Chapter Text
There was something uniquely frustrating about having a situation where you had all the options.
Lucy could burn the letter. She could drop it into a desk drawer and never look at it again. She could act on it. She could ask someone else to act on it. She tapped the folded paper on her corner table at the Blue Moon and scowled. The winter sandstorm outside kept even the tourists out of the saloon, but she didn’t want to risk this one getting around for a whole host of reasons.
Which of her many options was the best one? That was where it got frustrating.
The saloon door nearby flew open and in stepped a dusty Logan along with a whole lot of sand. Lucy found herself smiling despite her dilemma.
The monster hunter had to force the door shut. “That’s a rough one,” he said to Owen, the saloon’s only other occupant. He pulled his mask down and rubbed at his eyes as he walked over to the bar.
Owen nodded as he continued to clean some glasses. “What was lurking out there? Dive buzzard? Enraged boxing jack?”
Logan laughed. “Cock-a-doodles trying to stampede Coop’s herd. I’m not going out far in the Eufala in a storm like this.”
“Self-restraint? Discretion? Logan, you better be careful, you might be learning something.”
Logan pulled off his hat, shaking sand all over the floor, glaring at Owen as he did. Owen laughed and slid him a beer. The monster hunter almost took a seat at the bar, but then he spotted Lucy and made his way over.
She watched as he slid into the seat across from her. “Aren’t you social today?”
“Aren’t you not,” he answered easily. His eyes were the color of the sky they couldn’t see today and keen as always. “Something’s got a bee buzzin’ in your bonnet, Luce. What?”
“Sandstorm not enough?”
“Not for you. I’ve seen you out in the thick of ‘em swinging a pickaxe.”
She tapped the letter on the table a few more times, looking over to see Owen had headed back to the kitchen. Well, it was Logan. He’d understand and he wouldn’t go talking about it to everyone in town.
“Here.” She tossed the letter on the table in front of him. As he picked it up, she focused on poking at the remains of her sandfish.
It took him a minute to read, though it wasn’t like it was a long letter. “Lucy,” he said, “why is Pen writin’ you from prison?”
She dropped her fork and gave him a full-body shrug. “I didn’t think we were that close. He respected me, I guess, as much as he could.” She’d whacked him good and hard with her spear at the High Noon Showdown last year, winning one round for her and Owen, which was the turning point of her relationship with the man, it seemed. He’d quit treating her as a smaller version of Burgess and started being condescending in a way that might seem encouraging if one was a psychopathic narcissist.
Logan re-read the letter as he took a pull of his beer. Lucy’s eyes skittered across his throat and she looked away quickly, thinking of what the letter said.
Lucy,
In the ruins, I hid my most powerful possession. Well, hid is a bit of an overstatement, I put it in plain sight, just at the very bottom of the most deepest ruins I could find! Seemed good enough.
If anyone might procure it, it would be you. I’d have a lot more confidence in you if you’d managed to pick up the Space Punch like I always wanted! But that’s neither here nor there.
See you never,
Pen
“I thought his most powerful possession was them relic gauntlets,” Logan said, scanning the letter again.
“Me, too. It worries me.” She had the gauntlets locked up in a very sturdy box under her bed. She’d used them only a few times and they were a very easy way to cause destruction. They were undeniably priceless artifacts like the relic plasma blade leaned against the booth next to her. Just what else could a man like Pen value more?
“’Deepest ruins I could find.’ Is this supposed to be a map?”
“Apparently.”
Logan flattened the letter against the table, eying the doodle beneath Pen’s surprisingly neat handwriting. “Think it’s just outside town, not far from the moisture farm, which I think is this round shape here. Buncha caves out that way in the cliffs, but no ruins…not that I know of, anyway.”
Of course it’d be close to town. “It wouldn’t be the first secret buried around Sandrock.”
“It wouldn’t.” He folded the letter up almost violently and slapped it back on the table. “I don’t like this. It feels like a trap.”
“It does, but if there’s a booby-trapped cave close to town, I can’t just leave it for someone else to trigger by accident.” She could see Andy and Jasmine stumbling into it as they ran around, or some of the more thrill-seeking tourists getting themselves killed when spelunking.
Logan glared at the letter. “And you’re worried it’s another hard hitter of a relic if there is anythin’ there.”
“I also don’t really want…” She waved her hands around. “A mess.” Pen writing her from jail was cause enough for a fireside meeting, here only weeks after the invasion, as was the fact he’d left something behind. She thought about how it would go and paled, burying her face in a hand. “If they find out, half the town would be in a panic and the other half would be after the treasure. Then they’d wonder why he wrote me, as if I know.”
“If they doubt you for a second, Luce, then Sandrock has changed for the worse,” he growled.
“It’s just after Matilda…”
Logan shook his head. “Matilda really did betray them, you really wouldn’t. Take it from an expert: don’t get yourself tangled up in that sort of thinking. It does no good.”
He was right, in both his advice and his knowledge of the town. They’d welcomed Logan back with open arms, reluctant to punish him for anything. It was that sort of trust that Matilda had abused badly, but she hadn’t killed it. She nodded slowly. “Then there’s the Alliance.”
“Now that’s a fair concern.” He eyed the letter with more thoughtful hostility. “I imagine they’re mighty paranoid right now. Trudes would send a telegraph, she’d pretty much have to with all that’s happened.” He took another swig of his beer. “So don’t tell ‘em.”
“What, burn the letter and leave it alone?”
He grinned at her. “Nah, Luce. We go to this cave and find this treasure, or trigger the trap, or whatever. That way it’s over with hardly a fuss.”
She’d thought about doing that on her own, risky as that was. ‘Deepest ruin’ implied isolation, and if she ran off to some unknown cavern without telling anyone, there was a risk she’d get too hurt to get back out and no one would come. There was a reason people always left a note with the Civil Corps before going on a dive.
“You sure?”
“I want every trace of Pen gone from this town,” Logan told her, his grin dropping away, “Wiped out like he never set foot in my home. ‘Sides, it ain’t right, him messin’ with ya like this, probably knowing you couldn’t take it to Trudes or Justice without trouble.”
She laughed, shaking her head and leaning back in the booth. “But he forgot you were back in town.”
His grin came back, triumphant and gleaming white over his beer. “Pen wasn’t as stupid as we thought but he ain’t so smart as he thinks.” He reached out and flicked the letter towards her. “Pick a time, this matters more ‘n bounties.” A particularly brutal gust of wind and sand rattled some of the saloon’s upstairs windows loudly. They both looked up at the ceiling as if expecting glass to rain down on them. “Well, not during a storm maybe.”