He began walking again, still holding Eunjoo at his chest. He cleared his throat, “She’s underwater now, mujer. In that dancehall.” He looked up toward the sky, where a storm was forming past the mountains. “Or maybe that cloud over there.”

A lump in her throat. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not the end.”

She nodded. Thought of Phoenix. Quickened her step, her whole body raw with exhaustion. She couldn’t wait to hold her boy.

She also thought of Chance’s wife. Back on the Zuni rez? Waiting for him? Then why was he detouring to help Calliope? Why not go straight home? She wanted to ask but couldn’t form the words. They fell in step again, side by side as the road stretched ahead, vast and empty as grief.

* * * *

Hours later, they’d found a car not shot through with branches or wrecked. Calliope, quivering with cold, was relieved to climb in and blast the heater. They would have driven the rest of the journey but for entropy. “We are ruled by the laws of nature,” Chance had said when the car had broken down and neither he nor Calliope could fix it. “Only, I’m afraid try as we might, we don’t always know those laws, though in our human arrogance we think we do.”

Calliope would have been glad to discuss physics and wrongheaded scientists except that her limbs were red with frostbite and she was hungry enough to gnaw on tree bark, all their snacks from the campers’ tent already eaten. The distance between her pinched finger and thumb had grown teasingly thin—they were so close.

She found blankets in the trunk of the rundown car, wrapped them around herself and Eunjoo, and for what seemed like forever, walked on. Thin snowflakes were flurrying—melting before they hit the ground, beautiful granules of ice, nevertheless, landing sometimes on their dark hair and faces—by the time Tía’s hacienda silhouetted into view. Sunset had turned the cloudswell on the horizon brightly purple, so the whole land glowed. Calliope was running even before she exclaimed this is it and Chance followed suit, calling, “Wait, mujer. Let’s make sure it’s safe.”

“Safe?” Calliope called back, laughing with manic joy. She wiped the ice-rain from her cheeks like cold tears with her free hand, the other still under her belly, which screeched with labor-like pain she ignored. Panting, she said, “It’s my family. Of course it’s safe.”

But she had to stop at the arroyo gushing across the dirt road. The log bridge Tía had built for crossing when the rains came and the waters rose had been knocked down, and though the wooden beams were partially damming it, the water still rushed swiftly.

Chance at her side, “Is there another crossing?”