Grit

“You guys realize,” said Scout over breakfast, “that all the stuff with the auto-turret and the holograms was very exciting. But we don’t have any actual where-would-he-go-next leads.”

Josiah nodded grimly. “My path remains unclear.”

“Also,” said November, “I wanted the Dustbowl townies to know the truth, and I’m grateful for Josiah’s intervention. But I didn’t sign up to bounty-hunt a grit-wielding madman. I signed up to watch over this guy—” she jerked a finger at the Librarian, who had a cold compress over his eyes and wished very much he was dead “—handing out books.”

The Librarian stirred. “November makes a good point. Josiah, your duty is to hunt this man in terms of your oath. Mine is to collect and dispense knowledge.”

Josiah smiled. “And might you want one more bodyguard in your little troupe?”

Scout rolled her eyes. “Clean out your ears, gun-saint. We just said we weren’t going after Saint Gabriel.”

“Ah,” he said. “But I think it likely he will come after you. You hurt him, you took his town from him, and based on what I know, I judge him to be a vengeful man. If I do not know which direction to pursue him, I will stay with you and wait for him to come to us.”

The other three stared at each other. “I think I’ve lost my appetite,” groaned Scout.

****

The Librarian spread his maps out on one of Win’s folding tables. “If we keep north, we can re-join the High Way and take it on to…” his finger followed the black line up “God’s Boot.”

“God’s Boot?” Scout said, frowning. “Sounds lovely.”

“Well, Dustbowl turned out to be a green paradise, so maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” said November. “I’m sure the Librarian would agree.”

Scout stared at her. “Was that a joke?”

“Just a statement of fact,” November said blandly, but a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Shall we go?”

Scout fired up Win's engine. November sat in the passenger seat, rifle across her lap, scanning the terrain. In the back, the Librarian nursed his pounding headache while Josiah methodically cleaned his revolvers. The grit dunes were less steep, and they had to stop only occasionally to dig Win’s wheels free. The work went faster with four sets of hands instead of three as well.

"There it is," Scout announced as the great black ribbon of the High Way came into view. "Our ticket north."

November nodded. "Keep your eyes open. The High Way makes for easier travel, but it also leaves us exposed."

As Win's tires met the cracked pavement, the vehicle's ride smoothed considerably. Scout let out a contented sigh. "Now this is more like it. We should make good time to God's Boot, assuming nothing goes wrong."

"Don't jinx us," the Librarian groaned, wincing at the sound of his own voice.

Josiah holstered his weapons and moved to peer out the front windshield. "The High Way was a marvel of the Old World. To think of the resources and coordination required to build such a thing..."

"Yeah, yeah," Scout said, rolling her eyes. "Ancient wonders and all that. I'm just glad I’m not fighting grit dunes anymore."

As they settled into the journey, November kept her gaze fixed on the horizon. The High Way stretched endlessly before them, a stark dividing line between the red wasteland on either side. She couldn't shake the feeling that they were exposed, vulnerable.

"How far to God's Boot?" she asked.

The Librarian consulted his maps. "If we maintain a steady pace and don't encounter any obstacles, we should reach it by nightfall tomorrow."

Scout grinned. "Challenge accepted. I bet I can get us there even faster."

As Win picked up speed, the grit-covered landscape began to blur. They were making good time, but November couldn't help but wonder what challenges awaited them on the road ahead.

Scout leaned over to her and whispered, her voice buried by the sound of Win’s engine. “I’m worried about him.”

“Him who?”

“The Librarian. He’s been drinking even more than usual ever since he got scratched, and half the time it’s like he doesn’t even really care that much where we’re going.” She leaned in. “He’s not even sorting his books as much.”

November shrugged. “He nearly died. People take that in different ways.”

Scout looked at her sideways. “Did you ever have a close call like that?”

November was silent a long moment. “A pair of bandits ambushed me coming back from a hunt once. It had been a good hunt, and my hands were full of bags of Duster meat. Stupid. I couldn’t get to my rifle in time. One of them shot me in the gut, and they took my meat.”

Scout stared. “And they just left you there?”

“They were poor and they probably didn’t want to waste another bullet. And I still had my knife so they weren’t going to risk getting close enough to strangle me,” November said matter-of-factly. “So they took the meat. My wound got grit in it, of course. I wouldn’t have made it back to town, but a trading caravan stumbled across me, and they had a doctor who was half-way competent. It took three days for my fever to break.”

Scout’s eyes were wide. “And how did you ‘take it’?”

November shrugged. “I always kept one hand free from then on.”

Leaving details out, aren’t we, girl? whispered the Old Man. Like how you tracked the bandits to the town where they were spending the bullets they’d got for your meat. And how you camped outside the town gates until they had spent all they had and needed get back out on to the road to ambush some other sucker. And you shot them both coming out the gates before they ever knew you were there. That’s the girl I trained.

****

They stopped to make camp on an off-ramp. The Librarian didn’t offer to read a story as had become his custom, instead he kept to himself, a bottle in one hand, a book in the other. The voices were a near-constant din in his ears now - the liquor wasn’t helping any more. Sometimes he struggled to hear what the others were actually saying to him over the torrent of noise. After they finished supper, he sat up with his book and bottle, mumbling about wanting to finish a chapter. He caught Scout and November exchanging concerned glances as they left for Win. He wasn’t sure if he was staying up because he couldn’t sleep from the noise, or because he was scared of what his next dream might reveal. Was this why Saint Gabriel was…the way he was? Was that his fate?

The book slipped from his liquor-clumsy hands and landed with a thump in the grit, paper side down. He swore. Grit could find its way into every page and crevice of a good book, and took forever to clean out.

The voices muttered to themselves. Clean? Cleanse. Purify.

To his astonishment, he saw the book pushed upright on tiny grit-tendrils and flipped closed. As he stooped to pick it up, the grit between the pages fell obediently free of the book, leaving it clean and unspoiled.

Success! Triumph. Victory.

“All right, quieten down,” he muttered drunkenly. And the voices stopped. For a single blissful moment, the Librarian reveled in the echoing silence of his own mind.

“Okay,” he said to himself, taking another swig to strengthen his nerve. “Time to face this thing.” He shot a nervous glance over at Win and its sleeping occupants and walked further away.

He could still feel the voices, gently tapping at his consciousness. It was…familiar? Then he smiled. He imagined his old caravan, the shutters down and the eager children scratching at them to get their new acquisitions and return old favorites.

And then he imagined the shutters slowly opening, and the voices rose in clarity and volume. He slammed the shutters closed in his mind, and they quieted. Open. Closed. Open. Closed. Each time, the voices responded obediently. He chuckled giddily.

Then he sat down cross-legged on the grit and put the book on the ground in front of him. Open, he thought, and watched in marvel as more tiny grit-tendrils swirled into life and flipped the book awkwardly open.

Bring me the book, he instructed.

The tendrils swirled uncertainly. Confusion. Length. Clarity?

Ah, I see, the Librarian thought. Simple concepts.

Come, he asked, and laughed in drunken delight as the book seemed to slither across the ground to his waiting hand, borne aloft by the little tendrils.

Laughter which ended abruptly as he looked up to see November silhouetted in Win’s doorframe.

“What in the actual fuck are you doing?”

****

The three of them gathered around him. November had brought her rifle, which he felt was a trifle excessive.

“So you’ve been hearing voices,” said Scout.

“Yes.”

“And dreaming about the grit.”

“Yes.”

“And you can move it with your mind.”

“Yes.”

“And we’re finding out about this only now?”

“Well,” he said defensively. “I wasn’t sure about the grit listening to me until tonight. The gun could have been coincidence.”

Defense! the voices cried eagerly. Protect. Shield.

Grit swirled around his ankles and started to rise.

No! he thought. Safe! Fine! The grit settled recalcitrantly to the ground. The other three stared. November’s rifle was actually pointed at him now.

“You know what this means, of course,” said Scout, grinning.

November’s expression was dark. “We may have our own little Saint Gabriel waiting to go nuts in our camp?”

Scout dismissed that with a shrug. “No, we get to do science! I wonder how much he can lift!”

****

The night passed in a blur, perhaps aided by the fact that the Librarian was generous with his bottle.

They quickly established that he couldn’t lift anything much heavier than a book, but he could make a gun jam more or less on command - a trick which Scout enjoyed far more than Josiah and November did. Josiah went so far as to put his precious revolvers in one of Win’s cupboards to be out of range of any accidental ‘experimentation’.

The grit seemed to struggle with complexly-worded instructions, though it could often intuit the general intention of a command from a single word. Tests such as ‘when Scout says go, then lift the book’ were almost always failures. It also, for want of a better expression, seemed to have a very short attention span. Often it would be ‘saying’ three or four contradictory words and he would have to patiently align it with what he wanted.

The Librarian privately mused that it was a little like talking to Scout.

****

“It’s got to be the white grit,” Scout said, swigging from the remains of the bottle.

“White grit?” asked Josiah, his brow furrowing as Scout tossed him the bottle. The hour and the alcohol didn’t seem to have any impact on his reflexes, and he snatched the bottle out of the air without really looking at it.

“Yeah,” said Scout. “The Librarian got grit-infected and Saint Gabriel rubbed some weird white grit in the wound to clean it. Speaking of which,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “you know it occurred to me that we don’t actually know your name?”

The Librarian sniffed. “‘Librarian’ or ‘Brother’ will do quite well.”

“Why?” she grinned. “Don’t you like your real name? Is it embarrassing? Like Scrunch-Nozzle? Or Jasper-Baggins?”

“Forget about his name,” November cut in. “Saint Gabriel could do a lot more with grit than just move a book or jam a gun.”

Scout shrugged. “Maybe he’s taken more white grit. Or maybe it’s like a muscle and it gets better the more you use it. Ooh! We should design an exercise routine!”

Josiah nodded in approval. “A training regime.”

“Please,” groaned the Librarian, “let us table that matter for the morning. Late morning preferably.”

And so the hours ticked by with the four of them chatting companionably beneath the stars, passing the bottle around.