They both made polite if hurried good-byes, and she hung up the phone. But she did not return to the living room; instead, she remained at the desk, thinking hard, absently doodling on her notepad. Dust danced in the golden light coming in through the miniblinds at her office window, and there was a pair of blue jays pigging out at the feeder just outside.

She had to think this thing through, very carefully. She had to be absolutely sure of her own feelings and motivations before she found herself tangled in something she was not prepared to handle, emotionally and mentally.

If there was a conspiracy—if it was activists—

Her own people. Possibly a cause she had been involved in herself. One she was emotionally supporting—

I still have to turn them in. This was murder, terrorism. I can’t play cute little semantics games and call them ‘freedom fighters.”

Yes, that was it. There was a line that had to be drawn. What was the old saying? “The freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.” The freedom to be passionate about a cause ended when people could be hurt because of that passion.

People who murder innocent people in the name of a cause are still terrorists, no matter how noble that cause is. She had drawn that line for herself; now she must stick to it.

I hate terrorists. I hate them and everything they are. They’re cowards who won’t face the enemy honorably. They’re like the cowards who used to scalp women and claim they had taken warriors’ scalps—like the ones who attacked villages when the men were on the buffalo hunts.

That was another line of demarcation; the line between “warrior” and “terrorist.” A warrior was one who fought an enemy who knew he was the enemy—who fought other warriors, openly. There had been times in Osage warfare when coups were not even counted by taking a warrior’s scalp, but by merely touching him and getting away again. That was the purest form of warfare.…

But there had been times when the enemy did not abide by the rules, when he too became a terrorist. There was a site not that far from her home in Claremore where that had happened, where a band of mixed Heavy Eyebrows scum, renegade Cherokee, and rejects from other tribes had overrun an Osage village, killing, torturing, and raping the women, old men, and children left behind. Claremore Mound, it was called now. She could never come near the site without feeling rage overcome her, a rage triggered by all that helpless blood spilled—by the powerful grief and fear and pain left behind by the victims.

Anyone who sets bombs in bulldozers is no warrior, and he deserves to die like a poisoned dog, without honor, without a way for Wah-Ko’n-Tah to recognize him, so that his spirit joins the mi-ah-luschka and he wanders forever—