Clove tried to slow down again. Sweat streaked his back and flanks, and I felt shame for how hard I’d driven him for no good reason. The anger that had coursed through me suddenly subsided into hopelessness. I let him slow, and as the rattle of the cart decreased, my ears picked up the thunder of other hoofbeats. I glanced over my shoulder, and had a single, fleeting glimpse of mounted men coming up behind me, fast. I saw a muzzle flash.

Something was very wrong. I was breathing dust instead of air. A great crack had opened in my head, and light was pouring into my brain. It hurt. I tried to lift my hand to cover the crack, but my fingers only feebly twitched at dry dust. Every breath I sucked in pulled dust with it. I knew I should lift my head from the ground. It was too much trouble.

“Think he’s dead?” someone asked me. I couldn’t work my mouth.

Someone answered for me.

“Good as dead. This could be big trouble. Damn it, Jace. Slowing him down is one thing. Killing him is another.”

“He was trying to get away. You seen how he run that horse. Hoster said he might try to get rid of it if we didn’t get it right away. I had to shoot.”

Jace was angry, not repentant.

“Calm down. No one’s going to care if we prove he’s guilty.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill him. When he slowed, it spoiled my aim. His own damn fault for turning to look back at us.”

Someone else spoke. “I didn’t bargain for this. I’m sorry I got mixed up in this whole mess. I’m going back to town.”

“We all are,” the first voice decided. “Jace, you drive the cart.” Horses’

hooves striking the earth. Wheels turning. Then silence. I tried closing my eyes to keep the glaring light out of my skull, but my eyes were already closed. It just went on hurting and hurting. I tried to be unconscious or asleep. I failed. Lights bloomed across my vision and then faded. Pain burst and ebbed with the light. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened to me. Trying to think hurt too much. Stillness without thinking still hurt. The intensity of the pain suddenly increased. The throb of my heart was like a wave slamming against the inside of my skull.

Several days of agony seemed to pass. Then I could move my hand. I put it up to touch my head. Blood. A flap of scalp. The hardness of bone beneath my wet, questing fingers, and some rough splinters. The rip of the bullet’s passage was a ragged groove across the back of my skull. I was dying.

Time stopped. It seemed impossible that dying could take so long. Perhaps time dragged only because it hurt so badly, and because I was waiting for it to stop. Dully, I began to count the throbs that corresponded to the beating of my heart. I reached twenty. One hundred. Two hundred. I felt my eyeballs pressing against my eyelids, as if they wanted to leave my skull. Five hundred. A thousand. I managed to turn my head so I wasn’t breathing in so much dust. One thousand, five hundred. I heard the caw of a croaker bird. I felt the scuff of earth and the brush of its wings as it landed beside me. I braced myself to feel the slash of its greedy beak.