Chapter 29 · Dead Man's Crossing

He didn't ask. He put one hand flat on my back at the tree line and steered me off the road like I was a door worth shutting.

"We're not taking the truck," I said.

"The truck's got a plate. Plates get remembered." Torin didn't look at me. He was reading the ridge — wet pines, mud, the last gray light going out of the sky. "Kaelen's got two new men on the east gate. They'd sell their mothers for a promotion."

"Then let 'em sell. I'll walk up to that gate and say it to their faces. Contract severed, I walk out, nobody touches me." I yanked my hood off because it was making me angry, which is a stupid reason. "That's the law."

"That was the law on Tuesday." He said it flat, like a weather report. "Kaelen filed a retention claim Wednesday morning. Clerk stamped it. That's why the truck isn't moving and why the gate's got new men on it."

Mud came through my boot laces. I stood there with my mouth open like a fish on a dock.

"Fifty-one days," he said. "That's when the council sits.