After a lifetime of solitary traveling, Mara Rothstein had returned to the childhood home she’d lived in for only two years as a girl. But it had etched itself like graphite into her memory while she lived abroad in Europe and vagabonded through the United States. Nowhere had felt like home after the trauma of Los Alamos. Home was a cave dwelling inside her, dark and dank. But New Mexico had called her back six years before, and her trailer had become a permanent fixture on Trudy’s ranch in an artist’s town nestled in the hills below the Gila Mountains in the southwestern fold of the state’s broomstick skirt. She’d chosen this life. Without kids. Without anyone. And it suited her just fine, living without obligations to anyone but herself. Until Trudy. Trudy had stay-cabled her to this place.

The copper wren Mara had sculpted from something elemental and shapeless, a coalescence of nature and machinery, was finished. Time to affix him to his new home, spiny cactus upon which he could sing.

She imagined life into all her artwork. That was the beauty. That was the joy.

Once she’d donned her welding goggles and torch, sparks began to fly in a brilliant conflagration of orange chasing white-hot blue, her favorite part in the process. Trudy often nagged Mara about safety. Their relationship was above tactfulness, and Trudy was not one for beating around the bush. “Aren’t you getting too old for that torch? I swear, one of these days you’ll burn your arm clean off.” Still, Mara delighted in vexing her. In response, she’d quoted Edna St. Vincent Millay: “My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. But, ah my foes, and, oh my friends, it gives a lovely light.” But now, fusing her little copper bird atop the spiraled metal cactus rung, Mara went fuzzy. An uncanny falling sensation overtook her. She released her hand from the torch’s trigger, but the sparks did not cease. Outside the barn doors, crackling the once-blue sky, there appeared a horrifying blaze.

She’d seen it before, when her parents had helped create the world’s first atomic bomb. Seventy-five years fell away and she was five years old again, watching the sky catch fire from a safe distance atop Sandia Mountain. Watching the world fall away.

Something deep within her, deep as Chaiwa’s songs, told her this was not the bomb but what had happened after the mushroom cloud had faded …

A pain behind her temples grabbed her; she let the torch drop to the floor. Transfixed by the bloodred that streaked the sky, she stood immobile, as if still holding her mother’s hand and crying. She didn’t have a hand to hold now. Except Trudy’s.

Mara needed to check on her.