Rissa gapes at me for a moment, but her surprise quickly turns to wariness. She presses her lips together, clearly considering my words, before she finally says, “One of us has to stay with Caleb.”
“I’ll stay,” Clive says. “I’m the one with the medical knowledge. I can take care of him until I can get him to Tah.”
Rissa starts to protest, but Clive stops her. “I’m the better choice and you know it. If the two of you can just rein in your bullshit for a few days and work together.”
She looks at her brother, and something passes between them, whole conversations in the raising of eyebrows and the tilt of a chin.
“Fine,” Rissa says. “I’m going back to check on Caleb, and then we’ll get the hell out of here. The sooner we finish this, the better.” And she’s gone, I assume to Caleb for her good-byes.
Clive sighs, eyes on his sister’s back.
“I can handle Rissa,” I reassure him.
“I know you can, Maggie. But I wish you wouldn’t. She didn’t mean anything. She was just worried about Caleb and needed a target to take it out on, that’s all.”
“I’m not volunteering. She sucker punched me, and you and I both know she’s lucky I didn’t kill her for it.”
He shakes his head. “Putting you two together is like sticking two cats in a bag.” He glances at Mósí, looking sheepish. “Sorry. I just hope you don’t tear each other apart before you get to Kai. She’s angry, but she knows it’s not Kai’s fault, not really.”
“Are you sure?”
He studies me for a moment. “You two are a lot alike,” he says.
I make a noise.
“No, seriously. Rissa’s fierce because she loves her family. She would do anything for us. I’m the same. I get that.”
“If you recall, I don’t have a family.”
“I remember,” he says. “And I think maybe you like it that way.”
“What?”
“Don’t take it the wrong way. I just mean that when something is part of your identity for so long, even if it’s not a good thing, it’s hard to let it go. Even if maybe you should.”
“I let Tah move in, didn’t I? And before this, I was working with the Thirsty Boys. Hell, I’m watching over Ben, wherever she is. I’m practically a goddamn auntie!”
“Maybe not quite, but it’s a start,” he admits, his mouth leaning into a smile. “I mean, for someone with your rep. Look, just remember, Rissa’s my sister, Grace’s daughter. We love her.”
“That’s your problem.”
His smile becomes a full-on grin. “I suppose it is. Just try not to stab her, okay?”
“I won’t unless she hits me again.”
He raises his hands in surrender. “That’s all I can ask. I’ll go fetch Ben. She in the mess hall?”
Once Clive is gone, Mósí and I head back to the bikes. But something’s not right. Mósí keeps making little noises, blowing her breath out in short exasperated puffs. Clearly agitated.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her, worried that there’s something bad that I’m missing.
She blinks big eyes at me, hands on her hips. “Cats in a bag!” she exclaims. “Who is putting cats in a bag?! Is this a common five-fingered activity?”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
She glares at me, trying to decide if I’m lying. Finally, she huffs out a breath and says indignantly, “I never!”
Chapter 21
We head through the gate in the Wall about an hour before nightfall. Ben rides with me, and Rissa on the bike with Mósí’s sidecar. The darkness Mósí and I saw through the gate turns out to be more of an accident of the Wall’s height throwing shadows into the canyon beyond and not something ominously supernatural. A hundred yards out, we leave the deep shade of the Wall behind, and a gray winter sky reveals itself—blotchy clouds scuttling high and thin across a fading evening sky. Sunlight, or at least a weak semblance of it.
The path we are on curves through high sandstone walls, striped white and orange and brown by the shifting desert. Sand eddies in pools under a seemingly constant wind that howls low and mournful through the rocky canyons. No signs of life here, not even the dull hum of insects. Which, after our encounters with the locust, I don’t mind as much as I probably should.
A deep uneasiness settles over me as we enter the Malpais. Leaving Dinétah feels like ripping something vital from my body, something I need to keep breathing, keep my heart beating in my chest. Maybe it’s sentiment, but all my life I’ve believed that the Diyin Dine’é put us between the four sacred mountains for a reason. That we Diné are part of this land as much as any mountain or valley or stream. We are it, and it is in us, and out here, in this wasteland, none of that feels true. Mósí said being Diné is a constant, something that cannot change. That one cannot stop being Diné, even in a place where Dinétah cannot be reached. So maybe if the Bik’e’áyéeii can do it, a simple five-fingered girl like me can too.
I shiver, cold. Huddle down on the bike and try to ignore the uneasy feeling, the sense of being forsaken. But it’s not easy.
We follow the dirt path for half an hour as it wends its way out of the cliffs until it dead-ends into a four-lane highway. The blacktop on the highway is still smooth in some places. Worn but whole. In others it’s gutted, broken up to rubble like some massive hand came down and smashed the earth. The god-size potholes make for slow going. Better on our nimble bikes that can thread through breaks in the road than in wider, four-wheeled vehicles that will have to find more difficult ways to get around. We know from the surveillance tape that Gideon is in a car or truck of some kind, so maybe that works to our advantage. A thin hope, but that’s all I’ve got.
There are signs other travelers have passed this way. That smell of oil, for one, thick in the air. And the graveyard of abandoned vehicles around us, some left in the middle of the highway, most pulled to the side before they gave out in the heat of the day or ran out of fuel. But no people.
“Where is everyone?” Ben asks through her commlink, clearly thinking the same thing.
“Most travelers settle in somewhere safe once the sun starts to set,” Mósí says. “Probably in the cliffs around us, out of sight. The Mother Road is not safe in the dark.”
“Now you tell us,” Rissa quips, but she’s not serious. We already know. Danger flavors the air out here. We know something will come for us. We just don’t know what. Or when.
“If Mósí’s map is right,” I say, “we’ve got a couple of hours until we hit Joseph City. We should be able to rest there. Refuel. Maybe someone there’s heard of Amangiri.” Amangiri, the place where Caleb said we should bring the Godslayer, which, for now, I admit must mean me. We looked over the map but couldn’t find anywhere called Amangiri along Route 66, so for now we head west and hope the place reveals itself to us somewhere along the way.
“What’s in Joseph City, again?” Ben asks.
“It’s a Mormon settlement. There’s a handful of independent wards scattered through the Malpais, separate from the Kingdom. Joseph City is one of them. My brother used to go there sometimes to trade.”
“Clive?” Ben asks, sounding curious.
“My older brother,” Rissa says. “Cletus.”
“Oh, I didn’t meet him. Was he at the All-American?”