"Come on, in here," the boy said, opening the door to a small, ramshackle shed out in the wheat fields. "Make it quick. Sheriff wouldn't let us go without somethin' up his sleeve."

  "Thank you." Jen piled into the little 10-by-12 room, dragging a surly Marcie along with her. "I was getting worried back there. But you saved our skins. If there's anything we can do in…"

  Jen trailed off when she turned to face the door and saw the boy holding a tiny, fist-sized coat pistol in his hands. Moonlight glinted off the metal through the cracks in the ceiling. "Marcie," she said quietly, tapping her arm.

  "Yeah, I know. You can always tell when someone thinks they're clever carrying around a little mouse gun." Marcie turned around, carefree as ever, to stare the boy down. "One shot, accurate out to five feet if you’re lucky. But you don't need any better when you’ve got the element of surprise."

  "Sorry," the boy said, as firmly as he could manage. He had a staid, enunciated accent Jen didn't recognize, undercut slightly by the wavering tone of a voice that couldn’t have dropped more than three months ago. "But I needed some insurance."

  "Right." Marcie took a step forward, daring him. "And I bet all those zeroes on the poster wouldn't hurt either."

  "...They wouldn't."

  "Stop this," Jen said, and she marched towards the boy. "She hasn't done anything to you, except help you get out of that jailhouse." The boy glanced at her, flinching back with a conflicted grimace, but he kept the gun aimed at Marcie. "You're making a mistake–"

  A scaled, clawed hand gently pushed back on Jen’s chest. "It's all right," Marcie said with her usual flip confidence. "Let's all stay cool. Gettin' worked up is just gonna get him worked up and that’s gonna make it worse."

  After a few moments of hesitation, and despite her reluctance, Jen took a slow, small step back.

  “Thanks, Jen.” Marcie looked at the boy. “Now. Why don't you put that thing down, kid?" She stepped forward casually, and the boy stepped back, teeth gritted trying not to show fear. The little pistol shook in his hands. "First rule of carryin' a firearm is you never point it at anything you ain't willing to destroy. That's why mine are nice and tucked away. And I ain't gonna draw 'em. So I need you to think long 'n' hard about the message you're sending with that pea-shooter, and how you think a girl's s'posed to respond to it."

  "Don't underestimate me," the boy threatened, trying to sound more confident than his body could manage. "I didn't bring it here to not use it."

  "That's how you're startin' the conversation, then? 'Hello miss. I want you dead.' Pretty lousy greeting if you ask me."

  Marcie took another step towards the boy. He tensed up and tried to make himself look bigger. "Don't come any closer," he warned. "Don't try anything. I know you didn't get a bounty like that for nothing."

  "All right, all right," Marcie said. She put up her arms and slowly turned around. "Look. I'll go back the other way. Wouldn't shoot a woman with her back to ya, would you?"

  The boy frowned, conflicted, and his resolve wavered. The moment he wasn’t ready for it, Marcie’s tail whipped back and slapped the pistol out of his hand. The gun fell and hit the ground, leaving the boy to stare dumbly as it clattered against the flimsy wood floor.

  “All right, there.” Marcie spun around and sat herself down on a small bench in the back of the shed. “Go pick that thing up, put it away, and we’ll have an actual conversation. Sound good?”

  Though he trembled in place for a moment, tense and angry and probably sick to his stomach, the boy eventually gave up. “Yeah,” he said, visibly deflating. “All right.” He bent down to pick up the pistol and tucked it away under his shirt. “I don’t need some crazy big bounty anyway. I just need to make sure the Sheriff doesn’t get his hands on it instead. Besides, he’d probably find some way to steal it if I did try and turn it in.”

  “That’s a good instinct,” Jen said softly.

  "He spent all that time tryin’ to pretend he was a class act," Marcie said. "Dunno who he thinks he’s fooling when he's throwin' kids in jail."

  "Bastard has it out for me." The boy folded his arms, sulking and scowling. "He's got it out for my whole family. Ever since we told him he couldn't have his men stomping all over our fields."

  Jen glanced at Marcie, and then she took just a few steps to cross the shed. "What were they doing? If you don't mind my asking. Maybe we can help." She offered him her hand. "I'm Jen. She's Marcie. And we're in enough trouble as it is, so we can afford a little more. Right, Marcie?"

  Marcie waved her hand dismissively. "Yeah. 'Course we can. The way that smarmy jackboot was taking, I can't rightly walk away lettin' him do whatever he pleases. And I'd feel like I was leavin' somethin' unfinished if I didn't get a chance to rearrange that grin of his before we left."

  Jen smiled a little to herself, brushing a strand of hair out of her face. "Well. I wouldn't be here if you weren't a troublemaker, so I'm not going to complain."

  The boy looked between them, face scrunched up, like he was trying to squeeze a thought out through his ears. After a few moments of staring skeptically, though, he let his arms fall to the side, and finally reached out to shake Jen's hand. "All right. I don't know what you're thinking you'll do about the Sheriff and his goons, but whatever it is I'm in."

  “I was probably gonna shoot him,” Marcie said flatly.

  “I’m not against it.” The boy paced around the front end of the shed, working through his thoughts. “Right, where to start?” He glanced up at Jen and Marcie. "So… my name's Roy. Roy Mason. My parents own a bit of farmland, out at the far edge of town.” He pointed at one side of the shed, in a vaguely northeastern direction. “Few months back, Sheriff's men started stomping around our land. We’ve only been living here about six years, since they opened up the plots around the edge of town. Soil there’s not as good as the land closer in, but you can grow on it if you’re willing to put in the effort. We weren’t doing so well up north in Process, and mom and dad figured coming down here would be our best chance to start over and build something for ourselves.”

  “Didn’t go so well, I take it?” Marcie was leaning back with her arms behind her head and her eyes shut, but she opened one eye to look at Roy, her bangs hanging loosely in front of her amber iris.

  “Actually, it went pretty well at first.” Jen could swear Roy had perked up a little. “Some folks were a little skeptical or snobby, but most were pretty welcoming. I never got on with other kids too well, but I was making friends, and the farm was doing well. Not fantastic, but enough to keep food on the table. It was a lot better than we had before, I can say that much.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “But something changed,” Jen guessed.

  If Roy had found some new enthusiasm, it was gone in an instant. He nodded solemnly. “It started two years ago, when the harvests began falling off. Nobody was having the same kind of yields anymore, even the families who own the most prime land. Turns out folks get a lot less friendly when they’re on tough times, and they got someone they can pin it on. People were blaming all the new farms for their crops drying up. And folks like us, who came across the kingdom to have our own plot of land, got the worst of it. It wasn’t everybody turnin’ on us all at once, exactly, but…”

  “A few jabs here and there,” Marcie said. “Folks falling out of touch. Not talkin’ to you the same way anymore. And before you know it you’re fallin’ back into some bad old habits you thought you grew out of, til everyone gets convinced you’re just…”

  She ground her heel into the wooden plank beneath her.

  “...Well. Whatever it is they want you to be.”

  “Yeah,” Roy said reluctantly. “Something like that.” He glanced up at Marcie. “Suppose you know what that’s like.”

  “Well. Sorta.” Marcie opened her eyes and held out her hand to emphasize her claws. “I mean, if it ain’t obvious. Got a face only a father could love. And I wasn’t exactly an upstandin’ model citizen even when I was your age. So not havin’ much in the way of friends, actin’ out and all that, yeah. Know a thing or two about it.”

  Jen had a hard time imagining Marcie as an awkward, gangly adolescent. Or maybe she didn’t? More than anything it was hard to imagine her as anyone but, well, herself.

  “Right… sure.” Roy avoided Marcie’s eyes. “Point of it all is, Sheriff didn’t like me so much to begin with. Wasn’t that unusual for him to take time out of his day to hassle me. But he was mostly leavin’ my family and my home out of it, up until he wasn’t.”

  “What did he do?” Jen asked, furrowing her brow. Every word Roy said worried her more and more.

  “Like I said, it was a few months back. We heard some folks messing around out on our property, and when my dad and I went out to take a look, there was Sheriff Richard and a couple of his cronies mucking around. Dad tried to be polite to ‘em. He’s always sucked up to the Sheriff, like it’s his way of apologizin’ for me being a such a pain in the ass. And the Sheriff was really understanding at first. He can be really understanding when it’s convenient to him. But after dad asked him to leave the first time, he just kept coming back. The more we told him to stop, the more it pissed him off. Until eventually his deputies started showing up out of nowhere to mess with us. Coming with bullshit rules to pin us on, about how we're running our farm wrong." Roy’s frown had curled into a sneer. "None of the neighbors ever got in trouble for doing the same stuff, of course. They weren't even hidin' it. Sometimes I think they were rubbing it in our face. And of course they pegged me for everything under the sun. Stuff I didn't even do."

  "Yeah, that sucks," Marcie said bluntly.

  "I'm sorry he did that to you," Jen said, softer and more apologetic.

  "Hmph. It wouldn't have even bothered me except my parents believed him. Even when he was just flat out lyin'.Up until I locked myself inside for a week and the Sheriff still came round makin' stuff up about me. Then they had to accept I was innocent." Roy's arms were crossed and he was scowling bitterly. "Shouldn't have taken that damn much effort."

  Marcie opened her eyes and sat forward, lantern flames dancing in her eyes, even though the shed was dark. "That just ain't damn right."

  "That's what I've been saying!" Roy exclaimed. "But it doesn't matter. I can handle a bully. He wants to pick on me, I'll tough it out. But pestering my family, messin' around our farm week after week, that's too far. We work hard to keep our crops growing, and with the harvests getting worse the last thing we need is the Sheriff stomping around with all his cronies, pullin’ up our stalks and digging up the fields. I still remember what it was like when we had nothing. I don't want my brother and sister having to remember, too.” Roy frowned even deeper and closed in on himself defensively, instinctively projecting the same kind of prickly demeanor Jen had seen Marcie adopt when she was stressed.

  “It’s very sweet that you’re looking out for them,” she said softly. She wanted to reassure him, but she really didn’t know him well enough. Perhaps it was better not to push too hard, or make too many assumptions.

  But even though she wasn’t sure how to console Roy, her brain couldn’t help turning over what he had said. She glanced over to Marcie, who was staring off at the wall uncomfortably. “Do you think they’re digging around Roy’s farm because of what the Sheriff was talking about before? That treasure hunt he’s on?” Jen put her hand to her chin pensively. “I mean, it’s the most obvious explanation, and it makes sense. We know he’s been trying to get at something. I just have no idea what it could be.”

  “I’m pretty sure I do," Marcie said, teeth bared and fists clenched. "He dug up one of them bunkers. Like where the king gets his mechanical soldiers from."

  "Bunker?" Jen asked. "What do you mean?"

  "Folks ain't supposed to know about 'em," Marcie said. "Only a freak accident that I do. Stumbled on one a couple years back, just by mistake. Explained a few things once I saw it. Otherwise I'd be as confused as everyone else where the damn things come from."

  "I thought it was weird you knew so much about them," Jen said. "Honestly I never even thought about where they came from. I guess I assumed the King of Gryst had some way to produce them. But until this year they were just a story to me. The strange clockwork contraptions you could only find in Gryst. You knew not to pick a fight with them, and you knew you didn't want the chance to learn any more."

  “They aren’t clockwork machines.” Marcie leaned forward on the bench, claws scraping against the floor and eyes staring at the air just past Jen’s face. “They’re a whole lot more than that. Even if you busted one up and pulled it apart, you couldn’t make sense of how it works. I got more of a head for mechanics than most, and all I could ever get out of ‘em was ‘well that bit looks like it’s probably some kinda motor type deal.’ Damned if I could tell you how it was powered or controlled.”

  Roy leaned back against the door of the shed, forehead scrunched as he thought things over. "Folks back home used to wonder about it all the time. Had a lot more of the metal bobs back there. And you knew someone had to be building them, but you never saw a forge or a factory, never met anybody who'd worked on them, not even anyone who'd had the chance to touch them, unless they were getting bashed over the head." He rubbed his nose and frowned skeptically. "King might as well be digging them out of the ground like potatoes. Makes as much sense as anything else I've heard."

  “He ain’t building them himself, that’s for sure,” Marcie said. “There’s not a livin’ person in this world who’s got the capacity to build a machine like those. Gryst got a leg up over other places, sure, but it ain’t that big a leg up. Only place I ever saw that could have made ‘em was a metal pit under the earth that hadn’t seen a human hand in longer than I could even wrap my head around. Our fancy-ass King must have found one of them, too. Couldn’t have got that metal army any other way. Cuz throne or not, a king’s still a regular-ass alive human man when you get right down to it.”

  “So if that’s what the Sheriff found, what do you think he wants with it?” Jen asked, looking at Marcie with concern. “And what does he want with you?”

  “Sounds to me like he ran into some active machines down there under the kid’s farm. Those ‘restless spirits’ of his. Gotta be he connected the dots on what he was lookin’ at and figured he could take advantage. If a King can make the metal men dance at his command and use ‘em to run the land with an iron fist, what’s gonna stop a Sheriff from pulling the same trick?” Marcie spat on the ground disdainfully. “But if they didn’t want him poking around down there, he couldn’t have done nothin’ about them. Not without leavin’ a bunch of bodies he’d have to explain, with no guarantee there’d be something to show for it. I’m sure he was makin’ a bunch of plans to get around it, but why go to all the effort when the girl who’s in the papers for shooting up the royal guard waltzes on into town for him?”

  “It’s some kind of power grab, then?” Roy sighed. “But it’s always something like that. Some people are just born bullies.”

  “If they aren’t raised bullies.” Jen glanced towards the door, and shook her head. “At the risk of stating the obvious, though… the Sheriff getting his hands on an army like the King’s sounds quite bad.”

  "Of course it's bad. It's a whole hell worse than bad. The man's self-assured, and that means he's gonna walk into something he ain't prepared for and fuck it up royally." Marcie took a long, deep breath and sighed. "Smart thing would be to steal a horse back at the inn, skip town, and let the damn fool blow himself up doing whatever it is he thinks he's gonna do here."

  "Easy for you to say," Roy said, scowling and bitter. "You're not livin' in the blast radius."

  "Yeah, well," Marcie muttered. "That's the rub, ain't it?"

  Jen looked closely at Marcie’s face. She was conflicted, biting her lip and glaring intensely at a random point in the air. So Jen slowly reached out to rest her hand on the back of her palm. "Let’s be honest with ourselves, Marcie,” Jen said, her expression lifting into a wry but earnest smile. “You aren’t one to do the smart thing.”

  Marcie tilted her head back and banged it against the side of the shed with an exaggerated groan. "No, damn it. I’m not."

  my Patreon and a third going up tomorrow morning after I do one last quick editing pass on it. By Friday next week I should be back up to 4 early access chapters as usual. And, of course, the regular public releases will continue apace, so be sure to come back next week for a new chapter.

  CAT: Carefully Altered Timelines and it's about a time-traveling cat who has to herd a group of nerds into fulfilling their magical destinies. I wrote it in about 3 weeks for the and I'm proud of the little story the engineer, artists and I were able to tell with the time and resources we had. It should only take an hour or so to read through, so it'd be cool if you gave it a look and then checked out the other games that came out of this year's jam too!