LITMIR.BIZ

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      I wake to the sight of vultures overhead, flying in tight circles that I think are meant for me. But I’m not ready—I’ll fight them off with my knife, I’ll tear at their feathers, and I’ll keep one to eat. I’ll eat it raw; I don’t need a fire.

      The foul black birds with their burned faces land a few feet away. They hop and skulk toward the fox. It has begun to stink. They start to peck and tear at the flesh, oblivious to me.

      When I get to my feet, my legs are stronger than I thought they’d be. The desert stretches behind me. Before me, the mountains loom close enough that I can make out trees, basking in the shade of the high peaks, just below a steep snowline. I’m so close to the mountain that promises animals to hunt, wood to make a fire, shelter, and, of course, the bullet catcher. I can’t believe I ever thought of giving him up.

      It’s early, but the desert is already blindingly bright. It’s difficult to tell the earth from the sky, and at first I mistake the figure as a shadow, before realizing that there’s nothing there to cast it. It’s a free-floating shadow, a nightshade, a ghost. It’s the bullet catcher. He stands in the distance, watching me. Then he turns and heads off again.

      He knows I’m following him, and for whatever reason, he’s helping me. I kick away the vultures and cut a few pieces of drying flesh from the fox. I stuff the raw meat into my pack. The knife I tuck into my belt. And then I follow the bullet catcher to the very end of the desert.

      • • •

      That afternoon, the sky is sharp blue and piercing. I take a strip of the raw fox meat from my pack. I eat the whole strip and suck the congealing blood from my fingers.

      As I eat, I think of Nikko. He was tough and ingenious. He could be mean as hell too, but never to me. That’s why I looked up to him. While I was busy making myself small so I could fit into any shadow or hiding place, Nikko puffed out his chest and made a name for himself: troublemaker, dirt kicker, sinner. That’s what the Brothers and Sisters called him.

      Nikko once made me a music box. It played just three notes, but it was the only music I’d heard since before the orphanage. He showed it to me in theology class, cupping his hands around it so the Sister couldn’t see. But before he could give it to me, the Sister came over and rapped his knuckles with a switch. He smiled up at her like nothing she could do could hurt him. She pulled him from the lesson by his hair, dragging his heels along the floorboards of the schoolhouse. I watched through the wavy glass of the windows as they hauled him into the yard, tied him to a post, and whipped him until his shirt hung in ribbons—yellow from dust, red from blood. I think Nikko had smiled at the Sister so she would forget the music box. I hid it in my desk where no one would see it.

      That night was the first time he ran away. He didn’t tell me he was going to do it. I don’t think he’d planned it. He just ran. When I discovered he was missing, I told one of the Sisters I couldn’t find him.

      “One less mouth to feed,” the Sister said, and gave me the back of her hand for speaking out of turn. I went back to the dormitory, took the music box from where I’d hidden it under my pillow, wound it up, and cried as it played. I was certain he was dead. But the next day he came back, starving, panting from thirst.

      When Nikko ran away for good he had a plan: He was going to join the bullet catchers. But the bullet catchers didn’t just agree to train any skinny kid with a sob story. You had to be special. And Nikko was special. The music box was just one thing he made. He was always taking apart anything he could get his hands on. Clocks, small engines, the orphanage’s boiler and water recycler, they all met with the sharp end of Nikko’s screwdriver, and they all revealed their secrets to him. He would make me little clockwork toys out of scrap: little marching soldiers, or a dog that opened and closed its mouth like it was yapping, a bird that would raise and lower its wings. He made his own sun-powered engine. It didn’t do much; it only lit a light bulb. But to see his eyes shine! He was a genius at gizmos and mechanics.

      The thing was, no one but the bullet catchers knew the secret to catching bullets. Some said it was to do with the planet’s magnetic poles or black magic. Some of the more snakebitten drunks said that it was all done with mirrors. Others speculated that even the bullet catchers didn’t know how they did it, that each one of them carried a slip of paper with one piece of the secret written on it—maybe no more than a word or letter—that to learn the whole thing you had to find every bullet catcher and put the secret together.

      But Nikko didn’t care about the secret.

      Instead, he made a glove that he said could catch bullets. He only showed it to me once—he was afraid of the Brothers and Sisters finding it. Late one night, we went out behind the schoolhouse, one of his hands around my wrist, the other clutching a canvas bag. We crouched in the shadow made by the steeple, rising up between the moon and us, and he produced his invention. It was made from an old glove, the kind wranglers use to grip their lassos. Across the back, brass barbs arched like jumping spider legs. Thin coils of brass were molded in tight spirals around the fingertips.

      “With this,” he said in a whisper, “I’ll be able to catch bullets as well as any bullet catcher. When I show the bullet catchers this, they’ll have to let me in.”

      He flipped a switch and the glove hummed, low and full of power, like the quiet sound the planet makes if you put your ear to the ground in the middle of a desert night with no one around, when there are no animals howling or plants growing spindly roots through the dirt.

      • • •

      The mountain is not so far now. For whatever reason, the bullet catcher keeps within sight, slowing when I begin to slow, speeding up to pull me along. I think about Nikko, reduced to a set of bleached bones somewhere out in the desert. The bullet-catching glove he invented rusting away in his pack. Or maybe that’s all gone now, his bones carried away by grateful coyotes, his pack stolen away by salvagers. Because now that I’ve nearly done what he only attempted, I know that if he had lived, if he had found the bullet catchers, he would have come back for me. He would never have left me alone.

      What will I say to the bullet catcher when I finally catch up to him? If I could only figure out what Nikko would have said, I almost feel I could keep him alive, in some small way. I’d pick up where he left off, and I’d feel close to him all over again, like I did last night, when I was close to death.

      2.

      Near evening, I follow the bullet catcher into the huge, crooked shadow of the mountain. The shade cuts a dark, jagged scar in the desert and freezes my sunburned skin. At the foot of the mountain, tired-looking shrubs with dull flowers and spiny petals peek out through the shale. Midway up, where the earth turns from sand to stone, pine trees make a dense, green ring around the steep mountainside. Higher up, the trees turn sparse. The sight of snow, whitening the mountain peaks, makes my teeth chatter. If I close my eyes I can hear the wings of small birds fluttering from brush to brush, the sound of a weak stream running through the crags that form paths and switchbacks up the mountain. It’s into one of those switchbacks that the bullet catcher disappears: one moment there, then gone. He’s the disappearing old man and I’m the unnoticeable girl.

      The memory of last night, when I drank the blood of the desert fox, fills me with strength, reminds me I can do anything. I grind my teeth to keep them from chattering, and begin my climb up the mountain.

      The bullet catcher leaves no footprints. He doesn’t break a single branch. He doesn’t make a sound. There’s no hope in tracking him, so when the path comes to a fork I take my best guess and just keep heading up. Every now and then I come to a dead end of fallen trees or unscalable boulders and I have to double back to the last turning.

      Night is falling when the ground flattens out and the trees open into a small clearing. At one end of the clearing stands a tent made from canvas and animal hide, nestled in the shadow of a low cliff face. The canvas walls are propped up with wood poles tall enough so you don’t have to duck through the flap. Away from the tent, a line stretches between two trees, bowed with drying clothes. Iron cookware sits in a neat stack on a washcloth. And there’s the bullet catcher, sitting in an old rocking

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