Dana Ferris — Hollow Creek Market
At the gravel lot where the trail turned into the market, a plank sign hung from a single chain, the letters burned into the wood rather than painted: RULE ONE — NO EXCEPTIONS. Underneath, smaller, older, half-weathered: WE DO NOT ASK TWICE. Dana had photographed it without thinking and deleted the photo before it could sync to anything.
Dana logged the market the way she logged everything worth remembering: in captions she’d never actually post. Hand-thrown pottery stacked in uneven towers. Unfiltered honey in cloudy jars. A fiddle player two stalls down, good enough to make the detour from the highway feel intentional. She drafted the line in her head — found a place that still makes things with its hands — and almost reached for her watch to note the light before she stopped the motion halfway.
She wasn’t supposed to here. That was the bit. The charming bit. She’d read three sentences about Hollow Creek’s rule before the trip and filed it next to farm-stand honor systems and towns that still took cash. At the van she had powered the watch off completely. Sleeve pulled down over the band. Off meant inert. Off meant polite.
Paul Henley, the tour guide, was already three stalls ahead with the rest of the day-trip group, pointing at a rack of dried chiles and doing the voice he used for local color. Dana lagged. She wanted one thing that was hers before they herded everyone back to the lot.
Ruth Coyle’s stall held the honey. Small jars, cloth lids, a handwritten board that said cash or barter only. Dana reached for a jar in the second row — wildflower, the label claimed — and the motion tugged her sweater cuff back along her wrist.
The watch face caught the afternoon light.
Ruth Coyle screamed.
Not a call. Not a word to a neighbor. A full sound, torn out of her, terror without performance. Dana’s hand was still on the jar. She had time to think the woman had seen a snake, or a seizure, or something that belonged to a different kind of afternoon, before the market moved.
Eli Stroud came at a run from somewhere past the fiddle. Broad, gray at the temples, a leather strop already in his left hand as if he had been holding it for another job. He did not ask. He took Dana’s forearm in both of his and hauled it up so the sleeve fell to her elbow and the watch sat plain in the open air.
“Rule One,” he said. Not loud. Clear enough for the nearest stalls. “No device that can host or link an optimization layer.”
Dana laughed once, short, the sound she used when a host’s joke didn’t land. “It’s off. I turned it off at the van. Paul — tell them —”
Paul was already pushing back through the group. “She’s with the tour. We went over the rules. She powered it down. There’s no need —”
The crowd had closed a ring without anyone seeming to decide to. Market people. A few faces from the van, already stepping back. Ruth Coyle was still behind her table, nearly fainted, both hands on the wood, not looking at the honey.
Eli turned Dana’s wrist so the band showed. “Capability. Not state. Rule One.”
Someone started it from the left side of the ring. “Flesh and soul, no life in code.”
A second voice took it up. Then more. The second pass was louder. “Flesh and soul, no life in code.”
Dana pulled. Eli’s grip did not adjust; it simply did not give. She could feel the caption forming and failing — local justice, very intense, more on that later — and then there was a nervous laughter.
Paul pushed through the ring of townsfolk, shoulder first, reaching for Eli’s hands. “She’s a guest. You don’t — you can’t just —”
A woman from the crowd stepped-in and drove a short knife in Paul’s side, under the ribs, and drove it home with the flat, unhurried weight like putting a blade into a burlap sack. Paul grabbed his side. Lifting his hand drenched in dark red, he looked at Dana. His mouth opened. No instruction came out. He went down on his knees and then onto the packed dirt, and the woman went down with him only long enough to pull the knife free and step back into the chant.
“Flesh and soul, no life in code.”
Eli walked her to a timber post at the end of Ruth’s stall. The post had a stone sleeve at its base, dark already from older weather. He put her right palm flat against the wood, fingers spread, and bound the forearm with a strap from his own belt. Someone handed him a cleaver from a butcher’s board two stalls over. The edge was clean.
Dana said, “Wait.” She said, “I’ll take it off.” She said Paul’s name.”Wait!”
Eli set the cleaver just above the watch band, on the joint. He did not speak to her. He spoke to the crowd. “Rule One.”
The cut took two blows. The first bit through tendon and caught on bone; her knees buckled, and the strap held her upright by the arm alone. The second finished the separation. Her hand, still wearing the watch, dropped into the dirt at the foot of the post. Blood ran the length of the timber in a sheet and sheeted again when her body sagged and the open wrist dragged.
They unbound her. She sat because standing was no longer a shape she could hold. Her back found the timber. Someone wrapped the stump with a cloth from Ruth’s stall — the same cloth that had covered a jar lid — and the cloth went dark in an uneven map, edge to edge, faster than Dana expected and then exactly as fast as it was always going to.
The wildflower jar had broken when she fell. Honey and glass and dust mixed in a slow seep toward the post’s stone sleeve. She reached for a caption and found none. Blood tickled the inside of her elbow where it had run and stopped. On the packed dirt beside her knee, the watch face stayed dark, and her hand sat motionless.