ABOUT UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY Rye Bartleby is a man who has made a career out of avoiding responsibility on two different colonial planets. When he runs into Addy Hallis on the street, he just can’t make himself walk away, even after he’s mistaken her for a saloon girl. His life is getting ridiculously complicated, and everything is sideways, but he can’t seem to make himself regret it.
CHAPTER 1 Orion Bartleby wasn’t a smart man. He wasn’t a particularly talented man. He’d spent most of his childhood on the wrong side of the law, one way or another. His Mama hadn’t been a saint, but she’d been a good woman. She’d certainly deserved a better son than the one fate handed her. She’d deserved a husband who stuck around, too… Doc grumbled darkly, dabbing at the steadily bleeding cut over Rye's eyebrow. “Who in the hell told you it was a good idea to stop beer bottles with your face?” Orion didn’t answer. He wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t recognize a rhetorical question when he heard one. After five years, he’d learned most of Doctor Frank Laman’s questions were rhetorical. The rest were orders wrapped in question form just to see if you were paying attention. Careful hands moved to the bruising on his cheek. “If this godforsaken rock isn’t the end of me, you will be.” “Aww,” Orion cooed, “I love you, too, honey.” Stupid, because Frank was straight as a yardstick, and Orion had already been beaten up once tonight. “Not funny.” But Frank’s lip made that little corner twitch that said it was. ’Course, the eyebrow twitch that went with it meant Orion wasn’t out of the woods yet. For being manly, Frank could nag like no woman Orion’d ever seen. Since the day they met, Frank had been threatening to go back to a nice cushy life in one of the big cities. He hadn’t left yet. He’d even followed Orion to Wilma for ostensibly no reason but to keep him in one piece. “Hey.” Frank swatted his arm. “What were you thinking?” Orion winced at the pain in his shoulder. “That he was an asshole.” It didn’t look like Frank bought it. Orion watched as Frank’s brows drew down and his mouth pinched in the corner. He hadn’t yet, but Orion figured it had to happen sometime. Maybe when they were
eighty and Frank was still following Orion around muttering about him not taking care of himself. He didn’t really see himself living that long, but supposedly stranger things had happened. He wouldn’t lay odd on whether or not they’d still be living in the same little tumble-down farmhouse outside of Bend. The universe was a big place. Maybe bigger than he was comfortable with, but he’d already hopped planets more than once. “Dammit, Rye…” Frank sat back, folding his arms over his chest. For all that, there was only about seven years between them; sometimes it felt like twenty to Orion. “I’m serious! You can’t get into a fight with every Tom, Dick, and Idiot that wonders into Bend and acts like an ass!” “Oh come on. I don’t,” Orion insisted, embarrassed. He wasn't sure what the hell Frank thought was worthwhile about him. He'd never asked. It was entirely possible Frank just didn't care about much of anything anymore, and Orion was as good a person to follow around aimlessly as any. The fact Frank had invented a name for him didn't annoy him nearly as much as the fact he liked it, that somehow it had become his name. Rye. Nicknames meant ownership, and he had more than enough call to know how that went bad. Rye flushed, realizing he'd gotten a little lost in his own head there. “You’d be spending a fucking fortune in med supplies if I was. They’re all idiots and assholes.” Frank rolled his eyes and stood up from their chipped plastic faux-wood table. “Go to bed, kid. I’ve done all you’re going to let me.” He sighed and started muttering. “Why I put up with this…” Rye didn’t answer that either. He wasn’t sure what Frank had been like before. He couldn’t imagine the…crotchety…was new. He knew Frank'd been a surgeon. A good one. Respected by everyone, with a big shiny house and a big shiny paycheck, and a pretty young wife named Bella he’d loved dearly. Rye wasn’t a bad friend because he didn’t know how Bella’d died. Seriously. When you meet a man because he’s so fucking drunk he nearly falls out a ten-story window at the shuttle platform —
because he’s looking at an advert that reminds him of his dead wife — you don’t really say “so, how’d she die?” when he’s sober again. Sober didn’t happen for a year and a half, as far as Rye could remember. Not that he’s judging. At all. He’d pretty much never loved anybody — outside the way he loved Frank like a brother — and he couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to have the love of your life die before you were thirty. He watched Frank pack his med kit up and contemplated leaving Wilma for the fiftieth time. They managed some sort of life here in the middle of nowhere. Frank wasn’t really open to hospital work anymore. The people on Wilma were a little…uneasy about medical people, but they’d opened up to Frank helping them a little more every year they’d been there. Rye managed to keep a steady income. He wouldn’t lie and say it was all legal, but no one got hurt. Alright, so his morals were a little iffy. “What was that nonsense about the Sons of Paradise?” Frank asked, looking up at Rye as he stashed his kit back under the sink. “No clue.” Rye rubbed the back of his neck. The blond who’d made sure he made close acquaintance with his beer bottle had certainly thought they were something. The Sons of Paradise have the right idea about this place and Drifters like you… The whole damn thing made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Everyone knew where Paradise was. One of the settlements on the western side of the habitable zone, it had been one of the nicer ones until the mag line had mysteriously crashed. Aside from killing nearly everyone on-board, it had damaged the line so badly it wasn’t usable in its present state. Paradise had been left to die a lonely secluded unnatural death. The kind of death any place suffered cut off from the rest of society and access to everyday goods and new people. Bend was a small quiet place. Well, he supposed the whole of Wilma was generally small and quiet, nearly out on the outer reaches. Far enough away from the big planets that the centralized governments didn’t really bother with them. Wilma boasted one large city, and that only because someplace needed to hold the spaceport. They’d yet to terraform a planet well enough it could actually grow all its own shit. “Well, I suspect we’ll hear more.”
“Suspect so.” Rye looked out the window, watching the grass blow in the wind and the moonlight. Someday, Rye was going to find the right combination of alcohol and action that kept Frank in bed past freaking sunup. Really. He was. Maybe he needed to move on to pilfering sleeping meds? Something. Last night hadn’t exactly been early. Between the bar fight and talking to Frank after and managing to calm down enough to sleep, he hadn’t actually known how late it was. So, when Frank walked into Rye’s room and threw the curtains wide, Rye very nearly shot him. Seriously considered it, anyway. “Come on Princess. Time to get up.” Rye totally and completely intended to say “Dammit man, leave me alone.” It was a strange quirk of Wilma’s atmo — he would challenge anyone to tell him it has the same as any other terra-formed planet when it had two moons and green-tinged sky more days than not — that made it sound like he whined something about sleeping five minutes more. He was a man, and men didn’t whine. Obviously. “Come on. We have business in town.” “Fuck,” he muttered. “It’s six in the fucking morning. No one in Bend is awake yet.” “It’s nearly eight,” Frank countered. “By the time your ass gets out of bed and we’re actually in town, it’ll probably be ten.” Frank snapped him with the towel that had been hanging off the edge of the bed. “Up.” “Woman…” He glared at Doc’s exaggerated eye roll. Frank had never once felt threatened by anything Rye said to him. Rye had gotten a rise out of him once, but fuck if he could remember what he’d said. They’d both been about twelve sheets to the wind at the time. And, like every other time, he rolled his butt out of bed and stumbled into the shower. Frank didn’t take no for an answer, and while he might not like the wake-up calls and the bitching, there was something to be said for having someone willing to put up with his multitude of shit. Someone who could put him back together and keep
him from being too idiotic. Rye wasn’t entirely sure his morals would’ve lasted as long as they had, as well, without Frank looking over his shoulder. He’d expected Frank to still be waiting in the hall for him when he finished his shower. It wouldn’t have been the first time. The man was unusually keen to go into town today. By the time Rye was dressed and out of the can, Frank had already saddled his Paint, John, and tied him to the porch. Rye’s horse, Blue, was lazing idly in the grass next to the house, looking over at John occasionally. The gray Arabian eyed Rye for a moment, but didn’t much care. Blue was…special. Trouble. He wasn’t easy to handle, and he had a tendency to bite people he didn’t like. Which was pretty much everyone. That didn’t excuse the fact that his previous owner had decided to convert him to dog-food by hand. One of those times Rye would have crossed a line if Frank hadn’t been looking over his shoulder. He wouldn’t really class Blue as a defenseless animal — he’d been on the receiving end of those teeth a time or two, thanks — but in his book, no matter how mean or dangerous an animal was, it didn’t deserve to be carved into. John nuzzled his hand easily, making a soft noise. He wasn’t difficult. He was fastidious and just plain fucking strange for a horse, but Rye had decided years ago that being on a planet other than Earth did strange things to horses. Like, even after generations, they knew somehow, inside, there weren’t supposed to be two moons in the sky. That the stars were wrong. Not a view he usually shared; Frank looked at him like he was crazy often enough as it was. “Look who’s moving.” Frank came around the side of the house, lugging his saddle bags. “That shouldn’t be a surprise. You drug me out of bed.” “I didn’t drag you.” Frank settled the bags on John, shooting the animal a dark look when it tried to sidestep. John instantly stopped and held perfectly still. Even Blue gave Frank a wide berth most of the time. Animals seemed to know he understood things about anatomy a body shouldn’t. “Didn’t have to, this time.” He looked up. “Hurry it up.”
Rye wandered over to where Frank had laid out his tack and pulled up Blue’s saddle. “Why are you in such a rush?” “There’s a paper coming from Carlsburg. There’s supposed to be a break-down of the medical conference next month.” “And?” “And I’m a doctor, Rye. Maybe not much of one anymore, out here in the wilderness, but I am. I’d like to read it.” Rye raised a brow. “And that’s all. Not because some new girl’s supposed to be starting at Miss Tally’s today?” Frank shot him a reproachful look. “Have I ever had anything to do with Miss Tally’s girls?” “Well, no.” Rye shrugged. “There’s always a first time.” “Not for some things, there isn’t.” Rye dropped it, because he figured the “why don’t you ever see the ladies at the Saloon” was pretty damn close to that “why aren’t you over your wife even a little” talk they’d never had and were probably never going to have. Which he was entirely okay with. He finished saddling Blue and ran up the rickety porch to lock their door. Frank was already in the saddle, waiting with feigned patience. It wasn’t a long ride into town. Past a couple of scrubby horse farms and another poor soul trying to convince corn to grow on a planet outside the habitable zone for anything more complex than switch-grass and some of the more arid grains. Not that he really considered Bend a town. Or much of one, anyway: a few hundred people, Miss Tally’s Saloon, the inn, the bank, the general store. Pretty standard for any settlement. They had a mag train station on the edge of town, and he could hear the train whooshing into the station as they rode in. The others on the street didn’t notice. Train came through Bend six times a day. Usually empty, but it was there. Frank nodded cordially at Jenkins, the grain farmer who lived up the road from them. He was loading goods from the general store into his buggy with a mag-lift. Rye knew it still struck some people from the cities funny. People in the outer edges used horses and not vehicles because you could generally grow hay suitable for animal feed on the colony and not have to import fuel, which made them a
damn sight cheaper. But for someone like Frank, who’d grown up in a big shiny city with his own car, who’d learned to ride a horse just for fun, it had to be a little surreal. Some days it was surreal to Rye, and he’d grown up with it. Not on Wilma, but Titus hadn’t been much better off. Titus had looked a little less like an old Western movie. Bend seemed like the kind of place where you’d find an ancient steam train instead of a mag-train line. They tacked their horses at the stable next to the inn. There were plenty of people who tied their horses to anything in Bend that was nailed down. Left them looped to the post outside the bar, or next to Miss Tally’s or wherever. Frank didn’t because he thought it was bad manners. That biting issue Blue had meant he left him tethered somewhere people wouldn’t try to pat him. Damn horse was too attractive for anyone’s good. Frank, shaking his head, slapped Rye on the back. “Come on.” “I’m here, Doc,” Rye sighed. “Before noon. I think if it takes us an extra two minutes to get to the post, you’re not going to die.” Rye looked up, hiding a smile at the rare sight of a clear blue sky. Maybe horses weren’t the only ones who remembered how things should be. “And for the love of cheese, would you stop thinking about how strange it is to see blue sky?” Rye just managed not to flush. “You really need another friend.” Frank turned to the side as they crossed the packed dirt street before the bank, shooting him a frown. “What?” “If you’re reading my mind about silly shit that pops up when you drag me out of bed too-the-fuck-early in the morning, you need to get another friend. Like, say, someone who would willingly ride into town with you at the ass-crack of dawn just to read some medical journal thing. And also, ‘for the love of cheese,’ really?” Frank rolled his eyes. “I’ll buy you a drink. That make us even?” “What kind of doctor are you, encouraging me to drink before noon? Trying to make me an alcoholic?” “No,” Frank snorted. “One in the house is plenty.” “You aren’t an alcoholic.” Frank cocked a disbelieving brow.
Alright, so Rye had never mentioned that he’d know, because his mother had been married to a few of them. “You’ve yet to be drunk when I needed you to be sober.” “Maybe I’m just functional?” Frank asked wryly, stepping up onto the clapboard walkway that ran the length of town, an attempt to keep people off the muddy streets. The vid-screen embedded in the bank window flashed an advert for horse-feed guaranteed to grow on a class two terraformed planet, and Frank rolled his eyes at the obvious lies. “Is that like code for having a ridiculously high alcohol tolerance?” Frank snorted. “No, it means —” Rye didn’t get to find out what it meant. Doc — who usually paid due attention to where he was going — walked around the corner of the bank without looking. Right into some poor girl coming the opposite direction. “Hell,” Frank exclaimed. She was small, and Frank was turned the wrong way, and if Rye hadn’t reached out and grabbed her, she’d probably have face-planted on the boards at his feet. Frank was a big guy; not particularly heavy, but he was a tall son of a bitch and weighed more than you’d think. “Miss, are you alright?” Frank flushed. “I am so incredibly sorry.” Rye was going to say something. Any second now. After he stopped staring at the oddly vibrant color of her eyes. Blue. The kind of color the sky should have been, and deep. She blinked, and that seemed to give him some portion of his brain back. Not enough to freaking move, but better than staring at her with his mouth open. “That’s alright. I wasn’t looking where I was going, either.” She straightened but didn’t try to jerk away. She was pretty. Not that any of Miss Tally’s girls were hard on the eyes. Still, she seemed special. She wasn’t on the clock yet, if he had to guess. Her clothes were wrong: an artful bit of makeup, blue jeans, and a soft gray sweater. No jewelry. He suspected when she got all dolled up like the rest of the girls, there’d be a line around the block for her company.
Which made him wonder just a bit what the hell she was doing working at Miss Tally’s. Wasn’t as if she weren’t pretty enough for someplace nicer. In Carlsburg, here on Wilma, or damn near anywhere else. “Still, knocking you over isn’t a good way to meet the newest addition.” Rye gave her his most charming smile. “Miss Tally’s been pretty excited about your arrival.” She raised a brow at him, confused. “What?” “Tally? Owns the Saloon. Your new boss?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.M. Beal started her first novel on bits of receipt paper while she was working as a checkout clerk, and never looked back. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, son, and a menagerie of animals.