“In the casino?”

“Or any casino. It was all desert as far as I could see.”

He figured he was drunk—or someone had slipped him something. Maybe his girlfriend, though he couldn’t see her stooping that low. But those were the facts. He’d won a jackpot, then he’d gone blurry and everything was gone. Someone must’ve drugged him and dragged him into the desert. He’d slept it off, then found a car with the keys still in the ignition.

Calliope listened through a vague aura of grief, the kind of numbing that comes when you’ve already processed the most horrifying information: your father has died, for instance. And now you’re learning he’d had another family a few miles across the border, and you had half siblings in your city’s sister, Ciudad Juarez. It’s what you’d already figured, and though it might’ve ripped you apart when you were younger, more naive, or if he were still alive to defend himself, by the time police reports have been made and you’re helping your mother choose wood for a coffin, cheap pine for an undeserving man, no other shock can really settle in.

Calliope had heard Amy’s version of this story, and Chance’s. She knew hers and Eunjoo’s. And while she hadn’t heard her friend say the words, her pío pío pío in the dirt before the bullet to her head haunted Calliope.

All she could do was listen as Buick Janes ate chocolate chip cookies on her tía’s couch and explained how he’d misplaced an entire city. Then as he passed the Arizona-Nevada border on the road he always took to and from Vegas, something chilled his blood on the bridge over the Colorado River. “The Hoover Dam wasn’t dammed.”

“It broke?”

“I didn’t see no concrete at all, you hear what I’m saying? Like it had never been dammed.”

“Oh, we’re damned alright,” Mara said from the kitchen doorway.

“You know about Petrified Forest? You know what it is?” Buick asked Calliope.

She nodded. An archaeologist’s dream, a fossilized forest. On Navajo and Apache counties in northeastern Arizona, log fragments scattered over badlands. She’d heard it disappointed tourists expecting the trees standing in thick rocky groves instead of lying flat in sections. But Calliope loved the felled trees that had lived in the Late Triassic, 225 million years ago. The sediments containing the fossil logs comprised the colorful Chinle Formation for which the Painted Desert was named. Ever since she was a child, Calliope had loved running her hands across the smooth, cold, stony surface of petrified wood.

Buick raised his eyebrows, sat forward conspiratorially, and said, “Well, it’s not Petrified Forest anymore. Now, it’s just forest.”

Calliope felt a familiar paste in her mouth, the stirrings of nausea. “What?”