“I saw an incinerator chimney when we came in.”

So had Koda. Its squat black shape had jutted up against the clean blue sky, an obscenity in the light of day. The memory of her lover’s face, pinched and white, as she told of finding the corpse-filled trenches in Craig is something that will stay with Dakota as long as she lives. That, and the nightmare-filled nights that followed, Kirsten tossing and crying out in her sleep. “All right,” she says. “You stand watch here. I’ll go have a look.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Kirsten—”

“It’s going to be nothing, or it’s going to be bad. If it’s bad, it can’t be any worse than those graves in Craig. I’m coming.”

Koda holds her ground for an instant, then stifles her protective instincts and gives way. “All right,” she says. “Let’s go.”

The incinerator stands to one side of the main building, its red biohazard sign still bright in the afternoon sun. The stench of charred flesh still lingers about it, even to Koda’s human nostrils. It must, she thinks, be overpoweringly strong to Asi, where he stands at attention ten feet away, ears forward, legs stiff, issuing short, sharp barks of alarm despite Kirsten’s order to be silent. Foulness hangs over the place like a cloud.

The furnace has two doors, a larger one above for the burn chamber, a smaller below for scraping out the ash. Neither yields to Koda’s determined pulling, and she returns to the wreckage in front to scavenge a yard-long length of rebar. It makes an admirable pry, and she wedges it under the handle of the upper door, turning it fairly easily on the second effort. The door swings open on blackness and the stench of death, but the oven holds no bones, no infant corpses. Kirsten leans over her shoulder, peering into the shadow. It seems to Koda that the sound of her lover’s breathing has slowed; no demons here to haunt her nights. “Okay,” she says. “Nothing here. Let’s—”

“Check the bottom,” Kirsten says steadily.

Ash lies thick in the compartment below the burn chamber, black and stinking of grease. Dakota scrapes it out onto the concrete platform with the end of the rebar. Scattered throughout it are small flakes of white, bigger than the grain of the ash. “Bone,” Kirsten says, her voice expressionless. “That’s what that is, isn’t it?”

Koda nods, her teeth clenched. If she opens her mouth, she will vomit. After a moment, she breaks apart a clod of ash, freeing larger fragments of calcified bone. One larger piece still keeps its shape; half a vertebra, its spur still jutting out from the half-ring that once surrounded the spinal cord. The whole piece is less than an inch long.

“Now we know.” Kirsten’s voice is scarcely more than a whisper.

Koda forces herself to speak around the constriction in her throat. “Now we know.”

She feels Kirsten’s hand settle on her shoulder, warm and alive. A lifeline. “And we know someone else is fighting them, too. That’s a good thing.”

Suddenly it seems as if the buildings around her, the mountains around them, will fall on her at any moment. She levers herself to her feet, glancing up at the sun. “Let’s get out of here. We can be in the foothills again by nightfall.”

They make the trek out of the city in silence, hands joined, Asi quiet beside them. A long-forgotten phrase slips through her mind, from the mission school decades, eons ago. “And the Lord God rained fire and brimstone on the cities of the plain, fire from heaven.” Koda does not look back, lest she turn to stone.

CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT

THE FAINT GLOW of the embers reflects off the back of the rock shelter, tingeing the shadows with crimson. Spilling down off the heights of the mountains, the breeze carries with it a foretaste of the turning year, its scent sharp with pine and hemlock. Kirsten pulls the mylar blanket more firmly up over her body, settling her head in the hollow of Dakota’s shoulder. Her lover’s hand makes lazy circles against her back. On the other side of the dying fire, Asi snores softly, his paws twitching with his dreams. Cold with distance, a howl rises up into the night, coyotes hunting the lower slopes. Kirsten shivers, not with the chill but with the memory of the Salt Lake Clinic. It seems out of place here in the clean air, it the light of stars spilling across unimaginable distances.

But the dead will not leave her. She feels Koda stiffen where she lies beside her, and her soft breath ruffles Kirsten’s hair. “What is it, cante sukye?”

“Nothing.”

“Not nothing. Something cold has touched you.”

Kirsten turns her face so that she looks directly up at the sky. She raises one arm to point at the great stream of the Milky Way where it arcs across the night. Almost bright enough to cast shadows, it blazes down on the earth as it has for millions of years, answered now only by wood fires and the occasional, scattered glimmer of artificial light. “You call it the Ghost Road, don’t you? My dad was into Irish heritage stuff, and he said the ancient Celts called it the Path of Souls. Funny how different cultures had the same idea.”

“Maybe it’s the braids and war-paint.” Koda shifts her weight slightly to keep Kirsten’s head on her shoulder. “Most Cherokee and Creek families who use European names are called Mac-this or Mac-that. Lots of Scotts.”

“Do they wear kilts, too?”

Koda gives a soft snort, and Kirsten can feel the laughter as it runs through her. “Now that’d be a sight, wouldn’t it? Tartans and feathers.”

From somewhere a mental picture floats up of Tacoma, tartan plaid clasped about his waist, a classic warbonnet on his head. Kirsten giggles at the absurdity of it, and the tension in her eases a bit. “What about the Dipper? Do you call that a bear, too?”

“No, but we have a summer constellation called Mato Tipila, the Bear’s Lodge. That’s Gemini, mostly. And Leo is The Fireplace.”

“What about him?” Lazily, Kirsten points to Orion, whose belt of three stars just clears the peaks to the east. “Is he a hunter in the Lakota stories, too?”

“It’s part of what we call the Backbone, which is part of the Racetrack.”

“Oh.” Kirsten cannot quite keep the disappointment from her voice. The figure of a mighty man with upraised club seems so obvious to her—even though a part of her mind recognizes that obviousness as cultural bias—that it would seem to be the stuff of legend in any society. Get a grip, King. It’s a different world. Koda’s is a different world. And somehow I’m going to have to learn it all.

“There is a story, though.” Koda’s arm tightens about her shoulders. “Want to hear it?”

“About a backbone? Sure.”

“Not exactly. See his belt, there, and his sword? That, plus Rigel are what we call the Hand, Nape.”

“Whose?”

“A chief’s.” Koda’s voice settles into a steady rhythm that is almost ceremonial, and it comes to Kirsten that among the Lakota, as among her own ancient ancestors, stories are not simply entertainment. They are history, as Blind Harry’s ballad of the Cheyenne is history now. They reach into the future, as well as into the numinous past. “There was a chief who was not generous with his people. He kept all the horses he took in raids for himself, instead of sharing them with his warriors. He showed no concern for the poor in his tribe, or for widows and orphans. And one day, the Wakinyan, the Thunderbirds, had had enough of his stinginess, and they tore off his arm.”

“Too bad the Thunderbirds never took on the Congress. Talk about one-armed bandits.”

“Not to mention the whole swarm of bureaucrats. Anyway, this chief had managed to do one thing right, and he had a beautiful daughter. Wicahpi Hinhpaye, or Fallen Star, who was the son of the North Star and a mortal woman, came courting her. And she agreed to marry him, on condition that he find her father’s missing arm.

“So he searched and searched, all through the Paha Sapa. Then he searched among the stars, because the landscape of the Black Hills is reflected in the sky, because they are both sacred. The Wakinyan tried to prevent him from searching, and he fought them. Then Inktomi, Spider Woman, tried to trick him, but he outwitted her.

“Finally he found the hand where they had hidden it in the stars, and he returned to earth with it. In a ceremony, Wicahpi Hihnpaye reattached the chief’s arm and married the daughter. He became the new chief. In the spring they had a son. And—” Koda leaves the word hanging.

“—they lived happily ever after.” Kirsten finishes the sentence for her.

“And the people flourished, and the land had peace. It all goes together.” After a moment she adds, “You okay?”

“Mmm,” Kirsten says, turning again to lay her arm across Koda’s body. “Very okay. G’night.”

“’Night, cante sukye.”

“Ever after,” Kirsten murmurs, and slips into sleep.

*

Late afternoon light filters through the branches of pine and spruce, grown thick and tall here on the western slope of the Nightingale Mountains. The Trinities lie behind them, now, the folded valleys and jagged bare-rock ranges that scar the Nevada landscape. Asi trots easily along a deer track paralleling a narrow stream that loops and swirls its way down the mountainside. Kirsten follows, Koda walking rearguard. A jay scolds from somewhere half a hundred feet up, and is answered by a chittering squirrel. From time to time the sun catches the crest of a small rapids where the stream banks pinch inward; occasionally it strikes silver off the scales of fingerling trout or minnows. Out of the corner of her eye, Koda can make out the shape of a mule deer doe drifting between the trees a hundred yards away. Her two spring fawns follow, their spots fading now with the end of summer. Gently Dakota taps on Kirsten’s shoulder, pointing silently, and a smile light the other woman’s face at the sight. Asi, too, turns to look but makes no sound, then pads on, his humans’ feet making no more noise than his own.