Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World Book 1)

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  “These seem to be . . . hovering.”

  “Waiting?”

  I can see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve got special shot in the shells under your seat. Corn pollen and obsidian. It won’t kill them, but it will slow them down. Tie them to the place where they stand.”

  He reaches under his seat to pull the box of homemade ammo out.

  “You see one coming, crack the shell open and douse it,” I explain.

  “Then what?”

  “Then we run like hell.”

  He pockets a few shells, his face tight.

  It’s not a great plan, but if there’s as many as Kai says there are, it’s all I got.

  Thankfully, we don’t need my plan. Despite the signs of carnage around us, Crownpoint remains eerily empty of living things, and the dead things keep their distance. I remember the way to the college, and I drive us through the haunted town, turning right on Lower Point and left on Hogan Trail, then curve around past the empty security shack at the campus entrance.

  The old library is a glorified double-wide, with tan metal siding and a green matching roof. Someone has tacked a handicapped ramp and a grand two-story entryway in the middle of the building, four concrete pillars framing double doors. And the roof on the back of the building rises up in a half butterfly to add extra windows and space that suggest a second-story atrium inside. It’s not a bad-looking building, except for the charred foundation that runs the length of the outside. Someone has tried to burn it down recently, but they didn’t try very hard. It looks like they set a match to the brush and dry yellow grass around the building, but didn’t stay to make sure it actually burned. Point for us.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Kai asks, his voice still quiet.

  I throw the truck into park and turn off the engine. “No. But there’s information in there we need, right?”

  He nods.

  “Then we go in.”

  I reach under the driver’s seat and pull out a metal box. Take a small key from my key chain and insert it into the lock. It turns and opens. Inside is a .40 caliber Glock 22 with standard capacity fifteen rounds. I take out the gun and offer it to Kai.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a gun.”

  “I know that. I mean, why are you giving it to me?”

  “You’ll need it if there’s something big and bad in there.”

  “I think the big and bad has come and gone.”

  I stretch my arm out, insistent. “Take it anyway.”

  “I don’t need it. I can’t . . . and killing something might . . .” He shakes his head.

  I pause, my hands clenching around the cold metal. “Have you never used a gun?”

  “I told you. I’m a healer, not a killer.”

  “You said you could handle yourself!” I shout, louder than I mean to be. But it never even occurred to me that Kai would refuse to use a gun.

  He winces at my volume and makes a reassuring gesture with his hands. “I can take care of myself,” he says, voice calm. “But I don’t need a gun to do it.”

  I swallow the scream I want to let loose. “Tah entrusted your life to me. If you make me go back and tell that nice old man that I got you killed on my watch, I will throttle you.”

  His lips tick up. “I’ll be fine.”

  I put the gun back and shove the box under the seat. “You better be.” I get out of the truck. Slam the door for emphasis. He slides out of the passenger’s side door and follows me up the handful of concrete steps, his dress shoes clicking against the hard surface. I stare at his offending feet. “First chance, you get real shoes. Those things are so loud the monsters will hear us coming a mile away.”

  After all the noise I made, complaining about Kai’s shoes is pretty rich, but he has the sense not to argue. I pause near the door. The burned-out foundation is closer here, and I lean down and press a hand against the blackened earth. I hold my hand to my nose and sniff. It smells faintly sweet, almost metallic, like wiring insulation gone bad.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Just a hunch.” I stand and brush the ash from my hands. “Let’s check the library first.”

  Kai follows me up to the entrance. I stop, brace my shotgun against my shoulder, and aim it at the double doors.

  “Open the front doors,” I say.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I’m the one with the gun, so you’re the one opening the doors.”

  He grumbles unhappily, but he steps up, smart enough to stay out of my line of fire, and tugs on one of the doors. It swings open. I wait, ready to shoot anything coming toward us. Nothing does, so I go inside.

  The library is deserted. It has the feel of a place that’s been empty a long time. Wide-open front entrance, decorated in institutional browns and grays. The generator is out, and the only light filters in through the windows and skylight, wan and watery. A layer of desert dust covers the tops of shoulder-high shelves. More dust coating the bindings of books. Up here near the entrance there are rows of periodicals—Native Peoples magazine, Smithsonian, an old Indian Country special report—all bearing pre–Big Water publishing dates.

  Uneasiness slides down my spine. I never spent much time in libraries, not even when I was a kid, but this place feels more like a tomb than anything.

  “Where to?” I ask, and my voice echoes back to me off the cavernous ceiling.

  His eyes rove over the dusty rows of stacks, the long empty tables. “Archives,” he says. “Who knows. We might even find some of the stuff my dad worked on.”

  “Monster stories?”

  “Well, more than that. These are oral histories. Knowledge from elders about their lives, their time in residential schools, stories of parents who survived the Long Walk. Anything they were willing to share, really. Navajo scholars were afraid we’d lose the knowledge when the elders passed on. Maybe if they’d known the United States was going to crash and burn and Dinétah would be one of the last places standing, they might not have worried as much. But you can’t predict everything.”

  “A lot of people did. Predict the Big Water, I mean.”

  “Sure, but not like it was.” He leads us down a long hallway, walls dotted with posters—the 2030 Walk for Diabetes and the Crownpoint Fair of ‘29—that break up the blank expanse at regular intervals. “I mean, climate change was Florida flooding and California drought. Not two-thirds of the continent underwater.”

  I keep the shotgun raised as we turn the corner and head into a reference room, filled with oversize books containing big maps of the earth. Maps that are now obsolete. Next to the maps are old encyclopedias holding the history of a world that no longer exists as pictured. It’s eerie, and it leaves me thinking of the places outside of Dinétah in a way I haven’t in a long time. Or maybe it’s Kai who’s got me thinking that way. I wonder if there are other places like this, other homelands where the old gods have risen, where monsters threaten the five-fingereds, where death stalks the few who still live on the land of their ancestors.

  “Plus they didn’t consider the New Madrid earthquakes,” Kai continues. “The chaos and riots of the Energy Wars. Put all that together in a period of a few short years under an incompetent government . . . Even without the Big Water, bad things are going to happen.”

  “My nalí said it wasn’t those things at all.”

  He pauses and I almost run into him, my thoughts still stuck in distant drowned lands.

  “What do you mean?” he asks, voice curious.

  “Just a lot of traditional Diné tell the story of the first flood. Of how Coyote stole the Water Monster’s babies and the Monster flooded the world to get them back. They think maybe the Big Water was more like that.”

  Kai frowns. “Coyote did it?”

  “Hey, I’m not arguing.” I gesture for him to keep moving. The less time we spend in this place, the better. “I’m just saying that maybe there’s more to it. You of all people should kno
w that.”

  “Why me?” he asks. His back is to me, so I can’t see his face, but his voice sounds offended.

  “You’re the med—”

  He stops again. “This looks like it,” he says.

  “It” is a long row of horizontal filing cabinets, the kind behind a drawer but divided into individual trays for organizing audiotapes. The drawer Kai points to is marked “Oral Histories,” divided into year and last name. The filing cabinets stretch the length of the entire wall, at least four deep.

  “There’s no way,” I say, dismayed.

  “More than I thought,” Kai admits, “but maybe there’s a way to narrow them down. Let’s take a look.”

  I prop the shotgun up against one of the nearby shelves and jiggle the handle of the first drawer, marked “1971 A–C,” but it stays stubbornly closed. I try the second one just to check, and it’s locked tight too.

  “Looks like we break in,” Kai says.

  I raise my shotgun, stock pointing down. If I hit it hard enough, the lock should shatter.

  Kai clears his throat. I pause, look over. He lifts a perfectly arched brow in my direction.

  I say, “I know it’s a little heavy-handed, but it should get the job done.”

  “Or . . .” He points to the Böker strapped to my hip. “May I?” he asks.

  “You want to use my knife?”

  “I’ve got a talent with locks.”

  I make a disapproving noise. “Lying to authority figures, picking locks, hoarding bootlegged whiskey. And here I was thinking you were some kind of scholar.”

  He gives a look of mock outrage. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Does your grandfather know?” I ask, handing him my knife.

  “My cheii was pretty notorious in his day.”

  “Tah?” I ask, surprised.

  “Don’t let a pretty face fool you.”

  I lean against the filing cabinet, amused. “You know, now that you mention it, I bet Grandpa Tah was a looker. He’s still got that twinkle in his eye.”

  He gives me an exaggerated sigh. “I meant me. I’ve got the pretty face.”

  He’s bent down, studying the lock, a long-fingered hand braced against the cabinet door, his profile to me.

  “That face must let you get away with a lot of things,” I say.

  He shimmies the tip of my knife down between the lock and the cabinet. Works the mechanism a little. “What do you mean?”

  “I just mean someone as good-looking as you . . .”

  He’s grinning. I roll my eyes. “Forget it. I say anything more and your ego’s not going to fit through those double doors out front.”

  He gives the drawer a solid shove, and just like that, it opens. He hands me back my knife with an elaborate flourish. I sheathe the blade and pull the drawer open.

  There’s a row of at least a hundred slim plastic cases, each one containing a round disc about the size of my palm. Kai picks up a case at random and turns it over in his hands. “I haven’t seen one of these in a long time. Good thing the tribal funding ran out before they could upload all this data offsite somewhere.”

  I take one and hold it up to the dull light that’s filtering in through the high windows. “Do you think they have a CD player?”

  “I’m sure the library has one. We just have to find it.”

  “If you tell me where to look . . .”

  “No, I’ll do it.” He scratches absently at his ear. “But I want to catalog these first.”

  “All of them?”

  “I’ll start with just these, but even then it may take a while.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you work. I’m going out to scout around.”

  “Sure,” he says. He’s already focused on the recorded discs, mouthing the names on the labels—Atcitty, Bahe, Begay, Bitsue—and sorting through the collection.

  “Hey.” I rap my knuckles on the side of the cabinet. “If you see anything, scream real loud.”

  He looks up, like he’s surprised to find I’m still there and talking to him. “I’ll be fine, Mags. Really.”

  I give him one last look. His brow is lined in concentration as his fingers dance across the discs, his lips sounding out the Navajo names. Part of me wants to stay and watch him work. The other part of me is itching to get out of this dead box of a library and see what the hell happened to Crownpoint. I take my shotgun and go.

  I step out of the library, blinking away the dim gloom of indoors in exchange for the overbright blue desert sky. A breeze blows across the library parking lot and I catch a whiff of ozone. And just like that, the sweet metallic smell from the remnants of the fire clicks into place. No one tried to burn down the library, or at least not by hand. It was struck by lightning.

  Only problem is, it hasn’t rained in Dinétah in at least six months. I know it’s not impossible to have dry lightning strikes randomly starting fires on land this parched, but there’s a much more likely explanation.

  Neizghání.

  Whatever happened here to kill all these people must have drawn his attention. He’s been missing from my life for nine months, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still hunting monsters. Maybe he’s just doing it without me.

  I swallow down a tic of panic. I’m not ready to face him, may never be ready, but there’s also nothing I want more than to see him again. I wipe my suddenly sweaty hands on my pants and tell myself it’ll be okay, even though I know it’s a lie.

  Our last day together dawned bright and cold. January on Black Mesa. We’d camped in the shadow of Dziłíjiin, the Black Mountain itself, the distinctive slurry tower of the abandoned coal mine just a handful of miles north, jutting skyward to mar the view.

  The old mine haunts Black Mesa sure as any ghost. Once this part of the rez had boomed with jobs and lease payments and royalties. But with the money came the crooked lawyers, the double dealing, the forced relocations, the dirty water, the cancer.

  The whole place troubles me, pushes at my monster instincts, keeps my clan powers near the surface, like my life is in danger just being here. A shiver that has nothing to do with the subzero air runs down my back. All that ugly, the sickness, the loss and unhappiness. It still lives here even if the people have fled. It colors the black seams of earth that limn the landscape into something darker and deadlier than just unmined coal.

  Neizghání feels it too. He’s restless, pacing around the small fire I made to chase away some of the winter cold. His flint armor glints brightly in the crisp winter light. His fine moccasins make small breaks in the crust of ice that frosts the earth, a layer of silver that might be more beautiful if I wasn’t freezing my ass off. I hunch my shoulders and huddle closer to the fire. We’ve been up for the better part of an hour, him pacing and staring toward the abandoned mine. Me, waiting for him to speak.

  His silence is not exactly unusual. We often go days without speaking. But it’s normally a familiar quiet, a shared peace that reassures. But this morning I feel the distance between us. Man, woman. Immortal to five-fingered. Hero of legend to whatever I am. I don’t know if he somehow tangentially blames me, the human, for what’s happened to Black Mesa or if he’s thinking of something that has nothing to do with me at all. But I’m all alone out here, even with him standing a few feet away.

  “What’s the plan?” I ask, not for the first time. My voice cracks a little, but it’s not the cold, or even my uneasiness at his strange reticence. It’s excitement. I’m eager for the hunt.

  He ignored me the first four times I asked, but this time he glances back at me, his face dark with some emotion. “This place is sickness,” he says.

  “I’m not a fan of this place either,” I tell Neizghání, wrapping myself a little tighter in my coat and holding my hands out over the flames. “But you’re the one who said we had to come. That there were reports of monsters near the mine.”

  “Bad Men,” he corrects me, his face tightening. “Bad Men” is a legal designation, language held over f
rom treaty days that gives us the right to hunt monsters, human or otherwise, without the authorities getting their panties in a wad if someone ends up dead. Why the treaty language matters at all when there’s no United States left isn’t quite clear to me, and it’s not like the Feds ever upheld their side of the treaty anyway. But the term has stuck around. Seems a little silly to care either way what you’re calling someone you’re about to kill.

  “They’re still men,” he says, his voice a deep roll of thunder. “They are still five-fingereds. To call them monsters is to misname them.”

  “I don’t see how it matters what we call them. Dead is dead.” To me it’s splitting hairs not to think these men monsters. After all, there are plenty of human monsters too, just as twisted and evil as anything supernatural.

  He turns fully to me, his sweep of broad shoulders blocking my view of the slurry tower and filling the space between us. “Words matter,” he says. “The name you give things, it forms them when you speak. You must always be careful with your words.” The look he gives me is dark and studied, and suddenly I worry that maybe I’ve gone too far.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” I apologize.

  He grunts something noncommittal. The rebuke stings, and I cringe under his judgment. I know he’s trying to teach me to be a good Diné, but I figure it’s a waste of time. We both know why he keeps me with him. I’m a killer, and even if Neizghání is continually trying to counsel me to something greater, he’s never minded bloodthirsty when he needs me. I may be a terrible student, but he can’t deny that I get the job done.

  Finally, he senses something in the tilt of the sun or the scent of the air. Something that tells him we should move. I douse the fire eagerly and bend to gather our camp supplies.

  “Leave them,” he tells me.

  A change of our usual routine, but it makes no difference to me. And frankly, the sooner we get going, the better. I’m happy to leave the camp made as-is.