Signal at Red Mesa

The click came before dawn, a metronome of metal against wood that Maeve Calder had learned to read the way other people read the weather. It was a small sound, precise and dry, like a bone snapping clean; it threaded through the thin walls of the telegraph office and threaded into her sleep until she had to lift her head and answer. The room smelled of oiled rope and black coffee—two scents that never left Red Mesa—and the lamp's wick threw a low, steady light over her palms as she pushed aside the blanket.

Outside, the main street was a ribbon of dust and the first passenger hawk of a morning. Maeve let the dog, Jasper, slip his head under her arm and blinked sleep from her eyes. He was a small brown thing with a white snip at his chest and a knack for being where trouble would soon be. He climbed up onto the narrow bench by the window and watched the sun peel itself over the mesa like a slow, red coin.

She lit the lamp properly, listened to the click again and smiled without meaning to. The telegraph key sat on a scarred plank of wood that served as a desk, and when she tapped it the sound rippled through her bones as if someone had touched a memory. Her fingers moved with the ease of a craft learned in a dozen hours of moonlight and storm. Messages bled through the wire—plain, urgent, the town's life in quick staccato. The lines ran from Red Mesa to Dry Hollow, to the county seat at Mariposa, and the handful of ranches out east. The office was a small square of control for a corner of the desert everyone thought too dull to fight over.

Rook Tanner knocked once, then twice, like a man who had learned not to reorder his patience. Rook was lean and smelled faintly of coal and hot iron, his forearms crossed by old burns that told their own stories. "You up, Maeve?" he asked when she opened the door, his voice a rough wire.

She poured him coffee from the pot on the stove. The steam fogged the window and spat dark rings on the plank where the key slept. "Morning," she said. "The line's steady. County's in again with the weather notices."

Rook leaned his forehead against the jamb and watched the horizon. "You always know it by the click?"

"I always know it by the click," she said, because she did. It was a thing that had no explanation beyond the small rituals of living in a place where nothing moved fast except the wind. People came to the telegraph office with packages of gossip and official notices, with orders for supplies and sometimes with news that made you swallow it like gravel. Maeve liked to think the city beyond the wires moved on a scale that made sense. Here, things were measured in days needed for the well to stop, for the cattle to come down from the ridge, for the night to end without a skirmish at the saloon.

The saloon's sign creaked in the first sun, and in the alley a cart rattled its way along boards, a barrel clanking. A boy came by, messenger in hand, and Maeve snapped open the office door just wide enough to take the note. The handwriting was small and neat. She read it and felt a blade press at the base of her throat though the paper said nothing menacing: a legal notice from a firm she'd never seen before, and a timespan too short for the hills to swallow.