Niles leaned back in his chair, considering the proposition. It wasn't a perfect solution to his problems, but it was a way out of this dead end position, and more than that a way out of this fractured world that didn't involve swallowing the wrong end of a pistol. There was nothing for him in the Dakota Reaches, no reason to stay.

And skeleton archers and exploding wildlife didn't sound very much worse than raiders and hellbugs.

"I don't want to go down in the records as a deserter. Can you give me twenty-four hours for me to arrange a plausible explanation for my absence?" An explanation that might involve preemptively planting fake evidence for a kidnapping that wasn't happening. People vanish out in the frontier; it happened and typically no one wasted too much time investigating such disappearances.