Chapter 3

They carried her into town at dawn.

The place barely deserved the name—two streets crossing at a crooked angle, a water tower, a church that leaned, and a depot that smelled of creosote and resignation. The train hissed and cooled behind them as if nothing unusual had happened at all.

Ione Beaumont drifted in and out of awareness as they moved her. Pain came in tides now, dulled by laudanum and shock, but never gone. Every jolt sent fire through her legs and a deeper, colder ache through her back that frightened her more than the rest. She tried not to think about what she could not feel.

She was brought to the only building with whitewashed walls and a red cross nailed crookedly above the door.

Inside waited a man who did not look like the doctors she had known.

Dr. Emil Krüger was tall and narrow, his dark hair shot through with early gray, his accent unmistakably German even when he spoke softly. He wore wire-rim spectacles and a coat that had once been white. His hands were steady, his eyes alert in a way that suggested curiosity tempered by caution.

“I was told she jumped from a train,” he said, looking at Ione rather than Rigg. “That usually kills people.”