She searched the room. When she spoke, her voice was ragged, hoarse from screaming. “Where are my twins?”

Malia spoke in Zuni to another woman kneeling beside Calliope, and at Malia’s bidding she arose to an adjacent room where Calliope could hear children’s laughter. She listened for Eunjoo’s voice, the girl no longer at the dining table as she was during the birth, but Calliope could not make out the girl’s birdlike chirping amidst the other children’s. How long had Calliope been unconscious? Time hadn’t felt like itself since the light on the bridge, but it seemed even more pliable, more strange since she’d first gone into labor in earnest—pain had rendered time wobbly, set it wavering.

The woman (an aunt or cousin of Chance’s) came back from the adjacent room, Nala beside her, carrying a large wooden object that reminded Calliope at first of a boat, like Noah’s ark. Nala turned it around; she held Calliope’s first twin, her corn girl, wrapped in an intricately woven blanket and strapped to a pinewood cradleboard with suede cords, a kind of face guard made of green cedar sticks protruding in a semicircle, half haloing her face, her neck cushioned by a smaller blanket. The infant lay faceup, her head flat against the board. Cornmeal flakes dusted her forehead, reminding Calliope of Lenten ashes. The corn girl cried softy, a cat’s whining mewl. She was hungry. Calliope’s pelvis clenched, her nipples hardened into berries and stung, as the milk swelled her breasts. She reached for her corn girl, searching for Andres and Phoenix in the baby’s face, a shock of dark hair beneath the blanket enshrouding her head. Grief dropped as quickly as the milk, and the child latched. “Her twin?”

Nala’s eyes flashed, briefly. Malia’s eyes reproached her. Calliope’s stomach lurched at the silent exchange between the women.

“We’ve buried her to protect her, E’lashdok’i. It’s the Zuni way.” Malia’s voice was heavy, but soothing, steady. No hint of the quick anger she’d shown Nala. The silver around Malia’s face gave her a holy aura. “If the baby is stillborn or dies before the fourth day of life, it is buried inside the threshold where all step on the earth grave. This allows the soul of the infant to rest while the mother can become pregnant again.” She pressed a cloth against Calliope’s face. “If we’d waited, you might have grown gravely worse or turned infertile. Or illness might have cursed this living one.”

Calliope’s salt tears washed down her chest to the corn girl. “And this cradleboard?”

“Belongs to our family. It was Chance’s, now it’s his daughter’s.”

Calliope swallowed the lump in her throat, closed her eyes, tears still flowing.