Page 44 of 13 Nights

I check my phone battery. High enough. I plug it in anyway. I pull the backup battery from my bag and plug that in too. I find the flashlight I brought from Brooklyn and test it. I set the voice recorder beside my keys.

Then I sit at the table one more time, beside the marks Severin left in the wood. I send Lena a text with my coordinates and the time I plan to arrive.

If I don't check in by dawn, this is where I'll be.

I've observed the name's force twice. October twenty-third, the lamp flickered and Severin's manifestation sharpened. October twenty-sixth, the documented name produced impressions in solid wood and a lamp surge visible from across the room.

The Ride replays the death of a man no one called by his true name. I have the convergence point, the documented evidence, and the name that Fritz stole and Irving never learned.

Tonight, I'm going to the road where Severin died, and I'm going to say his name in the place that took it from him.

CHAPTER TEN

Severin

The cannon fires before I've finished forming. Night Ten. October 28. The 250th anniversary of the Battle of White Plains and the death of a Hessian soldier who died under a name that wasn't his.

I manifest on the road near the cottage, and the withdrawal plan dies before I can execute it. I'd intended to walk to the far edge of the boundary, put as much distance between myself and Ashley as the cage allows. The cannon has other ideas.

The cannon fires again, closer, and the ground beneath my boots stops being October asphalt and becomes October mud. The sound carries the specific percussion of a twelve-pound field piece, the concussion that strikes the chest before the ears register it, and I know what's coming before it arrives.

I've heard this opening every October since I died, the cannonade that preceded the Hessian advance toward Chatterton Hill, the guns that announced the end of the life Fritz stole from me.

My hands are still mine. The road is still visible beneath the overlay of trampled earth and gun smoke. The present holds for another three seconds, maybe four, and I use them to scan the boundary in every direction.

Ashley's cottage sits at the far end of the road. The porch light burns as it has every night for the past ten evenings, but the windows behind it are dark. The kitchen is empty, the driveway bare.

She's gone. Whether she finally listened, or ran, or simply decided that a man who disappears without explanation deserves the silence he engineered, the cottage is empty. Any of those outcomes keeps her alive. Any of those outcomes is the point.

The third cannon fires. The road dissolves.

The field has swallowed the road. Mud seeps through boots I didn't put on and smoke fills lungs that can't distinguish between 1776 and tonight.

The regiment is moving forward, a column of men in blue coats with white crossbelts, and I'm among them because I was always among them, a stolen man carrying a false name into a battle he never volunteered to fight.

The black horse rises out of the smoke like something born from it. It materializes beneath me between one stride and the next, and suddenly I'm mounted, armed with a saber I never carried in life, riding at the front of a column that marched this hill in 1776.

My head is gone.

The absence arrives as sensation rather than knowledge, a vast blank where my skull should be, a cold that seeps downward through my neck and into my shoulders like ice water filling a vessel.

I can't see, but the horse sees. I can't speak, but the rage speaks. The Ride has me, and I have no more say in the matter than the soldier who died here had a say in being conscripted.

I am the Horseman, the legend, the death echo of a man no one called by his true name, replaying the last terrible minutes of his existence because the world never gave him a reason to stop.

The Ride loops through cavalry charge, cannon strike, severance, and reset. Each cycle compresses the one before it, stripping away another second of awareness until only the core remains: the cannonball, the impact, the moment between having a head and becoming the thing Irving wrote about.

Between loops, fragments surface. A gap in the cycle where the present bleeds through for a heartbeat before the past swallows it again.

I catch headlights on a modern road, bright enough to register through whatever passes for vision in this state. A car is parked at the shoulder. Someone was here recently. Then everything resets to cannon and field and the forward charge.

Another fragment leaks through: cold air against what's left of my neck, October wind carrying the smell of decaying leaves and asphalt, a sound that belongs to the twenty-first century, faint beneath the artillery. A car door closes.

Another reset. The horse lunges forward and the saber catches firelight that vanished from this hill in 1776.

A third fragment catches: a light on the road ahead, small and steady and wrong for this battlefield. A phone screen or a flashlight, held at chest height.

Behind it stands a figure the Ride does not recognize, because the Ride remembers only the dead. The person on the old military road is very much alive.