Daily lives. That made sense to Calliope. Not the supernatural but the practical. The Ancients had starved, reduced to their basest instincts for survival.

Andres would have known how to survive. He would have gone where he was needed. Unless he needed help. Only the well could tend the sick. What if there’d been an altercation? A clash? She’d never known Andres to be a fighter, but in times of crisis people surprise us.

Where else could he have taken Phoenix and her mother? Once, when Calliope had explored a back road out of Albuquerque on her way to Chaco Canyon, she’d seen a sign that had caught her interest. Splitting the road into a fork, the sign had pointed two ways: one direction, shooting range. The other, winter shelter.

Ever led by curiosity, she’d followed the latter and come to a dead-end dirt road harboring a large, squat, metal building, encircled by a tall chain-link fenced topped with barbed wire, padlocked and bearing a sign made of red streamer-paper tied through the chains into a heart that read Welcome. The winter shelter had turned out to be a closed-down prison turned into a place to shelter homeless people each winter, bussed in from Albuquerque at sundown from the doorsteps of designated churches and train stations around the city. It was equipped with food rations, water, cots, generators. Why hadn’t she remembered this before? She’d been so set on Tía’s hacienda, it had never occurred to her they might have gone elsewhere.

She stretched her legs across the bathroom tile, wiggled them to get the blood flowing. She was still wearing the camper’s hiking boots and thick socks. Her feet ached. At home, before all this, she’d complained of aching pregnancy feet almost daily to Andres, and he’d rubbed aloe vera on them. She unpeeled the boots and socks, pulled one swollen fish of a foot up to her thigh, and began rubbing it, tears stinging her eyes.

She’d come all this way for nothing.

Would journeying back north be another wild goose chase?—resting completely on the off chance that Andres had remembered her once telling him about the winter shelter in her rush of excitement at finding it. What proof did she have he would have gone? She’d described it to him, yes, but they’d never planned to meet there. She had to return to the beginning. What had set this off? What change? Bisabuela said it was a change that set the Ancestors migrating. Calliope’s own research had corroborated Bisabuela’s story. She rubbed her other foot, closing her eyes to think. What made the day she’d crashed her car different than any other? What made her group different than any other? What did they have in common? Why had they stayed behind while the others had disappeared?

If there was an explanation, it eluded her.