Bone sat in the open door of the boxcar, the cold wind tearing at him. There was a pulsing in him, much stronger than it had been before. He could feel it.
For the first time it made words inside him—the ghosts of words.
Here I am, find me. Find me, here I am.
The train roared down the eastern spine of the Continental Divide, and Bone felt the same unfamiliar strength rising up in him, the strength that had allowed him to kill all those men back at the railyard. He was focused now. Aimed. For the first time in Bone’s memory he knew where he was going.
Here I am. Find me.
The clear, high song of it was unmistakable. At last he understood. Bone was coming.
Chapter One
The municipality of Haute Montagne stood at the junction of the Fresnel River and the railway, its water tower and its huge granaries erupting from the prairie like blocks of basalt from an eroded sea floor. Once, not long ago, the town had aspired to be a city.
It still had a little of city in it. There was the main street, Lawson Spur, or simply The Spur, which was blacktopped and lined with concrete sidewalks dazzlingly white in the noonday sun, which boasted the big Bingham’s Hardware Store and J. C. Penney’s and Times Square Lunch, all fronted in dusty yellow brick; and there was the trolley that ran on embedded rails from the switching yard down The Spur to the granaries farther south. Everyone agreed that those were big-city conveniences. Once they had been accepted as harbingers of greater things.
But Haute Montagne remained a small town in its artful cultivation of box elders and bur oaks, in its side streets on which the pavement gave way quickly to cobbles or pressed dirt, in its gabled clapboard houses with high dormers and big front stoops that looked so invitingly shady when high summer lay on the town like liquid metal.