Eunjoo was still crying although Calliope had assured her she was not badly hurt. She’d stopped driving long enough to examine the girl’s hand, torn at the fleshy pad of skin connecting thumb to index finger. Calliope thought it wise to stitch it with Andres’s suture kit. Phoenix had once sliced his thumb on his bicycle spoke while trying to fix a broken chain all by himself. Like Daddy, he’d said. They’d taken him to the ER when it wouldn’t stop bleeding, and the paramedic at the triage said he would have done the same, would’ve taken his kid. You don’t fool around with hands. Calliope had grimaced then, watching the ER nurses do their job. Now, each time she pressed the needle through Eunjoo’s skin, she held her breath. The girl was so brave, hardly cried. Just like Phoenix. “It’ll be fine, chica. No te preocupes, my bisabuela would say. It means don’t worry, but everything sounds better in Spanish.”

When Calliope drove again, her heart still pounded from the exertion of the coyote attack, her muscles ached from the pit of her stomach to her thighs, and pain radiated from her navel to her bowels. She breathed deeply and pressed onward, focusing on the headlights filtering dust in the road. The rundown cars growing sparser, Calliope accelerated through the rubble.

“That was close,” Amy said when they were on the road out of Los Lunes. “I still don’t understand why they attacked.”

Calliope didn’t answer for fear of scaring Eunjoo even more, but it must have been rabies. What else could have caused the coyotes’ erratic behavior? She’d have to watch the girl for signs.

Desert coyotes didn’t often hunt in packs; they usually ate mice and other small rodents, and if they ever came into town, it was solo, to eat garbage. Were they staking claim on the abandoned town? How had they known it was abandoned?

“What now?” Amy asked. “We didn’t get gas. Should we try another station?”

If the coyotes had so quickly overrun the town, what else would lurk in the stretch of empty desert and farmland between here and Belen, the last town along this road before they reached Las Cruces, with no other towns save ghost in between? Calliope checked the tank. A little less than half. “We have enough to get to Cruces.”

“If nothing else attacks us,” Amy said, chuckling mischievously.

Calliope shot her a warning look, signaling her not to scare Eunjoo.

Amy sobered, said, “Hey, I’m only teasing. We’ll be fine. Lead the way, momma.”

Eunjoo said quietly, “I miss my mother.”

“I know, chica. We’ll get to my tía’s and find our families, no te preocupes.”

“They won’t be at your tía’s.” The girl’s voice was quiet but firm. Eerily firm.