“It’s all there,” the Drifter lies while smiling. “You c’n count it if ya like. I got time. She got time.”

“Shut up.”

“‘S all anybody really got, is time.”

“I said shut up.”

The Drifter has been told that he has a smile like a shark’s.

Not in the way that it was full of jagged, layered teeth that stretched away into his throat – he didn’t have that, not literally anyway. No, when people told him his smile was like a shark’s, he figured they meant that you could always see it. His teeth were always on display, loudly daring the people he faced to question it or its authenticity.

And the Drifter doesn’t have any kind of problem with that.

The setting sun casts a jagged spiderweb of pink-orange shadows across the lobby of the half-sunken metro station he’d been called to. It’s him, the kid, and the idiot what’d took her.

Risen get all kinds of crazy notions in their heads. Some of them think the best way to make a buck is the old fashioned way: killing, stealing, slaving, and all the other languages of the burnt-out world. Under ordinary circumstances it isn’t a lifestyle the Drifter has anything against, per se – but this particular girl has a very important father, and so the Drifter has been hired to get her back. Well, that isn’t strictly speaking true. He’d offered, out of the ‘goodness’ of his ‘heart’, to go out and retrieve her. His plan?

Step one: Pay the thug the ransom he wants.

Step two?

The hulking Risen turns to the large trunk the Drifter had placed on the table and the second his head turns enough, the Drifter whips his iron out of his belt and shoots the fool in the back four times. The thundering crash of his pistol wakes the girl from her drug-induced slumber.

The Risen’s corpse spills across the table and knocks the ransom out of sight behind it. The Drifter’s pistol booms once more, and the sigh of Light from the fallen brute’s Ghost shattering into a million pieces tickles his coattails.

The girl is so shell-shocked that she doesn’t look away from the sagged corpse of her captor as he approaches; he wonders if this was the first time she’s ever seen a dead body, but she looks to be nearly twenty – surely she isn’t that sheltered. He pulls her gag down and she immediately begins sobbing all over him, talking about ‘thank you so much’ this, and ‘how can I repay you’ that.

The Drifter’s teeth glow in the strip of sunlight that falls across his lips as he stands upright. “Heard ya daddy’s got an ol’ bar at the edge ‘a his turf that nobody’s using,” he says, and lets the spent casings from his revolver clatter across the tiles.

When the Drifter gets back into town with the girl, it is his regretful duty to inform her father that in the scuffle, the ruffian had transmatted the ransom away to some far corner of the empty, and there was no way to find it.

He smiles the whole way home.

—•—•—•—•—

“You really put me in a pickle here,” the Drifter lies while smiling. This time the lie is dripping with red, just like his teeth, and his splayed hand is firmly pressed over the fist-sized wound in his side. He is spilled down a clearing on the side of a mountain that looks down into untamed wilderness. The report from the sniper rifle going off is still ringing down in the valley, and the Drifter’s eyes dart back and forth, from the tree line to his Sparrow – dug nose-down into the dirt beneath a fallen tree-trunk.

Andal Brask steps out from his cover in the trees above the Drifter, rifle slung low, smoke still rising off the barrel in the cold winter morning. The Drifter is laying with his back to the same rotten tree his Sparrow has struck, near the bottom of the slope.

“Y’ask me, y’all gotcha self inna this here pickle, friend,” Brask drawls. His accent is thicker than the Drifter’s, his voice twice as lazy, but also more menacing.

“In my defense,” The Drifter croaks, “You ‘n those Coyotes shouldn’ta buried your haul so close to my bar.”

“Ah do recall tryin’ ta advise yeh aginst stickin’ yer nose in Micah’s business, but, Ah s’pose Ah aught to’ve known better.”

The sun is still sleeping low in the sky above the center of the valley; the Drifter fancies that he and it are on the same plane right now, and Andal Brask stands above them both. He doesn’t bother trying to crawl away; though the sniper is down by Andal’s hip, the man’s finger is still casually toying with the curved trigger guard. The Drifter knows that even firing from the hip, Brask is good enough to pop his head like a grapefruit in a microwave.

There is a possibility for a long, arduous dance between the two of them, but ultimately the odds play Brask to come out on top – he’s the better shot and has the better position, and with a rifle he can dictate the range of engagement. But the Drifter has one advantage, one ace up his sleeve that Andal Brask doesn’t know about:

The Drifter is a Lightbearer, too.

Andal meanders down the incline like a lazy wolf, his eyes scanning the horizon but the barrel of his gun never quite swaying away from the Drifter’s vital areas. The Drifter mentally bids his Ghost to stay hidden. If this does turn into a fight, he has no guarantee Brask won’t just smoke the poor little wretch given the opportunity. There is a long thirty seconds of time the Drifter spends bleeding in silence before Andal speaks. “Jes’ you?”

“Just me.”

“Where’dja stash it?”

“Dunno what you mean.”

Brask lets out a short, dry chuckle as he stands over the Drifter, eyes still scanning the horizon, chewing a piece of straw and squinting into the morning sun. “Y’all real sure ‘bout that?” He asks, and sets his foot on the hand the Drifter has clapped over his injury. The sudden new pressure makes stars burst in his vision; the Drifter’s molars creak with the strain of his jaws clenching, but it doesn’t wipe the smile off his face. If Brask looks too close, or starts feeling around with his enhanced senses, the Drifter thinks, he will be thoroughly poached.

“Well wait,” he wheezes, voice strained. “You wouldn’t happen ta be talkin’ about that, ah, handsome Fallen rifle I... found... out by Three Quarters Bluff?”

“Aw, so yew do know it?” Brask’s voice is touched with amusement. There’s no need for the Drifter to beat Andal Brask in a fight. He doesn’t even need to stay alive, although that is certainly drastically preferable. Andal Brask is a Hero, or so he styles himself; and this is so important to him, the Drifter thinks, that anything which lands in line with that long shadow Brask is casting up the mountain behind him will satisfy that capital H. Bottom line, the Drifter needs to stroke Andal Brask’s ego – and shoot, he isn’t above that.

“Three miles out past the headstone at the bottom ‘a the valley,” he rasps; he can feel blood pooling in his lung. It’s unpleasant, to be sure, but it’s not the most unpleasant thing he’s ever experienced – which is probably saying something. “There’s a crooked tree, fell over ‘n caved in some ol’ hut ain’t been slept in since before the moon got split. I ain’t too proud to admit when I been beat.”

Brask scratches his chin, his gloves rasping over his stubble. “Reckon y’left it buried down there?”

“Yeah.”

Brask sucks his teeth, hems and haws, as blood runs down the Drifter’s side. “Ah don’t rightly know if Ah believe ya.”

“Then kill me,” the Drifter says, with a smile in his voice that could be a knife tapping against Brask’s adam’s apple. For the first time, the Drifter thinks he spots real disdain in Brask’s face – because they both know full well, Andal Brask is not the kind of man who would kill an unarmed foe in cold blood. He thinks much too highly of himself, and cares much too much about the way his crew thinks of him. It’s Andal’s reputation to break, not the Drifter’s.

The silence stretches for a full minute, but it’s terse and irritated now, as opposed to coy and satisfied. Brask grumbles something that the Drifter doesn’t catch because there’s an uncomfortable ringing in his ears. “Better hope, fer your sake, the gun’s there.” Brask slings his sniper and turns his back on the Drifter. “Ah don’t prefer gettin’ slime on my cape, ‘n even when y’ain’t perforated, you are an oozer.”

“Why would I lie to ya, Brask?”

“Why wouldja drink water?” Brask shoots back over his shoulder. “Reckon y’needta, or you’d die.”

The Drifter’s chuckle is wet. “We’ll laugh about this some day.”

(He’s right. But, only after the Drifter gives him a lifetime discount on alcohol.)

—•—•—•—•—

The Drifter lies while smiling.

It is a rictus grin. Sweat beads across his brow and runs down the side of his face into his scraggly beard. His fingers flex in his gloves; tendons in his wrists strain against the binding keeping him tied to a chair, in a den, in the dark, somewhere a quarter mile below the surface of the European Dead Zone, near Old Moscow. A cockroach skitters between cracked tiles that line the walls of the Old Metro.

Click.

“Lucky again, pal.”

His captor, Anderson Trescieu, is a weathered man in his mid-fifties, who steadies the nauseating sway of the overhead lamp with his free hand. The light is a simple conical lampshade and a bare bulb hanging from a chain, through which the wire is threaded; when it swings, it creaks and makes the shadows beneath it undertake a woozy dance. The pull-chain that turns it on and off creates a swirling dim spot in the cone of illumination the light casts.

“Man, this piece sure is heavy,” Trescieu mutters, more to his two compatriots – one guarding each door – than to the Drifter. Trescieu bounces the Drifter’s hand cannon in his palm and balances it with both hands; he exerts noticeable effort to cock the hammer and grunts as he hefts the barrel in the Drifter’s face. It’s a Lightbearer’s weapon, the Drifter thinks. You wouldn’t have the juice in those old bones for the kick anyway.

Click.

Trescieu lets out a sigh that is supposed to be playfully disappointed but that the Drifter reads as frustrated. “Lucky,” he says. “Lucky, lucky, lucky. I see why you like Russian Roulette, buddy. You’re real good at it. Do you know what you are not terribly good at? Knowing when you’re beat. Now, tell me where you found out about my friends in the Reef, and we don’t have to end this with your fucking brains all over the floor.”

The Drifter has never made a habit of keeping his nose out of other people’s business. Trescieu has action with the Fallen businessmen out in the Reef, down in the Tangled Shore where neither the glow nor the shadow of the Awoken quite reaches. The Drifter wanted a piece of that action. Trescieu took umbrage with that. The Drifter had... underestimated his retinue. He was used to dealing with other Risen. He was not used to dealing with other Risen that had a small army of normies in their corner.

So they capture him and they tie him up and beat him, and they say they want to play a little game with him, and Trescieu asks him how many rounds there are in his gun, so he says there are eleven. They fire it off ten times, until there’s one bullet left. And Trescieu spins the chamber. And Trescieu cocks the hammer.

Click.

“Do you think you can play games with me?” Trescieu shouts. “I’m the one running the show here! I decide if you live–”

Click.

“Or you die. Do you understand?! You tried to horn in on my turf, you sticky bastard! I’m gonna learn you a god-damn lesson if I gotta use my belt to do it!” A fleck of spittle lands on the Drifter’s cheek as Trescieu works out his little tantrum. But the Drifter has nothing for him but a smile.

The loose ends of the knot that had been holding his hands bound a couple minutes ago are balled in the Drifter’s fist. The lamp is swaying. Trescieu grabs it with such force that the bulb flickers and steadies it with strained, false calm. The pull-chain clatters against the metal lampshade.

Trescieu is sweating, now. The Drifter is a chatterbox; everybody knows the Drifter is a chatterbox. He hasn’t said a word since they sat him down in the chair. It’s getting to him, the Drifter thinks. He restrains his excitement. Not quite time, not yet. Trescieu stops spinning the chamber each time before he cocks the hammer, and just starts pulling the trigger. The Drifter’s cheshire smile, uncannily, grows wider.

The thing is, the Drifter’s gun only chambers ten rounds.

“Shoulda let me horn in on your turf,” the Drifter says, and his voice drips out from between his teeth – his is the ardor of the tiger whose cage has been left unlocked, and the ringmaster sleeps nearby. The Drifter’s hungry gaze slowly lifts up from Trescieu’s pale, waxen composure and fixes on the bulb of the lamp between them, which is swaying again. Trescieu looks up too, with the stony dread of a ringmaster who has miscalculated. The bulb flickers.

“Wait–“ says the Risen at the east door, realizing too late.

Click.

—•—•—•—•—

As the monolith towers over him in the dark, and the cold, and the wind howls around him and he thinks this may be the thousandth time he has died, and its Eye watches him, the Drifter is not smiling.

He does, however, feel the urge to laugh.