“Story is a home, it’s where we live, it’s where we hold everything we’ll need to truly survive—our languages, our people, our land. And you could say, but we’re out on the land, now more than ever. So why worry about it? Because we are not all one people, and this land that we walk, we are so often guests in these territories. We are different people. Even though now we are one group—Dreamers—we are still also separate nations. Lumping us together makes us easier for the outsiders to catalog, easier to dismiss, to devalue, until we are only single-colored containers for the thing they want the most. We are one box to check and stack.

“Like any home, Story has to be renovated—extended or repaired or even torn down from time to time. For us, the repair and renovation is not always pretty. Sometimes it’s unsound, but we do it the best way we can when the time comes. We do it with sticks if we have to. We hold them together with blood when we have to. Now, here are those sticks, and to it we add our own blood.”

I stretched my arm behind Rose, not holding her exactly, but just letting her know I was there, that I had her. In truth, I may have needed her more than she needed me right then. All I saw was Minerva’s blood on the road. My mother lying facedown in a ditch. My favorite uncle bleeding from the ears and nose, alone on a cot.

“Earthquakes in fracked landscapes. Tornadoes through pipeline-riddled fields. Tsunamis across poisoned waters. The coasts broke and sank. The weather turned manic. And the sicknesses were released. A virus, a pandemic of plague, a cure, and then another would step up to replace it. Depression as the markets crashed. Despair as the young and old died. Desperation when they could no longer rest at night with no dreams to hold them together. Madness, madness everywhere, and not a dream in sight. Until they saw us—maybe for the first time in a long time, really saw us. And suddenly, we were needed. Or rather, the marrow where they thought we kept the dreams. That was what they thought they needed. The very marrow from our bones. The very dreams from our heads.”

He turned to me, quiet but louder than I’d ever heard him speak out here in the green expanse of our world. “Don’t let them take them, French. We’re counting on you.”

✦✦✦ ✦✦✦ ✦✦✦

Something tickled my face, like I was walking through a spiderweb. I couldn’t lift my arms to brush it away. I heard an electric buzz and felt a weight being dropped and pulled against my head. Each time it was lifted, more webs fell on my face. It took a minute before I realized it was my hair. Someone was cutting my hair. I fell back asleep.

I woke up with tears in my eyes. Had I fallen asleep crying? I tried to speak, but there were no words. My throat was too dry to drag one up. There were voices. Then I was gone again.