As always, many thanks are due to Alexandra Machinist, my brilliant agent. Thanks as well to my peerless and patient editor Rachel Kahan; Tom Jacobson; Monnie Wills; Dr. Kira Chow, for her read of the manuscript and medical advice; and to Kerri Keslow, for the use of the names of her sons, Parker and Weston.
This is a work of fiction. However, there was a survivor of the ill-fated Narváez expedition named Juan Ortiz who lived among the Uzita. Ortiz was reportedly saved from a horrible death when the daughter of the Uzita’s chief pleaded with her father to spare him.
The search for a cure for aging—a biological fountain of youth—is also very real, as detailed in Jonathan Weiner’s excellent Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality. It describes the work of Aubrey de Grey and other gerontologists who seek to solve what de Grey calls the Seven Deadly Things, the ways in which our bodies break down and age and betray us. For anyone investigating the possibilities of an engineered immortal lifespan, that book is the place to start.
The horrific toll of the ongoing drug war in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is described in Charles Bowden’s remarkable book Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields.
The number of deserters and resignations from the U.S. Army during the Second Seminole War, as well as other facts about the Seminole wars, are taken from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present.
Shako and Simon’s language lesson is not in Uzita but in Creek, which I took from http://native-languages.org, the website of Native Languages of America, an organization dedicated to preserving Native American languages. The websites for the Creek Language Project at the College of William and Mary (http://lingspace.wm.edu/lingspace/creek/) and the Seminole Tribe of Florida (http://www.semtribe.com/) were also helpful.
Any errors are mine alone, as are any alterations I’ve made in history and geography.