if they knew she was going out alone.
She walked silently along the foot of the mesa, feeling the mounting tension of anticipation. It swelled inside her and made the dark pregnant with latent movement and force. The beauty of the night, its sharp-edged silence, thrilled her. Its fearful glory and clarity exploded joyously in her heart, and she panted with sheer exhilaration. Oh yes, she could die out here or lose her mind and go adrift forever in a lonely cosmos of stars and ghosts. But it was worth the risk. Close to death, you felt your life acutely.
It helped to have seen the area in the daylight. This time, she recognized the ravine before she got to it, an angled slash of deep blue-black against the paler blue of the rock face ahead. Moments later, at its mouth, she found she could now interpret the dim outlines of its sloping floor, the shadowed boulders, the old rock fall, and the forking corridor beyond.
She took a deep breath and one last look around at the bare plain, banished a sudden onslaught of fears that included scorpions and Skin-walkers, and headed up.
Again, she found herself drawn to the area near the rock dam. This time she climbed up and over the tumble of slabs and boulders and stopped just above it, where she had a better view of the cliff faces and shadows of the upper end of the ravine. Again the breeze snaked past her and took her steaming breath with it. Grateful for the stealth her soft clothes allowed, she found a shallow shelf a few feet up from the ground and folded herself into its shadow. It felt strategic and somehow safer than squatting on the ravine floor.
She unfolded her blanket, tucked it around her legs, and put the flashlight where her hand could find it quickly. And then she sat and tried to forget everything. She felt fears and thoughts and discomforts come and go and tried to be transparent to them.
Time passed.
The cold crept relentlessly around her thighs and into her collar. The blue ravine grew darker. More time passed. She felt the gradual onset of the paradoxical state she sought: so alert, yet so near sleep.
Movement startled her. Cree's eyes flicked as she realized that there was someone else in the ravine. Her heart thudded jarringly with the shock of it.
Forty feet farther up, a man crouched in the deep shadow next to a boulder. She could see the silhouette of his head and one shoulder and arm, one sharply bent knee. Motionless. The sight knocked the breath out of her, as if someone had punched her chest. She wanted to run, she wanted to cram deeper into her little shelter, but before she could do either she saw the second man, and she froze in fear. He was thirty or forty feet farther up than the first, just now squatting down in the shadow of a boulder. He tucked his head closer to the rock and all but disappeared.
Above the second, yet another shapeless shadow moved from side to side, coming down. Then it vanished, too.
Cree still hadn't taken a breath when the nearest man crept out of his shelter, slipped closer, and faded into a vertical seam in the cliff. She stared at where he'd been and could just see one long leg, the side of his body, the swell of a shoulder.
He was lit wrong. She could see him too well. Against the dark ravine, his body seemed to glow with a strange luminosity. A tiny, distant rational voice told her he glowed because it was daylight where he was. When he was.
A noise from below roused her from her paralysis and reminded her of her mission. At first she took it for a human voice of alarm, but then she recognized the bleat of a goat. Then the big rustling rumble, hooves and voices, the jangle of harness. She had to get down there, now; she had to find Brother. Warn him back. He shouldn't have gone to retrieve the goats. She shouldn't have gone after him, but she couldn't stop herself, and now it was too late.
Above, someone slipped on rolling gravel. She looked to see two more shapes coming quickly down the ravine and she knew she had to run now or she would lose her resolve and something terrible would happen to Brother.
She leapt down from her shelter and scrambled to the rock dam in confusion, smashing her front into the boulders, then climbing and stumbling and falling among the rocks, bruising her hands. The rocks were all wrong. She rammed both knees into a jagged slab and fell heavily, twisting her body just in time to take the impact on her shoulder. It stunned her, but in an instant she was up again, scrabbling on all fours over the fall and tumbling to the smoother floor of the ravine.
The big noise was there, out on the desert. The evil people were coming. She had to run now. Below, a shape moved out on the sunset-lit desert and she knew it was Brother. And he had caught one of the goats, he was running with it on a rope. She ran out of the ravine mouth to call to him, Shinaai, don't go for the goats, come back! but that was foolish because he had already caught one, he already knew the danger and was running back. Back in the ravine, the men were crying out in alarm and anger.
She had almost reached Brother when part of him broke away, part of his head was gone in an instant and suddenly he was splayed out on the sand and the goat was running away trailing its tether. And then the goat stumbled and rolled, shuddering and kicking its feet in the air as if savaged by an invisible predator. Far away across the ground, she saw the other goat running toward the south and then, panicked, change its mind and turn back. She knelt by Shinaai and knew that the monster that ate people and took them away had taken him. It was too evil to bear. She stood and ran at it, raging and cursing it, but something bit her leg like a dog or wolf. It tugged just once but so hard she fell to her knees. When she looked down her thigh was open, burst like a shattered gourd. And she shouted up at the horsemen a curse on their lives and clans forever and then her belly and chest burst, too. She fell on the sand and lay as the stamping hooves danced briefly around her and then moved on out of view, toward the ravine. She wanted to turn her head to see what was happening there, but she couldn't move. She lay looking along the ground, out toward the empty desert, a sideways red-lit plane where even the grains of sand were huge and frighteningly vivid. Unable to move her body, she felt her mind and heart fling outward, love and warning and apology snapped like an arrow from a bow, back toward the ravine where the family was. She heard the guns there and then she heard and saw nothing.
She awoke to find herself a hundred yards from the mouth of the ravine, lying facedown on coarse sand. It took her a long moment to regain herself, give herself a name: Lucretia Black. It wasn't sunset, it was deepest night. She sat up quickly and winced as all the pains came at once, the bruised shins and elbows and wrenched shoulder. She straightened and felt every vertebra kink and complain. She got to her feet and swayed for a moment, deeply chilled. After a moment, she thought to push the glow button on her watch, and found that it was after two in the morning.
Two people had died on this spot. She was too battered and numb to examine the experience in detail, but she sensed they were young, a girl of around thirteen and her brother, a little older. The girl had called him Shinaai. He had gone to retrieve the runaway goats against the family's instructions, and she had followed to bring him back, also against orders. They'd been shot by someone the girl thought of as the New People and the Enemy People: men on horses, many of them, enough to make that awful, air-quivering thunder of hooves and motion and manic energy.
She did a quick inventory and admitted that she was beat to crap, that she'd done all she could for now. She absolutely had nothing left, emotionally or physically.
But the wrong of it! The lingering sense of the girl's last bitter instant fired her, and she sat back down, suppressed her sobs, and stubbornly ordered herself to stillness. She willed it to come again: demanded that the ghost cycle through its manifestation, commanded herself to find and tolerate the echoes of that life and death. Insisted that the rocks give up their secrets. Whatever, however the hell it worked.
But of course you couldn't force it. You couldn't find it if it wasn't there or if you weren't ready. After fifteen more minutes, she accepted the obvious and got creakily to her feet.
She limped up the ravine to retrieve the backpack and blanket. Climbing over the rock dam again, she thought about the spatiotemporal divergence she'd experienced on her way down, during her urgent rush to warn her brother. The rocks impeding Cree's passage didn't exist in the world of the girl whose final moments she'd experienced; clearly the avalanche that had brought this tumble down hadn't been there when the girl had lived. Her stumbling efforts to clamber over the rocks when half her world didn't contain them brought home just what Tommy must be experiencing when the entity was active in him. It explained the confusion of his labored attempts to climb through the corral fence, or to come down off the examining table: spatiotemporal double vision.
She made it to the niche and stuffed her things into the backpack, then sat for a moment in the dead silence
