Mogollon Road narrowed to a bottleneck, and Amy slowed the truck to steer a hairpin turn. A thick clump of snow from a crag of rock above plopped into the road forming a snow hill reaching up to the bumper.

Amy said, “Shit. We’ll have to dig our way out.”

“I’ll do it,” Chance said, lifting Mara’s neck gingerly, placing her on the seat beside him as he slid out of the truck. “Got any tools in the back?”

“Yeah, a shovel,” Mara answered, her voice ragged. Eunjoo had turned to watch the commotion, and Mara said to the girl, “To dig out Earth samples.”

Eunjoo nodded, wisely.

“I’m gonna help the monster slayer,” Amy said, sliding out of the driver’s side. “Whoa.” She skirted close to the side of the truck. “It’s a long way down. Whoever dug this road forgot a shoulder.”

“Or it wasn’t built for trucks,” Mara said.

Chance was already digging with a long metal shovel as Amy scooted along the edge of the truck, grabbed a small garden trowel, rounding the passenger side. “Look, I get the baby shovel,” she muttered to Calliope as she passed her window.

Calliope felt useless, sitting inside, watching them work while she breathed deeply, counting cramps. Irregular, sporadic, nowhere near ready, nevertheless painful aggravations.

Eunjoo asked if she could drink snow too. Calliope reached to the back seat for the mason jar, stuck her hand out the open window, refilled the jar from a pile of clean snow heaped atop the rock wall, and handed it to the girl, who smiled wide and said, “Snowcone.”

Eunjoo set to eating, as Calliope breathed and counted through a contraction, comfort in numbers, and watched Chance and Amy scooping snow and throwing it over the cliff’s edge.

“You know Mara’s right,” Calliope told Eunjoo as the girl crunched the ice in her teeth. “These roads weren’t built for us. The mountain we’re on is called Mogollon, for the people who lived here thousands and thousands of years ago. They’re part of the Ancient Ancestors.”

“A’łashshina’we,” Eunjoo said, a Zuni word Calliope didn’t know.

“What does that mean?”

“Keepers of the path.”

“Chance teach you that?”

Eunjoo shook her head, bit another mouthful of ice. “Coyote.”

“You’re a very intelligent child, to remember everything Coyote told you in that one brief encounter … you have an incredible memory.”

Eunjoo shrugged. “I guess. Have you figured out Coyote’s story yet, like he said you should?”

“I think so. Though it doesn’t make sense, the stories are real? The stories are the reason we knew how to defeat the Suuke.”

Eunjoo slurped thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Yeah, that’s good. But Coyote dies anyway. In the story.”

“If Coyote died, how could he have told you the story?”