Chance scaled back down the rock, jumped catlike onto the ground beside Calliope.

“Don’t despair, mujer. I said I’d take you to your family, and I will.”

She bristled. He and Amy kept belittling her, insulting her with their diminutives. He kept calling her mujer. She wasn’t his woman. She wasn’t anyone’s woman—especially not his. She was her own. And she was going home. “Then let’s go,” she said. “Let’s walk to the highway. We’ll follow it until we find a car. The roads were stockpiled with cars up in Albuquerque, and you said the same of Texas. Why should it be different down here? Come on.”

She turned northwest, began to walk.

No one else moved.

She turned back to face them.

“What’s going on? Let’s go.” She yelled out for Eunjoo in the tent the way she would’ve called Phoenix running late for school. “Vámonos.”

Eunjoo appeared in the mesh doorway holding a juice box and an apple. Rain pebbled the nylon tent. Amy moved back, stood beside Eunjoo in the mesh doorway, holding her chips. Calliope looked to Amy for help, but Amy shifted her gaze to her feet, swept dirt from the tent with her boots. Fine, let the white girl stay. Calliope was going home. “Let’s go,” she called again to Eunjoo, reaching her hand out for the girl’s.

“I’m hungry,” Eunjoo said.

“You can eat while we walk.”

Chance sighed. “Mujer, you’re not thinking rationally.”

“Stop calling me mujer. And stop treating me like your damn wife. I’m a professor, I have a PhD. Don’t tell me I’m not thinking rationally.” Her face was sweltering, although the rest of her body was already numb in the cold.

His voice calm, unwavering, “I understand, I do. But we’re not going anywhere tonight. It wouldn’t be smart, or safe, to walk in this rain, in the dark. Not that far.”

Tears were streaming down her cheeks, so she couldn’t tell her tears from the rain on her chest. She turned away from them again, northwest. Before her family had been south of her—now she’d overreached, she’d passed them, she was on the wrong side, still lost, still alone.

She wasn’t being fair. These people had agreed to follow her, postponing their own journeys. They were here, in the City of Rocks, for her. She choked back the lump in her throat, wiped her tears away, turned, and, without looking at anyone, hurried past Eunjoo and Amy into the warmth of the tent.