“I knew she should exist. And now that I know she’s real, we will do whatever we have to do to bring her home.”
Arguing would be pointless. Thomas had anticipated this moment for too long. Alex nodded, his mind working angles.
Like this reaction wasn’t exactly what you wanted: an excuse to do whatever it takes to bring in the perfect Spark. The perfect weapon.
“We can have both. I can make it happen.”
“Then do it.” Thomas stepped away, raised his arms to resume his workout. “But remember, she’s our priority now. Once we have her, we have the future.”
Chapter 5
Lena sat cross-legged on the hard-packed earth floor of the medicine woman’s home. Soft, bright wool pooled before her knees as she worked the yarn and knitting needles above her lap. For the first hours after the agents had driven her away, she’d paced restlessly between the small bluff rising above the arroyos and Santo Domingo to the east, watching agents move in and out of her home.
Finally Gloria, the Kewa woman closest to Lena, had tired of Lena’s temper and sharply told Lena to wait at Gloria’s adobe house. As the afternoon melted into evening, a trio of young women appeared at Gloria’s door. They had gone to Lena’s home to retrieve clothing for her, as well as her knitting and needles.
Her mind worked as her fingers threw the yarn and moved the needles at a furious pace, everything soothing and meditative about the activity gone. She had turned her focus down to her hands, but instead of yarn and needles she saw Reyes and Lucas standing in her doorway and agents darting in and out like wasps. Could she reclaim her home?
It’s done. It’s done. No going back.
The rage built. It beat in tandem with the violence of her feedback headache. She needed to ground, but she couldn’t trust the agents were truly gone. Instead, she knitted.
What about Danny? If they’d made the appointment through him, would they arrest him now? Had another Gracey man been put in danger because of her? The memory of the night the men had come to tell her mother that her father’s body had been found, and the devastated, blaming eyes of her sister, rose up like dark water. She fled from it, as she always did, blinking away from her thoughts before the memory could suck her back down into the drowning depths of grief.
Her head jerked up. The light inside the little house had dimmed with evening, and Gloria entered through the front, a basket of eggs in one hand and an earthen jug in the other. She caught Lena’s attention.
“Light the lamp,” she said. “My hands are full of your dinner. Then we’ll talk.”
At home, Lena would simply spark it, but she couldn’t spark anything until she’d grounded. She rose to use tongs to pull an ember from the little round-bellied stove and lit the wick of the fat lamp on the table in the middle of the room. When she was done, she returned the ember to the stove.
“Put water on to boil. And heat the comal,” Gloria told her, referring to the large flat frying pan. She dipped out blue cornmeal and mesquite flour and mixed it in a chipped bowl. While she dropped spoonfuls of batter onto the hot comal and used her strong fingers to break apart pinon nuts and scatter them over the cakes, Lena set the table.
In moments, Gloria had flipped the pancakes onto the waiting plates and they were sitting together, a covered bowl of honey on the table between them. The crunch of the bits of toasted pine nuts and the distinctive tangy sweet flavor of the mesquite flour improved Lena’s mood.
Of course, her bliss might be related to her terrible sweet tooth. She pinched the last bite of the delicious cakes between her fingers, swirled it in honey, and shoved it into her mouth. She licked her fingers.
Plenty of mesquite flour and honey in storage up at the house. I should barter for more baking powder and cornmeal.
The realization that she didn’t have plenty of anything anymore hit like a slap in the face. How could she plan her cooking? It wasn’t even safe to return home. The delicious dinner settled like a hard ball in her stomach.
Gloria spoke to her in English now, the words coming in the odd, jerking cadence of a native speaker of Keresan. “It is hard to think of making a choice now, but you have to decide whether you are staying or going.”
Lena swallowed. “Am I allowed to stay here?”
Gloria made a small shrug. “It’s not for me to decide. Before you ask, you should think about what you ask of us.”
Lena stared at her. “I’m a hard worker. I would never be a burden, and I can help—”
Gloria shook her head. “It isn’t food and shelter that will cost us. It will be defending our friend from those who return for her.”
Lena’s shoulders slumped again, and her gaze returned to her empty plate with the bits of cake and nuts sticking in honey.