Mara was shaking her head, her eyes pleading. She whispered, hoarsely, “I don’t know, sweetheart. I just don’t know. They’ve all … they’ve all … disappeared.”

Calliope let out a small trembling yelp like an injured animal, caught in brambles. “But they were here? You saw them?”

Mara shook her head again, her face crumpled. “No, I never saw them. Trudy’s gone, that’s all I know. And your cousin. Everyone at the hospital. In the town. But your husband and boy, they never came here.”

Calliope had split apart when that light had flashed and she’d crashed into the bridge, then again in the hangar, when all the air had been sucked from the room and her lungs had smashed together. Now she was shriveling and shredding like a burnt piece of paper, ashes scattering into the wind. Everything hurt.

Her family wasn’t at Tía’s. She’d been wrong. They weren’t here. They weren’t anywhere.

“People don’t disappear,” she managed, her voice strangled. Her eyes stung, and she struggled to breathe. Where else could they have gone? She pictured the Ancient Ancestors roaming away from Chaco Canyon, from their elaborate stone buildings, their mysterious religious rites and astronomical pursuits—all of it, abandoned. Chance had said the myths were real. Were Calliope and her family caught in whatever ecological crisis had caused the ancestors to become refugees, to scatter and decline and all but disappear, their whole culture lost from archaeological record until they emerged again as much more modern Puebloans, hundreds of years later, the evidence for their sudden fall lost to the rocks, not yet uncovered? Was her family still out there? It was freezing. She had to keep looking. She had to find them before they froze to death.

A voice whispered, What if they’re already dead?

Chance broke her thoughts, asking Mara in his lilting accent, “Whose blood you got all over you?”

Mara flinched. “Trudy’s dad’s.”

His voice level, he said, “You murder him?”

She shook her head. “Found him dead.”

“Where’s his body? Show me.”