3. Hooves, Hammers, Horizons

Autumn stretched across the plains, turning the endless blue sky into a flat gray void. It hung low and oppressive, flayed open to expose the earth's emptiness and its uncomfortable proximity to the stars. Thomas tried patching the threadbare wool coat he’d bought second-hand, squinting at the needle in the dim light of morning. His fingers, stiff and clumsy from the cold, slipped, and the needle sank into the knuckle of his thumb. He hissed, shaking his hand out, but the sting lingered.

When Honey bent her head to drink at a shallow stream that morning, Thomas knelt beside her to test the water. The icy shock pierced his hand and ran straight to his spine. He shuddered, wiping his wet fingers on his coat.

Winter’s coming.

The thought settled heavily in his chest as he watched Honey's breath cloud in the frigid air. For days, the sky spat slushy precipitation that couldn’t seem to commit to a season. It would fall as cutting shards of ice, sharp enough to sting, only to melt the moment it hit the ground, turning the dirt paths into slick, treacherous ribbons of mud. Honey snorted in frustration when her hooves sank into the muck, and Thomas tugged her reins gently, murmuring his apologies.

The days dragged, slow and agonizing. Thomas found ranches scattered across the countryside, their fences in various states of disrepair. He would ride up cautiously, hat in hand, asking if they had work for him. Most days, he couldn’t meet their eyes without feeling the itch to apologize—for being there, for asking, for existing. 

Some turned him away with a brusque shake of their heads; others hesitated, looking at him too long before giving him a grudging nod.

But in the evenings, it was just him and Honey. He’d prop himself up against a tree, watching the dull orange sunset bleed into a heavy twilight, and scratch out notes in his journal. The weight of the coming cold pressed on him like the gray sky.

Winter warnings:

Running water gets colder.

Earth gets harder.

Sky looks heavy.

He underlined the last point twice, grains of charcoal falling, leaving vertical smudges on the page. Honey, already settled for the night, raised her head to watch him briefly, her dark eyes soft in the flickering firelight. Thomas gave her a faint smile. “We’ll manage,” he said aloud, though he wasn’t sure if it was meant to comfort her or himself. 

If Thomas could see his actions from another’s perspective, he might see how much caring for Honey had to translate into caring for himself. Every day, he found her water, made sure she had food, planned for the days ahead. None of which he would have made time to do for himself until his survival was in peril. 

People often made Thomas feel lonely. As if he had to flex each muscle, he felt the need to perform what people expected of him, and he felt himself often failing. Honey wanted no performance, she wanted to be heard, to have her thoughts considered. The older mare was intuitive, and would slow to rest whether Thomas gave her permission to or not. She could find a great deal of grazing, but never missed an opportunity to investigate Thomas’s food, who almost always shared. 

Soon, the ground would harden too much for grazing. They couldn’t move south fast enough to get to warmer pastures. So, Thomas devised a plan. For himself, he would trap and preserve enough rabbit meat to sustain him through the winter. He could sell the furs and the offal for pocket change, between that and fixing fences, he could buy small bales of hay when they passed through the towns they frequented. 

Thomas thought back to the trapper’s line Luc had shown him—an intricate trail, carefully constructed to subtly funnel wild rabbits into snares. He could still hear Luc’s voice, steady and patient as he explained, “Slow work,” The memory of Luc’s hands, deftly looping wire and pointing out the faint trails rabbits used, guided Thomas now.

The task was punishing and bleakley repetitive. With the autumn sun hanging low and wan, Thomas spent an entire day’s worth of precious daylight setting twelve snares in a rough line. His breath showed white in the frigid air, and each time he crouched, his knees groaned audibly. 

The wire loops had to be placed just right; concealed enough to fool a small animal, but strong enough to hold. He dug into the damp earth with numb fingers, driving the stakes where the undergrowth thinned and faint tracks hinted at promise.

By the time he finished, his back throbbed and his hands felt stiff as wood, the cold biting into his knuckles like a hundred pinpricks. But as dusk thickened into a deep gray twilight, he allowed himself a spark of hope. He had set twelve snares today, and tomorrow he’d set even more. Maybe, if luck held, he could catch enough to feed himself and Honey through the coming cold—and maybe put a little aside for leaner times.

At first light, Thomas walked the snare line, tearing thin strips of jerky and tucking one between his cheek and teeth to soften. The salt and meaty flavor cut through the sting of the morning air, distracting him from the ache in his joints, which felt as ancient as the hills. It also kept him from brooding on all the snares he’d found empty.

Empty.

Each slack wire mocked him with the hollow ring of failure.

Empty.

You deserve to be hungry.

Empty.

You deserve to feel afraid.

Empty.

Women recoil when they see you.

Empty.

Your best friend abandoned you.

Thomas clenched his jaw, grinding the jerky into pulp. He was near the last snare now, braced to find the same disappointment. But then, a rustle, faint enough that only total stillness made it audible. He froze. Another burst of frantic movement followed.

A rabbit.

Thomas’s breath caught. The animal had nearly squirmed through the loop unscathed. Only at the final moment had the snare clamped around its foot. It kicked and writhed in panic, letting out a thin, high-pitched squeal. Thomas advanced slowly, dropping to his knees on the cold ground. The rabbit’s fur trembled under his fingertips, its frantic pulse hammering against his hand. The shrieking seemed to tear holes in the quiet air.

He closed his eyes for a moment, cupping the small creature’s head in his palm. “Sorry,” he whispered, voice barely carrying over the rabbit’s keening cries.

A sharp, firm pull. A quiet, gentle snap.

The sound hung in the silent morning, and for a long moment Thomas just knelt, the rabbit limp in his grasp. Relief flooded him, relief that he’d found food at last, but guilt gnawed just as fiercely. He let those two truths exist together, rising stiffly to continue his day with one more life on his conscience, and one small meal closer to survival.

Thomas knelt beside the fire, the headless rabbit carcass draped across his knee, its final warmth long dissipated. He ran his palm over the pelt, letting his fingers brush the rougher patches along the spine, and sighed.

“All right,” he murmured. “Let’s see if I can do this right.”

He started by making a small slit at the belly, careful not to pierce too deep. The newly sharpened blade slid easily through the thin membrane. Inch by inch, he peeled back the hide, pulling it away from the muscle. Every tug felt like a test of patience; every slip of the knife reminded him to slow down.

Luc’s voice fluttered at the edge of memory: “Pas trop vite, Tomas. Not too fast.”

Once the hide was freed, Thomas laid it aside. He skewered the edible flesh, laying it across the fire to cook as he worked on the hide. 

Laying the skin flat, he used the knife’s edge to scrape away bits of fat and sinew. The flame’s flicker danced along the metal, reflecting off the damp fur. Hunger and adrenaline made his hands shake, no relief to be found no matter how many deep breaths he managed. 

Tedium amplified a million times over because he could taste the bile in his stomach, desperately searching for something to digest. When it gurgled audibly, he patted it like it was a separate animal entirely. 

“Soon,” he whispered. 

His back ached by the time he finished, the hunched position digging into his muscles. He straightened, rolling his shoulders, and stared at the thin sheet of fur and flesh in his lap. “Guess this’ll do.”

He took a break, again, gnawing on the blackened flesh of the little animal, spitting out tiny bits of bone as he went. 

He reached for his canteen, pouring a small measure of water into a tin bowl. 

Thomas frowned at the tiny head of the rabbit, dwarfed inside his palm. Its eyes were glassy, distant, but it still looked strangely alive in its expression, frozen in what Thomas was certain was fear, etched into its small, unforgiving face. 

He freed its brain through the brittle bone of its nasal cavity. It didn’t matter if little bits of bone got mixed in, they could be strained out. 

He grimaced, gagged, but kept going, stirring until it formed a thick, oily paste. Luc had told him each animal’s brain contained exactly the right amount of oil to tan its own hide. Thomas once assumed something got lost in translation, yet here he was, using that trick.

Darkened by the paste, the hide gave off a smell that made him wrinkle his nose, but he worked it thoroughly into every corner, using the corner of a bandana pulled over his finger. The fire crackled gently, softening the chill in his fingers, while he pinned the hide’s edges to a flat board with a handful of nails from the veteran’s tin.

“Dry now,” he murmured to the skin, as though it could hear him. “No falling apart.”

He spent the entirety of that night tending to the little rectangle of flesh, coaxing it into place, adjusting the tension. A light wind stirred the pines overhead, lofting cinders from the fire in fleeting spirals. The smoke caught in his throat, blending with the tang of raw animal flesh. Thomas grimaced, rubbing the side of his jaw while he worked. Cold gnawed at his back, but heat pressed against his face. 

The next day, the fruits of his labor multiplied, as he found three more rabbits in his snares. Though it was hardly enough for a feast, Thomas clung to the satisfaction of having done something correctly. 

The hide was dry, too. In the sun, the afternoon light warmed his skin, so he sat with his sleeves rolled up, carefully trimming the pliable skin until it formed a semi-circle. Using a hammer and nail, he pierced a series of holes through the outside, then used a needle and thread to sew it together until it formed a circular pouch. He used a chord of leftover hide to run a drawstring through the top. 

The finished pouch was far from perfect, uneven seams and a drawstring that caught frequently, but it was solid. More than that, it was something he’d made, not bartered or stolen, but crafted with his own hands, plucked from the earth with time, effort. 

As he felt the fur in his hands, he closed his eyes, picturing the life the rabbit had before. Thomas wondered how far it had wandered from this little stretch of wood, whether or not it had a family, whether or not he had given it enough respect in the process. 

Then he looped the pouch onto his belt, letting it fall onto his hip. With the last shreds of daylight, Thomas held the little skull of the rabbit in his hands, looking at the fire through its ocular cavities. 

“Thanks, rabbit,” he said quietly. He could still picture it, alive in his hands, musculature in his mouth, all the memories bending back on themselves. “I gues-s-s-s better you than me-e-e-e,” he shivered in the night, his words falling between the dead blades of grass, flat on the wet ground. 

That evening, Thomas heard no other sounds of man. No trains, no wagons, no strikes of a hatchet splitting wood, or crack of a whip driving beasts. It was as if he was the last man in the world.

He had the oddest sense that the woods, the sky, even the winds had witnessed his small triumph. He felt less like a trespasser now. As he tucked his new pouch against his side and settled near the glowing embers, he allowed the quiet to swallow him whole, and he surrendered to it without the usual dread.

A fence stretched long over a bleak stretch of rocky terrain, where the flat plains of Kansas began to surrender to the West’s harsher edges. Thomas tightened a sagging wire against a leaning fence post, pausing to straighten his back and let his mind wander. 

Something about the open sky and the brush of prairie grass reminded him of Texas, where he and Seb once rode broncos for cash. He’d hated it, found it needlessly brutal, but today that recollection seemed subdued, carried off by the wind that never stopped blowing.

Nearby, Honey lifted her head from grazing, muscles tensing as she went completely still. Her ears pricked forward, then pinned sharply back, and a low, uneasy rumble sounded in her throat.

“What’s got you spooked, girl?” Thomas teased, stopping his work, listening for what she could hear far better than him. A faint vibration traveled through the fence post, into his palms and through his shoulders, enough to freeze his movements entirely. 

He crouched, pressing one palm to the soil. The warm, sun-baked earth resonated with a distinct tremor, like a thunderstorm churning beneath the crust of the earth. 

Honey nudged his ribs, but didn’t wait for him. Instead, she turned toward a rocky ridge, trotting quickly, her nostrils searching the air for the source of her worry. 

In the distance, the rumble began to permeate through the ground, breaking out of the surface, filling the air with a muffled static. 

Atop the ridge, Honey found a large enough surface area to stand. Thomas’s feet slid out from beneath him on the loose gravel, forcing him onto his hands and knees so he could climb. Now there was enough force from the noise alone, lighter pebbles hopped and turned in place, dancing over a dirt drum.

On his knees, he leaned back and rested his bottom on his heels, his palms on his legs. 

He squinted out toward the plains and found nothing. The unforgiving limestone landscape stretched out in an eerie, silent yawn. The sky dappled different shades of grey, but revealed no depth, informed no distance. 

Honey kept her head low, her ears still pinned back like something nefarious might approach. 

At first, he saw only a single dark speck, easily three-quarters of a mile removed, rippling through the brittle, golden grass. 

A singular dark form began to repeat itself, until it was one murmurating shadow, clinging to the elliptical bows of the valley. It moved like the roots of sentient fungus, desperate to find the next decaying thing to consume. 

The lumbering pile tumbled forward with no clear path, but balletic precision. Now they were close enough to see the details that enumerated their woolen coats, their screaming chests, the crests of paired white specks marking horns. 

Bison. 

Leading the stampede was a spry young cow, cutting a diagonal line, trotting far in front of the rest. 

The others behind her moved like the heddles of a great, celestial loom, their wise heads bobbing up and down against the hollow of the hills. 

What started as a few dozen became a few hundred. The few hundred became a herd of more than a thousand head of buffalo, carving a trench into the Kansas dust. 

Heading straight for him, with more collective force than anything man could hope to invent. The sound alone was so sublime, he thought the vibration could shake apart the ridge where he stood, send him beneath the hooves of the stampede. 

If he were to lay flat, let his arm dangle down, he would brush the backs of the passing beasts. A single animal was enough to feel the weight of his insignificance, the density of their bodies evident in their effortless inertia. 

Thomas watched as one after another passed, almost close enough to touch. They were not concerned with him in the least. Amassed, they knew he posed little threat. 

Earthy thuds and pounding hooves pulsed in his ribs until he couldn’t tell his own heartbeat from the stampede. Clouds of dust choked the sky, and the buffalo moved as one—bellowing, roiling, their colossal weight bowing the land, holding the air in their breath. 

Thomas’s fingers clutched into the edge of the rock on which he knelt, squinting through the dust, but entirely arrested by the sight. 

The universe was made only of bison, the entire horizon, every sound, every smell, every square inch of his vision occupied with their presence or the earth they tilled with it. 

Honey let out her own whinny, lost in the storm, but belonging all the same. Fear was replaced with a sort of recognition. Now her ears tipped forward, her eyes alert and curious. She tentatively stood on her back legs for a second, landed, reared again, shaking her head at the passing congregation. 

Gradually, the stampede tapered off, turning into a hollow rumble that drifted across the plains. Thomas exhaled, pressing a hand to his chest to feel his heartbeat. It raged against his sternum, his own spirit alight with the same untamable momentum of the herd. 

Not for a single second of the affair, was he afraid. In fact, he felt as if he’d witnessed some kind of secret, a wild, arcane ritual to claim one’s own stake. 

Then, as the dust began to settle, a lone bull appeared on the horizon, limping slightly behind the rest of the herd. Its dark eyes latched onto Thomas, strangely intent, as if it recognized him, or measured him against some ancient standard.

Thomas didn’t move, his posture still anchored close to the earth, his fingers still clutching the pale yellow stone beneath him. 

The bull flicked its head up and down, then turned toward a deep, resonant call somewhere beyond. It held Thomas’s gaze for another breath. 

A squealing call from the herd pulled the bull away, disappearing into the eastern side of the valley. 

Thomas stood on the ridge, the echoes of hoofbeats still vibrating in his ears. The plains stretched ahead. 

The herd might have passed, but the air was still alight with their energy, this distant echo of four thousand-odd hooves still reverberating through the hollow. 

“I’ll be,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair and setting his hat back in place. Honey nudged his shoulder, as if to say she agreed.

A deep well of curiosity would drive Thomas’s constant observational nature. Now, he abandoned his work entirely. The fence would still sag, but this felt more mercurial, so he decided to follow it where it flowed. 

Remnants of adrenaline shook his knees beneath him, though he did his best to slide carefully down the ridge, meeting the gravel below quicker and clumsier than he intended. Honey ran balletically across the steep face of the hill, spilling her momentum onto the flat ground with several paces, arcing her path back toward Thomas. She shook dust from her mane, plumes of opaque tan falling on either side of her. 

But she didn’t, or couldn’t stop it as she threw up her front legs, nickering and smacking her lips together in joy. She trotted toward him, throwing her head back, circling around him, like she was checking if he experienced the same thing. 

He laughed the same quiet, rusty laugh, a little more certain of itself, with his hand flat against her snout. “I saw it,” he assured. 

Searching the line where the sky met the earth, his boots pulled him toward the notch. 

Crouching, Thomas inhaled deeply. Iron hung heavily on the smell of earth. The sharp, invasive smell of their sweat altered the atmosphere, created its own impenetrable fog. He scanned the tracks carved into the ground, tracing subtle patterns until he noticed a break, a place where the path diverged sharply into the brush.

Kneeling, he spotted a dark smear on the leaves. Warm blood darkened the leaves. 

Something clenched in his chest as he stood, following the droplets that scattered like breadcrumbs into the trees. He shifted the weight of his pack and glanced at Honey, whose ears twitched at a faint sound on the breeze.

Thomas stepped into the undergrowth with deliberate caution, guided by a thin trail of blood spattered over damp leaves and brush. In the shade of the trees, the air grew cooler, and he paused to let the wind carry the prairie’s distant sounds. 

A branch cracked underfoot, making him go rigid, heart pounding. Only Honey’s soft exhale broke the silence. Slowly, he moved again, setting his boots gently into the moist earth.

Where the blood began to pool in uneven patches, the sense of a living presence ahead tightened across his skin. Brushing aside a low-hanging branch, he caught sight of something crumpled just beyond.

It was the bull from before, lying on its side, flanks heaving with shallow, uneven breaths. Its eyes went white as soon as it spotted Thomas. Desperate, it tried standing, then collapsed again in a heavy thud. Thomas flinched at the dull impact of flesh against ground.

“Easy,” he said softly, crouching a few yards away. The bull circled in place, wounded shoulder rolling and trembling. Its cry echoed, a sound alight with a mix of anguish and defiance that rattled Thomas more that struck a primordial chord within his soul. 

“Well,” he said, halting just out of reach. “You want help, or put out of your misery?”

The bull stamped once, head drooping low, defeated. Then it stilled, its dark eyes tracking him warily. 

Thomas edged closer. Through the thick, matted fur, he saw a jagged wound, flesh torn open around a broken branch embedded deep in the muscle. Each time the bull tried to move, the branch twisted inside his flesh, surely sending it to a frenzy of confusion and desperation. 

Though he fancied his gut to be made of iron, he found himself involuntarily gagging as he got lower, got closer, the pink muscles and yellow fat and clear threads of veins were all too alive for Thomas to bear. 

He looked down at his hands, shaking so violently that he flexed his fists just to still them. He breathed deeply through his nose, out through a narrow tunnel in is lips, and took a slow, tortuous step forward. 

The bull pulled its weight off its injured leg, holding it out of the way, allowing a stranger to help. 

“This is gonna hurt,” Thomas warned under his breath. From his rabbit-hide pouch, he pinched some St. John’s wort flowers, grinding them between his back teeth into a makeshift paste. He tore off a sleeve of his shirt, ready to use it to soak up the current of blood. 

Thomas wrapped his hands intently around the branch, his knuckles whitening under the strain. His grip slipped for an instant on the slick branch, the bull’s blood coating his fingers like hot tar. The branch acted as a conductor, and Thomas could feel the bull’s musculature tremor. Rivulets of blood, so dense they looked nearly black, threaded over his hands. “Ready?” he murmured, unsure who needed the reassurance more. 

As Thomas began to pull, the bison took an instinctive, but stifled step forward. 

The branch came free, its end now free, arcing against the grey sky as Thomas tossed it aside. 

Warily, the bull came to a rest a few feet away. 

Thomas wasted no time. He splashed water from his canteen onto the rag and pressed it against the wound. The bull let out a low bellow, but didn’t resist him. “I know,” Thomas breathed, voice unsteady. Holding one hand to stave the flow of blood, Thomas fished a bloody finger into the pouch of his cheek, pulling out the bitter poultice. He spread the sulphuric flower paste around the gash, ignoring the churn in his own stomach.

Finished, he stepped back, wiping blood and dirt from his hands onto his trousers. The bull heaved itself to its feet with slow, deliberate effort, gingerly testing each step. Though it still limped, it kept its balance. 

It turned, its dark eyes locked on his. Fog curled from his nostrils, strings of drool meeting the ground in long, eerie tendrils. 

“Go on,” Thomas said, motioning toward the horizon where the herd had vanished. The bull didn’t move, only blew out a forceful breath through its nose. “Go on!” He clapped sharply, and the animal threw its head from one side to the other. Then, it turned its body toward the herd, its head still turned slightly toward Thomas. 

The bull lifted its head and let out a deep, gutterall bellow, so loud Thomas instinctively plunged his fingers into his ears.

Somewhere in the distance, another bison called back to him. Knowing where to head, the bull finally began to trot off.

Thomas exhaled, suddenly aware that he’d been holding his breath. He poured the remaining water over his hands, scrubbing off the blood and grime. With a final swish, he rinsed his mouth, spitting out the waxy sapor from the plant.

Honey nosed the frayed edge of his torn sleeve, her breath warm against the ripped fabric. He patted her neck, finding the place she liked best, finding the beds of his nails still darkened to a color akin to rust. 

Now the clearing was quiet, the smell of blood and sweat being carried off in the heavy air. 

They camped that night in an abandoned ranch field beneath a sky so wide and luminous it seemed poised to swallow the plains whole. A perfect, swollen moon laid silver stripes across the grass, and every star glinted in sharp relief. Pale trails of dust glowed between each puncture in the heavy ceiling of night. Not a single cloud obstructed his view, nor the light produced above. 

Thomas flipped open the journal—or guide, or bible, whatever it was becoming. He scratched out a crude drawing of the bull, heavy and wooly in the sparse light of his fire, and added a few notes:

• Watch animals- Watch others- They will warn you (by accident)

• Buffalo herds follow water & Fresh Grazing

• Surviving = Responsibility (don’t kill/take what you don’t need)

• Tanning notes- brain tanning works- gross- !

• Winter Prep To Do

  • Better Coat

  • Blanket

  • Shelter?

Thomas returned the journal, but struggled to sleep, focused on the stars above, his legs crossed over each other and bent up, his hat  resting on his knee. 

As his eyes focused through the darkness, more details of the night revealed themselves. Stars twinkled subtle shades of blue or silver. 

Suddenly, between the smudges of cosmic dust, a single trail of light burst through the dark. Just as quick, it fizzled out again. 

He thought he was imagining it, maybe, trying to focus his eyes in the same spot. There was another star, tumbling through the darkness before it disappeared again. A few seconds passed, then there was another. Then, the sky fell still again. 

“Hm,” he smiled, hearing himself register the sight aloud. A stampede of nebulae tumbling across the black night sky, silent in its distance from him. 

Let me let it go. He asked the heavenly bodies above him. 

Fix fences, pull splinters. 

Seek death. 

One buffalo was not a penance. 

It will not come.

“Just let it go,” he demanded of himself, watching as the glimmers fell away into the pitch black silence. 

The darkness, always the darkness, beckoned the memories to fall backward. The night came for him, cloaked in black like a preacher, coming to judge him all the same. The croaks of toads and the grinding of cricket legs sharpened the echoes. Their sounds hadn’t changed for eons. Thomas was stuck falling through every night of his life. And he was there in the grass, and he was 11, trembling in a dark cellar, trying hard to make out faces through his tears. 

In the void, Thomas saw Arthur’s 17-year-old-face, crouching in the boiler room of a warehouse.. 

“You did a good job,” Arthur said, grabbing Thomas’s shoulder. The other boys were hastily packing up their stash, stuffing silver dishes in cotton sacks, loose ammunition in their secondhand packs, drawing up the scraps of food in bandannas and tying neat knots at the top. 

“You h-h-hurt that lady,” Thomas had said quietly, lingering by the ladder, awaiting his payment. His heart pounded so loud, he was sure the older boys would hear it and would chide him for it. The objections shook his voice, despite his best efforts.

“She’ll be fine,” Arthur dismissed. He produced a paper sack with a random smattering of day old food and handed it to Thomas. 

But Thomas had stood there, his brow furrowed, but his eyes sad. He tried to look angry, but tears were welling in his eyes. His gaze darted around the dank, dirty room, and the chaos unfolding. Something locked him into place, a question he wasn’t sure how to ask. 

Arthur turned, noticing that Thomas hadn’t moved. “Your services are no longer needed, kid,” 

Seb interrupted, bent down and yelled in Thomas’s face “Are you deaf?! Go ON!” he hollered. 

Something inside Thomas had snapped. 

Without thinking, his fists flew, striking at Seb with all the strength his wiry little frame could muster, his skinny arms wheeling through the air. Each blunted smack landed with a labored grunt from Thomas. Seb pulled up his arm, shoving Thomas away with his boot. 

Arthur had laughed, prying Thomas off as Seb clutched his lip, bloodied but amused. “Jesus Christ,” Seb had muttered, the smile not quite fading from his face. 

Morris hauled Seb to his feet, accompanied by laughter born from surprise. 

Thomas had adjusted his ratty clothes, picked up the grocery sack, and made for the ladder. But before he could escape, Arthur’s hand caught his shoulder again. 

“Hold on,” he said, his tone changing just enough to make Thomas wait, to listen to what Arthur had to say.

His words held just enough warmth to hold him there, one hand on the ladder, split open on the knuckles against Seb’s false smile. “Maybe we underestimated you, you’re no bait. You got fight in ya,” Arthur cooed. He stood straight, brushing off Thomas’s shoulders. 

This was the beginning of the end. 

The four of them left town that night.

Morris had interrupted the commotion to pull Thomas aside, his voice low but urgent. “You can’t pickpocket outside the same bar forever.”

“That’s true,” Seb chimed in with a smirk, dried blood crackling at the corner, always quick to agree when it suited him.

“You have to keep moving,” Morris pressed. His tone was instructive, almost fatherly, as he crouched down to help Thomas fix his frayed shirt. “If you want to live rough, you’ve got to act the part. Stick around one place too long, people will start to recognize you. They’ll talk about you. And then, you’re done.” Morris slid his extended thumb across his throat like a phantom blade. 

“W-w-where a-a-are you going?” Thomas asked, his words small among the machinery surrounding them. 

“Dunno,” Morris said with a shrug, glancing back toward the others. “We go wherever we want. Do what we like.” His voice had a calm maturity to it, a stark contrast to the others—a lingering testament to the fact that he’d once had, and then lost, a decent home. Decent parents. “You can come, too,” Morris offered, his eyes softer than the words.

“If you make yourself useful,” Arthur interrupted, his voice firm and final as he leaned his weight onto Morris’s shoulder possessively. 

Make yourself useful.

The phrase rang in Thomas’s head like a bell struck too hard, reverberating through the years to settle in his chest now. A restless, halting bellow lodged in his ribs, pulling and pushing like a hot coal that refused to burn out. He groaned softly, the weight of the memory pressing against him like it had hands, like it could reach out and shove his face into the dirt.

Arthur made Thomas believe he was strong because he was angry, made him believe his rage was a virtue, the raw material of power. But Thomas understood something now: Arthur built a post, for which Thomas tethered his dignity, and Arthur moved it when it pleased him.

There was just enough loyalty to keep Thomas anchored. Arthur could see that, above all else, Thomas needed human connection, needed to feel some sense of belonging. He was only a child, impossibly vulnerable. Thomas also couldn’t articulate what he wanted, even if he knew what it was. His stutter started young, the adults charged with caring for him lacked the patience to coach him out of it. 

Arthur saw an opportunity. A physically strong child with a highly sensitive heart could be an invaluable asset. Now, Arthur could dangle what Thomas cared about, just out of his reach. His approval, his love, his genuine care could be won– but not yet. And he could convince Thomas of anything because of it. 

Now, Thomas felt angry at himself.

It should have been obvious the minute Seb crawled underground. That’s where Thomas would effectively spend the next two decades of his life, turning like a worm beneath the dirt. 

Why didn’t I leave? Why did I follow them even though helping them made me feel awful?

In the quiet, Thomas let out a sob, but covered his mouth as if he might shove it back into his voice box.   

Honey stirred, lifting her head and nuzzling him, her quiet breaths breaking through the heaviness.

He turned to lay on his side, raising his hand above his head and patting her mane. “S-s-sorry,” he whispered, the callouses of his fingers snagging on her fur. Honey laid her head back down in the grass, flexing her legs, returning to sleep. Thomas let the heaviness in his eyelids hold him there, did his best to let the memories go, incinerated with what remained of the corporeal bodies of Arthur Statton and Morris Leroy Montgomery.