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Published by
Blue Works,
a division of
Windstorm Creative

Excerpts

Chapter 1: Saskia's Window | Chapter 2: The Cliffs

Chapter 1: Saskia's Window

The black pyramid stands like a lone mountain towering above the vast and barren desert. Beneath a cloudless sky and a blazing sun it shimmers, an island in an orange sea. Endless rows of white windmills stretch out toward the horizon, rising up from the glowing sand like a legion of soldiers encircling a fortress. Little stirs in the scorching late afternoon heat except for a swarm of blue and orange barn swallows, catching insects in the shade of the pyramid. The glossy fork-tailed birds dart back and forth across the giant shadow as it moves slowly to the east across the shifting sands, like the hand of a giant clock. The sound of liquids pumping in and out of the pyramid through underground pipes fills the hot, dry desert air, but high above, near the tip, there is only the quiet echo of lenses, focusing in and out. Thousands of cameras built into the pyramid’s western wall stare out across the empty desert at the distant scrub brush and cactus-covered plains, the forested foothills and the jagged peaks of the Smokestack Mountains, looming over the western skyline. It is these faraway places that they search, methodically probing the outside world for plants, animals and other natural beauty to record and send to the people living behind the pyramid’s walls.

Inside the pyramid, Saskia taps her binoculars against a slanted window while watching a European house sparrow hop-scratch for insects, sixty-eight miles away. She sits cross-legged atop a giant green throw pillow; two red braids, a bit longer than the rest of her shoulder-length black hair, hang down over her slender coffee-colored shoulders. On the front of her white tank top there is a picture of a great blue heron spearing a fish in a patch of reeds.

The sparrow twitches its head from side to side, and then suddenly snatches a shiny black beetle out from under a leaf. Saskia takes a picture with the camera built into her binoculars just before the insect’s long black and white antennae disappear inside the bird’s beak.

She holds down a button on top of the lenses until the two numbers spinning in the blackness of her peripheral vision read ninety-five. One is more likely to see birds and other animals in the foothills, ninety-five miles away from the pyramid, than in the treeless plains. She scans the hillside and soon finds a red-shafted flicker clinging to the trunk of a dead oak tree, rotting amidst a grove of salt cedars. The flicker takes to the air and Saskia follows it up into the mountains along an old abandoned road, admiring the red stripe across its gray cheek. She pauses for a moment, staring at the crumbling asphalt, and tries to imagine a car driving down the road, an image from a world, now fallen into ruin, which she has never known.

Something green suddenly shoots across her field of vision and she catches a glimpse of blue beneath a gliding lizard’s outstretched legs just before it disappears into the crown of a large salt cedar. Blue-throated sky lizard, she thinks, female. Saskia uncrosses her legs and shakes her bare foot that has fallen asleep. Her toenails are painted silver and gold. She records the sighting, typing it into the teletriangle sitting on the windowsill. Beside the humming device sits three basil plants, a small squat cactus and a long box of rosemary, oregano, sage and other herbs.

The teletriangle was a birthday present given to her years ago by her father, who no longer lives with them. In the advertisements it proclaims: “Teletriangles can do anything you need and everything you want! Play games, listen to music and stories, look up information, watch movies or even draw!” Saskia, however, uses it mostly to store pictures and data about the animals she has seen in the outside world. As the tingling pins and needles surge through her foot, she pounds it against the white-tiled floor, and then squeezes her big toe.

She carefully adjusts the eyepiece of the spotting scope set-up in front of the window, focusing in on a live oak tree that she has been watching over the past few days. Four round galls bulge out from one of its branches. It is still early in the spring, but Saskia does not want to miss seeing the newly formed wasps emerge. Tiny black ants cover the surface of the galls, sucking the sweet juice inside and taking it down the trunk of the tree to their underground home. A large brown hornet hovering above the branch seizes one of the ants and carries it away. The wallphone rings and Saskia looks up. “Answer,” she says.

“I’ll get it,” yells her brother from his bedroom.

“I already got it!” she snaps. “Hello?”

“Hey, Saskia.”

“Hi, Vic. ¿Qué tal?”

“Just getting ready for the rehearsal. I’m at Sam’s. Damen went to get his sheet music ‘cause he left it at home, and the rest of us are about to leave for the theater. Anyway, lots of rushing around. Turn on the screen so I can see you.”

“It’s not working. Dakota threw a temper tantrum yesterday because my mom wouldn’t let him buy some stupid game that he wanted. He threw his shoe at the screen and cracked it. Some guy’s supposed to come fix it tomorrow.”

Vic laughs. “Your brother sure is a piece of work. That’s too bad. I was hoping to get a look at you. You looked so hot at school on Friday in those new pants of yours.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious. Hey, are you still coming tonight?”

“I don’t know, Victor.”

“Come on, Saskia! You didn’t watch us last night either! Don’t be such a raisin!”

“I feel like staying in tonight, okay? I have a big ornithology test tomorrow and I haven’t studied all weekend. It’s only the rehearsal, right?” She nervously twists one of her red braids around her long fingers.

“All right, if you can’t make it tonight I won’t be mad, but I’m getting kind of tired of this. I like hanging out with you and all, but if you’re gonna spend all your time at home, studying and sitting in front of that window of yours, well, I have to move on.”

“I thought you already had,” snaps Saskia, pacing. “I heard you and Ashley left together after school on Friday.”

“Oh, she just wanted to hear that new song I wrote. Don’t get all butt-hurt. I know she’s your friend. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Saskia, it’s not like I’m gonna cheat on you or anything, but we’ve been going out for almost a month now, and, I didn’t want to say anything, but we still haven’t even had sex! What do you expect me to do?”

“My God! Is that the only thing you care about? Why can’t we just hang out for a while?”

“What, and spend all day staring out the window?” He sighs. “Look, I gotta go. I hope you come tonight. If not, I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

“Sure,” she says sarcastically, “say hello to Ashley for me.”

The wallphone clicks and Saskia lets out a sigh as she plops back down on the pillow. She ties up her red braids behind her head and anxiously turns the sparkling white gem in her nose ring, wondering if she should call him back and say that she’ll come to the rehearsal. It’s been three weeks now that they’ve been going out, and Saskia can’t decide if she wants to take things any further. He’s so cute, she thinks, and we had so much fun bowling the other night. I wish he wasn’t such an ass.

“Was that Victor?” asks Dakota, coming into the living room.

Saskia gives him a dirty look. “Maybe.”

“Well, I heard everything you said and it was him,” he taunts. He wears blue and green plaid shorts and a T-shirt with a picture of a cartoon cowboy riding a horse; his skin is lighter than his sister’s, but they have the same almond-shaped eyes and dark hair.

“You shouldn’t spy!” yells Saskia.

“I just wanted to see if it was my girlfriend May calling me for my birthday.”

“Dakota, you’re only six; that’s too young to have a girlfriend. Your birthday’s not for another week anyway.”

“Well, you’re only sixteen and you don’t know anything about girlfriends!”

“I’m seventeen! Now leave me alone. I’m doing something important.”

“No you’re not. Mom says you spend too much time staring out the window anyway!”

“I don’t care what Mom says! Now piss off! Go back to your room and play your stupid game or whatever it is you’ve been doing in there all afternoon.” Saskia stomps down the hallway and shouts at her bedroom door to open. She crashes down on the mattress and takes a thin container out of the dresser drawer. “Brat,” she says aloud, and swallows two orange pills.

Saskia’s nervous blue eyes search around the room for something to distract her but she skips past the same old animal posters on the wall as if they aren’t even there: a coiled rattlesnake on a rock, a tree frog hopping from a lily pad, a kestrel hovering above a field.

“Hello Jacques,” she says to a goldfish floating inside a glass bowl. “Are you hungry?” She sprinkles some flakes into the water and it swims up to eat them.

Saskia opens a small red box on the dresser and peers down at the three claws, jawbone and petrified owl pellet that lie inside, all given to her by her grandfather years ago. Two months have passed now since the last time she saw him, just after his operation, and Saskia feels despondent and guilty. They used to be close when she was younger and her family would visit her grandparents in the West Pyramid almost every month. But now, more then three years since her grandmother died and they put him in a nursing home, they rarely make the trip, and her grandfather has changed, in her mind, to an image and a voice that exist somewhere else, far away from her everyday life.

She runs her fingertip along the dull tip of one of the claws for what must be the hundredth time. Her grandfather told her that it belonged to a sea turtle that lived in the ocean long ago. Saskia imagines the turtle drifting through miles of clear water and it seems like the farthest thing away from her in the world. She lets out a deep sigh, wanting so badly to touch something new, something not made by people. Gradually the pills take effect and the tangled knot of thoughts inside her head begins to unwind and dissipate. Her tight fist slowly opens and her teeth unclench.

“What are you doing?” asks Dakota, peering into her room from the hallway.

“Nothing,” she snaps, closing the box. “Get the hell out!”

“Do you want to play a game with me on my tele?”
“No. ¡Vete!”

“Why don’t you like to play video games anymore?” he asks, disappointed. Saskia scoffs

and brushes past him down the hallway. “You used to be fun,” he whispers.

In the kitchen, she slides a frozen dinner tray into the oven and drops the wrapping into

the compost slot. When it’s ready, she carries the steaming tray into the living room, picks some rosemary and oregano, and sprinkles it over the bland watery noodles. Saskia checks on the galls again and then pans along the hillside with her binoculars, just below the base of the Smokestack Mountains, through flashes of bushes, rocks and trees. She pauses at the moldering remnants of an old mountain town she has forgotten the name of. What was it called? she wonders, studying the rusted-out cars and trucks that lie scattered about the few remaining buildings. A thick tangle of scotch broom has overgrown what used to be a playground built along a dried up creek bed. A jungle gym still stands among the yellow flowers but the swings have rotted away and the chains dance in the wind.

Saskia moves up a bit higher along the mountainside and continues searching for birds. A flock of ravens soars through the air above a field of boulders. What was that? She stops suddenly and goes back. There!Something running down the hill. A deer! She leans forward, bumping the slanted window with her binoculars, as she watches a pack of wild dogs nipping at the deer’s legs. Her heart begins to race. Coyotes!

Saskia zooms in and is immediately disappointed to see that what she thought was coyotes is just a pack of feral dogs, the descendants of pets from the time before the pyramids were built. Three of them are light brown and coyote sized, but the other two are white and have long ears that hang down past their jaws. Finally the deer tumbles down into the dust and the dogs are upon it. As she takes pictures of them tearing the flesh from the creature’s rear she feels excited but also sad at seeing yet another wild thing destroyed by a consequence of the previous world. She pans slowly along the deer’s body, stopping at the head. Its eye blinks and Saskia shivers, sensing its pain. She takes one last close up of a dog’s bloody jaws gnawing on a trembling hoof before setting down the binoculars and wiping the space on the window that has fogged from her breath.

“Incréible,” she says aloud, and types the description of what she saw into the keypad of the teletriangle. Saskia has not seen many large animals before and her hands tremble as she types. There was a ring-tailed cat last year that fell out of a tree when it was bitten by a snake and a goat that she saw taken down by fire ants when she was eleven. She can still picture the holes forming in the creature’s body as it fell to the ground covered in red ants.

“What are you looking at?” asks Dakota coming out of the kitchen with a handful of chocolate cookies. “Can I see?”

Saskia scowls and then tells him to put down the cookies first. Dakota wipes the crumbs from his hands and takes the binoculars from his sister. “Be careful,” she warns, putting her hands on his head to show him where to look.

“¡Caramba!” he says. “Dogs! Just like in my videogame!”

“Yeah, except these are real.”

“What are they eating?”

“A deer; I think it’s a female.”

As Saskia gazes at the distant mountains she thinks about how lucky they are to have a window. Much of the pyramid’s surface is covered with solar panels and hardly anyone she knows lives on an outside wall, much less one so high up on the western wall where there is a clear view of the mountains. Her father gave the apartment to her mother, Saskia and Dakota, when he left them three years ago. She looks down at her brother and is immediately annoyed, knowing that he doesn’t appreciate the window and hardly ever looks out of it. No one even cares anymore, she thinks. It’s as if they’ve forgotten the outside world even exists.

“Do you ever wish you could go outside?” she asks her brother.

“People can’t go outside,” he says, handing back the binoculars. “That’s impossible. It’s too hot.”

“People live outside in some places,” she argues, “just not in the southwest.”

“Where?” asks Dakota, doubtfully.

“Further to the north.”

“Yeah, right. Do you want to play a game of Predator Attack now? We can chase animals in jeeps and catch them with poison nets! Come on, it’s my new game. You haven’t seen it yet.”

“No,” she says, disgusted, and brings the binoculars back to her eyes.

“Can I have the rest of your noodles?” he asks.

“I really don’t give a shit. Just go away!”

Dakota takes the tray and sulks off to his room.

A lone vulture circles above the carcass and Saskia tries to imagine what its wings sound like moving in the wind. She contemplates her conversation with her brother and wonders how many other children in the pyramid believe that everyone in the world lives inside of Controlled Environments. They don’t even understand what the world is anymore, she thinks. It’s hard to imagine living outside when you’ve spent your whole life surrounded by walls...

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Chapter 2: The Cliffs

Abbie runs her callused fingertips down the smooth twisting trunk of a manzanita and catches the thin flakes of bark in a weasel-skin pouch hung round her neck. She looks up at Venus, shining brightly in the gathering dusk, and gazes wistfully into the west. As the twilight illuminating the horizon fades, darkness spreads across the western face of the Smokestack Mountains and stars begin to fill the hot night sky. The chirps and whistles of the birds fluttering about in the manzanitas suddenly go silent and Abbie lifts her head. A great horned owl dives down from the top of a ponderosa pine tree into a pile of boulders and comes up with a small furry pika in its talons. Dead needles fall from the upper branches of the tree and land in Abbie’s long dark hair, gleaming in the light of the rising moon. When the pouch of bark is full she slings it over her bare shoulder and creeps over the boulders toward her brothers, Tsultrum and Dober, who are collecting flowers on the other side.

“I don’t think they’re ready yet,” whispers Dober to his older brother. “The poison in these petals wouldn’t even kill a skunk. We should leave them and come back in a few days.”

Tsultrum picks a flower and examines its petals through the slits of his cautious eyes. A gust of wind lifts his long black hair up off his bare shoulders. Sweat glistens on the tip of his pointy chin. “They won’t be ready for another month if it doesn’t rain,” he whispers, “but we’ve almost run out of meat back in the cave and we need to hunt soon.”

A passing hummingbird pauses just above Dober’s long, tangled orange hair and buzzes back and forth. When he notices the vibrating of the bird’s wings, Dober turns suddenly and it zooms away. “I’m not a flower,” he grumbles. “I hate when they do that.” His brother smirks.

“Hey,” whispers Abbie, slipping down from a boulder into the grass. “¿Listo?”

“Almost,” whispers Tsultrum, wiping the sweat from his bare arms.

“I still haven’t picked any berries,” she continues, “but we can collect some on the way back. I got some bark for your poison oak, Dober.”

“How is your foot?” asks Tsultrum.

“It’s fine,” she whispers, looking down at her cedar-bark sandal.

Tsultrum picks up his spear and follows his younger brother and sister through the boulders toward the steep cliffs above them. A pair of jays at the top of a pine tree scolds them as they pass. Both boys are thin and wear a small bit of jackrabbit fur around their waists. Dober’s skin is much lighter than the others and his face and shoulders are covered with freckles. A quiver of arrows is strapped to his back. Abbie wears a wrap made of pica-skins that comes to just above her knees. Her skin is dark like Tsultrum’s, but unlike her brothers, her shoulders and waist are broad. They creep cautiously through the darkness, gathering berries from the manzanitas. A cloud covers the half moon and the crisscross patterns on the ground made by the light shining down through the pine trees fade.

Abbie rolls a berry between her fingers, thinking of the sweet cider that it will be ground into when they get back home. It is the first time in weeks that she has been out of the cave and she is happy to be up and about. Almost a moon ago, a hobo spider bit her on the foot while she was sleeping. At first the wound was small, but in time it turned into a large gaping hole, so painful that she couldn’t walk. Ever since then she has done little but rest in their cave, soaking her foot in herbs and warm water. Although she has mostly recovered from the bite, there is still pain when she steps down. “It’s hot tonight,” she whispers, wiping the sweat from the back of her neck.

“Maybe those clouds gathering around the peaks will open up,” whispers Tsultrum. “I wonder if this year the spring rains will fall.”

From out of the corner of her eye, Abbie sees a flock of juncos suddenly lift into the air. “Something’s coming,” she whispers.

Just after they have hidden behind a large boulder, a fox creeps out of the bushes and smells the air. It hops up on a rock, lifts its chin and sees them crouched down in the boulder field. The fox stares into Abbie’s eyes for a moment and then trots quickly down the hill into the darkness. “I haven’t seen a fox in a long time,” she whispers.

“For some reason they’ve been more cautious lately and have kept themselves hidden,” whispers Tsultrum.

“I forgot to get sap to make more arrows,” remembers Dober. He scrapes some off of a pine tree with a flat rock. Abbie stops at a fir tree and gathers a handful of needles to make tea. Tsultrum climbs up a crack in the steep cliff toward the mouth of the cave. It is not until he is just below the opening that he hears rustling from inside. He motions to his brother and sister to stay put, rubs some of the flower petals on the tip of his spear and creeps toward the entrance.

A small white goat comes clip clopping out of the cave and looks nervously toward the edge of the cliff. It starts to bound away but Tsultrum throws his spear and pierces the creature straight through its belly. The kid falls to the ground and soon it is dead.

“At least now we’ll have some carne,” says Tsultrum, pulling his spear from the carcass.

Suddenly a herd of goats pours out of the cave and Tsultrum jumps with fright, dropping the spear. The bleating goats bound down the mountainside, clip-clopping from boulder to boulder. Abbie throws her spear at one of them but she misses.

After the bleating of the goats fades into the darkness, Dober points at his brother and laughs. “Did you see his face,” he says, slapping his sister’s bare shoulder. “He was so scared!”

Abbie climbs up the crack in the cliff to the entrance of the cave and leans over the rock wall built beside it. “They didn’t get into the garden,” she says. “I’m glad we decided to build the wall higher last week.”

“Let’s see how much damage they did,” says Tsultrum, annoyed. He kneels down and

says a prayer of thanksgiving over the body of the goat before carrying it by one of its small rounded horns into the dark cave. Abbie and Dober follow behind him, snickering.

Inside, it smells like goat and urine. Many of the food baskets are torn and the acorn flour that Abbie had pounded the day before is sprinkled across the floor of the cave. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t make cakes from the flour yesterday,” she says, holding up a small oil lamp made of stone.

Tsultrum sets the kid onto a slanted stone platform and licks the blood off his forearm. He picks up a shard of striped pottery and throws it down in disgust. The sliver of clay clinks against some stones near the entrance of the cave.

“They broke Abuela’s prayer beads,” says Dober sadly, holding up a string of brown seeds. He slumps down against the wall of the cave. “It’s been almost two moons now since she died. It feels like much longer though.”

“We should not speak of the dead,” says Tsultrum. “Let their spirits rest.”

“I told you that someone should’ve stayed back to watch the cave,” says Dober. “Why won’t you ever let us go out alone? It’s going to smell in here for days.”

“Dober, you and Abbie go down the cliffs alone all the time…”

“But not far!”

“That’s because you’re both still too young to go out alone,” says Tsultrum firmly. “You know the rules. Now let’s dress this goat so we can eat. At least he will taste better than all the marmots we’ve been eating lately.”

“Can’t we go back down the cliff to dress it?” asks Dober, pulling his tangled hair out of his face and tying it up in a bun on top of his head. “It smells like pee in here.”

“Since we’ve already got him in here we might as well not carry him all the way back down,” says Tsultrum. “We’ll just have to be careful not to make a mess.”

“He’s not that heavy,” says Dober. “I bet I could carry him down there myself.”

“We shouldn’t waste our energy,” says Tsultrum. “Besides, we still don’t know what it was that was howling the other night.”

“But I can barely breathe,” whines Dober. “Can we at least sleep in one of the other caves today?”

“No,” says Tsultrum, turning the goat onto its back. “They’re all filled with spiders and scat. Remember that day we stayed in one of the other caves and you wound up getting a porcupine quill stuck in your leg?”

Dober cuts loose the tendon from the back of one of the legs and starts to pull it off but Tsultrum stops him. “Hold on,” he says, holding the goat by its forelegs, “be patient.”

Abbie slides her obsidian blade up the goat’s belly, careful not to puncture any organs. She cuts a hole around the anus and then saws through the pelvis with a large stone blade. Dober collects the blood in a marmot-skin pouch as it runs off a groove in the platform. “You just don’t want to go down the cliff because I want to,” he says.

“That’s ridiculous,” says Tsultrum.

Abbie reaches up under the sternum, cuts the windpipe and pulls it out, along with the heart, lungs and intestines. She cuts loose the fat and membranes and the rest of the organs spill out. The liver slips off the platform and falls onto the floor of the cave. Dober picks it up and sets it in a large pot that has been chipped by the goats. “Can I take the sinew now?” he asks, in a mocking tone.

Ignoring him, Tsultrum lets go of the goat’s legs and they flop down onto the platform. He gathers up some wood near the mouth of the cave and rapidly twists a dried mullein stalk into a flat, thin piece of cedar. When a coal forms, he picks it up with a leaf and places it on a small bundle of dried mugwort, lying inside a nest of cedar bark. He blows on the nest until it ignites and then shoves the flaming bark beneath the sticks.

Once the rear of the goat is mostly skinned, Abbie cuts off a few small pieces of meat from its hip and skewers them onto a sharp wooden spit sticking up above the fire. As she washes her hands with water from a clay jug, she gives Tsultrum a disheartened look and sighs.

“I don’t like being in the cave anymore anyway,” continues Dober. He cuts lose a hunk of fat and begins pounding it with a round stone. “It always makes me think of Mother and Father…and Abuela.”

Abbie takes a deep breath and turns abruptly to her younger brother. “Dober, did Abuela ever tell you the story about a village by the sea?”

Tsultrum glares at his sister. “Yes,” says Dober, beaming. “I remember. The village was called Jalal. Abuela said that there were so many fish in the water, the people didn’t even have to hunt.” He slides another gooey glob of fat off of the platform into a shallow stone bowl and continues pounding it.

“It’s supposed to be cooler than the rest of the lowlands because of the ocean breeze,” says Abbie, skinning the goat’s shoulders.

“Oh!” exclaims Dober. “And there were islands the fishing people went to in their boats that had trees full of fruit!”

Tsultrum cuts a piece of meat from the rear leg of the carcass and skewers it forcefully on the spit. “We all know Abuela liked to tell stories,” he says coldly to his sister, “and that she liked to make things up about the past.”

“No,” says Abbie, meeting her brother’s stern glance, “it’s not just a story, Dober. It’s true. Not the islands or the fruit trees though…but the rest is anyway. More then fifty seasons ago some of our people went down past the foothills to try and live by the sea.”

“There has been no word or sign from Jalal for a very long time,” says Tsultrum.

“After Mother died,” continues Abbie, looking at her younger brother, “Abuela begged us to leave her in the cave and go to the village.”

“It would have been wrong to have left her here alone,” says Tsultrum firmly, “no matter how old the custom is.”

“I know,” says Abbie, sincerely, “but it was her last wish for us to leave this place. Wasn’t it?” Dober looks back and forth from his brother to his sister as they speak.

“It’s too far to the ocean,” says Tsultrum. “We’ve been through all this before!” He pulls a piece of charred meat from the spit and thrusts it toward his brother. Dober takes the meat with a pair of flat sticks and blows on it, trying to cool it down.

“If Abuela’s story is true, Father would want us to go, right?” he asks with his mouth full.

“Maybe,” says Tsultrum quietly. “But he wouldn’t want us to risk our lives unless we were sure.” Abbie scoffs and buries three small rocks in the coals with a long stick. “Go see if there are any pots left unbroken to hold the rest of the meat before we smoke it,” Tsultrum tells his younger brother.

“But I want to know what…”

“Just please do this for me now. We can talk about this more when you get back.”

“Whatever,” mutters Dober. He pours a bit of the clear, liquid-like fat from the bowl into another oil lamp, lights its wick with a flaming branch and hurries into a dark corner of the cave. As soon as he leaves, Abbie starts to argue again but Tsultrum cuts her off.

“I thought we agreed not to talk about this in front of him until he’s old enough? You know how I feel.”

“Well I’m tired of just killing time,” snaps Abbie. “If we keep waiting and do nothing, we know what the future holds for our people. We’ll disappear.”

“We don’t know for sure that there’s anyone still living in the village. Look at what happened to our people in the caves.”

“But we survived,” exclaims Abbie. “Maybe there are survivors there too.”

“And maybe there aren’t,” says Tsultrum. “Our people have lived here for more than a hundred seasons. We can’t just suddenly leave all that behind.”

“It’s not sudden,” says Abbie, sprinkling the manzanita bark into a water pouch. “It’s almost been a whole year now since Abuela first talked to us about leaving. Don’t you remember?” She pulls a hot stone from the fire with two sticks and drops it into the pouch.

“I say we try to find the village,” says Dober, emerging from the darkness carrying three small clay bowls. “Let’s leave tonight!”

“Thanks for bringing this up right now,” says Tsultrum, snatching a bowl from his brother. He yanks a piece of meat off the spit, drops it into the bowl and licks the hot grease from his fingers. “We’re not ‘leaving tonight,’” he says, imitating Dober’s excited tone. “This is our home.” He throws a stick in the fire and stomps out of the cave.

Outside, the night is still and a warm breeze blows across the western face of the mountains into the south. Tsultrum hops up onto the garden wall and gazes up at the stars, trying to quiet his mind. Sweat drips from the brim of his nose and runs down his stomach, settling in his belly button. He breathes deeply and for the first time in along while lets himself wonder if perhaps the village is still there after all. Maybe Abbie’s right, he thinks. Maybe we could make it. Looking out over the trees, he tries to remember the path down to the blackberry thicket where he has camped a few times with his father. “You’d go, wouldn’t you, Father?” he whispers to the stars. But Mother always said you took too many chances. He looks down over the wall at a small squash shining in the moonlight and smiles sadly. “How could we leave behind Great-grandmother’s garden?”

He sits, staring up at the night sky for a long time. A pair of mourning doves calls back and forth to each other in the trees below the cliffs. When he hears Dober laugh loudly he hops down from the wall and peers inside the entrance to the cave. Abbie’s face is illuminated by the firelight and Tsultrum immediately realizes how much she has grown to look like their mother with her long, flat rosy cheeks. He thinks back to the day, more than a year ago, when they buried their mother in a small clearing of the forest. It was when they were walking back to the cave that his grandmother first urged him to leave her and take Abbie and Dober to the sea. But she was not herself then, sick with grief at having lost the last of her daughters. It was on that day that Tsultrum truly gave up on the future of his people, and ever since then he has told himself that the village doesn’t exist, that there is no hope.

Tsultrum picks up the shard of pottery he had thrown earlier and walks slowly into the cave. Abbie is gently rubbing the brew she made with the manzanita bark onto the poison oak bumps spread across Dober’s ankle and calf. When their brother approaches they both look up at his face, glowing in the firelight.

“Even if we decided to leave,” says Tsultrum, staring into the fire, “we’d still have to wait for your foot to fully heal.”

“I’m fine,” pleads Abbie. “I can keep up.”

“Let’s go!” says Dober. “It’s not that late yet and…it stinks so bad in here.” Tsultrum shakes his head in disbelief. “If you’re worrying about me,” says Dober defensively, “don’t. I can move across the land just as fast as you can.”

“I’m not worried about you,” he says. “The night is almost half over. We’d never even make it to the Blackberry Maze by sunrise. If we go down into the foothills, Dober, there’s no joking around. We’ll have to be completely aware and silent at all times.” He takes a bite of goat meat and chews it slowly. “Tomorrow night then,” he says, his voice trembling. “But we must pack up everything tonight if we’re going to leave at first dark.” Abbie stands suddenly, unable to hide her excitement. “Just relax,” he says. “We should only take what food and water we can carry and the most important of the relics. Save the rest of the carne for tomorrow night. We shouldn’t even bother with the brains and other organs now that we’re planning on leaving so soon. I was going to tan the hide but I guess there’s no point now.”

Tsultrum tells his brother to fill a plastic bag with the manzanita berries and then opens an old wooden trunk on the far side of the cave. He carefully pulls out a prayer wheel and a small statue of a praying figure with the sun behind its head. Tsultrum spins the wheel for a few rotations and starts to say a prayer but then stops. His grandmother used to spend whole nights sitting, praying and spinning the wheel at the mouth of the cave. It sure hasn’t done us any good, he thinks. Under an assortment of plastic bags, he lifts out a small, thin, circular object tied to a piece of cordage and places it into a deerskin pouch. Abbie pulls a large dusty book from a frayed basket and carefully opens it to a picture of a man playing a drum. She reads the words below the picture about the winter festival, closes the book and places it in her pouch.

“Will it really be cooler at the ocean?” asks Dober, setting down the bag of berries.

“I hope so,” says Tsultrum, “but in the foothills, it’s going to get hot. We’ll have to find shelter each night long before sunrise.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to stay in the hills the whole way, or will we have to drop down to the desert?” asks Abbie.

“No sé,” says Tsultrum, annoyed at all the questions.

“What does the village look like?” asks Dober.

“I don’t know!” shouts Tsultrum suddenly. “See! This is why I don’t want to go. I’ve never been past the Blackberry Maze. Hopefully we’ll be able to stay in the hills all the way to the ocean and there will be a whole village full of people waiting for us, but I don’t know!”

“I’m sorry,” whispers Dober.

“Look, I’m not angry,” says Tsultrum. “I just don’t know if we’re doing the right thing, that’s all.” He stands up, pulling back his long hair.

“Can I help to keep watch today?” asks Dober.

“You’ve asked before,” says Tsultrum, “and you know the rules. Not until you’re ten.”

“But if we’re really leaving tomorrow night, then this will be my last chance to keep watch in the cave.”

Tsultrum sighs and puts his hand on his brother’s bare shoulder. “Okay, you can have second watch.”

Dober hugs his brother around the waist. “I have to make my arrows,” he says suddenly. He grabs the flat rock full of sap and the goat tendons and disappears into the darkness.

Tsultrum carries the hide and the pot full of organs out of the cave. Before throwing them over the steep side of the cliff, he pauses, unaccustomed to wasting so much of a kill. When he returns, Abbie asks him to help her with the water. He holds up a plastic bottle while she carefully pours water from a clay jug.

“Gracias,” she whispers. “Tsultrum, I know it will be dangerous and hot, but we can make it. I know we can.”

“I hope so,” says Tsultrum, turning away. “Now that you’ve gotten Dober so excited we really don’t have a choice do we?” He calls to his younger brother and disappears into the darkness...

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