Wesley

Leaves rustled. Wood creaked. Wind sighed. Dappled sunlight streamed down on him from above, and the dizzying plunge stretched out underfoot.

Talltop again. Why? He didn't know what he was doing, only that he had been here before. Picking a narrow rope bridge and starting down it, he knew that he was walking in his own footsteps, even though he had no memories of actually coming this way.

The town clung to the sides of those monumental trees like flowering polypores. Its platforms stood empty. All was still except the connecting bridges swaying lightly in the wind. There were no sounds of people.

"Hello?" Wesley called uncertainly while he walked, only answered by his own echo. "Is anyone there? I can't remember why I'm here!"

He stepped off the bridge and onto a platform. Buildings clustered about the trunk of the grandfather tree, doorways yawning empty and dark, no sign of movement through shuttered windows. He stood there for a moment, then moved on. Kept crossing bridges, kept calling out. Kept coming up short.

Eventually he made his way to the large square at the center of town. There, sitting on the edge of an adjacent platform, was a lone figure. His legs dangled over the side, and his hands were occupied playing with something metal.

"Hey!" Wesley shouted as he began running down the nearest bridge to get to the other person. "Hey, sir! Do you know what's going on here?"

The man looked up as Wesley stepped onto his platform, and stopped spinning a big revolver by its trigger guard, catching it by the grip with a flick of the wrist. Looking puzzled, he levered himself up and watched Wesley approach with a growing frown.

He was familiar. Nick Tawney, sheriff of Talltop.

"Who are you?" Tawney asked.

"I'm—"

* * *

Wesley jerked awake.

He became instantly aware of his body's aching complaints at sleeping on a cold floor, curled up in a ball like a dog.

He was hungry, and thirsty, and exhausted even though he'd just slept through the night. His only comfort was the piece of warm metal pressed against his chest. Safe. The only possession he owned aside from the clothes on his back.

Noise filled the warehouse even though it was still early morning. Abandoned by its rightful owners, Wesley shared the place with more than a dozen other survivors at least as desperate as he. Squirming tiredly against the wall of his little dark corner, he shouldered himself into an upright seated position and scanned his surroundings with a suspicious eye. His closest neighbor was ten feet off with his back turned, and didn't look like he posed a threat at the moment.

Wesley sat around for a while just feeling sorry for himself. Why had everything gone so wrong? The plan had seemed so simple at the time. Sneak away from the keep with enough money to board a ship, then go wherever that took him, start anew someplace where they'd never heard of Sam Darling and her kind.

It should have worked. He'd pinched enough trade goods before skipping out to get enough cash together for a passenger spot. For sure, he'd thought. The stuff had netted him what he thought at the time was a decent chunk of change, then he found out he'd gotten ripped off on account of being flagged as a freshie. On top of that, he found out that barely any ships were pulling into the Sheerhome docks, and the few that did charged extortionate fees for taking on passengers.

Far from being able to pay, Wesley had tried to sneak on board a merchant vessel, which had gotten him nothing but a hard beating at the hands of half a dozen sailors. The only other alternative was to approach one of the slave ships where some people were willingly selling themselves in exchange for a ticket out of Sheerhome. He wasn't quite that desperate.

Not yet.

He had spent the last five days holed up in this warehouse. He had run through his money extremely quickly due to soaring food prices. He'd been buying these really cheap pies—comparatively speaking, anyway—from a cook shop to try and make the money last, but the meat inside turned out to be monster meat, which had made him violently ill and had him spewing up precious nutrients and fluids, leaving him even worse off.

The money had run out two days ago. Selling Price's longsword had netted him enough glories to keep him fed through yesterday. But now it was a new day, and his belly had the audacity to be grumbling again already. There was nothing more to sell other than his body or his gun, and for some reason he was more willing to consider the former.

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As he sat around despondently watching other vagrants sitting around despondently, he tried to figure out what to do with himself now. At this point he wished he'd never left the keep at all, but it was too late to go back. Even though he thought Sam might forgive him for stealing and running away and breaking his promise, he was pretty sure some of her friends were of a less charitable disposition

Whenever some hungry fellow began eyeing him up, Wesley reached inside his soiled tunic to pull out part of his gun, which quickly had prospective scavengers looking elsewhere. Even though it still wouldn't fire, the sight of it was enough to have people thinking he meant business. Without it, he would probably be facedown with a slit throat somewhere.

Justice. That was its name. A concept that suited the Frontier like tits on a hog.

Somehow, while he was gripping its lacquered wood handle, its reassuring weight helped sap away some of his fear. While it was in his hand, he was filled with the naive hope that things might turn out all right in the end.

And Wesley, who had never really stuck to anything in this life or the one previous, knew for an unshakable fact that if anyone wanted to take Justice away, they'd have to peel it off his corpse.

A pair of newcomers wandered into the warehouse—a big man and a plain-faced woman—and Wesley's eyes narrowed as he watched them cross the open packing floor. Right off, he knew they were bad news. For one they didn't look poor, hungry, or desperate. For another, the man was a Level 10 Laborer. Which, as far as Wesley had gathered, meant that he was probably either a militiaman or a mercenary, and his dark, stained leathers suggested nothing toward the former.

The pair went up to a few different people. Short conversations took place. No bribes changed hands, because the wretches in the warehouse knew they'd be stomped into pulp by a Laborer that high up the food chain if they dared voice any complaint.

The man did most of the talking while the woman hung back, arms crossed. Then, after a handful of seemingly fruitless conversations, one of the survivors nodded frantically and pointed.

Pointed right at Wesley.

Oh, come onnn…

He leapt to his feet and bolted immediately to his right toward an enclosed office where he could slip through a window he had previously opened to serve as an escape route in case of emergencies like this.

Before he had made it more than two steps, a knife came whizzing through the air and embedded itself in the wall, quivering less than a foot from his face. The surprise of it rooted his feet to the ground, and by the time he had regained his preservation instincts the big man's shadow had already fallen over him, the guy grinning evilly.

"Wesley, right?" the man asked in a coarse, bassy voice. He took one more long stride to completely cut Wesley off from the open doorway he had been gazing longingly toward, and leaned over to retrieve his blade with a quick pull. He pointed to his beefy chest with the keen steel tip. "I'm Ratcatcher. Nice to meet you."

Wesley slowly raised his hands over his head. "I-I-I don't want any…" He swallowed, cleared his suddenly chalk-dry throat. "...no trouble, please."

He didn't bother denying his identity. The newcomers clearly knew who they were talking to, and he figured giving them the run-around would just result in him getting a much too intimate brush with that knife.

"Oh, good! Because I was told to take you alive if possible, and I'd hate to hafta kneecap you to keep you from running. The screaming, the carrying on," he turned his knife one way, then the other, "it'd just be a headache. You get what I mean."

"I get you," Wesley replied. He tried to laugh, but it came out more like a shaky whimper.

Every pair of eyes in the warehouse was fixed on him. A few seemed to have a bit of pity for him, while most just looked hungry. Maybe the newcomers would leave some scraps behind once they were done with him.

"I have a weapon," Wesley said quickly, nodding toward the bulge at the front of his tunic. "But, uh, it doesn't work!"

"I know," Ratcatcher said matter-of-factly. "Don't worry about it, boyo. Just don't start digging around in your waistband, and you get to keep all your fingers."

"Who are you? What do you want?"

The man heaved a great sigh. "I just introduced myself—keep up, eh? As for what I want… I'm in the market for you, as it happens."

Wesley pressed himself back against the wall, trying to make himself small without dropping his hands. "Why? I haven't done anything! I don't know anything! Or, wait, I do! I know stuff! I'll tell you, I'll talk, whatever you want!"

"Shhhhhh," Ratcatcher hushed softly, and pressed the flat of his knife to Wesley's lips. That shut him up pretty quick, made his face go all cold. "I've been employed by a man named One-Eye—an associate of Sam Darling, who I've been told you're acquainted with—because he's concerned that you have some information he doesn't want leaked. So please, do refrain from blurting out any secrets you might be chewing on, or…" He shrugged.

"Do you know why they call him Ratcatcher?" asked the woman standing nearby. A level 10 Trader, her bearing suggested that she was the one in charge.

"Because he… catches rats?" Wesley guessed.

"Yep."

"Rats… like me?"

"You got it."

"What happens when I get to the keep?"

"Not our problem. I guess One-Eye is going to want a chat."

"Am I going to live?"

The man chuckled. "If the boss wanted you dead, he'd have asked us to take care of it. So yeah, probably, if you take care not to piss him off too badly." He tipped his knife toward Wesley. "So, what do you say? Are you coming with us all nice and quiet like, or am I gonna have to carve some manners into you?"

"I'll come!" Wesley blurted quickly. "Just, uh… lead the way, sir. And ma'am."

The man nodded; sheathed his blade, then promptly turned to leave. As Wesley fell in after the two of them, fingering nervously at the pistol through his tunic, he wasn't sure whether to be terrified or relieved.

At least if he was being taken to the keep for slaughter, he wouldn't have to die in some dirty, smelly, depressing warehouse.

Aw, shit. How am I going to apologize to Sam? Maybe… If I'm lucky, maybe I'll be able to avoid her. God, I hope so.

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