Page 40 of Forbidden Protector

"Other one," Mackenzie says, and the beam moves before I ask for it, tracking my arm, reading where I am going next the way a spotter reads a shooter. The second hoof comes forward. I line them up and pull, slow and steady, and the calf slides into the straw in a rush of fluid that goes to my boots and everywhere else.

It doesn't move.

I clear the mouth and nose. Rub the ribs hard with a fistful of straw. Nothing. The heifer cranes around and looks at the dark wet shape on the ground. Beside me, Mackenzie goes still.

I rub harder. Thumb along the jawline. The chest fills once, hitches, fills again. A cough, then the front legs fold under and the whole thing tries to stand and fails and tries and fails and stands.

"Got you," I say, and nobody answers. The barn is quiet except for the heifer licking and the Chinook hammering the walls outside like something trying to get in.

I tag the ear. Number 4-117. Not a name. I don't name things on this ranch. Haven't in two years. That job, I'm beginning to understand, has been reassigned to someone who does not know she has it yet.

We come out of the barn into sunrise.

The first light has come up over the plains while we were inside, and across the valley the granite face is turning from grey to pink to orange. Ten thousand feet of rock is warming from the top down while the Chinook tears at everything below it.

The air is warm enough that I am standing in my shirt with blood to the elbows and I am not cold. The gusts still hit hard enough to press my shirt flat and take my breath sideways.

A house finch sits the fence wire by the tack room in a lull, the first of the year, arrived overnight on a wind that carried it over the divide and set it down above a valley still deciding what season to be.

Purple crocuses along the south wall of the barn. Three of them, pushing through mud and old snow. Nobody planted them. They come back every year on their own schedule, indifferent to what the ranch thinks.

Mackenzie stands beside me, close enough that her sleeve nearly touches my arm. She looks at the crocuses and does not move.

"You're good at that," she says.

"Calving?"

"New things. Alive things." A beat. "It doesn't match the rest of you."

"Which rest?"

"The part that reads a murder in four seconds. The part that comes sideways into a parking lot on ice at midnight." She pauses. "The part your file doesn't explain."

I look at her. She is looking at the flowers.

"Those are different skills."

"No. They're the same skill used in different directions, and that is worse, and you know it." She turns. "Last night you told me things I am going to hear for a long time."

"I know what I said."

"Did you mean any of it, or is that the vault doing what the vault does?"

The vault. She named it. A breath comes out of me that is almost a laugh, because she has been paying close enough attention to build a word for the thing I do, and she chose the right one.

"All of it."

"That is not a safe answer."

"You didn't ask for a safe one."

She holds there three seconds. Then she moves first.

One step. Her hand comes up and touches the blood on my forearm, above the stitches, where the calf left it.

"You're bleeding again."

"It's not mine."