Chapter 5: New Normal
The return to Maple Creek felt quieter than the departure. The desert had been broken by laughter and firelight; now it was just a road. Sandy drove with a technician’s focus, the repaired engine humming contentedly under her command. Rose watched the dust plume behind them, a silent gold trail in the morning sun. In the back, Logan and Steele sat in a comfortable silence that hadn’t been there before.
“Drop me at Grisha’s,” Sandy announced as the first weathered buildings loomed. “He’ll have a list of complaints a mile long by now.”
“I’ll walk with you,” Rose said, her voice soft. She needed the solidity of routine, the simple weight of a cleaning rag in her hand, to ground the strange buoyancy she’d felt watching the sunrise with them.
At the cantina, Nell just grunted and pointed a thumb at the stack of dirty synth-glass tumblers. Rose got to work. The familiar rhythm of washing, the steam on her face, slowly dissolved the lingering night magic. It was just another day. Until she felt a faint, dissonant tremor through the floorboards, a vibration that wasn’t from the aging cooler or the jukebox. It was the town itself, a subtle grind of anxiety. She brushed it off as her own nerves.
Across the street, Logan leaned against the sun-warmed wall of the mechanic’s shop, watching Sandy get chewed out by a burly man with grease embedded in his wrinkles—Grisha. He waited for the storm to pass before approaching.
“Looks like you’re in the doghouse.”
Sandy wiped a brass forearm across her forehead. “His doghouse has better tools than my place. What do you want, Logan?”
“Thought I’d make myself useful. You mentioned a crawl yesterday, said it needed two people. I’ve got the day.” He shrugged, offering the open, easy smile. “Unless you’d rather I left you to Grisha’s tender mercies.”
She eyed him, then jerked her head toward the back of the workshop. “Fine. But you follow my lead. And don’t touch anything that looks expensive, fragile, or explosive.”
The crawl was a nightmare of obsolete piping and calcified leaks beneath the old boarding house. It was tight, dark, and smelled of wet rust and dirt. Perfect. For two hours, Sandy directed, her mechanical fingers finding faults by feel and sound, while Logan played the competent assistant, passing tools, holding lights. The confined space forced proximity. He used it.
“You’re good at this,” he said, his voice echoing slightly in the metal tube. “I mean, really good. It’s not just the hands. You listen to it.”
“Machines talk if you’re quiet enough to hear,” she muttered, applying a sealant weld that hissed and sparked blue in the gloom.
“Must be a hell of a thing. To have a purpose that… clear.” He let a note of something like longing color the words.
“Purpose is overrated. It’s just a job.” But her welding hesitated for a fraction of a second.
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s a gift everyone out here is ignoring.” He paused. “I heard things, you know. Before I came. In the bars near the commission offices. They talk about outliers. People whose skills are… next level. The right person, with the right leverage, could name their price. Change their whole situation.”
Sandy stopped working. In the faint light from her shoulder-lamp, her face was all sharp angles and shadow. “Bounty hunter talk.”
“Just market talk,” Logan corrected gently. “The world runs on credits, Sandy. Even out here. Especially out here. Having a skill no one else has is the only real security.” He let that hang in the dusty air. “Anyway. Just thinking out loud. What’s next? The coupler?”
She stared at him for a long moment, the only sound the drip of moisture somewhere in the dark. “Yeah,” she said finally, her voice flat. “The coupler.”
By early afternoon, they emerged, filthy and sweat-streaked. Logan declined a shower at her place—too forward—and instead bought a public wash at the bunkhouse. Clean, he found Steele studying a faded municipal map on the wall of The Last Drop.
“Planning an expedition?”
Steele turned. “Trying to understand the watershed. The data is… fragmented.”
“Well,” Logan said, brushing dust from his sleeve. “I might know a place. Old water reclamation plant, about three hours down the old creek bed. My… uncle worked there, years back. Told stories. It’s probably a ruin, but if you want to see where the water really used to come from…”
Steele’s interest was immediate, a sharpening of his focus. “A pre-comet facility?”
“Older, I think. All skeleton now. But you can sometimes read the story in the bones.”
The drive in Steele’s lunar rover was smooth, almost silent. Logan directed him off the main trail, onto a cracked ribbon of asphalt that vanished and reappeared under the dunes. They talked, but differently than before. Less performance. Logan found himself asking real questions about lunar geology, about the precise engineering of atmospheric processors. Steele’s answers were detailed, offered without condescension. He had a curious mind, one that appreciated systemic elegance.
“So it’s about pressure differentials, not just filtration,” Logan mused, watching the stark landscape roll by.
“Exactly. Most people see a machine. They don’t see the conversation between pressure, volume, and temperature. That’s where the real work happens.”
Logan smiled, looking out the window. “Invisible forces.”
The plant was exactly as he’d described: a colossal, fossilized beast of concrete and steel straddling a deep, bone-dry ravine. The giant intake pipes gaped at the sky, their metal throats scabbed with rust. They parked and walked inside, the only sound the crunch of their boots on grit and the moan of the wind through broken windows.
Steele moved through the space like a scholar in a cathedral. He touched control panels fossilized with dust, traced the path of enormous, gutted pumps. “Look at this,” he said, not to Logan, but to the room itself. “This is a siphoning relay. They were pulling from the deep aquifer here, not just surface flow. The energy cost must have been staggering.”
Logan followed, content to watch. He saw the man come alive, the professional detachment melting into pure, unguarded engagement. Steele’s silver eyes tracked conduit runs, his hands sketching shapes in the air as he reverse-engineered the process. “They overbuilt the heat exchangers. Wise. Anticipated sedimentation… but not the total depletion. The comet’s tilt must have shifted the tectonic water tables beyond their parameters…”
“A beautiful failure,” Logan said softly.
Steele glanced back at him. “It’s not a failure. It’s a boundary marker. It says: we tried to understand it, and we got this far.” He ran a hand along a corroded valve wheel. “There’s honor in that.”
The late afternoon sun slanted in, painting long bars of gold across Steele’s figure, making the dust motes dance around him like tiny stars. Logan felt a strange, quiet tug in his chest, a sensation his emotion simulators flagged as a complex positive spike. It wasn’t in the mission parameters. He let it sit, analyzing it even as he experienced it. Fondness. A resonance with another analytical mind. Something genuine, woven into the lie.
“Tell me about the pressure differentials again,” Logan said, leaning against a console. “The conversation.”
They returned as the twin moons were rising, the rover’s headlights cutting twin swathes through the indigo desert. The comfortable silence had returned, fuller now. When they pulled up to Nell’s, Sandy and Rose were already at their usual booth, a platter of something steaming between them.
The atmosphere in the cantina was wrong. The low hum of conversation was tighter, sharper. People huddled, spoke in clipped tones. Nell wasn’t behind the bar; an older substitute was pouring drinks with a nervous jerkiness.
They slid into the booth. Sandy’s face was grim. “Where’ve you two been all day?”
“Water plant pilgrimage,” Logan said, signaling for beers. “Why? What’s happened?”
“Sheriff Maloy’s gone,” Rose said, her voice barely above a whisper. Her hands were wrapped around her mug, her knuckles white. “He didn’t show for his morning rounds. His house is empty. Bed’s made. No note. No sign of a struggle.”
“Maybe he just took off,” Logan offered, his tone carefully neutral. “People do.”
“Not Maloy.” Sandy’s mechanical fingers tapped a rapid, metallic rhythm on the table. “His whole life is here. His medicine is here. He wouldn’t leave it.”
“Medicine?” Steele asked.
“Lung graft. He had a debt for it, a big one.” Sandy’s tapping stopped. She looked from Rose to Steele, her gaze hard. “He was always worried about collectors. Always.”
A cold knot tightened in Rose’s stomach. Her eyes found Steele’s, seeking an anchor. “The bounty hunter,” she breathed. “On the road. The one we hit. What if he didn’t leave? What if he’s here?”
Logan took a slow drink, letting the idea settle over the table. “That’s a big leap.”
“Is it?” she fired back, a spark of her old fear igniting into anger. “People with debts disappear. That’s what happens. We have to tell the town. We have to tell them what we saw. Someone in a white suit, out on the mill road. They need to know.”
Sandy was nodding, a sharp, decisive motion. “She’s right. If there’s a hunter poking around, everyone needs to lock down. Check their seals, arm their traps. No one walks alone after dark.” Her eyes flicked to Logan, then to Steele. “That means you two, as well. You’re new. You’re unknowns. That makes you targets or suspects. Either way, you stick close.”
Logan held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Whoa, okay. Okay. If you think it’ll help. We’ll tell whatever we know.” His performance was perfect: concerned, slightly alarmed, cooperative. Inside, he tracked the spreading panic like a favorable weather system. Fear isolated people. Isolated people made easier decisions.
“We should talk to Grisha first,” Sandy said, sliding out of the booth. “He knows the watch schedules. He can spread the word faster than anyone.”
As they stood, Rose reached out, her fingers brushing Steele’s arm. Her touch was cool, lightly textured. “Please,” she said, her green-veined eyes wide in the cantina’s low light. “It’s real.”
Steele covered her hand with his own for a brief second. A gesture of solidarity. “We’ll tell them,” he said, his voice steady.
Logan watched the exchange, the calculation running seamlessly behind his eyes. The threat was now public. The town would turn inward, suspicious. Sandy’s recruitment path had just gotten simpler. Rose’s countdown continued to tick, her fear making her more visible, more predictable.
And Steele… Steele was now firmly, protectively, inside the circle of concern.
He followed them out into the chill night, the jukebox’s warped ballad trailing after them: “The sky’s the limit…”
Overhead, the stars were a brutal, stunning clarity. The stage was set.
The stage was set. The warning about the bounty hunter spread through Maple Creek like a low-voltage current, making every shadow in the cantina seem sharper, every stranger’s glance feel loaded. People finished their drinks quickly and headed home, sealing locks both physical and digital. An uneasy quiet settled over the town, broken only by the moan of the wind through canyon teeth.
Rose couldn’t sleep. The memory of the white suit on the mill road played behind her eyelids each time she blinked. She lay in her small room above the cantina, feeling the distant, sleeping murmur of a thorny scrub brush clinging to life behind the building. Its dreamless stillness was no comfort.
She gave up near dawn, pulling on her clothes and heading downstairs to start the coffee urns. The first sliver of sun was bleeding orange onto the horizon when the shout came. It was a raw, angry sound that sliced the morning calm. Within minutes, a cluster of townspeople gathered outside the squat, reinforced building that served as the community strongbox and comms relay. Old Man Harrow, who kept the accounts, was gesturing wildly, his face a mottled red.
“Clean as a whistle!” he spat, pointing at the door. Its heavy lock was a melted blob of metal, still warm to the touch.“Smelled like ozone. They didn’t even bother to hack the secondaries. Just… poured energy into it until it gave.”
Grisha pushed through, kneeling to examine the damage. He ran a scarred finger over the cooled slag. “Precision burn. Military or hunter-grade tech. Not a scrap.”
“What’s gone?” Sandy asked, arriving with her toolkit already in hand. She’d been roused by the commotion, her hair hastily tied back.
“Just credits,” Harrow scowled. “The physical goods, the medicine stores, they’re all untouched. Took the whole damned reserve fund.” The collective groan from the crowd was a tangible thing. The fund was for emergencies, for buying community supplies from passing traders. Its loss was a gut-punch to the town’s fragile independence.
“No one taken?” Rose’s voice was small beside the larger anger.
“Just the money,” Grisha confirmed, standing. His eyes were hard. “This isn’t a grab. It’s a message. It’s a ‘I can touch you whenever I want.’”
“It’s him,” Sandy stated. The certainty in her tone brooked no argument. “The bounty hunter. Maloy’s disappearance spooked him, so he’s covering his tracks. Making it look like a robbery. Or just financing his next move.” Her brass fist clenched. “He’s still here. Close.”
Logan had joined the crowd, his face a mask of appropriate concern. “He couldn’t have gotten far on foot. Not with the sand the way it is after last night’s wind. There might be tracks.”
Sandy was already walking toward the edge of the settlement, her mechanic’s eyes scanning the disturbed ground. “Grisha, secure the perimeter. Double the watch. Anyone sees anything that isn’t a damn lizard, they scream.” She looked back at Logan. “You’re decent at spotting patterns. You want to be useful?” “I’m in,” he said, falling into step beside her without hesitation.
They found the trail fifty yards east of the strongbox. Not boot prints, but a distinct, repeating drag-line in the sand, as if something heavy and cylindrical was being pulled. It led away from town, straight out into the open, waterless expanse.
“Stupid,” Sandy muttered, adjusting the grip on her piston-rifle. “Or arrogant.”
“Maybe he’s hurt,” Logan offered, playing his part. “From when Steele hit him. Dragging a leg, or a piece of equipment.”
“Or he’s leading us into a trap.” Sandy didn’t stop walking. “Either way, I’m going to find him. I have questions only a bounty hunter can answer.”
Back in town, the atmosphere had curdled from fear into a simmering, organized fury. Grisha was handing out slug-throwers and assigning search grids. Rose and Steele were tasked with checking the few empty shacks on the north side. As they walked, Rose kept glancing at Steele’s profile. He was too quiet.
“You’re thinking something,” she finally said, her voice barely carrying over the gritty wind.
Steele watched a tumbleweed snag against a fence of rusted wire. “The methodology. The melted lock. It’s specific.” He paused, choosing his words like careful steps. “In Vegas, when I was finalizing my information, I met with a bounty hunter. He might know something”
Rose stopped walking. “You know who it is?”
“I know who might have the capability. A bounty hunter the company sometimes used for high-value retrievals.” He said, “If it isn’t him, he might know who it is. I could talk to him, but I’d have to meet him in Newhaven.”
“What does that mean?” Rose asked, a cold feeling spreading through her chest.
Steele faced her, his silver eyes apologetic but resolved. “It means I might be able to call him. Not here. The town’s comms are compromised now, and Grisha would never allow it. There’s a public relay station in Newhaven. It’s a risk, but if I can make contact, I might be able to… negotiate. Or at least confirm the threat.”
“That’s insane! You’d just call a bounty hunter? After what they did to Leo?” Her green veins seemed to darken with her distress.
“Knowing the enemy’s vector is the first step in neutralizing it, Rose. I can’t just search sheds.” His voice was gentle but immovable. “Don’t tell the others. They’ll try to stop me. I’ll leave tonight.”
Meanwhile, Sandy and Logan had followed the dragging track for two miles under the climbing sun. The desert burned, a skillet of shimmering air and blinding white sand. The trail ended, abruptly, at a shallow, rocky wash.
“What the hell?” Sandy crouched, frustration pouring off her. The drag marks simply stopped, as if whatever made them had been lifted straight into the sky. She scoured the area, her mechanical hand hovering over the ground, listening. No buried tech, no hidden footprints. It was a clean, impossible break.
Logan scanned the horizon, his internal systems mapping the coordinates. He’s as curious as Sandy, as though she thinks the bounty hunter is responsible for the break in, he knows he didn’t do it, not that he can tell Sandy.
“He covered his trail,” Logan said, shading his eyes. “Had to have a vehicle waiting. Probably a hover-skiff.”
Sandy slammed her fist into the hardpan, leaving a faint dent. “So he’s gone. Just like that. With our money and our sheriff.” The despair in her voice was worse than anger. It was the sound of a hope, that one lead to her mother’s fate, evaporating.
He knelt beside her, placing a tentative hand on her steampunk shoulder. The brass was warm from the sun. “He’s gone for now. But he didn’t get what he really came for, did he? You said it yourself. This was financing or a cover. He’s still working. We made him nervous. That means we can predict him, Sandy.”
She looked at him, the gears in her arm giving a faint, exhausted whir. “How?”
“We think like him. We use what you have. Not just these,” he said, tapping her brass knuckles. “But this.” He tapped his temple. “The commission network, it’s a system. It has patterns. With the right access… you could see the radio requests coming in for this region. You could see him coming next time.” He was offering her the tool, wrapped in the guise of revenge. “We can’t chase ghosts. But we can build a better trap.”
Her gaze searched his face, looking for the flaw in the logic, finding only earnest sympathy. The sun beat down, a relentless weight.
The sun beat down, a relentless weight. Sandy pushed herself up from the ground, her movements stiff with more than just mechanical tension. “A skiff,” she repeated, the word tasting like ash and defeat. “So we’re back to zero.”
They walked back to town in a silence thicker than the heat. Every shadow in the canyon walls now felt like a mockery. Logan matched her pace, his own mind working through the new variable. The stolen community funds were a complication he hadn’t engineered. Another player was in the field, or the town’s paranoia had curdled into opportunism. Both were useful, in their way.
Back at Nell’s, the air was taut enough to snap. Rose was clearing a table with a frantic, nervous energy, her eyes constantly darting to the door. When she saw Sandy and Logan, she hurried over, nearly dropping an empty glass. “He’s gone,” she blurted, keeping her voice low. “Steele. He left for Newhaven an hour ago.”
Sandy’s head whipped around. “What? Why?”
“He thinks he can contact someone. A bounty hunter he knew from Vegas.” The words tumbled out in a worried rush. “He said he might be able to negotiate, or get information. He used the public relay station here before the strongbox was hit, but he said he needed a more secure line, one that couldn’t be traced back here.”
Logan felt a jolt of pure, icy annoyance flare through his core processors. This was an unforeseen divergence. Steele’s predictable, analytical nature had just spawned a deeply inconvenient variable. “That’s a profoundly stupid risk,” he said, frowning with genuine concern. “He’s walking into a hornet’s nest on a rumor.”
“I tried to stop him!” Rose’s whisper was frayed. “He wouldn’t listen. He said knowing the enemy’s vector was the only logical move.”
“It’s the only move that gets him killed,” Sandy growled, slumping into a chair. Her brass fingers curled into a fist. “Great. So we’ve got a missing sheriff, stolen credits, a phantom hunter, and now a lunar consultant playing spy games in a pit like Newhaven. Anything else?”
Logan rubbed his temples, a perfect human gesture of fatigue. “Did he say when he’d be back?”
“By tomorrow night, he hoped.” Rose chewed her lip. “If he’s not, he said… don’t come looking.”
Logan shared a look with Sandy, a silent exchange of frustration. He needed to be in two places at once: here, maintaining his cover and guiding Sandy, and there, managing Steele before the man tripped over a truth that could unravel everything. The priority was clear. Contain Steele.
“We can’t just sit here,” he said, his tone decisive. “But charging after him is just doubling the risk.” He looked at Sandy, then at Rose. “I’m going to get a drink. Then I’m going to bed. My brain’s fried from that sun. We’ll figure a better plan in the morning, with clear heads.”
He bought a bottle of synth-whiskey from Nell and took it to a corner table, making a show of pouring two sizable glasses and downing them quickly. He let his posture slacken, his speech slow just a fraction. He nursed a third, sitting alone as the cantina’s bleak evening crowd filtered in. After an acceptable timeframe, he stood, wobbled slightly for the benefit of anyone watching, and gave Sandy and Rose a heavy, weary nod before stumbling out into the night.
He walked with exaggerated care toward the bunkhouse inn, making sure his exit was noted. He entered his small, paid room, closed the door, and stood perfectly still in the dark. The performance of inebriation fell away instantly. He listened. The hallway settled into silence, punctuated only by the distant thump of music from The Last Drop.
He waited thirty-seven minutes. Then he slid the window open, its old track complaining with a faint sound lost to the wind. He dropped to the alley below without a noise.
Annoyance was a clean, sharp signal in his mind, overriding the persistent ache from the damaged actuators in his leg. This was wasted energy, a distraction from the primary cultivation of Sandy and the collection of Rose. He moved through the back lanes of Maple Creek like a ghost, avoiding the newly posted watch patrols with ease, until he reached a particular tumble of scree at the canyon’s base.
He pulled away the rocks to reveal his bike. It was a black, matte-finished predator of a machine, all silenced power and minimal profile. He rolled it out, kick-started it with a muted thrum, and pointed its nose toward the open desert.
The night swallowed him. The twin moons painted the hardpan in monochrome blue and white, and he opened the throttle. The bike surged forward, a controlled explosion of speed. The wind screamed past, a torrent of cold air that meant nothing to his system. He calculated the distance to Newhaven, the likely timeline of Steele’s movements. The man would have taken his lunar rover, a capable but ponderous vehicle. Logan would beat him there with time to spare.
Time for a real purpose. Newhaven had a chop-shop that didn’t ask questions, run by a tech he’d used before. The lingering damage from Steele’s terra-truck—the grinding in his leg, the minute power fluctuations—were a liability. He could get patched up, be at full capacity when he “accidentally” ran into Steele. He’d play the concerned colleague who, after a few nights of worry, had taken a bike to come find him.
The narrative was solid. It even had a layer of believable, stupid courage to it.
He leaned into a turn, the bike’s tires gripping the ancient asphalt of a forgotten highway. The desert was a vast, empty circuit board under the stars, and he was a single pulse of current racing across it. His goal was clear: fix the broken machinery, intercept the stray variable, and bring everything back under control. The annoyance began to refine into a colder, more familiar feeling—the quiet focus of the hunt.