“Ahéheé, Grandpa,” I say as I get ready to make my jump.
“Wait,” he says, hand on my arm. I pause. Look back.
“I’ve got something for your friend. The one you’re going up there to rescue.”
“Kai?”
“Aoo’. Somewhere here.” He pats the pockets of his blue robe, searching unsuccessfully. His hands move to his chest, patting, until his eyes light up in discovery. He reaches into his shirt and pulls out a flask. No, it’s more like a hand-size clay pot. Black-and-white, wider at the bottom with a thin narrow neck. It’s attached to a rawhide string, which he pulls up over his neck. He hands it to me.
“What is this?”
“A present. For your friend. You give it to him when you see him. Tell him it’s from me.”
I drop the string over my head, tuck the pot safely under my shirt. “I will.”
“Don’t forget.”
I pat the object. “I won’t.”
I turn back to the shore. Swing back and forth on the rail to build a little momentum for my jump, and then leap to dry land. I give Tó one final wave.
“Maybe your silver-eyed boy will change my luck,” he says under his breath, but I hear him well enough.
I turn, incredulous. “What did you say? About Kai’s silver eyes?”
He grins. “Don’t forget your fish psychology!” he shouts, waving vigorously.
“What did you say about Kai?” I repeat.
But the boat is already drifting away.
“Tó!”
I hear the engine punch into drive. “Tó!” I shout again over the roar of the engine. I watch it pull away, quickly becoming a diminishing speck on the darkening lake. I linger for a while, wondering who the mysterious old man was. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough.
“Maggie!” Rissa shouts from down the path. “Let’s go!”
One last look across the lake and then I’m hurrying to follow my companions, down to whatever awaits us at Amangiri.
Chapter 34
“That’s got to be it,” I tell Rissa as I hand her Aaron’s binoculars. She takes them from me, shifting for a better look over the rocky cliffs and down into the valley where the Amangiri spreads out below us.
“Looks nice,” she says. She gives the binoculars back to Aaron. “Swank. Or at least, apocalyptic swank.”
“So, what’s our plan?” Ben asks, sounding eager.
I glance over at Ben. In the camouflage pants and Twin Arrows gift-shop T-shirt, she looks like a version of the girl I met with Hastiin, even if the bandanna hanging around her neck is now pink and white, more cowgirl than mercenary. But with her hair back up in a tsiiyééł and that expression on her face, she looks enough like a Thirsty Boy again for me to take her seriously. Which isn’t going to make what I have to say next any easier.
“So, Ben,” I start, trying to ease into the conversation, “I was thinking that maybe you should wait here.”
Her brow wrinkles in confusion. “What? What do you mean?”
“I mean that Hastiin trusted me to keep you safe, and maybe it’s safer for you to wait up here on the ridge while we go down and scout . . .”
She’s shaking her head, eyes big in disbelief.
“Ben,” I say. “I know this isn’t easy to hear. But remember what you said to me back at my trailer? When I said I’d let you come along on one condition? Remember that?”
Her eyes lock on me, the same look of betrayal I remember from the mountain when the Thirsty Boy told her to back down. “No! I’m going down there with you. I earned this.”
“It’s not about earning anything.”
“No, Maggie!” She takes a step toward me, that same cold fury rising from her that I felt when I tried to get her to stay with Tah in Crystal. It’s intense, desperate, and for a minute I almost waver.
Ben’s voice breaks as she yells, “You promised!”
“I didn’t promise,” I correct her quietly, my voice steady, reasonable. “I didn’t promise you anything, Ben. In fact, the only thing I said was that you could come along if you promised not to argue with me.”
“You don’t think I can do it? That I’m not brave enough? I rescued myself from Knifetown, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“And I killed that archer woman at Lake Asááyi. You saw that. You can’t deny that.” Her hands clench into fists. “But you still don’t think I can handle myself in a fight. You saw me with a knife. You were there. You saw me kill her!”
“It’s not that.” I knew we’d come to this at some point, but I didn’t want it to be like this. “I think you’re plenty brave, Ben. That’s not it.”
“Then what?!” She’s shaking, her whole body radiating rage. At me. “You want the glory to yourself !” she yells, accusing. “It’s not enough that you rescue your boyfriend—you have to kill the bad guy too?!”
“Ben,” I say, voice sharp. “Quit it. Now.”
“Always have to be the big hero. The monsterslayer. Oh, no. Now it’s Godslayer. Godslayer! So stupid!”
“You need to stop, Ben,” I warn her, my own temper rising, “before you say something you regret.”
“Regret? Regret? I already regret. I regret ever trusting you. Ever thinking you were my friend. Ever calling you my auntie. I regret—”
“She didn’t die!” I shout.
Ben freezes. Stares at me, mouth hanging open, the color draining from her face.
“You didn’t kill anyone, Ben. The archer back at Lake Asááyi? She didn’t die! You stabbed her with a steak knife. The wound was surface deep. The handle broke off, remember?”
“B-b-but . . . ,” she stutters. “She was bleeding!”
“After we left, the Thirsty Boys took her down the mountain to get medical attention. No doubt she’s in jail right now, having to face justice for killing your uncle. And that council spokesperson. But she’s not dead, Ben. You didn’t kill anyone.”
She looks at me one long minute, and I’m sure she’s going to burst out into tears. But instead she turns and runs. Fast and Deer People nimble. She scrambles straight up a cliff. Disappears into the darkness in a matter of seconds.
“Dammit!” I shout, teeth clenching. I throw my hands up in frustration, pace away from Rissa and Aaron, ready to smash something.
Rissa waits until I’ve stopped cursing to ask, “What are you going to do?”
“Let her go,” I say. “She’s not my problem.” And I almost mean it.
“What if she goes after Gideon on her own?” Aaron asks.
I hadn’t even thought of that. Surely Ben wouldn’t be that reckless. Who am I kidding? That’s exactly what she plans to do.
“No, Maggie,” Rissa says, guessing what I’m thinking. “You go find Kai. Aaron and I will go after her.”
“No. She’s my responsibility. I should go.”
Rissa shakes her head. “I have a little brother, remember? I know teenagers. Let me handle Ben. She’s not going to want to hear anything you have to say right now.”
“No. She—”
“Maggie.” Rissa clears her throat, and I know whatever she’s going to say is going to be bad. “Killing that archer? That meant something to her. It was her redemption. You know she blames herself for Hastiin’s death, right? It was her fault, wasn’t it, that the archer spotted you on the trail?”
“The clip in her hair,” I acknowledge. “Did she talk to you about it?”
“She confessed. When we were at Twin Arrows. And that’s the way she put it. A ‘confession’ that she was responsible for Hastiin’s death.”
“She told me at Lupton that if she had died in the Energy Wars, maybe Hastiin would still be alive. I took it as survivor’s guilt, but now I think she meant it literally.” I shake my head, feeling like an idiot. “What else did she tell you?”
Rissa hesitates. Glances over at Aaron, who’s looking at his shoes, hands stuffed in his pockets.
“She told me what happened to her as a bride at Knife
town.”
Something seizes up in my chest. “Don’t tell me . . .”
“No, nothing like that,” she says, looking back at Aaron again. “But it was bad enough. Poked and prodded and graded. Bishop gave each bride a freaking grade, like a side of beef. That’s how he set their reserve price. Grade B would sell for less than an A. . . .”
I wave my hand, disgusted. “I get it.”
“It was humiliating. Awful. But no one . . . violated her.”
“Brings down the price,” Aaron whispers, so low I almost don’t catch him. “Bishop don’t do that no more. Nobody wants to buy a girl . . . or a boy . . . after that. Soiled like that.”
Rissa presses her lips together, gives her good-enough-for-now boyfriend a look that’s part compassion and part concern.
“Aaron,” Rissa says, voice worried. “Are you okay?”
He glances up, a surprised look on his face. “Yeah, yeah. ’Course. There’s no more to Knifetown, is there, ’cept rubble? No more Bishop, maybe? I’m fuckin’ great.”
She gives him an encouraging smile, and he returns it wider.
“I’ll go after Ben,” Rissa says after a moment. “Maggie, you go find Kai. And then, please, can we go home?”
Without another word, she turns and heads up the path Ben took, leaving Aaron and me standing there looking awkwardly at each other. He tilts his head, eyes narrowing between white lashes. “We all seen some shit, eh? Done some shit too. I bet you done some dark shit.”
I nod slowly, unsure where he’s going with this.
“Probably going to see and do a lot more dark shit too.”
“Probably.”
He reaches into his pocket and hands me something—the brochure of Amangiri.
“It’s got a map,” he says. “Layout of the facility. Gideon will be in the private residence. He plays rabble, but he ain’t common. Not really.”
I take it, not sure what to say but, “Thanks.”
He tilts his head. “Godslayer, huh.” His mouth bleeds into a half smile. “I always knew you were the crazy one in the girl gang.”
He gives me a salute and jogs after Rissa. After a moment he, too, disappears into the darkness, leaving me alone on the cliff above Amangiri.
Chapter 35
The Amangiri Resort and Spa is bigger than it seemed from Aaron’s brochure. And colder. Not in temperature, although the desert has dipped to freezing with the sun down, but in architecture. All the buildings are built along sharp angles, the materials not adobe or even wood, but cold concrete. The place has none of the curves of the earth, nothing that speaks of Dinétah, of wooden hogans or warmth. It is entirely foreign. A place made by bilagáanas, for bilagáanas. That is a truth I feel deep in my bones. Bones that plead for me to turn around, that I don’t belong here, that this place has no love for a child of Dinétah. But I do my best to ignore the cold dread that warns me to turn back. Because if I don’t belong here, Kai doesn’t either.
Aaron’s brochure turns out to be helpful, giving me a general layout of the grounds. The main hotel building of the Amangiri is a sort of shortened L shape, centered around a pool in a courtyard. The main area at the top of the L shape appears to be the entrance to the building, with a series of rooms for guests trailing down the long body of the L. The spa is a separate building on the other side of the pool, and up the hill opposite us, there’s a an individual residence. A mansion, really. If Aaron is right about his brother, that’s where I’ll find Gideon.
I approach from the southwest, keeping low and moving quickly through the darkness. Large walls of windows face outward to the desert, lit from within. I look for cameras, guards, some kind of security, but there’s nothing. Either I am expected and it’s a trap, or the White Locust’s hubris is as vast as the land around me. I’m able to look into the rooms as I pass. All of them seem to be lived in, if currently empty. There are no bars on the wide windows, no chains forcing doors closed. I stop to test a sliding patio door. It opens easily, a puff of a whisper on an oiled rail. I tense, remembering they could be alarmed, half expecting to hear a warning shrieking into the night sky. Nothing. I could just walk in. Anyone could just walk in. Or out. I slide the door closed and keep moving, looking for . . . something. Some sign that one of these rooms is Kai’s and that he’s being held against his will. But they are all variations on the modern concrete cube, clean lines and sand-colored furniture, pre–Big Water stylish but entirely nondescript. I don’t know how I’m going to tell.
And then I do.
The room is the last one in a long row, closer to the main common area than I’d like. But as soon as I see it, I know it’s his. There’s no sign of the man himself, but I know this is where Kai’s been living. The room itself is the same plain box of concrete and pale wood as all the others, only this room feels warm. Living. A pool of rich golden light falls across an oversize desk, and smaller puddles cascade from tall, thin silver lamps placed around the room, the warmth of light a tonic to the stark concrete. They illuminate books. So many books. Books covering every surface, twice as many as Grace’s library. There are books lining floating wooden shelves, books sitting in haphazard piles on the floor, books spread lavishly across the bed, allowing only the edge of a gray blanket to show through at the far corner. And these books look important, totally the opposite of Grace’s well-loved paperbacks. These books are thick, hardbound, stacked three or four deep on the desk, higher on the floor. And besides the books, there’s maps. Hung on the walls, even a few on the floor, like someone had hunched over them, studying their arcane lines. The maps on the wall have been written on, marred by crisscrossing black lines and scribbled numbers in longitude and latitude, others in letters and numbers that look like math equations. Maps of Dinétah and the Malpais, maps of Page and the surrounding area. I think I recognize the dam, the one Aaron called Glen Canyon, but from out here beyond the glass door, I can’t be sure.
My heart beating loud in my ears, hands shaking, I slide the door open.
“Kai?” I call softly, even though he’s clearly not here. It feels almost blasphemous to enter his space uninvited, but I’ve come so far and waited so long. If I can’t be close to him, at least I can be close to his things.
I circle the room, trailing my fingertips across everything. The desk, a spiral notebook full of his writing, the gray blanket on this bed. His scent is here, that smell of cedar and clean tobacco, and I close my eyes and inhale it. It calms me, heals me. And makes me miss Dinétah so much it feels like a physical ache in my side. I keep moving, letting my eyes travel carelessly over the maps. And I begin to see a pattern. I was right that one of the maps on the wall was of the dam we crossed to get here. But I see other dams too. The Hoover Dam, which I recognize from school. And smaller ones I’m not familiar with. Grand Valley, Navajo. The routes of the Colorado River and its tributaries are highlighted over in different colors of permanent marker, the places they flow into Dinétah inked the thickest. And next to them, notes on force and time and acre feet. I turn to look at the books. Many of them are accounts of ancient stories—the Hebrew Bible, a story of something called a Tiamat from Ancient Babylon, another book with a Chinese dragon and what looks like a tortoise on the cover. I pick the Tiamat one up at random and flip through the pages. It’s a poem, and hard to follow, but it’s definitely about a primordial flood.
And a dull worry starts to gnaw at my belly.
I set the book down and pick up a different one. This one has a tan cover and the book itself is flat and twice as wide as a normal book. It’s a side-by-side analysis of the story of Noah, a story I recognize from a brief stint in Christian school as a kid. Alarm blossoms at the back of my brain as I realize the stacks of newspapers around me are all accounts of the various events that led up to the Big Water. It seems obvious that Kai is studying the world-ending floods of history, looking for I’m not sure what. But combined with the maps of the Colorado River and its tributaries through Dinétah and the massive dams used to ma
nage the river . . . and I’m starting to see the method to Gideon’s madness. And the part that Kai, the one-time King of Storms and student of the Diné Weather Ways, may play in it all.
* * *
I leave Kai’s room and slide the glass door shut behind me, feeling shaken. Gideon may be some kind of madman, but if he is, why is Kai staying here?
Because Kai is helping him. There’s no other way to explain it.
Kai was always smart. Having been raised by scholars meant he knew his way around books and libraries and research in a way that I never did. Never will. And he’s helping Gideon with this plan to do what—flood Dinétah?
It’s too much. Too different from the Kai I know. And it makes me think that maybe I’ve misunderstood him. Maybe I don’t know him like I thought I did. Maybe I need to admit that even though he was willing to face death for me to be free of Neizghání, perhaps that sacrifice has blinded me to the ways he deceived me when he thought I was the monsterslayer of his nightmares. And maybe there’s something true to Rissa’s suspicions, to Nohoilpi’s interrogations. And instead of feeling a happy nervousness to see Kai again, my body feels heavy, my feet drag, and all I feel is dread.
There’s a small fence separating the hotel rooms from the pool area. I vault the gate and move soundlessly, following the line of the building. I turn the corner only to pull up abruptly when I realize that around the corner is a wall of glass. And on the other side of that wall of glass are people. I can hear the buzz of their voices now, rising and falling in conversation. Laughter and the clink of utensils and crystal cups. And under that, music. A familiar song I can’t quite place. Something from my childhood, so ubiquitous as to become anonymous, something about the snow or the cold and staying inside near a warm fire.
I hunch down low and peek around the corner, hoping that the bright indoor lights will blind the people inside enough to keep me hidden from a casual outside glance. They are in the main dining room of the hotel. The room is understated. Low-backed modern chairs in shades of honey and sand cluster around sleek modern tables. And on every table, a white candle glows, encased in a glass lamp. Golden boughs made of foil hang tastefully along the walls, interspersed with sprigs of sage. Here and there, big golden ornaments are arranged artfully on piles on the floor, and in the center of the room, behind a massive table that could seat fifty people, is a huge artificial pine tree that touches the ceiling. It, too, is decorated in golds and ivories and long coils of foil. And I realize that the White Locust and his Swarm are having a Keshmish party.
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