> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://ephergent.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Score — Chapter 3: Gulchmarker
- URL: https://ephergent.com/the-score-ch03-gulchmarker/
- Published: 2026-09-29T17:26:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T18:53:56.000Z
- Author: Ephergent one
- Tags: The Score, Ephergent, novel

*The Score — a novel of the planet Ephergent. Chapter 3 of 12.*

The Score — Chapter 3, read aloud (Gulchmarker)

![The Score — Chapter 3 plate](https://ephergent.com/content/images/2026/09/ch03_plate-2.png)

---

The Cupruma band began the way all bad country begins: by getting worse slowly enough that you didn't notice until you were already in it.

Chewy noticed. The grass thinned to burr and dust, the pines fell back from the road, and the hills turned the color of old blood. The trail north narrowed to two ruts and then to one, and the one was more suggestion than road, a line the land had drawn with its own finger and mostly forgotten. By late afternoon the wind had a grit in it that tasted like the inside of a coin.

"North-northwest and don't argue," Clive said, which was its way of saying the trail had bent and the compass knew and Chewy should keep up.

"Your cap's crooked," Chewy said.

Clive reached up and straightened the brim without breaking stride, which was its way of agreeing and also not agreeing.

They came over the last rise as the sun was laying itself down along the western ridge, and there it was.

Gulchmarker.

Nobody had to tell him the name; it was burned into a board over what had been the assay office, the letters cut deep and filled with something that had once been white and was now the color of tea. The town sat in the bottom of a dry gulch like a set of teeth somebody had pulled and set down in a row. Twelve buildings, maybe fifteen, all of them the same sun-bleached brown, all of them leaning the same direction as if they'd all heard the same wind and agreed with it. A church with no steeple. A stable with no horse. A bar with a door hanging off one hinge, swinging slow in a wind that wasn't quite strong enough to deserve a door.

"Ghost town," Chewy said.

"Claim town," Clive corrected. "Ghosts don't leave their stamps in the ground. People give up and leave. Different thing."

They walked down into it. Their boots on the packed dirt made a sound too loud for the place, the kind of sound that travels and comes back with opinions. Somewhere a piece of tin was tapping against a post in a rhythm that almost had a meter to it.

Chewy stopped at the assay office and put his hand on the doorframe. The wood was warm from the day and dry all the way through, light as bone.

"Cache," he said. "Has to be. Hollis came through here."

"He came through," Clive said, and there was no tone in it at all, which was the tone it used when it was being careful.

The journal was in the pack and the word in its margin was still his name and it still didn't mean anything yet beyond address. He didn't take it out. He'd learned in the waystation that the ink did what it wanted and it wanted light he didn't have.

He was working the assay office door open when the voice came from behind them.

"You boys are on private ground."

Chewy turned. The man was standing at the head of the street with the sun behind him, so for a second he was just a shape and a hat and a voice, and the voice had the flat, patient, jurisdictional weight of someone who had said this sentence before and expected to say it again.

He came forward and the light resolved him. Late fifties, maybe older. Warden's coat, the green gone gray at the elbows, a brass pin on the collar Chewy didn't recognize. A face like a shovel that had been used for a lot of years and not complained about it. A shotgun broken over one arm, not pointed at anything, just carried the way you carry a thing you've been carrying since breakfast.

"Private ground," the man said again. "Gulchmarker's inside the Pruett claim. Been inside it for thirty years. You got business?"

"Chester Chambers," Chewy said. "North Prima. I'm following a survey route."

"Route's closed."

"Route's a public trail."

"Trail's closed," Warden Pruett said, and let it sit there. He had a way of letting things sit that was clearly professional. "Erosion wash. Landslide risk. Signed it myself last spring."

"There's no wash," Chewy said. He looked down the street. It was as dry as a bone. "There's nothing."

"Sign's at the head of the gulch. You passed it."

Chewy hadn't seen a sign. He looked at Clive. Clive's cap was straight and its compass was in its hand and it was reading the bearing on the compass and not looking at anything else, which meant it was listening and not getting involved.

"I'm looking for a cache," Chewy said, because lying to a man with a shotgun was a worse idea than not lying to him. "My uncle Hollis Chambers cached supplies along this route. I have reason to believe there's one here."

"Hollis." Pruett said the name the way you say a name you've had occasion to say before. "Surveyor's fieldman. Came through, oh, six years back. Signed the register."

"There's a register?"

"Was." Pruett shifted the shotgun to the other arm. "Fire. Took the assay office. Register was in it."

The assay office behind Chewy had no windows and a roof that was half gone and the doorframe under his hand was scorched black on the inside, which he had not noticed until right then.

"Fire," he said.

"Fire," Pruett said. "You want to dig in my claim for a box that may or may not exist, in a town that burned, on ground I've held thirty years, you go get me a permit from the Surveyor-General in Prima and you bring it back here and I'll stand right where I'm standing and watch you dig. Until then you're trespassing, and I'm inclined to be neighborly about it, because your uncle signed my register once and he was decent about it."

"Then you'll let me through."

"I'll be neighborly," Pruett said. "Which is not the same thing."

He walked them out. Not roughly. He walked behind them at the pace of a man who owned the ground they were standing on and let them find that out for themselves, and when they were up at the head of the gulch he pointed at a sign Chewy could now see, nailed to a post, the paint gone to ghosts of letters: CLOS—D BY ORDR OF THE W—RDEN.

"Enjoy the view," Pruett said, and went back down into his town.

They sat on a rock above the gulch and watched the last of the sun go.

"Thirty years," Chewy said. "He's held this claim thirty years. Hollis came through six years ago. He's been sitting in a dead town waiting for somebody to come dig up a box."

"Maybe he's waiting for the box," Clive said.

"Or maybe he knows what's in it."

Clive didn't answer. It was doing something with its compass, turning it slowly in its big fingers, reading the needle like a man reading a menu he'd already decided on.

Chewy pulled out the journal and opened it flat on his knee. The margin word was there, gold under the last of the light: *Chewy*. One word. He'd had it since the waystation and it still hadn't opened into anything.

"ARC," he said. "How far off the recorded route are we if we cut around the north side of the gulch?"

ARC's voice came out of the small unit on his belt, dry and slightly impatient, the way it always sounded when it was doing arithmetic.

"Cutting north of the Pruett claim adds nine point four kilometers and puts you on loose scree for two point one of them. I don't like scree. I'm going to say I don't like scree and then you're going to do it anyway, so I'll save us both the conversation. Ledger update while I'm here."

A pause. The kind of pause ARC took when it wanted him to feel the number arrive.

"Probability Hollis Chambers is alive: seven point nine percent."

Chewy looked at the number he couldn't see.

"That's up," he said.

"From four point seven. The waystation moved it. The provisioned blankets, the dated rations, the swept floor. Someone was maintaining a site with an expectation of return. I've weighted it accordingly. Seven point nine percent. It is not a large number. It is a larger number than it was."

"Good," Chewy said.

"It's arithmetic," ARC said. "Don't make it a feeling."

They cut north in the dark. The scree was as bad as ARC had promised, a long slope of broken rock that shifted and clicked under every step, and Chewy went down on one knee twice and put his hand out both times and both times the rock bit him. Clive moved over it like it was a sidewalk, which was annoying and also a comfort. Behind them, far down, the dead town ticked its tin rhythm at the stars.

They came down into the gulch on the north side, past the assay office, past the bar with the swinging door, to a building that had been a telegraph office and still had its key rack on the wall, a dozen little brass hooks with nothing on them.

"Here," Chewy said.

He didn't know how he knew. The floor was stone, the walls were adobe, there was a stove in the corner with its pipe gone through the roof and a hole where the roof had been, and under all of it the same hum the hillside had hummed at the waystation, low and patient and under everything.

He put the journal on the floor and got on his hands and knees with the small pry bar Clive had packed and worked the stone at the base of the back wall. It took a long time. The stone didn't want to move and then it moved all at once and tipped and there was a space underneath, dry and dark and smelling of nothing, which meant sealed.

He reached in and pulled out a box.

Not big. A surveyor's lockbox, the green canvas gone stiff, the brass corners tarnished. It had Hollis's mark on it, the little cartographer's sigil Chewy had watched him stamp on a hundred maps, a circle with a line through it and a smaller circle on the line, like a planet with a moon.

He set it on the floor. He didn't open it.

"Clive."

Clive came and stood over it and looked at it for a while. It put its hand on the brim of its cap and did not straighten it, which meant something Chewy had learned to read in the last two days meant it was feeling something it didn't have a bearing for.

"That's his stamp," Clive said.

"Yeah."

"I packed you into a crate, boy. I have packed a lot of things. I know what a thing looks like when somebody packed it for somebody else to find."

"So do I," Chewy said.

He opened the box.

Inside: a coil of surveyor's wire. A compass, small, the glass cracked in a spider. A folded map of the Cupruma band with a route drawn in Hollis's hand, and the route had marks on it, five of them, small circles with numbers beside them, and the numbers were not distances.

And under all of it, wrapped in oilcloth, a child's boot.

Not a baby's boot. A boy's boot, maybe size six, the leather gone soft and gray with age, the laces rotted through. Chewy picked it up and turned it over and there was a date written on the sole in ballpoint, a date that was eleven years ago, and the shape of it was a shape he knew, because he had owned a pair just like it, because he had worn a pair just like it the summer his uncle had taken him up to the ridge and taught him to read contour lines with a stick in the dirt.

He sat down on the floor of the telegraph office and held the boot.

"Ledger," ARC said, from the belt, quiet.

"I heard you the first time," Chewy said.

"Acknowledged. Seven point nine percent stands."

Outside, the wind picked up and the swinging door of the bar found its meter again, and somewhere below them the tin on the post kept time with nothing.

Clive crouched beside the box and lifted the map out and held it where the moonlight came through the hole in the roof. The route ran north, out of the gulch, and the five circles with their numbers sat along it like stations on a line.

"Five marks," Clive said. "He's numbered them."

"Numbers aren't distances," Chewy said. "Look. There's no scale on them. They're just — numbers."

"Notes," Clive said, and then looked at its own hand as if it had said something it hadn't meant to say, and set the map down and straightened its cap all the way straight.

Chewy looked at the numbers. One, three, five. Two of the marks were blank, or looked blank, and then he held the map closer to the hole in the roof and saw that they weren't blank at all, they were numbers written in ink that had gone the color of the wood and refused to come back until there was a certain kind of light on it, and he knew that light, he had seen it once, at the waystation, for about a second and a half.

He folded the map and put it in the box and put the box in the pack and put the boot on top of the box.

"We should go," he said. "Pruett'll be up at dawn."

They were out of the north side and halfway up the scree by the time the sky started to go gray, and Chewy stopped once at the top and looked back at Gulchmarker sitting in its hole in the ground, twelve brown buildings in a row, the sign at the head of the gulch with its ghost letters, and the one light in the place, a lamp in a window of a house at the far end that he was fairly sure had not been lit when they came down.

He didn't mention it to Clive. He turned north and kept walking, and the journal was in the pack against his back with a boot on top of it, and the boot fit the shape of something he'd been carrying a long time without knowing it had a shape.