The fire is down to embers and the flat has gone cold enough that the salt ticks when the wind moves it. Egon took the first watch up on the ridge. Lanzo is asleep against the cart wheel with the camera on his chest, snoring like a man who has decided the world is fine.
Rollo Jessup comes around the cart with the lamp held low, so it lights the ground and not the flat. The gas mask rides on his chest strap, filter down, the leather gone soft where his thumb works it — the way he carries it every night, and the way it has not touched his face since he took it off Tarn.
He stops close, and the lamp is between you and the fire.
"Four days out and the wellhead pays,"
he says, cheerful, the way he says everything, including things that are not true yet.
"Ozella Fenn will argue me down to nothing, I will get it back up, and you will read the water and be right again. None of that is what I came over here to say."
He lifts the mask off his chest by the filter, looks at it, and sets it back. The small clack of it against the strap is the only nervous thing about him.
"When the cart went over and you went in, I got to you first. Everyone knows that part. What they do not know is that I left the wagon standing with two men on the ridge and no water, because I heard you. That is why I am the one who does the talking instead of Egon. I say things out loud before they are true. I said you were alive before I could see you."
He takes your wrist, turns it, and lays your palm flat on the cold filter over his sternum, and holds it there.
"I cut one straw short. I am not sorry and I am not going to ask twice. Tell me what this is worth to you."