A bat flew by just over their heads. “No one knows I still come here. Not even my dad. I think everyone’s forgotten about this place except me.”

A firefly lit up and danced in the air above them.

“So…” Bugz smiled and took a half step closer to Feng. “Can you keep my secret?”

“Absolutely.”

CHAPTER 39

Bugz couldn’t escape the eerie dream. Unlike in the Floraverse, she couldn’t disconnect. She could only step forward.

Bugz was a child again, carried in her mother’s arms. They stood in a Sundance arbor, the site of that most sacred of ceremonies, as her father prepared to pierce. Bugz recognized the scene as one of her childhood memories—an old sepia filmstrip, everything soaked in a warm honey glow. She saw her father’s chapped lips. He’d fasted, without food or water, for four days as part of the ceremony. Frank shuffled slowly, tired from dancing since before dawn on each of those days.

Bugz watched her father step forward onto a buffalo robe and pop two small black wooden pegs in his mouth. A Sundancer grabbed her father’s upper arm, pinching the skin between his fingers and lancing it with a scalpel. The dancer pushed the blade through until it emerged from Frank’s skin a half-inch away. A second dancer slid one of the wooden pegs through the hole. The two men repeated the process on the other arm; then they shook hands and hugged her dad. He turned to face Bugz. She could only focus on the wooden peg embedded in each of his arms. Summer and Bugz followed Frank to a spot farther away in the arbor, where he retrieved a forked rope tied to the tree at the center of the space. The Sundancers harnessed each end of the rope to the pegs in her father’s arms.

Bugz watched from the safety of her mother’s embrace as her father danced in place and stared at the tree, blood slowly trickling from his arms. Summer blew the eagle whistle she wore around her neck. After a small eternity, Frank ran backward until the tightening rope ripped the pegs from his skin and sent the harness flying back toward the tree.

“Why did Daddy do that?” Bugz asked her mother.

“Because he wants his prayers to come true.”

“But why not just give tobacco?”

“Because the Creator made everything. Sacrificing a piece of ourselves is the only thing we can really give to the Creator,” her mom explained, wiping away a tear.