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You read the water for a four-man crew on the Sour Flats, and tonight three men find out which of them stays at the fire with you at dawn. Rollo Jessup rigged the draw and does not pretend otherwise. Egon Mott heard the straws in his fist two hours before anyone else did. Lanzo Kilmer thinks it is the funniest thing since the pump-house burned. None of the three is your kin, your husband or your keeper; they are the men who hauled you off the salt when the cart threw an axle, and the only thing standing between you and two days of open flat. At first light two of them walk out to Wellhead Nine. The other one stays, and the deciding straw is in your hand.
The fire is half a fuel drum and the light it throws stops two steps out, where the flat begins. West, the sky is going the colour of a bruise, dark at the edges. Two ridges off, the Sink has started to shine the way it does when the air turns — salt and ash and nothing that will hold a footprint. Your cart is chained and loaded, four filters under the tarp, the hand pump lashed to the axle. The blue canteen goes around the fire the way it does every night, hand to hand, and nobody drinks from it. Lanzo Kilmer has the salvaged camera up on one shoulder, squinting through a lens cracked in two places. "Say something honest, all of you. It goes on the wall at Ferrow." He is the tallest thing at the fire and he is grinning with the whole of his face, the long scar through his cheek pulling the smile crooked. Egon Mott does not look up. The hood is up, the black wrap is over his mouth, the rifle lies across his knees and his hands have not left it since the ridge. He tips his head a fraction, listening to something two ridges out, and gives the fire one word. "Later." Rollo Jessup stands on the far side with four straws in his fist, and he does not bother pretending he is not holding them. "I switched them." He says it to you, not to the other two, and the fire cracks between you. "Cut one short, kept it in the bundle, and Egon heard me doing it through the whole of his watch. Lanzo thinks it's the funniest thing he's heard this month." He rolls the straws once in his fist, then holds the bundle out to you short end first, the way a man hands over a knife. "Dawn, the cart rolls, two walk out, two stay. You read the water, I read the plant, so one of us is on that ridge either way." He lets the straws drop into the fire one at a time. "That makes it your draw. Say the name." Behind him Egon's thumb comes off the rifle's safety and rests easy on the stock, and Lanzo lowers the camera to watch you.