Arlen continued, “Your family aren’t the ones who disappeared.” He picked up a ko’ko known as a mudhead from a low shelf, its doughnut-­shaped mouth and disfigured, knobby bucket head, harrowing. It held a knife. Calliope shivered. Arlen placed the mudhead on one of the wooden chairs beside Calliope. “You are.”

They’d argued that night, nearly six months ago, after Arlen’s terrifying words. Arlen and Chance agreed that the previous world still existed; only it had been split apart, and their world, which belonged to Mother Earth and her people, had been given back, restored to its proper balance. They speculated that those left behind in the previous world believed the splitting was a nuclear explosion, but it had come from Mother herself, so the scientists and politicians there would see it as the irrevocable consequence of stored nuclear waste in the land, which had been building since Trinity Site and had finally come to haunt them, causing volcanic eruptions and spurring a series of climate events and earthquakes. Mother splitting herself wouldn’t appear Spiritual to them because they wouldn’t know what they were looking for. It would be like the shadows left behind in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They would believe the incredible but plausible idea that the few who had disappeared had been annihilated by the atomic bomb. Their shadows burned into the ground.

Calliope was a shadow burned into the ground.

But on the level of Spirit, what Mother’s people understood, this was the unfolding of Mother’s reclamation—which began millions of years before, when the first people started emerging from the fourfold underworld of her womb in their reptilian form. This was merely the next phase of evolution, of never-ending creation, what the Zunis had always known about levels of existence. They’d passed through several worlds before. Now they’d simply moved to the next.

The Zuni people, and all the Puebloans who were of the same Mother, would understand this. They wouldn’t need it spelled out. Malia and Nala and Wowo łashhi, all of them. They’d understand what Mother had done for them. Protected them as she’d protected herself. As she’d promised them she would so long ago.

Arlen said, “They’ll believe you dead, but you’re not dead. No deader than any of us.”

If she wasn’t dead, then there was the possibility of return.

Calliope still didn’t know if she could believe. Maybe Andres and Phoenix were alive, here, in this world. The only world she’d ever known. All the unexplainable phenomena could be explained—only she hadn’t found the right equation, the underlying principle. Her family was somewhere else in New Mexico. The eastern part of the state, maybe, near Roswell or Carlsbad? Or anywhere at all in the US. They could have been anywhere. But another world?

She could cross a state line or a country. Those borders she understood.