"Look beneath the overhang," she whispered, her obsidian eyes glowing in the dark. "They are not shooting only to kill us. They are buying time for the wagon."
Ethan squinted through the gunsmoke. Through the gaps in the dust, he saw what Thorpe was truly doing.
A hundred yards down the wash, four men in grease-stained canvas coats were working frantically under the shadow of a hollowed-out red sandstone bluff. They were rolling heavy oak casks—stamped with the red diamond of the Dupont Powder Works—straight into a natural undercut cavern directly beneath the foundation of the Gate of the Sun. Two men were already tamping the kegs with bags of river sand, while a third was unrolling a thick, tarred waterproof fuse along the dry creek bed.
Fifty kegs of black blasting powder.
If that charge detonated beneath the undercut cliff, the entire western buttress of the gate would collapse into the canyon. Thousands of tons of fractured red rock would come down, sealing the only exit from the basin and burying the defenders alive. Even if the cavalry arrived by noon tomorrow, they would find only a tomb of shattered rock and suffocated women and children.
"Thorpe isn't bluffing," Ethan said, the last trace of color draining from his face. "He's going to blow the mountain foundation. He knows if he drops that cliff, nobody ever investigates Claim Forty-Four. The silver remains his, Vance’s lawyers will claim the whole range as an abandoned mine, and your people will be erased from the territorial maps."
From down in the darkness of the wash, Ben Thorpe’s mocking laughter echoed off the cliffs, amplified by the natural acoustics of the stone.
"Walker!" the mercenary shouted, his voice coarse and raspy from the burn on his shoulder. "Two minutes left on the clock, drover! I see you up there behind that chief's skirts! Send the girl down with your hands tied behind your back, or I swear to God I'll drop twenty thousand tons of rock on that dirt village! You’ll be eating granite for breakfast!"
"We must strike the kegs," Tahzay hissed, his dark eyes wide. "One flaming arrow into the powder!"
"No!" Ethan grabbed Tahzay’s wrist. "You hit that powder with fire while it's sitting in that undercut, and the concussion will level this whole ridge! We'd blow ourselves up along with them!"
"Then what?!" Tahzay snarled, shaking off Ethan's grip. "We sit here and wait for the match?!"
Ethan looked at the steep, jagged face of the eastern bluff above their heads.
It was a sheer wall of red sandstone, fractured by deep, vertical chimneys where rain runoff carved narrow chutes through the rock. The chimney directly above the powder cache ended on a razor-thin shelf seventy feet above the wagon. It was a route no horse could take, and no man could climb without exposing himself to the riflemen below.
Except from above.
"Ayana," Ethan said, turning to her with a sudden, desperate intensity. "The high trail we took from the Tortolitas... does the upper goat path connect with that eastern rim?"
Ayana looked up at the black silhouette of the crags, her eyes narrowing as she mentally mapped the secret goat paths of her childhood. "Yes. The Path of the Crows runs along the upper crest. But it drops down through the chimney. It is slick as glass. A man who slips will fall into their camp."
"I don't need a man to climb down it," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a hard, deadly register. "I just need to get directly above that powder wagon."
He unslung his Winchester carbine and pulled a heavy leather pouch from his saddle roll—a bag containing two sticks of Hercules dynamite and three copper percussion caps that he had bought in Tucson two months ago for blasting irrigation ditches along the river.
"Ethan," Ayana said, her fingers catching his sleeve. The terror in her eyes was no longer for her village; it was for him. "If the gunners see you on that high rim, you have no cover. The stone is bare."
Ethan looked down at her small, strong hand gripping his wrist. In the dim, terrifying light of the burning canyon, he saw the depth of everything they had shared over the past six days—the desperate gallop through Ghost Wash, the freezing traverse of the Needle’s Spine, and the quiet truth spoken in the council lodge. He reached out with his calloused hand, his thumb gently brushing the dust from her cheekbone.
"You told your father that I was a man of two worlds, Ayana," Ethan said softly. "It’s time to prove that one of those worlds knows how to fight for the other."