Chapter 2 – Taken

The Bandit Leader came back to the world on his hands and knees, coughing dust and smoke out of his lungs in long, racking spasms that tasted of charred wood and something chemical he couldn’t name.

He spat. Blinked. His ears were ringing with a high, insistent tone that flattened the world to a single frequency. When he shook his head to clear it, the dizziness rolled through him in a slow, nauseating wave that nearly put him back in the dirt.

“Cole,” he rasped, coughing the taste of charred wood from his lungs. “Miller. Where are you?”

He got to his feet. His hand went to his belt and found nothing. The revolver was gone. It was blown clear in the blast, buried in the crater, or simply erased from existence along with the carriage and the horses and any pretence that this job was going to be simple. He drew the long knife from his boot instead. The handle was warm from proximity to his skin, and the weight of it settled his breathing by a degree.

The carriage was gone. In its place, a crater three metres wide sat smoking in the road, the edges charred black, the earth still radiating a heat that he could feel through the soles of his boots. The horses and driver were nowhere. The rain had not yet started, but the sky was bruising. Heavy, dark clouds were piling against each other with the slow, deliberate menace of something that intended to arrive on its own schedule.

“Boss…”

The voice came from his left. Thin. Wet at the edges.

Cole was pinned beneath a splintered beam of the carriage chassis, the massive timber lying across his midsection at an angle that had driven his body into the soft earth. He was pale, the translucent, waxy pale of someone whose blood was busy elsewhere. His right leg was twisted at an angle that the human knee was not designed to accommodate. The shinbone had come through the trouser fabric. White against red. The boy was staring at it. His face hadn’t caught up yet—his eyes were glassy, disconnected, still waiting for the information to become real.

“Help me up, Boss.” Cole’s teeth were chattering. Shock, not cold. “I think I’m stuck.”

The Leader looked at the leg. He looked at the sky. He looked at the tree line, where the road curved south toward the nearest posting station, and calculated the distance in minutes and the explosion in decibels and arrived at a number he didn’t like.

“Can you walk, Cole?”

“I don’t—” The boy’s face contorted. The fascination was wearing off, and reality was arriving to replace it, and reality brought pain. “I don’t think so. It hurts. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, it hurts—”

“I know.”

The Leader crouched beside him. His voice had gone quiet. Not soft—quiet. The decision was already behind his eyes. The words were just the mechanism of delivery.

“We can’t carry you. Not where we’re going. And I won’t leave you for the constables.”

Cole’s hand found the Leader’s sleeve. The fingers were dirty, the nails cracked, the grip of a boy who had been recruited from a workhouse six months ago and had never once, in all that time, questioned an order.

“Boss. Please.”

“I know,” the Leader said again.

He placed his left hand on Cole’s forehead. The gesture was almost paternal, steadying and grounding, the last kind thing. His right hand moved once, quick and clean, and drove the knife into the space between the third and fourth ribs.

Cole’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened. No sound came out. The fingers on the Leader’s sleeve tightened, held, and then released, and the hand fell back to the dirt with a sound that was too small for what it meant.

The clearing was quiet. The three surviving bandits stood where they had risen, bruised and bloodied but whole, watching their employer with the blank, unsurprised expressions of men who had seen this arithmetic performed before and understood the variables.

Nobody spoke. Nobody needed to.

The Leader wiped the blade on Cole’s jacket with a short, efficient stroke, the cloth catching the blood in a dark line. He stood.

He looked toward the elderly merchant couple. The old woman was unconscious, her head lolled against her husband’s shoulder. The merchant was stirring, blinking, his mouth working around sounds that hadn’t yet organised themselves into words. His hands were still bound. He looked up as the Leader’s shadow fell across him, and the sounds stopped, and his face did something that the Leader had seen enough times to no longer register as a thing that required acknowledgement.

“Loose ends,” the Leader said, to no one in particular. “They weren’t what we came for.”

He put a finger to his lips.

Two movements. Quick. The same clean economy he’d used on Cole, because the Leader was not a man who enjoyed his work, but he was a man who finished it.

The clearing settled into a silence that was different from the one before. It was heavier and more complete, the kind of quiet that arrived after the last voice capable of breaking it had been removed from the conversation.

“Right.” The Leader sheathed the knife. “We move. Rain’s coming.”

The first drops hit as they reached the tree line. Within a minute, the sky opened.

The rain came down in sheets. It was freezing and percussive, hammering the canopy with a violence that turned the forest floor into a churning slurry of dead leaves and mud. The Leader tilted his face up and let it wash the blood and grit from his skin. The water ran off his jaw in dark rivulets that the downpour diluted and carried away before they reached his collar.

He stared at the clouds. His employer had given him a window. A specific hour, a specific stretch of road, and a promise that the weather would cooperate if they kept to the schedule. He had assumed it was bluster. The theatrical posturing of a client who wanted to feel important.

So they weren’t kidding.

He lowered his head, wiped his eyes, and signalled the men forward. They vanished into the trees, and behind them, the rain erased their footprints almost as fast as they were made.

Alice came back to consciousness one sense at a time, and none of them brought good news.

First came the rhythmic jolt of being carried. A broad, bony shoulder smelling of wet wool and stale sweat was digging into her stomach with every step, and each impact sent a white spike of pain through the base of her skull. Second was the cold. Her clothes were soaked through, the fabric clinging to her skin with the intimate, miserable persistence of something that intended to stay. Third was the sound. Rain hit the leaves, heavy and constant. Beneath it was the suck and squelch of boots in deep mud, and beneath that, the low murmur of men who were not speaking to her.

Her hands were still bound. The charred rope was hot against her wrists, her own doing from the heat she’d built before the sky had torn itself apart, but it hadn’t burned through. The fibres were damaged and brittle, but holding. Not enough. Never enough.

“You’re awake,” a voice said from ahead. It was not a question.

Alice didn’t bother with the pretence. She lifted her head, and the world pitched sideways before settling into a smeared watercolour of greens and greys. She was slung over a man’s shoulder. To her left, through the dripping undergrowth, she could see another man trudging with Florence’s limp form draped across his back, her arms hanging, her hair trailing in the mud.

Still breathing. Good.

“Where are you taking us?” Her voice came out wrong. It was cracked, dry, and scraping against her throat like a file.

The Bandit Leader dropped back to walk beside her carrier. The rain had plastered his hair flat against his skull, but his stride was easy and unhurried. It was the gait of a man who had walked through worse weather to worse places and considered this a commute.

“Somewhere you won’t be found.” He said it the way someone might say somewhere with a nice view. “Don’t bother looking for landmarks. Don’t bother hoping for the constables, either.”

He gestured at the dense thicket ahead. The undergrowth was a wall of thorny vines, knotted and impenetrable, the kind of growth that would shred clothing and skin in equal measure.

“We’re walking through a veil,” the Leader continued. “Illusionary wards. Courtesy of a very expensive associate. To anyone tracking us, we vanished into thin air three miles back. To a passerby, this is just a patch of briar too thick to bother with.”

He walked into the wall of thorns without slowing.

The vines did not tear. They did not scrape or catch or resist. They rippled with a shimmering, liquid distortion, as though the air itself had become uncertain about what was solid and what was not. The Leader passed through them like a man stepping through a curtain.

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The man carrying Alice followed. She braced for the bite of thorns, her shoulders tightening involuntarily, but what she felt instead was a tingle. It was dry and electric, crawling across her skin with the intimate precision of static before a lightning strike. The hairs on her arms stood. The back of her neck prickled. And then it was over, and the forest on the other side was different.

The undergrowth was gone. The trees stood wider apart and the canopy was thinner. What little light remained fell in grey columns onto a clearing that looked as though it had been holding its breath for a very long time. In the centre sat a cabin. It was squat, stone, and half-swallowed by the earth around it, its walls furred with moss and its chimney leaking a thin thread of smoke into the rain. It looked less like a building and more like a geological feature, something the forest had grown around rather than something men had built within it.

“Home sweet home,” the Leader muttered.

The interior was a single room, and it smelled like the history of every man who had ever used it and none of the women who hadn’t. Woodsmoke. Stale tobacco. Damp wool left to rot rather than dry. Beneath those was the subtler note of cold stone and old grease and the particular sourness of enclosed spaces occupied by people who did not open windows.

A blackened stone fireplace dominated the far wall, cold and unlit. A heavy table sat in the centre, rough-hewn, its surface scarred with knife marks that might have been practical and might have been recreational. Along both walls were makeshift bunks. They were piles of furs and straw that looked more like nests than beds.

Two men were already inside, seated at the table, their hands resting near the sawed-off shotguns propped against the bench. They looked up as the door banged open, read the situation in the time it took the Leader to cross the threshold, and settled back without a word.

Alice was carried past the table and dumped onto a pile of mildewed rugs in the back corner, the furthest point from the door and anything useful. Florence was dropped beside her a moment later, landing with a soft sound that was not quite a groan and not quite a word. She did not wake.

Alice pushed herself upright against the stone wall. Her ribs protested. Her head protested. She ignored both and took stock.

Five men.

The Leader was peeling off his wet greatcoat. Miller, the name they used for the one who had carried her, was a broad man with heavy hands and a face that looked like it had been assembled from leftover parts. There was the one who had carried Florence, whose name she hadn’t caught. Jenkins had taken up position at the only door, leaning against the frame, loose and proprietary, as though the door were a post he’d been given as punishment and he wanted everyone to know it. The last two were from the table, one of whom had begun disassembling a revolver methodical, unhurried—nowhere to be and nothing to do but maintain the tools of his trade

The Leader caught the revolver Miller tossed him, checked the cylinder with a flick of his wrist, and tucked it into his belt.

“What about the girls?” Jenkins asked from the door.