Some part of me still hopes that I am wrong, that she’s just a poor sick child after all. But when I clean the last of the blood away from her temple, there’s no denying it. There’s the tattoo – the double triangle and three thick lines – proclaiming what she is.

I shove myself away. My own temple throbs, as if the skin there – a faded pink scar now – is reverting to newly seared flesh; as if my hand has only just dropped the hot iron. Covering my face, I try to find some control, try to wrest myself back from the woman I once was, the woman who only a few years ago might have taken up the knife and used it without question.

I close my eyes. The Free Limits are finished. The woman who fought and killed for them is gone. Now, the tally is all that matters and it demands that the child, whoever she is, whatever she is, must live.

Besides, I have a promise to keep.

* * *

I make sure to arrive at the trade post in the twilight, when the winds are picking up and no one cares to look too closely at the shape on the rear of my mule, covered with the tarp. It’s reckless, but there’s no way I’m going to take the child into the settlement until I have some answers. Too much attention. Some bad part of my brain whispers that she might wake and escape on her own and so spare me a decision I don’t know how to make.

The trade post is outside of Redcrop proper, separated from the settlement by fields of sickly-looking century trees and ghostly agave. Townsfolk prefer it this way. It keeps uncertainty out of their lives, along with scratchtooth drifters and wreckers, bandits and scavengers, the desperate and the damned who come trailing suspicion and violence from the Unincorporated Zone.

Redcrop is a faithful, fearful town: they take no risks and brook no questions. Questions lead to uncertainty, uncertainty opens the door to doubt and so, to them.

Different in the cities; there, hundreds of people make thousands of choices, every day. It’s enough to keep them at bay, people reckon, gives them enough to feed on. But out here in the wastes people are few and choices are scarce, and if you let yourself doubt – if you let chance into your life – you’ll shine out like a beacon through time and space and they will come to feed.

Or so it goes. All folk ever have are stories. Farms too near the Edge destroyed utterly by one bit of bad luck after another, brawls that somehow turned into massacres, folk who ran, maddened, into the desert and were never seen again. No proof. Just thin-air superstition – the Accord said – stoked by mercenary peacekeepers and vice wardens for the purpose of extracting money from the fearful.