Lines in the Dust

Night pulled the town into a thin, honest hush. Above the station’s cramped parlor, Jo Larkin let her palms settle on the telegraph key like a smith lets his hammer find the grain of metal. The key spoke in a private click and hush she’d grown used to—short dashes, patient dots; language that didn’t interrupt. It was, for her, less a machine and more an honest listener.

Wind out on the plain softened itself to a polite whisper and washed a smell of frying dough up the stairwell. Marta Bell’s gin-scented ginger cakes had the town’s attention—Marta liked to bargain happiness into pastry—and the aroma snagged in Jo’s nose like a memory of summer. Cinder’s Crossing had its small cuisines: Marta’s cakes on market mornings, the butcher’s slow-cured beef on Sundays, and a black tea that the stationmaster drank too hot and too often. None of that changed orders on a key, but it softened how people were when they came in.

Tomas Rivera pushed the hatch open and ducked inside with the easy lack of a creature that expects no judgment. He carried two thick slices of cake wrapped in oilcloth. “I brought evidence,” he announced, making a ridiculous bow that sent a flock of crumbs across the desk. He always came late with contraband sweets and impossible optimism.

Jo didn’t look up. She kept her fingers light and let the rhythm tell her what to expect. “You’ll burn your fingers someday, Tomas,” she said without abandon. “You’ll find out Marta’s oven is both a miracle and a weapon.”

His grin widened. “Worth it,” he said, and nosed a slice toward her. “Besides, if the wires are gossip, I am a whisper. I keep the story sugary.”

Their banter folded around the room like warm cloth. It was the kind of small talk that meant more than it should—Tomas admired her, and she tolerated him in a way that let him be useful. He’d learned a simple sleeve splice once; Jo had made him practice until his hands stopped shaking. It was a trade in small trust.

From the glass pane in the door the stage’s lantern winked—a patient, wrong amber—and then a second thump landed on the landing. Boots in the hall. Not the stationmaster’s careful tread; something hurried now. Jo’s fingers stilled. She hauled the receiver closer and attuned herself to the incoming line. Static ran like a spider across the message, a string of dots mangled by a ragged pause. She frowned, tugged at the adjuster and felt the vibration of something that didn’t belong.

The hatch banged open and someone brushed in—cloth, dust, the sound of a man who had been riding at the edge of things. The office smelled suddenly of soot and iron and a new, sharp urgency.