Chapters (41)
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- PART TWO
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- PART THREE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“I’ve passed through a hundred times. But now the cut-down petrified ruins are full-grown again and lush. Brand new. It’s jacked up is what it is.” He pulled a handful of cookies from the box, shoved them all in his mouth.
She didn’t tell Buick and Mara about the forest that had sprung up on their way to Tía’s from the City of Rocks. She didn’t want to hear Mara’s theories. She didn’t want to hear anything.
But Buick’s story wasn’t finished.
“All the gas stations and ghost towns along the 40? They aren’t ghost towns anymore. They’re just ghosts. And Albuquerque? Disappeared. It’s like I was lost, but there were the Sandias, just the rest of the land was covered in black lava rock.”
The Sleeping Sisters had buried the city. Nausea hardened in her belly.
If her family had been hiding, she had to believe they’d gotten away, as she had …
She couldn’t ignore the pain radiating from her pelvic floor down her thighs. She keeled over, pressing hands to knees, breathing in short spurts, instinctively.
“Ma’am? You gonna have your baby now?” Buick’s pleasant Southern accent rang in her ears, the absurdity of the situation hitting her. Was she really going to give birth in front of this man she’d just met? That was surely more than he’d bargained for when he’d stumbled across her tía’s hacienda. “Should I get the father?” He nodded toward the back door.
The cramping seized her tighter. She glared. He meant Chance. He thought they were together. If she weren’t splitting apart, gripped with fear, she might’ve laughed.
By the time the contraction released her, tears wet her face. Eunjoo stood patting Calliope’s hair, her little hand a cat’s paw. Mara held a damp washcloth to her forehead, though Calliope wasn’t sure what good the woman thought that was. A cloth to her head did nothing for the pain in her midsection. “He’s not the father,” she said, hoarsely, to a frozen-in-place Buick, cookies still in hand. “I don’t know where the father is.”
Buick nodded, his expression shifting from fearful to melancholy. “Ma’am, damn near the entire Southwest’s gone missing … but I think that’s the saddest missing-person case I’ve ever heard.”
NINETEEN
NINETEEN
LABOR PAINS
The contractions persisted into the evening, aftershocks to the initial quake, none quite as strong as that first and sporadic enough to mean false labor. But that didn’t mitigate their effect. A message from Calliope’s body, burning with fever, or her babies, squirming: calm down or brace yourself.