm. She flexes her fingers until bark scratches the memory raw.
She hears Jonah's voice again, not mocking, not cruel. Real. Memory. You let the ground tell you. It wants to.
The ground is telling her something now. It slopes into a gully ahead, roots weaving a net over a hollow. A choke point. A place where the moon can't cut as clean. A place where a man could be stopped.
She crouches, scanning the place, measuring in the way Jonah used to measure when deciding where to rest. Except she isn't resting. She's deciding where Mercer will bleed.
Her stomach twists, but her body steadies. She's run long enough. The Ferryman isn't just across the river — he's on the other side of Mercer. And the only way to reach him is through.
Her breath fogs. She lets it. No more hiding the proof that she's alive. Mercer already knows.
"Not far now," Mercer calls, tone almost kind. "I'll take you in warm. Won't let them rough you too bad. You've earned that much."
The words would almost soothe, if she didn't know better. They almost sound like mercy. Almost.
She lowers into the gully, body pressed against the slope, hands finding purchase in cold earth. She steadies herself, heart beating not with panic but with something new. Not Jonah's steadiness, not yet — but close.
The forest presses around her, waiting. The moonlight slants sharp across the roots above, a silver trap. Mara sets her jaw. She is done running.
The gully is a slit in the earth, roots knuckled across its lip like a woven fence. Moonlight can't quite find the bottom; it falls in thin rations and leaves the rest to damp and smell. Mara eases onto her belly and lets the slope take her weight, palms splaying into cold that feels older than the night.
The ground wants to help, Jonah had said. Let it.
She listens. Above, the pines whisper like a congregation deciding whether to stand. Beneath, water she can't see nervouses through the soil, a slow pulse under everything. Somewhere in the left-hand distance, a fox yips and then regrets it. Closer, needles give to something heavy, then spring.
Mercer moves without hurry. He is the kind of man who believes the woods are his. The belief makes his feet sound sure.
Mara maps the place the way Jonah taught, but silently, with touch more than sight. Her right hand finds a fallen limb near the rim — half-rotten and furred with lichen on the underside, but stiff where the heartwood still holds. Her left hand finds stones — one the size of a plum, smooth and cold; one flat like a skipping rock; one jagged enough to bite.
She gathers mud with her fingertips and smears it across the clean skin of her wrists. The damp steals heat she can't spare. It will keep her scent down, he'd said. Or maybe he hadn't — maybe that was something she read in the panic of her own mind and gave Jonah's voice to because it felt truer that way.
The flashlight beam skates the ridge above, thin and white, and the gully becomes a mouth with a pale tongue licking its teeth. She pulls the limb into the shadow with her, eases its end under a snarl of root, tests the give. It holds. If someone steps there with weight and the roots are wet —
She crawls lower, tucking into a curve where the earth cups her. The mud grips her elbows and her jacket drinks it greedily. She wants to shake out her hands but cannot afford even that small sound. She lays the flat stone where her fingers can find it again without looking. She lays the jagged one under her thumb.
She waits.
Waiting is its own pain. Time does heavy things in the dark. It tries to put her back inside the lantern circle, back at the crate's edge, back where Sullivan's face opened like it had been waiting. She doesn't go. If she goes, she'll drown in that moment and when the present arrives it will arrive without her.
She breathes in counts until her chest loosens. The cold talks to her bones. Her bones agree to stay.
Mercer hums. The tune is nothing, but he gives it the confidence of a song that can't be wrong. The hum stops. The needles shift. The breath of the forest holds.
"Mara." Not loud. Placed. Closer than before. "You're smart to go quiet. Quiet gets you farther than brave." A pause shaped like a smile. "I can carry you, you know. If that's what you want."
He's on the ridge now. She knows it by the way the light falls different and the damp under her hands feels peeled. She presses herself flatter and feels for the limb with her toes. When she has it between boot and root, she waits for the exact wrong step that will make it right.
Mercer's boots test the rim. His light angles into the gully and slides along the root snarl, searching for a path that won't wet his knees. He knows better than to step where leaves lie too smoothly. He knows better than to trust ground that doesn't look walked. He has done this. He has done this and lived.
The beam creams across a notch in the roots and catches the pale of her knuckles where she presses into earth. She pulls her hand deeper. The light drifts on.
He chooses the place she would have chosen if she were him: a twist of roots that look braided into something sturdy, an old root thick as a wrist crossing under newer growth. He sets one foot light on it, tests, then commits. The weight shifts from testing to trusting. His second foot lifts, looking for the next certainty.
Mara shoves the limb with her boot.
It pops free of the root with a wet suck and snaps upward, then inward, like a trap jaw. Mercer's testing foot skids on peeled bark, weight dumping where the old root is weakest. It goes with a sound like a man trying not to say a word — held breath, then break. His shin slides down the slick and his knee twists into the hole where the rotten meets the sound. For a heartbeat he is an animal trying to learn a new way to have legs.
Mara moves.
She rises in the gully like a question mark, one hand on the cold, the other swinging. The flat stone finds the flashlight first. She doesn't aim for his face. She aims for the light. The stone's edge kisses the lens and the world goes from white to shards to sudden dark, the beam becoming a handful of useless stars. Mercer swears — short, the word stripped down to bone — and his free hand comes toward the sound he thinks she is.
She is already elsewhere. The gully teaches her how.
He lunges on instinct, not grace, and the bad knee scolds him with a crack that puts a sharper word in his mouth. He catches her hair instead of her throat. Pain blooms where the scalp is cruelest. She tries not to give him the cry he wants, but a small one gets out anyway, and the forest gives it back to both of them. He hauls and her head goes the wrong way and the sky shatters into toothy pine.
She doesn't fight the pull — she runs with it. She steps into him, close enough to smell wool and salt and the metal-smell that lives on men who carry rifles too long. Her left hand spits mud into his eyes. Her right hand brings the jagged stone down on his ear, not full force — there's no room for full force — but enough to jar.
He grunts and the hand in her hair loosens. She drives her shoulder into his ribs where the jacket gives, trying to make his balance choose something stupid. The slope helps. His bad leg slides back into the wrongness, trying to learn ground that isn't there. They go down together, but only he falls. She rides him like a thrown thing and jumps off at the last breath, letting gravity have him alone.
He hits with a loss of air that sounds like surrender's first cousin. The rifle skitters across the gully mouth and clacks against root. The broken flashlight globe glitters like frost on the dirt where his hand scrabbles for it and finds glass instead of power.
"All right," he says, surprisingly calm for a man who just lost the world's up and down. "All right." His voice is in the gully with her now, not a ghost but an animal, panting for a second before it remembers its training. "That was tidy."
He pushes to roll. She doesn't let him. She drops her knee into the good shoulder and feels it connect with a noise she'd like to forget later. He catches her wrist in a strong hand and squeezes until bone complains. The stone falls from her fingers, a dull clack lost in needles. He tries to ride her weight the way she rode his, and for a blink she feels the same tilt that pulled him. The gully wants both.
She writhes sideways, not up, and the gully approves. His grip loosens just enough. She slaps her palm into mud and flings the whole handful across his face. It strings dark between them. He curses with more syllables this time.
His other hand finds the fabric at her collar, bunches it, tries to own the space between her neck and the cold. She wedges her forearm across his throat, not to crush but to take away choices. He's stronger. He's larger. But the slope makes liars of measures.
"Sullivan," he manages, grinning blood into his teeth like the taste proves a point. "That was luck."
"Maybe," she says, the first word she has allowed the night to have. Her voice sounds not like her. It sounds like a place. She will think about that later. Not now.
She presses her weight into the forearm and reaches with her other hand, searching the ground for something that can be a ending. Her fingers find the flat stone again, slick now, trying to sneak away. She pins it against a root, gets a grip, brings it up once, not high. Enough.
He jerks and catches her wrist. The stone stops a breath from his temple. He's fast, even in a hole the earth dug to keep him. He laughs, a short dog-bark, proud of himself for the small thing. His bad leg tries to help and sends a message of pain that steals half that pride back. His grip shifts.
She doesn't aim for the skull. She aims for the ear again — the tender hinge at the side of the head where noise becomes thought. She turns the stone and rakes, not smashes. Pain sharpens faster than blunt ends, Jonah had said once, cutting a fish for the pan.
Mercer yells, real, not reshaped for cruelty. The yell tears pieces off the night and throws them at the trees. A bird explodes out of the canopy and vanishes. The woods ring and then recoil.
He bucks, and the gully tries to decide whom it loves more. She slides with him, keeps the forearm where it needs to be, not choking, just trapping choices. "Easy," he rasps, of all words. "You don't have to…" He swallows glass. "You don't want to be the kind that —"
"Shut up," she says, and the words feel like a good cut in bad bark.
He tries to turn that into a conversation. She doesn't let him have the room. She shifts her weight to her knees, pins his good wrist with one and his shoulder with the other. The position is ugly and true. She can't hold it long. She doesn't need long.
The rifle is half on the lip of the gully, sling tangled in roots like the forest has opinions. She cannot reach it without giving him back leverage. She doesn't need the rifle. She needs him to stop.
She drives the stone into the soft of his temple, not with rage, but with the flat certainty of a necessary thing. Once. The light that isn't there anyway goes out of his eyes for a second, then tries to crawl back in. Twice. The second time makes his body choose limp as a tactic. She waits to see if it's a tactic.
His chest rises and falls. His eyes try to decide whether the world is worth focusing again. They pick no and close. His mouth mutters a word she doesn't know or refuses to hear. The bad leg lies wrong.
She holds the position long past when her arms start to shake. She waits for trickery because men who talk like he talks find trickery a kind of mercy they owe themselves. He doesn't move. The forest retakes the space they borrowed from it. The bugs come back in ones and twos. Somewhere, water ticks inside the earth like a slow watch.
She rolls off him and into the gully wall and lets it hold her upright. Mud prints her shoulder like a hand. Her own hands don't feel like they belong to her. They're too far away and too loud.
She wants to cry now, and could, and doesn't. Not here. Not with a man who might be pretending to sleep.
She stands. The standing is worse than the fighting. Her legs negotiate new terms with her. She pays a price she'll feel when the sun exists again.
Mercer breathes. He will live if the night allows it. He will not follow her fast, not with that knee, not with that head. She looks at him too long and the looking tries to make him into a person. She stops looking. She finds the broken flashlight by her boot and, without thinking, tosses it deep into brush where even a careful hand will take minutes to find it. She sets the rifle further from him with her foot, deeper into roots. The forest will make a project of it.
She wipes her hands on dirt and the dirt decides to keep her blood. Her palms sting. Her scalp stings in a circle where his grip tore skin.
"Mercer," she says to the gully, testing his sleep. He doesn't answer. "Stay." It isn't a threat. It's a wish she gives the trees to manage.
The air has the river's breath in it, clearer now that her own breath has space to listen. She lifts her face to taste it and it tastes like metal and promise. The slope she needs is there, the one that will take her down to where the ground opens its hands.
Her body offers her a chair made of leaves and the idea of never getting up. She declines the chair. She takes the hill.
As she climbs out of the gully, her foot slips on the peeled place where Mercer fell. She steadies herself on the roots he trusted. The spot knows her now. It lets her pass.
At the top she pauses, just once, and looks back — not at him, but at the shape the ground takes when a decision has been made. The shape is ugly and true. She commits it to memory the way she memorizes marks on bark.
"Down," she tells the dark. "Ferryman. Lantern."
The words are not hope this time. They are a plan.
She moves.
The air loosens first. The breath of the pines thins and slides wider, the smell turning sharp with metal. Mara lifts her head and the forest seems to exhale her. The ground beneath her boots grows soft with seepage, needles clinging wet to her soles. Her mouth tastes iron.
River-close.
She wrings what strength is left out of her legs and lets the slope pull. Trunks become crutches, bark scars turning into rungs on a ladder that leans downhill. The canopy frays into ragged strips. Moonlight unrolls in long silver tongues that feel like orders more than gifts. She obeys, though every instinct claws for shadow.
The trees break. The world opens.
The river is a black road, thick and moving. Moon cuts it into shifting plates of white. It eats the bank slow, patient, and throws mist in small breaths. Mara stops at the edge, shoes sinking into cold silt. Her knees try to end her. She refuses them.
Across the water — light.
A lantern, low and steady. Not the skittering tremor of a lone firefly or the lie of reflection. Fixed. Patient. Held.
Her chest swells too fast. Hope is heavier than fear. She clamps her jaw until her teeth ache and makes herself still. The glow does not wink out. It sways a little, the way a lantern sways from a wrist that knows boats.
She squints until her eyes water and sees the shape of a man with the water at his knees, a skiff's dark spine beside him. The lantern lifts slightly, enough to show her where the boat's lip waits.
The Ferryman.
Behind her, the woods hold their breath. No bugs. No owl. Nothing that will tell her if Mercer stands in the dark, listening.
She doesn't look back. She steps forward.
The river takes her boots in both hands. Cold knifes through leather into bone. Her calves seize and then surrender, muscles hitching as the current pets her the wrong way. She staggers. The shove at her hip is not cruel, not kind. Just water doing what water has always done.
"Easy," a voice calls across the dark, low and even. "There you are."
It is not Mercer's voice. It doesn't curl. It doesn't taunt. The sound fits the river the way river stones fit the riverbed — true, long-used.
She wades deeper. The water rises to mid-thigh, then higher, a slow bite up her ribs. Her arms float out for balance and the current slaps at her elbows as if arguing. Panic flares and dies. Numbers hold her: one-two, one-two. Same as in the woods. She almost laughs at that, but her mouth is busy with breath.
"Keep to your left," the voice says. "There's a shelf. Feel for it with your foot."
She feels. Her toes skid, then find something that resists — a lip of gravel. She plants on it. The river's pull changes from wrench to drag. She takes the next step and the next.
Behind her, something breaks in the trees — a branch, a promise. She doesn't turn. She reaches for the boat. Her fingers meet wood. Slick, real, splinter-cut true. Relief hits her so hard it might have been another current; she leans, and the skiff shifts and holds. The lantern tips and rights and throws gold across her wet hands.
A man stands there, close now, boots braced in the shallows. Face weathered into usefulness, not secrecy. Lines made by sun and wind rather than menace. A beard salted with gray. His eyes catch the lantern and flicker with it — dark first, then warm.
"Got you," he says, and his hand comes down and it is warm. Not the fever-warm of fear, but the remembered warmth of stoves and skin. His grip takes her whole hand like it was made for it. Steady. He does not yank; he leans and lets the river give her to him. He lifts her as if weight is a thing to be negotiated, not conquered. She folds into the boat like laundry taken in from rain and sits hard on the rough plank, water slapping from her clothes.
Her lungs cough river. It hurts and feels right. She coughs again and a third time until air remembers her.
"Easy now, darling," he murmurs, close to her ear, voice low enough the river will keep it. "You're safe."
The words land heavier than Mercer's hours of talking. They push at the panic like a hand flattening a sheet and the wrinkles quiet.
He tips the lantern to the side peg and it hooks there and makes a soft circle out of boat and girl and man. He doesn't ask questions yet. He moves. The skiff noses free with a sound like a sigh. He braces one boot and pushes off from the riverbed. The boat slides deeper and the bank pulls itself away.
He turns them with a long pole and a gentle arm, and the current takes what he gives it and gives back a path. The trees on the far bank are a different black, less crowded. The sky over there seems wider, though that might be a trick of wanting.
Mara hugs herself, but it isn't enough. The cold is inside her bones now, knocking for entry in her teeth. The Ferryman sees it without looking and stoops under the bench. When he straightens, he has a thick coat in his hands — oilcloth outside, wool within. He shakes it once to free the river from it and lays it across her shoulders like a blessing someone earned.
"Hold that tight," he says. "You've done the worst of it."
She nods, a small, jerky thing. "There's a man," she gets out, voice shredded. "Mercer. Knee's wrong. Might be behind."
"I know the name," he says, neutral as he would say wind. He doesn't look over her shoulder. He adjusts their angle instead, quiet, efficient. "Night's got him for now."
"What if he —"
"If he makes it to the bank, I won't be there." Not bravado. Not a promise he can't keep. Just the plan spoken simple. "Turn about and look only at me."
She does. The lantern glosses his cheek in thin gold, picks out the threads of gray in his beard. He studies her in one quick pass — the way a man checks the tie on his own boat — then rests a hand light on her shoulder. It's not ownership. It's anchorage.
"You did well," he says. "You came alone. That's no small thing."
"Jonah," she says. The name is a drop of iron. "They —"
He nods once. The nod says he knows how the rest of that sentence ends and won't make her carry it any farther right now. "I'm sorry, darling."
The word darling should sound borrowed in a mouth like his. It doesn't. It sounds like a small plank laid between two places, steady enough to cross.
The river is thicker here, more insistent. He leans his weight into the pole and the skiff slews and then straightens. His movements are quiet as thinking. If he's afraid, he's given the fear a chore to do and it's busy with it.
Mara's breathing evens in fits and starts. The coat drinks what the river left of her. Her hands remember how to be hands. Her eyes sting, then clear. She chances a look back, not to the dark line of trees but to the water already behind. It shows her nothing except itself, and that is a mercy.
He steadies the bow with his hip, holds out both hands. "Up you come."
When her boots land in the mud of the far bank, he nods once, lantern painting gold across her face.
"You're across," he says, then softer, as if giving her the password to her own freedom: "You're in America now."
Her throat tightens. For the first time all night, she lets herself believe she's made it.
Thanks for reading. If you want more from the Unified States of Texas, the newsletter drops new reports and release news direct to your inbox.
Join the Newsletter Back to USTX
