She craned her neck toward the sky, breathing in sharply. She had never seen so many stars in her life. The clouds and ash that had menaced the sky since the flash had disappeared. It was impossible, she knew, but there it was. The Milky Way they were part of, luminous in purplish gold, banding a quilt of bright lights. She breathed out slowly, “No light pollution.”

“The way we were meant to see the night. A’shiwi call it the Great Snowdrift of the Skies.”

“It’s beautiful.” She gazed in silence a few moments before she was troubled again. “How could the ash clear so quickly? It should hover in the atmosphere for weeks, months even … why else did it get so cold?”

“I’d say everything is breaking the laws of physics—but I sense that would be untrue. Everything is expanding. Showing its deepest self.”

They stared quietly at the sky. She reclined in the lawn chair, kicked her feet to the firepit, scraping the mud from the soles of her boots. “Where did everyone go? I don’t believe in Revelation, in rapture. People don’t just disappear.”

“The white man’s bible is only one end-of-the-world myth.”

She was silent for a moment, watching the fire as nearly all of humanity had watched before. “How have you done it? Reconciled your people’s beliefs with your scientific knowledge?”

“There’s not really a chasm, they’re part of the same story.”

“Max Planck said science can’t solve nature’s final mystery, since we’re a part of that mystery, in the end.”

“Our ancestors tracked these stars, all the celestial bodies, from these lands.”

She thought back to her first astronomy lesson, atop the mesa. “Bisabuela took me to Chaco Canyon and showed me the sun dagger. Without meaning to, she got me started on the path toward anthropology, toward science and evolution. No one knew what made the ancestors leave. They built these elaborate buildings in the middle of nowhere and then abandoned them. I had to understand why.”

“We don’t believe they ever left. Their spirits still inhabit the places they created.”

“Bisabuela said that.”

“She’s a wise woman.”

“Chance, how could she be here? And the Suuke?”

“Do you want parable or myth?”

“I want the truth.”

“Then parable.”

Calliope laughed, exasperated. “How is that truth?”

“Listen … didn’t your bisabuela tell you your origin story?”