She wakes to pressure of Kirsten’s body against hers, her still-bandaged left hand held lightly in her lover’s right. The bright head rests just as lightly on her shoulder, and she opens her eyes to its silver-gilt sheen. “Nun lila hopa.” She barely breathes the words, not wanting to wake Kirsten. “Nun lila hopa.”
“Thank you,” Kirsten says quite clearly, and Koda can just see the twitch of her mouth as the corners turn up in a smile. “I’m not asleep.”
“You should be, cante sukye. You need rest worse than I do.”
Kirsten lifts her head with a sigh. “I’m fine. Really. All it took was a couple nights’ good sleep.”
“That was quite a hike.” Koda cannot quite picture the map of northern Colorado and is not quite sure she would know Craig if she saw it, but she knows how far they are from the state line here on this mountain. She knows that the country gets no easier for a hundred miles or more. It is mostly vertical, just as this narrow valley is.
Kirsten shrugs. “Piece of cake, compared to that last high pass over the Medicine Bows. I went, I got the stuff, I came back. Nothing to it.”
“Mmm,” says Koda.
“What?”
“You never have said just what decided you to go to Craig. Instead of, say, Columbine. Or Steamboat Springs—that’s pretty close, too.”
Kirsten does not answer, and Koda begins to think she will not. Then she says, “It was him.”
Koda takes note of the unspoken capital H and italics. Him. “Who’s him?”
“Him. My pet delusion.”
There is only one male creature that Koda knows of that Kirsten regards, sporadically, as an hallucination. “Your raccoon, you mean? Your spirit animal?”
“Yeah.” There is a long pause. Then, “He showed up in a white coat and wrote a prescription. Dr. Kunz.”
The image floats up in her own mind, vivid, of a raccoon in a lab coat, stethoscope slung across his shoulders. With an effort, she keeps her face straight and says seriously, “For the Levaquin?”
“Yeah. And then he told me where to find it. I went, and it was there.”
Koda strokes Kirsten’s hair, running the fingers of her good hand through the silky strands. She may be Inktomi Zizi the warrior, but as a Lakota, she is still a work in progress. “You know, you’re going to offend him if you keep calling Wika Tegalega a delusion.”
“All right. An hallucination.”
“How would an hallucination know where to find the antibiotic?”
“My subconscious, that’s all.”
For a long moment, Koda remains silent. She can sense something held back, something besides Kirsten’s ambivalence about her encounter with another walker between worlds. Gently she says, “Do you think Wa Uspewikakiyape was an hallucination?”
“Your wolf? No!” Kirsten’s head comes up sharply. “I mean—I saw him, I—”
“And you saw your raccoon, too, didn’t you? I seem to remember he messed up your shoes in a very visible, tangible way.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?”
Very carefully Kirsten draws away from her, sitting back on her heels so that she can face Dakota. She says, “But it wasn’t just him. There was another—creature. A black wolf, with blue eyes. It pulled me up a snowbank when I twisted my ankle. It brought me a crutch. That’s what St. Bernards do. Not wolves.”
“Well, not as a rule,” Koda says mildly.
“But they do occasionally, huh? Black, blue-eyed wolves? Lakota shaman wolves.”
“Occasionally, yes.”
The breath goes out of Kirsten in a rush. “Oh boy. I’m not sure I— Shit.” She shakes her head as if to clear it. “But that’s normal in your culture, isn’t it? The fox out in the chicken house just may be Aunt Matilda, huh?”
“Great-Aunt Matilda,” Koda says solemnly, “is very fond of chicken. But she likes it fried. With gravy.”
“You’re laughing at me!”
“No.” She reaches out to draw Kirsten close again. “If it’s hard for you now, just let it go. No one’s going to ask you to accept things you’re uncomfortable with. Give it time.” Then, “What is it? There’s something else, isn’t there?”
With that, Kirsten turns to her again, her face against Koda’s shoulder, her hand gripping fiercely. Dakota feels her nod, an abrupt movement against her arm. “I didn’t want to tell you when you were so sick. I wanted to wait another day or two.”
“Tell me now. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it together.” Koda feels Kirsten’s muscles tense under her hand, her whole body going rigid. “Tell me.”
“They’re killing babies.” It comes out on one breath, desperate as a gasp for air in drowning water. “Newborns, infants, toddlers. They were all tossed out into a pit at the back of the clinic.”
“Just babies? No older kids, no adults?”
Kirsten shakes her head violently. “I don’t know. I didn’t see any. But I didn’t stay for a second look, either.”
It does not make sense. Not that the general slaughter of the uprising makes any. If you’re going to capture women to breed, go to great lengths to confine and impregnate them, presumably what you want is the babies. Any babies, given that the droids have not been exactly fastidious about the studs. So why destroy the desired product?
Maybe the droids had killed the boys? No livestock breeder keeps excess males. Bull calves become hamburger; all roosters but a few end up in the frying pan.
Clearly the droids are not eating the babies. Breeding slaves, maybe? But for whom? Slaves would not be culled by gender; every society that has ever bought and sold humans has valued strong male workers. Has valued breeding females, too, so at least that part fits. But if slaves, where is that market? Who are the buyers?
Finally she says, “I don’t understand it, cante sukye. I don’t understand it at all.” A shiver passes over her skin. Shadows have lengthened; the sun has dropped below the tops of the trees. “Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold out here.”
*
“Now I remember why I’ve always hated shopping.”
Koda picks her way through the remains of a sporting goods store, stepping carefully through the spilled tennis and golf balls scattered across the floor. Against the walls, the locked cabinets that once held guns have been broken open, their sliding lexan doors in shards behind the counters. In one dark corner stands a rack that once held basketball jerseys, judging by the scraps of brightly-colored mesh now piled beneath it. From somewhere behind it comes a rustle and the sound of small feet scrabbling on the floor tiles, punctuated by grunts and a threatening hiss. Asi gives a pleading whine, his head up, tail straight as a standard.
“Possum,” says Kirsten from behind a counter that still stands largely intact, “Mama Possum.” The drawers have been thoroughly looted of ammunition, gun oil and other useful items. Her head appears above the glass top of the display case, and she aims a frown at Asi. “Don’t even think about it, Deppity Dawg. You don’t need to get chewed up again.” Asi whines again but stands down, leaving the store’s residents in peace. Returning to her rummaging under the counter, Kirsten adds, “At least you could find stuff to fit. ‘Petite’ is a lot larger than it used to be.”
“Small but mighty.” Koda flashes her a grin. “What hasn’t been carted off or ruined by the weather has been co-opted by the critters.” Still, this modest strip mall is tame compared to the sprawling wreckage of the Wal-Mart on the north side. At least one pack of coyotes had moved in, denning among the fallen I-beams and the slabs of collapsed ceiling, sharing their quarters, judging by the limewash on the walls and the castings on the floor, with a pair of owls and innumerable mice and rats. They have assiduously avoided the business district with its tall office towers rearing up against the purple-grey bulk of the mountains and the sprawling Temple complex, all of which offer prime opportunities for armed bands to fort up. After The Elk Mountain Incident, which has permanently acquired capital letters after the manner of The Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge or The Ox-Bow, Koda will be perfectly happy if they never see another human between now and their return to Ellsworth.