Ja’far finished his smoke as a dot of cinnamon sun bled through the hot, grey haze of the desert. He crushed the cigarette butt with his heel into the sand. He grabbed a heavy satchel from the trunk.

“We walk from here.”

They walked for hours before arriving at a massive gravesite long since abandoned. The sun disappeared with a puff behind the horizon line. The temperature dropped and the air turned cold.

Ja’far led them down an unsteady ladder to the lowest surface of the site.

In the growing moonlight they walked through bleached bones and weather-shattered trinkets left as prayers.

“The terror began here long before Saddam,” Ja’far said.

They reached a wall at the far edge of the site.

Ja’far studied the moon.

“What are you doing?” Julian asked.

“Waiting,” Ja’far answered.

“For what?” Dominique said.

“The moon will guide us.”

Dominique and Julian moved to a patch of ground away from the bones.

Ja’far took the heavy satchel he’d been carrying, tossed it on the ground, opened it, and from inside took out a chunk of coal. He made a small pit, nestled the coal inside it and lit the coal with his Zippo. The coal took the flame, drew it in, and began to give off its warmth. Ja’far sat in front of the pit. Dominique and Julian did the same.

“Are we going to be here a long time?” Julian asked.

“Until the moon allows us to enter the cave.”

Julian raised the collar of his jacket and moved to the other end of the gravesite.

Dominique and Ja’far sat in the quiet of the desert night, Ja’far’s attention on the arc of the moon.

Dominique studied Ja’far. In the glow of the coal heat there was something about him that looked familiar, beyond the echo of John Hurt.

In the week since she’d met Jhana-Merise, Dominique couldn’t stop thinking about her—about one of the things she’d said: “we are base metal and our souls are threads of gold.”

Ja’far was another thread being pulled through their lives. And while the idea of reincarnation wasn’t foreign to her, she’d come to a deeper understanding since that meeting, when Jhana-Merise said Dominique reminded her of her mother.

Dominique had contacted the friends she’d made in Cuzco. The same friends who’d told her of the miracle of the boy in the burn unit. She’d asked them to see if they might be able to find any information on Vincente Salva’s wife, Jhana-Merise’s mother. What they found brought Dominique to another level in their collective evolution.