Wab had popped Ishkode inside her shirt and held her there with both hands, reminding the tiny girl’s heart how to beat with the rhythm of her own. Her eye patch had been knocked loose in the fray and hung around her neck. Her ruined eye was a pucker and a slash, and for the first time, she didn’t try to cover it, both hands tending to the baby, rubbing her back, smoothing the thin fabric over her bottom. She was in her own world, a world where she had to reckon with the fact that she had almost ended her baby’s life before someone else could end it more brutally. She was different, quieter, pulling inside herself to somewhere we couldn’t follow.

Headlights cut across the lawn.

“Shit.” Chi Boy tensed, moving in front of his partner and child.

A truck headed straight for us, cutting up the sod and knocking over a low fence around color-coordinated flowers.

“Scatter!” Miig yelled.

“Just wait.” Rose held out a hand to stop him. “Just wait a minute.”

The truck screeched to a stop, turning at the last minute so the lights illuminated the side of the house, its neat trim and clean windows with jaunty drapes way creepier than any abandoned building I’d seen.

The driver’s side window rolled down, the engine revving. A small face appeared.

“Get in,” the driver said.

Rose’s shoulders dropped in relief. “Oh, thank god it’s you. Where the hell did you find this?” She turned to us. “Guys, this is Nam. They’re with us.”

Nam gave a short wave and answered, “It was parked out front, keys in it and everything.”

We piled into the truck, Wab and the baby in front with Nam and Rose, the rest of us in the back bed. Slopper leaned over the side and yelled in the window, “You sure you know how to drive? You look pretty young.”

“Bitch, I’m from the rez,” Nam called back. “I’ve been driv ing since I got out of diapers.” Then they pulled the truck around and lumbered back over the grass and onto the road.

I watched the house get smaller, the wind screeching between us and the property as if measuring distance in sound. The blue light from the pool marked the grave site we’d left; the tires crunched over the packed gravel.

“Where are we going now?” Slopper yelled over the wind.

I turned to look in the small window in the cab and saw the back of a head, curls escaping wild from a loose braid. And I couldn’t look away. It was her. It was really Rose. She was back.

“Home,” I answered. “I think this time, we might be headed home.”

CHAPTER 40

BEGIN AGAIN

French and His Family

MIIG, ISAAC, AND NAM TOOK TURNS AT THE WHEEL. We drove south until the needle was below empty. Then we refilled the tank from a canister stashed in the toolbox in back, which we smashed open with a rock. We kept going, driv ing until the truck sputtered and slid to a stop at the side of a back road surrounded by fields gone wild, sunflowers and vines between jagged rows of dusty cornstalks. It was a different landscape than we were used to, more flat and open, more terrifying than the darkest woods.