She’d pared away at the sandstone that aspired to be anything but rock, that tried hard to look like broken pottery, chipped stone, even shell. It was the most common stone in Chaco for groundstone artifacts, manos and metates, and yet most of the time sandstone was just sandstone, shaped for masonry or hearths and hatches. Figuring out which pieces of sandstone were actual artifacts and which were just rock took time and experience. She’d spent long, dirt-covered days and nights in Chaco, devoted to uncovering its mysteries in khakis and a hard hat, crouching under crumbling walls that took five scaffoldings to keep from falling in on her and the rest of the crew, scribbling her field notes but finding nothing truly tangible to support her bisabuela’s emergence belief. Until now. If someone had told her then that she would reenter this place of her Ancestors, restored, made new, as if she had traveled back in time a thousand years, she would have laughed them off the ruins. She laughed now, tears streaming down her face. It was absurd. It was surreal. Yet here it was. Sometimes sandstone was just sandstone; other times it was a portal to another world.

Chance, his voice somber, said, “Everything has two forms, mujer. The outer layer, which is all many Anglos tend to see, and the inner, the sacred, the Spirit. Before you came here, you only saw the outer form. It’s all you would allow yourself to see. Now, you see the inner.”

Still laugh-crying, Calliope nodded, her tears landing on the corn girl’s dark hair. “Except I think there must be three forms, or a person will never fully see at all. The outer, yes, and the inner. But there is another, inchoate in the imagination. I think I had to believe this impossibility possible to understand there was another way. Bisabuela’s stories becoming real right in front of me …”

Mara had awoken, said, “Honey, it’s quite a sight.”

Calliope finally understood why the Ancients had chosen this unforgivably desolate patch of high desert where food and water were scarce, where they had to lug by foot massive timber from distant mountains to build the center of their culture. She understood the purpose of their dark enclosed rooms that were not intended for living, with no ventilation for a fire and deliberately sealed when they left. This was the Middle Place, cut through the middle of time. It was the heart of their cosmology. The Ancients hadn’t died out or migrated away or abandoned their sacred sites. They had used them to move through worlds. Somewhere the Ancients still existed. They had never ceased.

She searched the sandstone building for figures, human or ghostly, but saw neither.

Chance parked in the soft dirt, adjacent to the fortress wall surrounding the Great House.