Long before she set foot in Boot Hill, Lumen Vera’s parents fell to consumption, fading in a house that smelled of damp linen and woodsmoke. When the last cough went still, the neighbors barred the doors and burned sage on the porch, leaving Lumen for dead.

That was when Mother Myrrha came.

She was a traveling lithographer. A woman veiled in ash and silence, who wandered from town to town printing funeral cards, obituaries, and the last portraits of the dead. Myrrha had come to record the passing of those claimed by the sicknes.

When she entered the Vera home to collect the final details for her ledgers, she found a small girl sitting by the hearth, hands and feet gray with ash, eyes wide and unblinking. Myrrha said nothing. She wrapped the child in her printing shawl and carried her away.

Lumen was too young to remember.