Chance said, “Sé fuerte, mujer. We’re almost to Old Lady Salt.” His voice, a pillar, but beneath the stone, slight fissures. “I’ll ask her for a blessing for you and your babies.”

Eunjoo woke, patted Calliope again. “Who’s Old Lady Salt?”

“I thought you knew everything about Indian ways?” Chance said.

The girl shook her head.

“She is our mother. Ma’l Oyattsik’i, Salt Lady. She is sacred and we must treat her with respect. In the old days, she used to live near Black Rock, beside the rez, but people grew selfish, took her for granted, removed her sacred flesh without so much as a prayer stick or jeweled cornmeal offering, and she became angry and moved south so we would have to make a pilgrimage to see her and treat her better.”

Calliope knew the controversy surrounding the sacred site, center of a decades-long battle over mineral and water rights. The nation’s second largest electrical company, little brother to the one devastating the North, planned a coal strip mine twelve miles from the lake, along with a railroad line that would intersect with pilgrimage trails, documented graves, and other sacred sites nearby. The company would build wells to pump water eighty-five gallons per minute from underground aquifers near Zuni Salt Lake for use in settling coal dust. The aquifer and surrounding springs supplied the lake, and without this water source, the lake would dry up, the ecosystem irreparably damaged, obliterating Old Salt Woman and the ceremonies surrounding her.

The protests at Zuni hadn’t turned as bloody as in the North, where the camps had burned and the Ancients with them. But Calliope had a feeling the battle wasn’t over. Bisabuela’s voice in her ear as she watched on the news, When they live for greed, what will burn in the end is them.

Now she felt ashen. Grief as bitter as salt in her mouth, swollen with it and feeling cursed with it, Calliope said, “What blessing could she give me?”

“That’s what we’ll find out, mujer. You know, Zuni women aren’t allowed to visit Old Lady Salt. But you’re a different tribe. It should be all right. I don’t have cornmeal with me. I’ll offer her my turquoise.”

His jewelry. It was so beautiful. And he would give it up for a miracle.

He wouldn’t call it a miracle. But it amounted to the same. She was about to give birth to two premature babies without a hospital or Western medicine. She needed a miracle.