She sighed, rubbing her hands vigorously across her temples and cheeks. Forget the supernatural. What were the facts? She’d been a terrible mother. She sighed again, leaning her head against the cabinet. She was allowing emotion to cloud her judgment, and she couldn’t keep wallowing in guilt. Where had that ever gotten her with her Catholic upbringing, her own guilt-ridden mother always criticizing her for not believing hard enough, not being good enough. There was no room for her mother or her bisabuela. She’d tried things their way and ended up on a monster hunt, searching for a mystical path that didn’t exist. She hadn’t found her family. This wasn’t about faith or guilt, which felt interchangeable to Calliope.

No, this was about bridging what she knew about the abandonment of the past with what she knew of the sinkhole she’d found herself in. That’s what she lived for—connecting the pieces of prehistory to the present. The Ancient Ancestors left Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde because of drought; severe hunger and thirst drove them from their elaborate structures, their society and way of life. Yet signs of an ancient horror lay buried beneath the rocks. Excavation uncovered a darker story, one Calliope was hesitant to believe and never would have shared with Bisabuela. Over a thousand bones and bone fragments, shoulder blades, skulls, vertebrae, ribs, arm bones, hand and foot bones, and teeth. Nearly all were broken and scattered in heaps in air shafts, irreverently. Like game bones after butchering.

Bisabuela had taught her that the Ancients had abandoned Chaco after supernatural intervention. The knowledge they’d gleaned, their ability to shape the natural forces of their environment, their closeness to the earth—they’d used their power in ways that caused things to change. What changed? Calliope had asked. Changes never meant to occur, Bisabuela had told her, and Calliope remembered because at that moment the clouds were swelling above the mesa and thunder grumbled, giving credence to Bisabuela’s tale. She said these changes had set the migrations going again. Calliope thought of Room 33 in the great building at Chaco Canyon. The grave goods left there. Calliope had seen for herself in her fieldwork research that it was used for dark rituals. Room 33 had scared her, though she couldn’t say for certain why. When the Ancient Ancestors abandoned their great architectural achievement at Chaco, the buildings and doorways were sealed, pottery broken, a ceremonial going away. Clans divided. Kivas burnt. The Ancestors had been so in tune with natural forces they could control those forces and abuse them. Everything is meant to fall back to Mother Earth, mija. Some things in our migration history, we don’t understand, but we don’t need to understand. We no longer need to repeat that portion of the story. We’ve found our place, and that story no longer bears on our daily lives.