Gawea was a kind of goblin. When she was two and did not want to go to bed, Oma told her, the lantern shattered and licked the floor with a tongue of fire. When she was three, she could whistle and call a bird fluttering from a branch to her shoulder. When she was four, she began to work in their garden and the vegetables grew oversize and the flowers remained in bloom through the fall. When she was five and wandered away from the cabin alone, Oma spanked her and woke up the next morning covered with hundreds of spider bites.
Oma read stories to her, played games with her, taught her how to sew and knit and cook, how to gut a fish, butcher an elk, and though Gawea could talk—in a tiny, calm voice—she never asked questions, only gave answers. Sometimes it seemed she had another way of communicating with the world, plugged in to a connection unavailable to the rest of them. And more than once Oma found herself fetching a cup of water that Gawea reached for eagerly, though she never asked for it.
Oma kept a picture of her daughter, Juliana, a charcoal sketch, the frame stained darkly along the right side from all the time she spent holding it in her hand. Sometimes she and Gawea went hunting. Not for deer or elk or bear, but for information. About the men who had come in the night. They found other villages scorched and riddled with bones. Sometimes dried-out corpses hung from trees like cocoons, and sometimes spears bristled the ground, their tips topped by skulls. They found survivors, mostly old men and women, who told them about a long parade of wheeled cages crammed with men and women and children.
“Which way did they go?”
“That way,” the old man said, pointing north. “Or maybe that way.” West.
“Thank you,” Oma said, and the old man said, “I wouldn’t go that way. I’d stay as far away as you can from there. There’s a darkness rising.”
Then Oma died. Her glands swelled—in her armpits, below her jaw—into lumps, what they knew must be cancer. She became feverish. Her sweat smelled like sulfur. She lost her appetite and slept most of the day and thinned to a skeleton with loose, papery skin. After Gawea buried her in the backyard, she remained by the hump of dirt for hours, and the sky steadily filled with shrieking birds. The birds always listened.
There was nothing for her here. Her sense of aloneness was so complete, so consuming, that the rest of the world blurred away, and there was only her mother’s face sketched in charcoal. Her oma believed her alive. So did Gawea. She was sad and scared, but Oma taught her what she needed to know to live, and she was fourteen now, not a woman but the beginning of one.
She hiked across Colorado and into Utah and in her pack she carried the sketch. When she smelled smoke, when she happened upon trails that carried footprints and wheel ruts, when she spotted lamplight flaring through the woods, she watched for a long time before she approached. Sometimes people fired arrows or threw rocks at her. And sometimes they talked, though none seemed eager to offer much of themselves to the black-eyed girl.
Many told stories about the slavers, about the wagon trains driven west, about the drumbeats they sometimes heard that took over their pulse and made them fear the night and what it might bring.
The high-walled valley was a bowl of fissured clay, empty of anything except a single boulder deposited there by a glacier. The boulder was pocked and red and round, its own tiny planet. She rested in the shade of it. The day was so hot her lungs felt scalded. She was in Utah, near Salt Lake City, or so she believed from studying her map. She snacked on beef jerky, smoked fish. She drank from her canteen, then spared a few drops to make mud on her palm to spread on her sunburn. She took off her hat and fanned her face and gave up when she felt no relief.
She curled up, hoping to sleep, to hike again after the sun set. So she did not notice, a long way off, near the neck of the valley, a ribbon of dust dirtying the sky, kicked up by a caravan of oxen and carts. Nor did she notice the trembling in the ground. Their slow progress matched the sun—it was as if they were pacing each other—both of them rolling along for the next hour, the sun centering the sky just as the first of the carts heaved to a stop beside the boulder.
It was too late to hide.
The nightmare parade consisted of twenty cages, some built from wood and barbed wire, many of them repurposed truck beds with cages welded over the top, each dragged by two rib-slatted horses or oxen that foamed with sweat and bled at the yokes. The wheels of their caravan cut deep furrows in the clay. Men and women and children peeked out of the cages. Their lips were cracked and bleeding. Those with white faces were a mess of peeling, reddened skin. A few muttered and sobbed, but most observed her silently.
The boulder offered the only shade in the valley, and burrowed beneath rested a jeweled nest of lizards and snakes. One of them rattled its tail now, and the rest joined in, making a sound like a storm of gravel.
The man in the lead cart wore cracked sunglasses and a round-brimmed hat with what looked like a bite taken out of it. His beard had a white streak waterfalling down its middle. “Well, well.”
The rattling faded, snake by snake.
He dropped down stiffly from his perch. His boots shattered the crisp patina and a dust cloud rose and breezed away. He jerked a knife from his belt and stepped toward her, ready for trouble. She trembled. Cast down her eyes.
“She alone?” said one of the other drivers.
“Looks it.”
The man smelled unwashed, and she breathed in the thick, oily flavor of him. She wanted to run, but this was what she had been looking for—wasn’t it? By finding them she might find her mother. The man nudged up her chin—and it was only then that he noticed her eyes, black and empty, watching him. He took a step back.
“What?” the other driver asked.
“Something wrong with her.”