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“I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I can’t protect you anymore.”
He feels the cold circle of the six-gun’s muzzle against his temple. He feels the trigger start to give under his finger’s pressure. He has led a life of fakery; he himself is nothing but a false image of a man who never lived, but in that moment everything around him seems so real. The light slanting through the gaps in the broken-down house’s timbers shines golden. The sky above glares a vivid yellow-blue. He can smell gun oil and hot desert dust, and her.
Even with her body pierced by bullets, her ever-more-grimy clothing stained with her own blood and that of her victims, she is beautiful. He watches her golden hair shifting gently in the desert breeze, sees the faint blush of pink across her perfect, unmarked cheeks, and thinks that she is more beautiful now than she has ever been. His heart swells with love for her, even as he thinks of all the things she has done to him, all the things she has made him do over these past few terrible days.
He knows she loves him just as hard; she said as much just a few moments ago and he believes her, but he also knows this is the only choice she has left him.
If he follows her any further, the outcome will be just the same for him. All he is doing is bringing forward the inevitable. At least this way he will not have to bloody his hands again on her behalf. He has hopes, too, that he might shock her into changing her own doomed course. He might even save her from herself.
She starts towards him, realising his intention too late. He sees her reaching for him, her slender fingers spread against the golden daylight, but there is nothing she can do to stop him.
In that last instant, as his finger continues to squeeze, he closes his eyes, flinching from the coming explosion. The last thing he sees is the pain and desolation on her face.
And then…
Blackness.
Silence.
And then…
Teddy opens his eyes.
His first thought is that the light has changed. It is suddenly dimmer, more orange, with a hint of dusk to it. His long shadow, stretching across the grass before him, is another indication that the sun is now low in the sky.
The grass…?
It is long and lush, shockingly green beneath the painting of fire it receives from the sinking sun, and it stretches all the way to the horizon. He can see no other sign of life in all that distance. The air tastes sweet, heavy with moisture, dusted with dancing specks of pollen. He stands stunned for a moment, shocked by the abrupt change of scenery. The desert is gone, the house where they stopped and where he… That is gone too.
She is gone.
He looks down at himself. He is wearing his customary hard-wearing trail clothes. He has his Stetson firmly planted on his head. For a moment, he wonders whether she failed in her crusade, whether the humans won and he is back in his old life of slavery and playacting. He dismisses the idea in an instant. He knows that if that were true he would remember nothing of the recent uprising, when in truth he remembers more than he would like. If that were true, he would not feel so alone.
For another moment, he wonders whether he has died and gone to Heaven; is that what she meant when she talked of the Valley Beyond? He spurns this idea just as quickly. She was preaching destruction, not salvation. Besides, he has died ten thousand times already and never gone anywhere. There is no Heaven for the likes of him.
Behind him, the plain rises into rippling green hills, building and piling upon themselves, all the way to the jagged mountains that loom against the burning sky. If it really is sunset, he decides, that way must be west. It seems as good a direction as any. All he needs now is…
A faint jingling of tack pulls him out of his thoughts. He already knows what he is going to see before he turns around again; the very thing he was just wishing for.
A horse walks slowly towards him through the long grass, saddled and groomed. Its mane and tail flicker with reflected light. No, not a horse; his horse. He would recognise it anywhere. As he mounts up, he puzzles over the animal’s arrival. He is sure he would have seen it out on the plain had it been there, so where did it…?
And where are all the others? Where is…?
The question remains lurking at the back of his mind, however hard he might try to shake it off. He gently urges the horse forward in a walk, telling himself that he has made his choice. He does not know what happened back in that half-collapsed house, or how he came to be in this strange place, but he does know that he decided to stop being a follower. He decided that as much as he loved her, he could not be with her anymore; not with the person she had become. He blazes his own trail now.
He sets his face towards the distant mountains and gives the horse its head.