Miles tosses a fistful of dirt on the grave, then pulls his father’s pistol from its new place on his hip and fires a bullet at Heaven.

“No chance of hitting Father up there,” he thinks. George Stanson hadn’t earned a noble death, so the prostitute hadn’t see fit to give him one.

Miles Stanson had joined a mercenary gang, headed by an Arthur Whitman. They call Stanson by the name he shared with his father, and save his first name for bad jokes. George had left Miles with little else, save a second gun and a deep shame for having the Sight.

One a boon and one a curse; Two guns are better than one, but Whitman hates the Westling-born Sight more than George did.

“Can’t trust a squint,” he growls.

The other mercs in Whitman’s company echo the sentiment, make it a motto. Every one of them burns and burns with Glare, so Miles keeps his eyes lowered and lips shut.

~*~

The distant church wavered in the heat rising from the town’s only road, as if even piety were just a mirage. Out here, that might not be too far from the truth. Father Guinevere wouldn’t be the first man preaching praise to the Light while shrouded in his own Glare shining white.

The barman had proved useless beyond some basic onboarding into Road’s End, so Stanson had shifted his attention to the sheriff’s office. Not every law-keeper wanted to work with vigilantes, but they didn’t have to like him to be useful.

He pulled the brim of his hat low over his brow to hide his eyes better from sun and Glare, then crossed the street to the office. The horse tethered outside nickered, and its chest heaved with heavy breaths as it bore the midday sun. Stanson frowned, holding out the back of his hand to its nose as he passed.

Inside, a woman sat at the jailhouse’s only desk. She didn’t look up.

“Afternoon,” she said, eyes moving along a stained paper on her desk.

Stanson gave her a quick look-over as his eyes adjusted. She looked only a little older than Stanson, tall and broad-shouldered. Glare glinted from her like white sunlight reflecting off a rippling pool. Stanson noted the badge pinned to her lapel before he averted his eyes. Her Glare wasn’t as bright as some, certainly dimmer than most lawmen at the frontier, but it was never an easy thing to look at.

The woman looked up from the desk and whistled. “Damn, if you ain’t the prettiest new thing in town. That ain’t sayin’ much, though. I’m sheriff Julia Tate. What can I do for you?”

“I’m lookin’ for a man—"

“Ah, tsk. The good ones always are.”

“Mm. He came this way some time ago, name of Arthur Whitman.” Stanson reached into his duster for the notice and unfolded it, then held the drawing of Arthur’s bearded, angry face out to her.

The sheriff reached over her desk and plucked the document from Stanson’s fingers. The chair creaked as she leaned back. Her eyes darted about the fine print before she chuckled and handed it back.

“Whatcha want him for?” she asked.

“Beside the felonies listed there’n the bottom?”

“Every other man, woman, and whatever in the Baronies’ve probably done least half these things. Mr. Whitman touch some big wig’s special little boy or somethin’?”

Stanson grunted. “Issuer didn’t say. Murder not enough for you?”

“Bounty’s ten years old; So’s the murder. What do you want him for, gunman? He do ya somethin’ personal?”

Stanson paused. Outside, the horse scraped an iron-shod hoof along the dirt. “I used to know ‘im.”

“Long-lost lover?” Sheriff Tate prodded, grinning.

“I need the money.”

Sheriff Tate shrugged, and tipped her chair backward on two legs. “Don’t we all.”

“You protectin’ him?” Stanson asked. It wouldn’t be the first time Whitman had put the local bruisers under his thumb.

“Nah. I got bigger problems than him. Dustmen, for one. Demons, another. Seems we just keep getting more. Why, last week, Ron Deringer come runnin’ out of his shack, naked to his stockin’s with a knife in his hand. Laughin’ like Hell, bleeding from a hundred cuts. Starts cryin’ a minute later.

“Then,” she drops forward and slams a hand on the desk, “he sprints full-tilt at Jenny. Right as she’s comin’ out of the feed ‘n’ tackle shop. Broad daylight. I keep my gun loaded, but that still mighta been the luckiest shot I ever made. Real glad that demon he caught made Ron cut himself up like that first, or no way a couple bullets was gonna stop him in time.”

“Rough way to go,” Stanson nodded. "Surprised he’d been possessed for so long without the Reverend noticin’.”

“Nah, I’m tellin’ ya, it’s that devilcraft the Westlings are always messin’ with. Makes all sorta weird shit come out at night, quick as a rattler. Only way they know how to scare us off their land without actually attacking us, see? The sooner the Railway comes, the sooner civilization can put an end to that crap. I’ve got enough on my hands keeping these folk civil.” She gestured with a raised palm past Stanson to indicate the town, as though general mayhem were ongoing.

“If I can find Whitman,” Stanson said, “that’s one less problem for you an’ your folk.”

“Whitman ain’t my problem. Besides, he don’t bother with no devilcraft like those Westlings.”

“He don’t. So you’ve seen him?”

“Sure have. He died right here, in our little town. Like I said, he ain’t doin’ no devilcraft, and he ain’t a problem,” Sheriff Tate smirked.

Damn. He’d traced Whitman all over the scattered frontier towns at the edge of the wastes, looking for closure. Now he found it from the lips of this Julia Tate with as much satisfaction as a night with one of those waifish youths at the saloon.

Julia leaned onto her desk with both elbows. “Say, don’t you know it’s impolite to wear a hat in front of a woman? I never forget a handsome face, but it’s the eyes that count the most. Yet you ain’t hardly look at me once.”

That accusatory final sentence. Stanson tilted his chip up and met her narrowed gaze with a pointed stare. “Where did they dispose of the body?”

Sheriff Julia Tate held his eye contact for a moment, searching, then heaved a sigh and made herself busy with the papers on her desk. “You’ll want Father Guinevere for that.”

Stanson nodded, then removed his hat in farewell before departing. He felt the sheriff’s eyes on him until the door slammed, friendly as the barrels of his guns. Despite her flattery, she was no ally.

~*~

Stanson keeps his head down—literally. The Sight is too sharp a tool to ignore, so he adapts to fighting with a wide-brimmed hat to hide the tell-tale squint of a man with the Sight. He reads his adversaries’ footwork like a battle map. He tells the other mercs that the technique keeps his opponents off-guard, overconfident.

Nobody’d ever suspect him of Westling blood.

They buy it, of course. He’s Arthur’s favorite, and he trains hard so the hat trick never handicaps him. Whitman’s gang takes bigger jobs, confident in their skills—and in Stanson’s. When they celebrate, they satisfy every vice. Stanson’s own Glare quietly grows, but it will be worth it, he tells himself. Arthur trusts him more than anyone.

Stanson’ll steer him back right.

~*~

Stanson had hardly made it twenty paces up the road when a rough, familiar voice barked at him.

“’Ey, gunslinger!”

Stanson turned and lifted his eyes only enough to identify who had spoken.

The bartender’s dust-caked boots marched across the street from the tavern. The gangly man nevertheless lumbered like a gnarled badger emerging from its den. In the hot, dry air, he smelled not just of pungent liquor but of the sharp, sour tang of fresh sweat dripping over the long-dried.

“Yeh!” the man hollered. “Fuck y’ think yer doin’?”

“I paid my bill already, old man,” Stanson replied. “I thought we’d gotten off amicably.”

“No, sir! Hoo-hoo, not a chance! You ain’t tell me honest! Yer not just some boun’y hunner! You got th’ Sight. I saw it when you paid up, and I said to myself, ‘tha’ man there, ‘e’s a squint!’ I can peg ya for it from ‘cross the road now that I seen it! Lookit me straight!”

The topless youths stood in the thin shade of the saloon’s awning with a matching pair of wry smirks.

“Bounty hunter I am, but if I had been squintin’, it was only to wrinkle my nose to keep your stink from sobering me up.”

Stanson tilted his head up and locked hard, unflinching eyes with the inebriated tavern owner. "

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The drunk staggered in surprise under Stanson’s unwavering stare. Even if the man was stone sober, Stanson had enough practice hiding his Sight that he could fake it enough to be rid of the fool.

“You ain’t ’drunk,” the bartender tried after a moment.

“No, and a good thing for you, or your accusations might cut through what little patience I have left for you. Now, sod off and soak your head ‘til you can think clearly again.”

Stanson didn’t wait for a retort. He turned and continued up the road. After a few steps, the drunkard remembered his anger and flung threats and slurs at Stanson’s back.

Then, the crack of a weapon reverberated through the heavy air. A jet of dust jumped in front of Stanson where the bullet hit the road.

Stanson moved instantly. Before the shower of dirt could fall he had whirled behind a dry rain barrel, supple as a dancer. He drew as he spun; both guns rested in his hands.

Stanson re-examined the moment instinctively. The old man had been yelling, but stopped when the gun went off; the shot had surprised him, too. The weapon’s report had come from behind him with a near-imperceptible delay between gunshot and impact. The bullet had hit the ground instead of flying down the street.

Unknown assailant. Midrange. High vantage point.

The bounty hunter tipped his hat back, then peered out from behind the barrel. The townsfolk had retreated behind doors and windows, knowing better than to involve themselves but unable to pass up the spectacle. The stupefied bartender scuttled back to his den.

Stanson didn’t see anything else. The roofs were empty. No glint of gunmetal, no Glare of sin. The shooter must have realized they’d missed and ducked back behind cover.

Or relocated.

Stanson slipped sideways into the alley between the sheriff’s station and its neighboring tenement. Back turned and unaware, he had been an easy target, but the assailant had missed anyway: an unskilled marksman. Yet to position themself on a roof by the time Stanson was leaving the jailhouse meant they knew Stanson had gone inside. They hadn’t ambushed him as he left the saloon, so they must have taken offense about the same time the saloon owner had.

Something wasn’t adding up. Worse, Stanson knew he was missing something right in front of him. Something—

Sheriff Tate rounded the corner on the far side of the alley, blocking the narrow exit. She held a lean rifle in one hand.

“Ain’t see ‘im back this way,” she said quickly. She flicked her head back the way she’d come, toward where the shooter would have been. “Must’ve fled straight away.”

“Quick response, sheriff,” Stanson grunted.

“I was up quicker’n a virgin at a whorehouse when I heard the shot. Figured I’d come around back and cut off his escape. Keep myself outta the crossfire, dig?”

Stanson shoved the twin pistols back in his gunbelt and nodded. The gunner was gone. “Thank ya anyway, sheriff. I appreciate the expedience. This happen often in your little town?”

“Aye, here’n there. I try to discourage gunfire in the town proper, but you know how the heat gets to people. Fries their heads real good, can’t even wait to settle their disagreement outside the fence.” She spoke quickly, and gestured about with a free hand more than than she had during their earlier meeting.

“I’ll keep a keen eye, then,” Stanson said. “You think the Reverend will be in any danger if I go up to that church there and let myself in?”

Julia barked a humorless laugh. “Ain’t nobody ‘round here stupid enough to shoot at the church. Go on, now.”

Stanson ducked his head and gestured past Julia to the back of the alley. “May I, then?”

“You need anything else, just ask,” she said, stepping aside.

He thanked her and moved into the back street, which was little more than a long, winding alley at the back of the main road’s line of structures.

As he zig-zagged through the dilapidated neighborhood, past burned-out tenements and linen-covered shanties, he kept his ears open for further aggression. The lines of sight here were too short for anyone to get the jump on him without getting close, first.

Something was definitely not adding up, and Stanson couldn’t help chewing on it further. Julia’s voice had dripped with deception. She was trying too hard to hide something, but he couldn’t figure out what. She wasn’t the shooter, not with the shot missing like that, nor would she have been able to reach the alley in time from any of the roofs at the end of the street. So who had she been protecting?

Stanson shook his head as he came around to the end of the neighborhood back-alley. The church was just ahead. Whatever was going on with Road’s End and its sheriff, it could wait.

He had a priest to meet.

~*~

Arthur enlists the crew for a job evicting Westlings from the coming Railway’s path. Miles Stanson is blind with love and ignores his Sight. He ignores the Glare in his own reflection.

Half the Westling village is dead before Stanson can process what happened. He didn’t shoot, but the end is the same. The glee and the fervor in Arthur’s eyes during the bloodshed haunts Stanson for years. There had been no parlay, no diplomacy, and no survivors.

“You’ve gone softer’n a Sight-coward skulkin’ in the shadows,” the crew jeers when they find Stanson standing over the corpse of a Westling child.

That night he slips away, running until the Glare of their atrocities is no more than a flickering star on the horizon.

~*~

The church was the road’s end of Road’s End, a final holdout of civilization before the unrelenting Wilds.

Inner Baronies civilization, at any rate. Stanson knew better than most frontiersmen why the Westlings devoted themselves to sparsity and self-sacrificing community. Civilization did not end at the frontier towns; it changed. Where the Westlings adapted to the Wilds, the Baronies tried to conquer it. The Railway would arrive no matter how many hellfires or hauntings stood in its path.

But you couldn’t kill demons with industrialization—arrogance and greed only made you more susceptible to their predations. Against hunters of the mind, you could only hide, and to sin was to walk through their dark forest blindfolded and waving a torch.

Church officials easily rose to power at the edges of the Baronies. When the shield and sword of familiar, iron-wrought civilization was miles away, spiritual guidance was the next best thing.

Not that you could kill a demon or stop the dustmen plague with gunpowder.

Despite the Reverend’s status here, the church itself did not bare signs of luxury or decadence. It was well-maintained, though. Stanson could see that much. He ran a finger along one wall, noting the differences in weathering on the wooden planks. The paint peeled in places, flaking off under his touch or turning to dust, but it had still been painted, once. The rest of Road’s End had no such gilding.

Maybe the man’s piety was still intact after all. A fool’s hope, but a hope nonetheless.

The church doors opened into a high-roofed chamber, the silence within encouraging solemn reverence. Two sections of pews faced a podium atop a raised platform. Tall, narrow windows admitted light to shine through the rafters above, which shone hazily through the cracked crystal of the lone chandelier.

A single figure sat in one of the pews, his bald head bowed. The man appeared to be in his forties—older than Stanson, but not by much. The sun had not been kind to his Inner Baronies complexion. The vestment hanging from his shoulders marked him as a clergyman, though Stanson didn’t know enough to recognize any marks of rank.

Still, it was not hard to discern this was the man Stanson had come to see: the man bowed before him had no Glare.

The gunslinger removed his hat and waited for Reverend Father Guinevere to finish his prayers

“The Light shines favorably on those who exhibit patience,” the Father said after a few minutes. He eased himself out of his seat and into the aisle, adjusted his robe, then smiled at Stanson and spread his arms. “Welcome to my humble chapel.”

“Father,” Stanson said, bowing curtly. “I hope to take little of your time. I’m lookin’ for someone—I figure the graveyard where he resides is in your safe keepin’.”

The Father nodded slowly and stepped forward, a red-jeweled clergyman’s medallion swinging from its chain around his neck. “Yes. Yes, and I suspect I could guess who it is you’ve come to visit.”

Stanson raised an eyebrow.

“Only one man in my care that could draw a bounty hunter this far out. You’re after Mr. Arthur Whitman. Always looking over his shoulder. A man that paranoid surely had the law at his heels, and that was evident before I’d come to know him. Or have I missed the mark, if you’ll excuse the bounty pun?”

“You’re keen, Father. This town is in good hands.”

“You’re too kind. Too kind,” Father Guinevere said, and gestured at the door. “Shall we?”

“It seems I am no longer in any hurry, Father. I would wait until you are finished with your worship. I’m sure I could—“

“If you wait until I am finished with my worship, you’d be waiting until the desert turns to ice. Come, I would very much like to give my blessings once more to my mother’s grave. And, at any rate, the cemetery requires a key, which is in my safekeeping.”

“Of course, Father.”

~*~

Miles wanders the Wilds. A woman finds him, head and shoulders bowed under the beating sun. She guides him to her village. She’s revered there. Honored. She has the gift to see when another needs help they don’t know how to ask for, after all. The Sight.

“The sinner draws calamity to their soul like dustmen to the flesh and demons to the mind,” she teaches.

It is familiar. The gunslinger had lived like this, once. Peacefully, trusting in others, without a reason to hide his heritage or Sight. No violence, no hate. His father had thought people like Miles—Sight-hunters, squints, shamans, even regular Westlings—to be cowards and informants. Perhaps he had simply feared what they saw in him?

~*~

“Father Guinevere, if you don’t mind my askin’…the people here look up to you, yet do you not counsel them against hatred for their neighbor?”

“I lead them as best I can, yes,” the Father nodded, “but where liquor and apathy mix in the heat of the desert, well, there’s sure to be some wounded pride now and again. So long as they don’t take it too far.”

“I mean the Westlings, Father.”

“Ah.”

The Reverend Father was silent for a time as they walked. He raised a palm in greeting to a woman pulling a wagon of empty bottles, clinking and bumping along the unpaved dirt road. She nodded, spoke his name, but reserved the majority of her attention for Stanson. Her eyes were sharp with suspicion and distrust.

“These people,” the Reverend began slowly. His lips trembled, as if a jumble of different words tumbled around his tongue, the right ones hidden among the insufficient. It made him appear older than he was. “These people need purpose. Without it, not even the Light could guide them through the dark nights. They need something to believe in, yes, but they also need something to strive against.”

The pair moved through a gate in the meager fortifications surrounding the town, and continued into the barrens beyond. The sun fell slowly to its rest.

“It motivates them, you see,” the Reverend continued. “Gives them a sense of community—a foundation, if you will—to stand against the ravages of an unkind world. If I can foster such a bond of brotherhood and sisterhood in them, to see each other as allies and family against incursion, they’ll be much less likely to turn on each other.”

“That doesn’t explain this hatred toward the Westlings,” Stanson said.

“Doesn’t it?”

“What purpose does it serve, Father? The Westlings are survivors. They’re born in the Wilds, raised alongside its dangers. They could offer trade, knowledge. Why make enemies of them? Why not ally with them against the evils of the desert?”

Road’s End fell away behind them, shimmering from the last of the day’s heat rising off gravel and dirt. Just ahead, the gated graveyard baked. Stanson felt something prick at his nerves like an insect crawling down the nape of his neck. He had never found the would-be assassin. The desert beyond Road’s End left him exposed.

“Steam and steel are the harbingers of progress, my son. The Westlings have no such drive. Their mystics balk at industry and ambition while communing with the unholy and demonic. Their devilcraft gives them strength, I’ll admit that,” the priest said, jiggling an upraised finger, “but their Sight is a mockery of the maker. Only He of the Light can judge the sins of mankind. I would not have my people engaging with them, lest those good folk decide perhaps the Westlings are capable of being forgiven.”

Stanson bit his tongue. Father Guinevere had been misled by the Inner Baronies imperialism, but how could Stanson challenge his assumptions without revealing secrets of his own?

Apparently, he didn’t have to.

“You seem ill at ease with my position against the Westlings,” Father Guinevere observed. His voice, conversational and friendly, barely masked the underlying thrust of his interest. As with the sheriff, Stanson was once again under scrutiny, and not simply because of his reputation as a bounty hunter.

Stanson answered carefully, slowly. “The Inner Baronies are dogmatic, violent. Conquer and consume, that’s their way. I’ve seen first-hand the destruction that expansionistic drive wrecks on the land, on the Westlings. On themselves. They’ve no regard for sin, despite all the pretense. The Westlings teach—”

“The Westlings are no different, gunslinger. They use their devil-vision against us, harrying trade caravans and railway workers, farmers, innocent towns! Until we can leverage proper efforts to civilize them, they are our enemy. They are in league with demons, with dustmen.”

Stanson let the conversation evaporate. He’d surprised himself at the intensity he’d felt toward the Reverend’s practices. Why? Stanson was Westling himself, sure, but he’d always ducked the blow of prejudice. He could fake his heritage.

Father Guinevere hadn’t the tiniest sparkle of Glare about him. How could he harbor such prejudice without triggering the Glare?

Still, Stanson’d come here to settle a score, not to bridge the gap between the two halves of his bloodline. Reverend Father Guinevere was not his concern.

They arrived at the cemetery, and Stanson peered through the reinforced metal fence at the grave markers within while Father Guinevere searched for his key.

Whitman’s in there, Stanson thought. But who was he to spit on the grave of a dead man in front of a Reverend?

The sun was nearly down, and the long shadows of the scattered headstones and wooden crosses reached toward Stanson like so many fingers.