She put her hand on the gun in her backpack. Larry had taken her out to kill jackrabbits when she was a kid. The same type of rabbits that hopped like sentries around the shack. They were brown as the hills at twilight, quicker than tumbleweeds. Izzy had refused to fire at the animals, she hated guns, but now she was glad he’d taught her to shoot.

The mannequin watched, eyeless, from the corner of the room.

◆◆◆

Perhaps she had cried out in her sleep because she woke to Dog licking her cheek. The warm, soft tongue. The dog-eyes always watching. She looked around at the Cyrus-less room with that sinking-stone feeling: throat-chest-belly.

The spine in the desert had still not been identified. Ted had called Izzy, apologetic, and told her he’d had to hire someone else, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to look for other work. She still felt compelled to spend her time in the mines, as if nothing else could distract her, at least temporarily, from the helplessness and pain that dogged her. She’d have to make the savings last for now.

Izzy’s birthday had passed without her having noticed. Neither Nephy nor Seth had texted her since their meeting at the restaurant. Fuck them. Cyrus was as gone as ever; his phone was still locked.

Izzy got up, checked her own phone, let Dog out, fed him and Yard. She choked down two hard-boiled eggs and an apple, drank some coffee. She dressed, gathered the supplies she’d packed the night before, including the gun. She stroked Yard’s shell and blinked at him, kissed the soft divot between Dog’s eyes and told him to be good. Then she drove back out into the desert.

◆◆◆

Deep among the Joshua trees and yucca and desert grasses and sand banks and boulders, Izzy closed her eyes and tried to sense where to go next.

“Cyrus,” she said. “Tell me where to go.”

She opened her eyes and walked toward the nearest base, the ball mill where the miners processed ore. Beside the ramshackle wooden ore bin was a large piece of yellow machinery with the words “Compressor Reciprocating Power Drive: Property of US Marine Corps.” stamped on the side. There was also a table with a bowl of rusted nails, a bottle that said “Marvel Mystery Oil” in old-fashioned script, and another large bottle labeled “Cyanide Powder.”

She followed a set of metal tracks that led from an ore dump, a midden of debris that could have been animal, vegetable, mineral, or human, to the mine itself.

Among an outcropping of tan and gray boulders, Izzy found the lower portal. She felt a mild gust of air, ensuring there was oxygen down below. Larry had taught her this. A cable fitted with wheels for transporting buckets of ore ran on a tram from the portal to a deep vertical shaft in the distance.