They climbed down the mesa with Dr. Toya, Calliope’s heart knotting, hemp and wick. Her skin bloomed with sweat. They were going down into the recesses of Pueblo Bonito. She knew from the viga rings, the rafters in the ceilings, that the ponderosa pine had been hewed and dragged from a forest hundreds of miles away to build the Great House. Tree rings in the charcoal from fires in the ceremonial kivas revealed how long it had been inhabited. From an aerial view the kivas would appear as crop circles. She knew the textbook material. Archaeologists had named it for a city since they believed that over a period of two hundred years, Pueblo Bonito had grown and expanded like a modern city, though always retaining a half-moon structure. But she couldn’t believe it had ever been inhabited. Not in these cramped, cave-like rooms. Or not by the living.

She feared she wasn’t going back to Phoenix but to her death.

A great sandstone wall, made of the same ocher sand bricks as the rest of the building, surrounded the entranceway to Pueblo Bonito. Calliope brushed her hand against stone. The group stooped into the low, dark interior of the Great House; they could have been any excavation party she’d been part of at the University of New Mexico: Dr. Toya and Chance as guides, Mara as photographer, Eunjoo as research assistant, and Dr. Santiago with her corn baby strapped to her chest as historian. Her stomach flipped with an almost manic apprehension. They were so close.

Room 33 stretched toward the northwest section of the Great House. They entered in the crest of the moon shape and headed toward the apex. They needed a flashlight, the low first rooms pitched black through an endless corridor of doorways save one pin of light in the direction of Room 33, approximately 350 feet away. She’d been right. There was a skylight.

Eunjoo began whispering as she had been in the truck. Calliope couldn’t make out her words. She grasped the girl’s hand and asked, “What are you saying, chica?”

In her bird’s trill, “I’m calling Coyote.”

“You want Coyote to come home with us?”

Eunjoo said nothing, but continued whispering under her breath, an incantation Calliope couldn’t discern.

“Do you have your stones?” Dr. Toya asked, her voice an echo from somewhere nearby though Calliope couldn’t make out more than faint shadows in the darkness.

The stones. Arlen had told Calliope and Chance that among the sacred bundles when the Zunis emerged was a stone, within which beats the heart of the world.

In Calliope’s fever dreams, Phoenix had been showing the stones to his mama, hadn’t he? He wasn’t hurling rocks in anger. He’d been showing her the path back to him. It was as Bisabuela had predicted.

The rock baby and Amy. They were Calliope’s stones, weren’t they? Her keys through the portal.