The final leg of the drive was short but chaotic. The Numunuu peeled off just before leaving their territory, their Pachycephalosaurs melting into the scrubland after the transfer of the Ankylo pups and a sincere, if brief, farewell. Marsh’s crew pushed the remaining mixed herd of Triceratops and Stegosaurs toward the massive, metal scar on the horizon: the San Antonio Rail Junction.

  The canyon trail was the wilderness; the Junction was the jagged edge of civilization. It was a sprawling, noisy, and pungent convergence of old-world metalwork and new-world bio-tech. The air, clean just an hour ago, was now thick with the smell of sweat, processed meats, dino musk, and the faint, sweet odor of organic fuel crystals burning in the station generators.

  Marsh, John, Jase, and Mateo rode side-by-side, their faces grimly set against the transition.

  “Check the numbers and branding on the dinos one last time, boys,” Marsh ordered, his voice tight. “The Inspectors here don't need any extra excuse to dock the price.”

  Mateo, still energized by the morning’s deception and battle, pushed Mambo into a trot. “Relax, Pa. We got this. Just keep that ramrod of a Marshall off our backs.”

  The "ramrod Marshall" was Augustus "Gus" Thorne, a former military officer in the Western Alliance, who oversaw the entire junction for the territory's council. Gus was all clean uniforms, polished boots, and a rigid adherence to regulations. He was the antithesis of the McClintock family’s hard-won, messy peace.

  As they reached the first set of loading pens, Marsh spotted a familiar figure waiting near a clean, white medical trailer: Calli. She wore a practical canvas vest over her tunic, and her long dark hair was tied back, revealing the focused intensity of her eyes. Beside her stood Quackers, her Hadrosaur, a highly intelligent dinosaur trained to aid her with medical care in the field. Marsh dismounted and walked quickly toward her, the tension of the last few days finally bleeding away.

  “I was starting to worry you had just turned around and gone home,” Calli said playfully, stepping forward. She didn’t embrace him immediately, instead holding him at an arm's length giving him a quick, practiced scan, checking for wounds. She gave him a stern look and said, “I swear, I let you all out of my sight for a few minutes and you manage to find a fight in the middle of nowhere. With a bunch of eastern cyber thugs no less.” She clicked her tongue and shook her head at the man.

  Marsh leaned down and kissed her deeply. “Hello my dear, I missed you too.” Marsh said as he leaned his forehead against hers. She finally relented and smiled back.

  “Hello,” she said warmly.

  Marsh stood straight and put his arm around Calli as they walked towards the entrance of the trailer. “ I don’t suppose you managed to calm down old Gus have you?”

  “Gus is being Gus,” Calli sighed, pulling him toward the trailer. “He wants to know why you turned over nine men to the Numunuu without a signed judicial waiver. I told him he can take it up with the Chief Quirtquip If he wants.”

  Marsh found Lin inside the trailer, quietly tending to Sarah, the traumatized girl they had rescued. Lin was probing the girl’s wrist with a portable bio-scanner, a flat piece of polished crystal that displayed the bones in a shimmering green hologram. Sarah, who nestled under a wool blanket, looked frail but finally still.

  “Lin said the Marshall Office wants to interview the girl,” Marsh said, looking at Calli.

  “Not happening,” Calli stated firmly, checking Sarah's pupils. “Not until her stress levels drop. I told Gus that patient safety takes priority in any investigation of his. Besides, she's not talking to anyone right now anyway.“

  Mateo and Jase came up behind them, having finished penning the herd. “Ma, Jase and I are going to check the bids on the market board,” Mateo offered. “And maybe sneak some real sausage. Jase added”

  “Be back before nightfall,” Calli instructed. She turned to Marsh, her expression serious. “Marsh, I need to talk to you about something else. The rings you messaged me about.”

  Calli led Marsh outside. “I did some investigating on those rings after you told me about them. You're right, they aren't just jewelry, Marsh. They’re identity rings. They are very common back East now, supposed to be safer than carrying money, most of the currency there is digital now. The thing is once they’re on, they don’t come off, which is supposed to be a deterrent in the large cities for criminals not to mess with them.”

  Marsh took the chain from his pocket, the shiny rings looking cold and grim in his hand. “The small jewel?”

  “That’s the key. That’s a cheap, low-level data storage crystal,” Calli explained, her voice low. “It holds all their personal info, contract details, any ownership history, and banking info. But out in the wide world outside of the enforcement zones, all someone needs to do is cut the finger off and get the pin number. Then it’s just a comm cube transmission to get all the money transferred to wherever you want. Colonel Franco was likely hijacking clueless travelers moving to the newly opened Center Zone of the continent.”

  Marsh had a sudden, unbidden memory of that day the gravity bomb went off, of the sudden, unnatural darkness and silence. “Quirtsquip said there's a lot of pioneers headed that way from both coasts, with their heads filled with ideas of a better life and not much else. I wonder if that girl, Sarah, was likely spared because she wasn't old enough to have a data ring yet. I don’t want to think about what they intended to do with her.”

  The knowledge settled like a stone in the pit of Marsh’s stomach. The death of the Barons hadn't ended the darkness; it had just decentralized it.

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  “Why would anyone agree to wear something like that?” Lin inserted, her tone incredulous. “Seems like a guaranteed way to lose your finger and your life.”

  “That’s the way of things back East, young lady,” a nasally, imperious voice said from directly behind the group, causing them all to turn sharply.

  Marshall Thorne stood there, having approached silently on his Deinonychus. He had dismounted, his tall boots spotless even among the muck of the pens. He wore a faint, superior smirk.

  “Those rings are the most basic augmentation required to live in any of the Nine Great Cyber Cities these days,” Thorne continued, his eyes cold. “Without a digital ID, you can’t work, use public services, own property, or even buy food in most places. And that's if you just want the bare amenities of life. If you want a real job, you have to acquire further, more specialized augmentation.”

  Thorne gestured vaguely at his own body. “If you can’t pay, don’t worry, all the companies have work contracts you can sign—ten years here, twenty years there. And if you want to advance in your work, that's gonna require some more parts here and there: an arm, a leg, new lungs, better eyes. But don’t forget about the maintenance. All that hardware wears out and needs fixing or even replacement. Before you know it, you're literally a cog in the machine. Eventually, you don’t even bother to go home anymore. Homes are for the flesh, and they signed that away years ago.”

  Thorne’s demeanor changed, a practiced mask of professional courtesy sliding into place. “Hello Marsh, long time. Heard you had some trouble out there.”

  “Marshall Thorne,” Marsh greeted, keeping his tone level. “Nothing we couldn’t handle, dino rustling is nothing new.”

  “Neither is highway robbery, or human trafficking,” Thorne retorted bluntly, his eyes narrowing.

  “Human trafficking?” Calli said.

  “We didn’t see any type of equipment that would suggest that, Thorne, no chains, no cages. All their transports were light and fast, no cargo vehicles,” added Lin.

  “Unless they already sold their cargo, transports and all, by the time they met us,” Marsh stated, locking eyes with Thorne.

  Thorne rubbed his temples in frustration. “That's probably the case. That Franco animal is or was one of the subjects in a pretty recent, high-level series of sting operations ordered by the Council of Nine. He's been on the Marshall's BOLO list for awhile. The numbers of suspected trafficked people had become so large the leaders of the Cyber Cities themselves took an interest.” Thorne lowered his voice. “They’re happy to let the dregs of their cities come out here to gamble their lives in the wild, but it doesn’t look good when even your lowest citizens are getting trafficked wholesale.”

  Marsh, who was usually very even-tempered, became visibly upset. “Who was he selling too out in the middle of nowhere? And why would he risk going through tribal land, and why keep the girl?” Calli placed a hand on his arm, and he visibly calmed himself.

  “Franco had been chased out of the cities,” Thorne explained. “The prevailing theory is he and his crew were probably looking to complete a large payday so they could head south. If they made it to Mexico, they could have paid for passage to the southern continent. No rules, no laws down there. As for the girl,” Thorne paused contemptibly, “Franco was known to have certain proclivities.”

  The entire group stood silently for a moment.

  “We found some coins on them but nothing that would fund an aspiring warlord,” Lin said. “If they already sold a bunch of people, where's the money?”

  Thorne glanced at Lin but quickly returned his gaze to Marsh. “The last confirmed location of Franco was close to the northern border, in Michigan. Authorities found the aftermath of a shootout in a played-out strip mine. Only one surveillance drone positively identified him. He left in a hurry, with less than a quarter of the men he went in with, and almost none of the equipment he had. We found lots of his crew's bodies, but the forensic evidence shows there were more bodies. Looks like they disappeared right into the ground, all the footprints just stop right at a big patch of disturbed earth. The theory is he was double crossed, probably made a deal with people he didn’t know since his usual channels were not available to him. The next confirmed sighting is when he ran into you. Probably robbing and stealing anything they could get their hands on to make it over the border.”

  “That would certainly explain why they were desperate enough to cut through the tribe's land,” said Calli.

  “And try to rustle a bunch of baby dinos out from under us” added Lin.

  Marsh frowned. “Disturbed earth, as if they tunneled into the ground.” Marsh looked doubtful, “The Sobek, really?”

  Thorne shook his head. “Not necessarily. They’re more known for human sacrifice than slavery. But the snake lovers are hardly the only evil thing running around up there. Using the cult's methods might just be a clever cover. We’re not ruling anything out. But that's why it's imperative I speak to that little girl. She might be able to shed light on the situation.”

  Calli spoke up. “She's in no state to speak to anyone. She's still in a state of shock and has barely been able to tell us her name. She’s not going to lay out some detailed, elaborate international human trafficking plot for you.”

  “I understand your feelings, Calli, really I do. And normally I would agree.” said Thorne, his voice gaining an edge. “But there are forces involved here that don’t concern themselves with the moral objections of plain folk like you or I. They have methods of pulling out the info they want.”

  Calli looked as if she might strike the marshal. Marsh put a hand on her shoulder. “The Marshal service is using mind probes now? Not sure mind flaying jives with the ‘Marshals Code’ you all swore to uphold.” Marsh said mockingly.

  Thorne stepped right up to Marsh, face turning angry. “We hold to the Code and keep the peace and order, and that keeps the outside powers at bay as well as the criminals that threaten it.” He put his professional face back on. “And we don’t use mind probes, but as I said, the Council of 9 are very interested in this case. They sent one of their own investigators out here to question her. It’s standing in my office right now, you know those damn robo-cops don't even sleep, or sit? It's just standing there waiting, and it's not leaving until it gets what it wants.”

  Thorne leaned in, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, a genuinely fearful look in his eyes. “This thing… It's a full cybernetic unit, seven feet of sleek, grey ceramic and integrated weapons. Terrifying to look at. It marched right into the station and started making demands like it owned the place. It wants whatever it can get from that poor girl's head.”

  Thorne interrupted Calli before she could protest. “And don’t think I haven’t made the same protest you're about to make. It assures me that the probes are not the way they used to be; it promised there would be no permanent physical damage. It says it can even remove any traumatic memories from the child's mind.”

  “I’ve never known you to be pushed around by an Easterner before, Gus,” Marsh said wryly.

  Thorne pointed a finger at Marsh, “ You don’t know what these things can do, these aren't the same Toasters we fought during the war. I’ve seen full cyborbs like him in action. It took a team of twenty armored men to bring it down, and that was a clunky back ally augment job of a criminal. This is a state of the art agent of the Nine with the latest and greatest tech. It would probably take a kinetic strike from an armored bronc to bring it down. So don’t mistake my caution for cowardice!”.

  Marsh raised his hands in a show of submission.

  “Remove memories? I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse,” Lin said, shaking her head.

  “I don’t think just cutting out memories is the right cure for any trauma,” Calli stated. “People aren’t just some machine you can cut the corrupted software out of. That sounds barbaric.”

  “Listen, and hear me for once, you two,” said Thorne with a surprising amount of concern in his voice. “There's nothing ‘good’ in this situation, but you do not want one of these things chasing you down. It says it won’t hurt the child. Let it have what it wants. Finish your business here and move on, for your sake and ours.”

  Marsh watched Thorne ride away, the conflict between his duty and his fear etched on his face. This wasn't about dino rustling anymore. This was about the deep, corrupt rot of the Eastern Cyber Cities reaching its metallic hand into the free territories. Marsh held Calli’s hand and she looked up at him and smiled. “Come on Rancheroos” he announced loudly,” Let's go check on the patient.”