Once the gas was streaming through the plastic snake into the truck, she asked, “Are you afraid this won’t work?”

He pointed his chin toward the flowing liquid, his hand pinching the tube. “It’s working.”

She tapped her foot in the sand. “Not the siphon.”

“I know.” He shifted his weight, leaned against the side panel, rubbed his temples and eyes with his free hand. “What other option do we have?” He sighed, took a deep breath. “It has to work.”

“Chaco could be a dead end. Then what?” She would never see her son again? Never hold him? Never show Andres he had a daughter?

Mara called out from the driver’s seat, “It’s not a dead end. Keep the faith, honey. I’ll be back to my Trudy this time tomorrow.”

“It’s not even equinox yet,” Calliope muttered under her breath. “If there is a tunnel, it hasn’t opened.” They assumed, anyway. What did they actually know? What secrets they’d learned, they’d learned from Arlen. And Calliope wasn’t even sure she could trust him. Nothing was written down. And if they were right, and Chaco opened a doorway home, what then? What would Calliope say when she took Chance through, to her house? Would she just open the door and bring him inside, the way he’d taken her to Malia’s house and introduced her as his Zuni wife? How would this work? Hey there, everyone, here’s the man I crossed universes with. We fell in love and got pretend married and now we’re home and want to get married for real, so I’ll need a divorce, thank you. She felt dirty. More than that, how could she do that to Andres? She’d loved him before all of this. Or at least she’d thought she’d loved him. Had he moved on? This whole time he and Phoenix must have thought she was dead, and now she was going to show up with another man instead. They wouldn’t believe her story. They’d think she’d left them to live with Chance, maybe down in Texas. Or like her own father, that she had crossed the border. That she’d actually just abandoned them.

Chance pulled the tube from the barrel, then the truck. “Should be good.” She stared at him while they closed and secured everything, covered the bed with the tarp. Was she searching for some sign from him that he knew what they were doing? That anything would be untangled once they got to Chaco, if Chaco really was a way back? He didn’t look at her, and she felt cold in the night air, even with the corn girl wrapped in wool around her chest. Chance walked around to the driver’s side and asked Mara if he could take the helm for a while.