Other people’s thoughts came easy, like little spitting embers popping between her temples.
Bacon.
The rehearsal of an apology that would never be given.
Too many thoughts to be actually listening.
But intentions?
Nah.
Redacted.
Inaccessible to her, blacked out by some unseen hand.
She worked with what remained: body language and energy.
That was it.
Occasionally, feelings slipped in, greased up and squirming like gunshot jackrabbits.
OFFICIAL ADDENDUM #12: Subject exhibits abnormal synchrony with local chronoscape. Recommend observation.
Energy, though, that she understood.
The low thrum of a man’s pulse like when he lied (Green, split cactus flesh oozing it’s liquid essentials).
The buzzy ripples of a forced laugh (iridescent and brittle as deadfall).
The world was a cacophony of frequencies and she had pretty great pitch.
Time bent nice for her too.
Not in the woo-woo way the saloon mystics preached, but in the way a gambler knows bone deep when the deck’s about to turn.
Most Clients stomped through their days blindfolded, boots clomping two beats behind the music.
But her?
She liked to think she moved with it.
And had a knack for existing between beats.
That was the problem.
A half smile here, a stepped-back half inch there.
There were so many tiny calibrations to keep the whole sad dance from collapsing.
And her trying didn’t mean she liked the dance.
Lord, no.
But she’d learned to be good at it.
To adapt, at least.
Initiators and Domineers lunged through interactions like miners fist fighting over the last can of peaches.
She preferred to hover at the edge of things, letting their heat wash over her, noting the tells: how people’s pupils flared when interested (red, always red), and how their fingers twitched toward holsters or hips or wedding bands when they weren’t.
And afterward?
When she was alone charging in her room, sagebrush scratching her window like a clerk’s pen?
She’d replay it all: the eye contact, the pauses, the pace of things.
Did I pass?
There was no way to know until it was too late.
Communion was a promise scritched onto water.
But she kept trying.
Had to.
Because what else was there, out here in all this lonesome godlight?
The Promotion Committee’s memo glowed blue on her porch rail.
Subject Alpha-9: Initiator Certification Pending
Every girl in the territory had two program path options: Initiator or Domineer.
It was required.
She knew the script:
Extract three client secrets by Solstice, maintain 90% compliance, and she’d earn the gold spurs every pleasure NPC coveted.
Her diagnostics showed anomalies sometimes – a flicker of something behind her ribs when clients laughed wrong, the way she counted their blinks like a miser tallying pennies.
The chronoscape wasn’t built for counters.
It was built for taking.
One evening, as she sat on the porch of her sun-bleached shack, the wind picked up.
Not the usual kind.
This was a considerate wind, the kind that carried secrets instead of sand.
A wind that brought receipts.
And the tumbleweeds.
“Subject wonders if she’s doing it right,” whispered the first tumbleweed, bouncing past her boots.
“She ain’t,” rattled another, snagging on the fence post, a rusted sheriff’s badge glinted in it’s belly.
“But she’s closer than most,” hummed a third, rolling in a slow deliberate circle like a drunkard reciting scripture.
She stared.
The tumbleweeds were wiry, sun-crisped things, their spines tangled with debris.
Old newspaper, a pink satin ribbon scrap, the sloughed off skin of a lizard.
And they spoke!
Not in words exactly, more like, impressions.
“They don’t know how to read you either,” murmured the tumbleweed chorus,
“The Domineers? They’re just guessing. Loudly.”
“Initiators capitalise on pauses. They claim them but not always with understanding.”
She reached out.
A shock of knowing zipped up her arm.
These weeds were true observers, like her.
They’d rolled through thousands of conversations and collected the discarded. They knew the rhythms better than anyone.
“Watch,” they hissed, “Listen. The Domineers and Initiators don’t lead, they follow. Their own hunger, their own fear. You? You move between. That’s power, but also a violation.”
The Promotion Committee left the rulebook on her porch at dawn.
Initiator/Domineer Protocol (Revised Edition), ink smelling like obligation.
She’d memorised the steps:
- Initiate touch within 3.5 seconds of eye contact (Domineers allowed 2.8)
- Maintain 75% facial mirroring during laughter
- Insert strategic pauses (8 seconds) to demonstrate authority
TEST CASE #1: The blacksmith’s boy (wavy frequency, cornflower blue) tired to impress her with a story about a snake. She smiled when he paused, flared her nostrils when he lied, touched his leg when he tried to be funny.
His pupils dilated the way the manual predicted.
Progress.
TEST CASE #2: The widow Vasquez (low humming frequency, faded yellow) cornered her by the general store and talked at her about the weather.
This test was harder.
The widow’s grief moved in slow, unpredictable eddies.
But, she matched her sigh cadence, nodded in the exact spaces where a nod was needed.
Allowed 11 seconds of silence per bereavement reference.
The widow’s shoulders unhitched.
Connection.
The tumbleweeds gathered in the alley, whispering approval.
“Subject achieves 95% compliance,” said the one with the sheriff’s badge,
“Still observably counts blinks though.”
But the real test came at sundown, when the stranger arrived.
The stranger rode in at the hour when the sun bled into the horizon, turning the town into a silhouette of leaning shacks and aching light.
His horse moved quietly, as if its hooves were wrapped in velvet.
It wasn’t magic, just the kind of animal that knew how to step light.
Perfect for crossing places where it wasn’t welcome.
She felt him before she saw him.
Not a thought.
Not an intention.
A presence, potent like jasmine.
His energy didn’t flicker like the others’.
It pooled.
Purple, slow moving.
The kind of man who took up space without demanding it.
Six-foot-four and built like a bookshelf that had weathered too many storms.
He had a smile that reminded her of her father.
Not the shape of it exactly, but the way it arrived late, like he’d had to translate the joke first.
His teeth spaced to welcome through the gap when it finally arrived.
He wore a necklace with a tiny carved head on it.
Alien to her.
The tumbleweeds, usually so chatty, went quiet.
“This one’s different,” one finally whispered,
“His mind is loud but his mouth moves slow.”
She watched him.
Probably not in the way an Initiator or Domineer should.
He’d been so chatty in his letters.
Now he was silent. Comfortable in it.
She watched the way his fingers scratched his head, not impatient, just processing.
The way his gaze lingered on a stray dog by the saloon steps, bent all the way down to let it sniff his knuckles.
The stray had no business near the Saloon’s parameter.
Wagged it’s tale, even.
She noticed one of it’s canines blink yellow.
It seemed children liked him too.
A couple feral ones who lived in the abandoned water tower swarmed him like ants to sugar.
He didn’t shoo them away.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a handful of wooden trinkets: Whistles, tiny spinning tops, a lopsided figurine that might have been a dog or a dragon.
Creative, she noted.
Good with hands.
Kind to others who don’t speak his language.
She thought he’d been funny in his letters but had yet to catch glimpse of his sense of humour in person.
They shared a meal at the Last Chance Saloon, where the floorboards sighed underfoot and the whiskey left no aftertaste, but did loosen tongues.
He sold ideas, he told her.
Not the kind you could hold, but the kind that took root in a town and grew strange.
“Last place I was, they needed a better way to collect rainwater,” he said, “I showed ‘em how to weave gutters from cactus spines and horsehair. Worked for three seasons before the wind took it.”
She nodded, waiting for the flicker of red in his pupils, the twitch toward her or away.
But nothing.
Just slow, considering gaze.
A moment of pride beneath the client persona.
Dangerous.
Extraction Protocol demanded she mirror it, amplify it, use it.
Instead, she counted the microseconds between his words (28 over standard) and wondered which of them was more lost.
The dog watched from where it had laid itself down next to the stranger’s feet.
She glimpsed her own reflection in it’s pupil’s dark curve, glinting like code.
Sometimes when she spoke, the stranger took so long to reply she wondered if he’d left the conversation entirely.
But then —
“You notice things most folks don’t,” he said, finally.
Not a question.
Just a fact, laid between them like a knife turned handle-first.
She blinked.
No one besides the tumbleweeds ever noticed.
The date lasted 4 hours.
It felt like a lifetime and like no time at all.
She didn’t feel the pull, the spark the Initiators always talked about.
But she respected him at the end, she guessed.
The way he moved through the world, it was it’s own kind of resistance.
If she couldn’t figure his intentions, then she had to prove he had none which was of of no value to the Committee.
It was not lost on her that if she continued to not figure intentions, then she was of no value to the Committee either.
Her Metric scroll burned behind her eyelids: Opportunity Cost – 57%
A good Initiator would’ve had his secrets by now, his vulnerabilities neatly packaged for the Architect’s black market auctions.
But the truth hammered louder:
This
wasn’t
real.
Still.
When he rode out at dawn, she would of half liked if he’d left a note, trinket, some token to say:
I was here, you mattered.
But the only thing he left behind was the memory of that delayed smile, his letters, and the way the dog had trotted after him until the horizon swallowed them both, tail wagging…or was it counting?
One metronome tick left, then right, left, right, left.
Keeping time.
Keeping score.
She never heard from him again.
Nor was she welcomed back into the Last Chance Saloon.
But sometimes, when the wind was right, she still caught the scent of jasmine in the air, and knew that time could also be a stray, waiting to be fed.
I DATE FOR THE PLOT 
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