CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

TUESDAY

Starr was trapped in a nightmare—in a small, dark space where she couldn’t move her arms. She launched herself upright but was stopped by a surface that was hard and damp. It felt like she was underground.

“Quinn,” Starr said, the word a small hope in the darkness.

“Whoa, whoa, stay down,” Chenoa said. “You’re hurt.”

“Get me out, get me out,” Starr said, low and distinct to keep the fear at bay. Don’t panic, she thought. Find Quinn. “Get me out.”

“You stay in here. We have to stay warm,” Chenoa said. “I’m trying to start a fire. To keep us…”

Starr began pulling herself toward the light of an opening by pressing the heels of her boots on the ground. It was a strategy of desperate inches. Her side burned, and the heat rose each time she moved.

“Wait,” Chenoa said. “I’ve about got it.”

The dim interior brightened. A cave, Starr thought, not a grave. It all came rushing back to her, the gunshot, the knife fight, Chenoa leaving her in the cave…Bernard. He was still out there, a threat.

“Okay, that should do it, and then we’ll…” Chenoa stopped talking. Starr was still working her body toward the mouth of the cave.

“Fine,” Chenoa said, exasperated. “Have it your way.”

Starr felt hands on her ankles and the scratch of gravel on her back as Chenoa pulled her outside. Thank God. Outside.

Starr slouched against a cold rock wall beside the cave’s opening, a fire crackling pleasantly inside, the heat beginning to radiate from the mouth of the cave. She fought to keep her eyes open. In the ravine, the first light of dawn illuminated a body—Holder’s. That meant she still had to watch for Bernard, to stay vigilant.

Looking back into the cave she’d just escaped, Starr could see that the light would never fully reach into its depths.

Chenoa’s form took shape as Starr’s eyes adjusted to the lifting of the darkness, but the idiocy of her own sludgy mind held her down.

Chenoa was here. Starr had found her.

But Quinn? Still gone.

The weight of her confusion made her want to weep. A shiny black beetle with orange-red bands on its back scurried along the rocks at Starr’s feet, its movements quick and purposeful.

“See those antennae?” Chenoa said, crouching next to Starr, pointing to the beetle and then pulling a thick coat around herself.

Where had she gotten that coat? Starr wondered. Had Bernard been wearing it?

It had stopped snowing sometime during the night, and every surface around them sparkled as if the spirits had strewn glitter.

“Those antennae”—Chenoa pointed to the beetle again—“contain special chemical receptors to detect dead meat. They’re so sensitive that they can detect a carcass from a long distance, and very quickly—usually within an hour of the animal’s death.”

The beetle crawled up Starr’s boot and onto the leg of her uniform pants. Chenoa set a knife on Starr’s lap. It was the one they’d used to free themselves, the one Bernard had attacked her with outside the cave, the one responsible for the red stain blooming on her left side.

“After I cut my ties with the knife,” Chenoa said, “I saw red. I thought that was just a saying, but I’m not kidding. I literally saw red, I was so angry. I wasn’t thinking about you at all when I left the cave. I was thinking about them, those men. Not just Bernard, but every man who’s made women afraid to walk after dark or caused us to check the backseat of a car when we get in or had us looking over our shoulders. What right did they have to interrupt my life, any woman’s life? They thought they could hurt me, hurt any woman they chose. I remembered what Grandmother told me, how to survive. I thought of Loxie, of every girl, every woman, whose life had ended at the hands of a man, whether she was dead and buried or just dead inside. What if every woman met violence with violence? What if we made sure the men who tried to harm us could never do it again, not to anyone…?”

“There’d be a lot fewer men fucking around, that’s what.”

“I needed to stop them. Then…” She hesitated. “I saw Bernard shoot Holder.” Starr looked at Holder’s body.

“After the gunshot, I couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t see”—Chenoa pointed to another form, lifeless on the rocks, then looked down at her feet—“until my senses rushed back to me, but not just my senses, something larger than myself. Ancient. Everywhere. My head filled with the sound of hooves beating like drums.”

Chenoa went silent. Starr felt her eyelids slipping down, down.

“I don’t know how to describe it. No one will ever believe me, but I don’t care. I know how it felt. The sound was inside me and all around me. Part of every rock, each tree, every cell, every fiber of my skin, my fur. I stomped and kicked, but it wasn’t until…”

Chenoa looked at Starr for a long moment.

“It was the antlers,” she said. “That’s what took care of him.”

“Justice,” Starr said, and smiled grimly.

Starr looked again at the bodies, first at Holder’s and then at the smaller one lying a few feet farther away. She couldn’t tell it was Bernard’s, but she was willing to take Chenoa’s word for it. Bernard’s head was a bloody mass, swollen beyond recognition, and beyond him, there was something else.

Starr’s teeth began to chatter as she squinted into the distance. She wondered if this was the end, if she had crossed a barrier, if a veil had been lifted between worlds. She could clearly see the silhouette of a beautiful woman turned to the rising sun, her crown of antlers glorious and deadly.

“You were her,” Starr said. From far away, she heard the slur in her speech. Had she said that aloud?

“What?”

“You’ll always carry her with you,” said Starr. “Don’t you see? You’ll be okay.”

Starr curled her fingers around the handle of the knife in her lap as Chenoa settled beside her.

This young woman was smart. Once, Starr had known every little thing about a girl like that: how it felt to brush her hair, watch her pick onions out of every casserole, burrow into the tenderness of a hug.

Starr grieved—would always grieve—the promise of that girl’s future. There were so many ways it could have turned out, and in her mind she’d traveled every one of them.

A string of pink drool slipped from Starr’s mouth and onto the knife. It was difficult to control the bobbing of her head, the intense need to close her eyes. And what about her own future? Maybe if she’d been raised here, been part of the rez, part of an extended family tree whose broken branches remained inextricably tied to one another, she would know about caves, about ghosts, about half lives and how to cure them.

Chenoa made a small sound and shifted closer, and Starr could feel the memory of Quinn’s warm frame pressing against her like a gift.

She thought of the old woman and of Odeina, of daughters lost and found, of Deer Woman. Cautious. Powerful. Imbued with the strength to avenge, whether by hoof or by old magic descended through the ages.

Starr and Chenoa stared at the bodies, heard in the distance a round of cries. Help had come for them.

“Put it all on me,” Starr said to the girl. “The bodies. This is on me.”

Starr wanted to pat Chenoa’s hand, to pull her into a protective embrace. Instead, she used the last of her strength to fumble open the snap on the front pocket of her uniform shirt, then light an awkwardly bent joint. As the flame flashed and the paper burned, she watched a pool of crimson spread beside her, flowing from her body and onto the rocks that had seen a million lives, large and small, pass over them. The burying beetle marched on.

Maybe this was the place of her salvation.

Maybe she finally understood where she belonged in the world.

Half in. Half out. A stranger between nations.