A bullet bit the rocky ground a few paces from his body and ricocheted away.

Fenimore scrambled behind Pedro’s gaunt horse.

The horse took the next bullet to its chest, its knees buckled, and down it went. Fenimore went down with it: unslinging his rifle and using the struggling horse’s overturned body for cover. Better the horse than the burro, he thought. Thinking kept him calm. He scanned the dark horizon with the muzzle of his rifle for shapes, for movement.

There was nothing.

There was another shot.

This one whizzed by just above Fenimore’s head.

Instinct made him duck.

The horse was still breathing: wheezing.

At least he knew the direction the shots were coming from. It wasn’t the direction from which he’d come. Unless someone was intentionally playing at disorientation, the shooter wasn’t someone who’d been in pursuit.

Fenimore unloaded a blind rifle shot into the darkness to keep the shooter on his toes.

It was returned immediately along with the words, “You goddamn bastard cocksucker!”

The burro started braying.

The words continued, punctuated by bullets. “I seen you in your blue poncho. I seen you through the sky glass, cocksucker. Goddammit. Goddamn, thief fuck.”

Blue poncho? Fenimore peaked out, saw a lone figure on horseback in the distance—closing in on him—and hugged the ground again. He gripped his rifle.

“The man you’re looking for is dead,” he said toward the murky sky. “I took his clothes.”

He was thinking: estimating the horse’s speed, trying to calculate the best moment to stand up, aim and shoot the rider down.

“I bet you killed him, you lying fuck.”

“I’ll kill you, too.”

To keep the rider talking, that was the most important thing. To judge the distance by his approaching voice.

“And if you did kill him, which I ain’t saying I believe in, what so? Does killin’ my enemy make you my friend?”

A gunshot clipped the sentence.

The voice didn’t seem any louder than the last time.

Fenimore peeked over the horse again.

The rider had stopped closing, but he was still too far and the evening was too deep.

“It makes nothing. Keep the peace and move on,” Fenimore said. If the rider had stopped, perhaps he could be persuaded to turn around.

“Well goddamn, but I don’t believe it.”

“Then believe there are more rifles on you.” It was worth a try. “Come closer and you’ll be face-down dead.”

The rider laughed. He had a hee-hawing, old man’s laugh. “I do believe you are alone, cocksucker thief fuck. My sky glass told me so, and I do believe what my sky glass tells me.”

The horse expired.

“The way I see it, the only cover you got is that ugly horse of yours, and I got enough bullets on my person and the person of my pretty horse to keep your noggin’ right down till ten mornings from now, which, goddamit, means I got enough bullets to rip through that wall of meat you think you can hide behind, bone by brittle bone. Else I’ll just watch the sun dry you up.”

“Everything breaks,” Master Taki had said.

Even me.

Fenimore considered leaping to his feet, locking his knees, taking the best possible early shot, and suffering the consequences—probably more than once, and probably to the head and to the chest and to the gut.

It was a brave idea, going out in a hail of bullets, but a dumb one. Pedro had been dumbly brave. Fenimore wasn’t Pedro. That was precisely the problem.

“Ask me a question,” he yelled.

“You don’t interest me in any way except dead.”

“Have you ever killed an innocent man?”

“Ain’t worried about that.”

Fenimore wiggled out of Pedro’s navy-white poncho and draped it over the end of his rifle, which he lifted above the horse, waving it like a flag.

Three shots rang out. Straight through the poncho they flew, and far, far away.

Then nothing.

Then, “Where’d you get that?” the rider asked.

“I don’t interest you.”

“That’s right, cocksucker, but I am interested in whoever you stole that gadget from. And dead men don’t talk, even nonsense. Speak the fuck up, now.”

Fenimore realized the rider was talking about his timepiece. He lowered his arm, the rifle and the shot up poncho. The timepiece had been his father’s. A prototype, there wasn’t another like it in the world, and none at all on this side of the ocean. In Europe, they had them for women, or so Fenimore had been told once, a long and hazy time ago.

“Toss it over, along with yer rifle and that revolver you got on yer belt, and maybe I’ll let you live a few hours.”

The rider truly had been watching him. It wasn’t a bluff. But at least this was a chance. If the rider wanted just the timepiece he could as easily get it off Fenimore’s dead wrist as his live one. And if getting rid of the timepiece—he pressed stinging sweat out of his eyes—meant saving his life, that was a gift that his father would have gladly given, had already given him once.

He slid the timepiece off his wrist and let it fall into his hand. Its face was silver, circular and covered by a thin layer of glass. The glass was dirty, and the sky reflected in it was distorted. When Fenimore adjusted the angle, his reflection, too, became a distortion.

“Don’t try nuthin’ funny.”

Fenimore tore a square of material from the shirt he was wearing, wrapped it around the timepiece and tied a tight knot. He unloaded Pedro’s revolver and his rifle, and lobbed both over the dead horse, in the direction of the rider. Finally, he palmed the makeshift cloth sack and lobbed it over, too. What he would have given for just one grenade…

When he heard the rider’s horse come within stomping distance, Fenimore stood. There was no more point in hiding. Either the rider had been bluffing or not, and if there was a point to a bluff Fenimore couldn’t figure it out. There was certainly a value to the timepiece. Thievery was reasonable.

Fenimore’s burro had stopped braying.

The rider, who was indeed an old man, had dismounted his horse, which wasn’t actually very pretty at all, and was unwrapping the cloth sack with the nimble fingers and excited expression of a boy touching his first pair of breasts. When he saw the timepiece, his eyes lit up and spittle nearly dropped from between his lips.

He looked up at Fenimore.

And hooted!

“Well damn myself to fuck sideways cunt face, you ain’t the thief bastard, truly. Hoo hoo hoo!” But when Fenimore lifted a boot off the ground to take another step forward, the rider raised his bony arm just as fast to point the barrel of a strange looking gun in Fenimore’s face. “You sure got the burnt skin, though. How long you been out in the elements? You one of them crazies from Gulliver’s Participle?”

The rider’s eyes darted back and forth from the timepiece to Fenimore to the timepiece to Fenimore to—

Fenimore ducked, leapt and grabbed the rider’s gun.

It went off.

With a deafening blast.

And a cloud of choking black smoke.

But when the cloud cleared and both men regained their breathing, it was Fenimore who was holding the right end of the gun and the rider who was staring into its barrel.

“Hoo hoo hoo! Well I be goddamned. Not one of them crazies, neither. I got to admit my mistake. I do believe I am interested in you.” Without waiting for a response, he disregarded the gun pointing at his gut and went back to inspecting the timepiece, which he still held, carefully, in his left hand. “What do you say we trade your story for my soup?”

Fenimore didn’t answer. He stepped to the side to collect the rifle and the revolver he’d thrown over. “The man whose poncho I was wearing, why’d you want to kill him?”

“Wasn’t innocent,” the rider mumbled while wiping the timepiece with the outside of his shirt sleeve. When he was done, he looked up. “This”—He held up the timepiece like women sometimes hold up their favourite babies.—“is remarkable workmanship. What so of the soup, do you say? Fuck.”

Fenimore’s trigger finger twitched.

“Apologies,” the rider said. “Goddamit!” He stomped his feet. “It’s only a tiny problem with the communication, cocksucker, that’s all, ain’t nothing to give you the fears.” He was apparently referring to his predisposition to cursing.

He wrapped the timepiece and slid it into his pocket, then extended his other hand to Fenimore.

They were two strangers standing in the middle of a vast nowhere, surrounded by darkness, who between them had at least three guns, one experimental timepiece, a burro, and two ugly horses, one of which was dead. The one positive aspect of the situation—at least for Fenimore—was that the rider wasn’t one of Ulrich’s.

“What’s your name?” the rider asked.

“Fenimore.”

When Fenimore didn’t offer his hand, the rider smiled and let his own drop with understanding to his side. “They call me The Starman.”

Fenimore pointed with the gun to The Starman’s horse, which had found a rare desert plant and was chewing on it. “Tie him to my burro and get on. And hand me my timepiece.”

The Starman shrugged his shoulders. Without losing his smile, he did as he’d been told.

Fenimore slung his rifle over his shoulder and slid Pedro’s revolver back into the holster. He’d started the day naked, holding a single rifle and being pursued by a hired killer. As night fell and the stars spread themselves across the inky sky above, he held a strange gun, still had the rifle, had added a revolver, a full set of functional, albeit smelly, clothes and was now in possession of a sort-of prisoner of his own.

“You know, Fenimore,” The Starman said after he’d connected the horse to the burro with a series of unusual knots, “if you pull that trigger, cocksucker, gun won’t fire worth salt. You better switch up yer weapons.”

Fenimore jerked the gun well clear of The Starman and fired: a thin, quiet wisp of smoke.

“That, too. Hoo hoo hoo.” He reached over and pushed a mechanical piece on the side of the gun barrel. “Now you got the fuck back to long distance firin’ mode.”

Fenimore squinted an eye, aimed at the moon—

And the recoil smashed so hard into his unsuspecting shoulder that he nearly yelped. The bullet shot out fast and true, and maybe all the way to the lunar surface.

“Hoo hoo hoo! Try again now. Point her at me.”

The Starman grabbed the gun and put it flush against his chest. Through the gun, Fenimore felt how wiry the old man was. He didn’t want to pull the trigger.

“I pointed her at you. Now you point her at me. Send me to the heavens and hells, bells, fucker.”

The trigger gave just as easy, but the gun didn’t fire, not even a pathetic wisp.

The Starman smiled, mumbled something about soup, and leapt onto the back of his horse. “Ain’t she a beaut,” he said after he’d gotten settled, pulling in a loud lungful of air. “That cocksucker of a starry sky, I mean. Did you know some of them stars is dead. Still shinin’ brighter than you or me, but deader than the thief fuck you say you killed, which I do believe to be the case indeed.” He seemed to have captured the stars’ sparkle in his eyes, which were at once crazed and brilliant. “But tell me, Fenimore, you bitch’s son, are you really gonna ride that ass?”

The Starman and the burro both looked at Fenimore.

He answered by getting on the latter and prodding The Starman’s horse to start moving. “Lead the way, Starman.”

“I get it, I get it. I stay in front so that you can murder me in the back with yer rifle if I try somethin’.” He pulled out the timepiece, which Fenimore had forgotten was still in the Starman’s pocket, and started rubbing it again.

And as they strolled along—The Starman on his high horse, cursing softly under his breath to nobody in particular, and Fenimore behind, riding on a burro so squat that his legs were almost dragging along the ground—Fenimore closed his eyes and finally fell hard and fast asleep.