Summary
A caravan of bruised twilight gallops across a dust-lacerated horizon where cobalt mesas brood like shattered cathedrals; astride skeletal motorcycles that spit violet fire, Walter Rodgers’s renegade courier, scarred by a map tattooed under his collarbone, leads a cortege of outcasts—Joe Rickson’s one-eyed stunt-pilot, Elinor Field’s runaway heiress in a blood-splashed wedding gown, Charles Dudley’s defrocked priest clutching a reliquary of nitrate film—pursued by Maude Emory’s copper-armored railway heiress who commands a locomotive fitted with pipe-organs that blare execution marches. Between ghost towns whose saloon pianos play themselves in reverse and alkali lakes that reflect double moons, the Riders intercept coded telegrams inked with disappearing iodine, unspooling a conspiracy to sell the last aquifer west of the Rio Grande to a syndicate whose boardroom is a dirigible hovering like a black jellyfish. Betrayals detonate at way stations built of kerosene-soaked scripture; alliances are soldered by lightning as Rodgers, half-coyote and half-chronicler, barters his memories for gasoline, trading recollections of a lost Kansas prairie to a blind archivist in exchange for a single bullet. The climax erupts inside a cyclone of tumbleweeds wired with phonograph needles: the locomotive derails into a mirror canyon, celluloid strips unfurl like Pentecostal tongues, and the aquifer, uncorked, becomes a silver deluge that erases every surveyor’s landmark, leaving the survivors to navigate by starlight and scar.
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