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
Calliope aimed for the Suuke’s face. But she couldn’t get a clean shot. She had to hit it somewhere that would distract it more than a wasp sting to its rhinoceros-thick skin. She needed somewhere soft.
The Suuke shot its bow, straight ahead. The arrow struck Amy’s neck, blood spilling down her body as she fell to the snow beyond the truck.
Calliope heaved the glass with all her strength. It hit the rock, shattered.
The Suuke turned, its face a snarl. Calliope shot it in the eye. It howled, stumbled back, blood seeping from the blackened socket. Chance wasted no time. He sprang, arrow still in hand, and jabbed it into the Suuke’s throat. Like an oak felled, the monster tumbled from the ledge, landing beside Amy in the snow.
Amy.
While Chance climbed down the rock face, Calliope stumbled forward, unbelieving.
She dropped to her knees at Amy’s side. Chance grabbed every arrow from the Suuke’s clutch, pulled the bow from the monster’s grasp, and shot one after the other in a row of arrows from his eyes to his groin. Then, not even bothering with a prayer, as if he’d gone too far this time for prayer, he kicked the corpse, rolling it through the snow, and shoved it off the ravine ledge.
Calliope grasped the arrow that had killed her young friend. And as a stinger burrowed deep in a child’s skin, as any mother would, she yanked it out.
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SIX
OLD LADY SALT
Calliope, a small ponytailed girl standing in a windstorm on the mesa above Chaco Canyon with her bisabuela, shivered despite the autumn heat. They’d hiked the steep black basalt carrying a picnic basket filled with chile verde fry bread, sweet potato empanadas, and cold glass bottles of orange soda. They’d hiked the mesa even though Bisabuela was in her seventies, her silver hair covered with a knitted rebozo. She had to show her great-granddaughter the sun spirals. The mesa had been closed to hikers and tourists for many years, but back then it was still open. On the flat top behind three great slabs of sandstone, a spiral carving, just as a dagger of light pierced its center, a ray channeled by the rocks, capturing the sun’s cycle. It could be no accident. There’s a language written in the architecture, mija. You have to find it. The large spirals marked the solstices, and the small spirals, the equinoxes. These specific markings of the sun’s cycle repeated on the mesa. In the center, a double spiral, like a pair of curved spectacles. Bisabuela had brought Calliope to the opening of the world not for a mere September lunchtime picnic but to show her this: at noon equinox the double spiral marked the middle of the day in the middle of the year.
She said it was the middle of time.
* * * *