“You don’t have to be scared.”
I glanced at him and forced a smile. “You’ll protect us?”
“Ever since I was a boy I was taught that I was going to be the leader. I didn’t know what to do, because there was so much death and I knew I couldn’t stop it. What good is a leader when all they can do is help people who will die anyway?”
I smiled now, a real, exhausted one. “I feel like that right now.”
“We may die,” Suski said. “I knew long ago that I may die, and I understand death. But I also learned that I can be a leader who helps people be happy whether they live or die.”
“I wish you’d give me some lessons in that right now.”
“You are teaching me lessons in it every moment,” he said. “You are a good leader. Because you love those you lead.”
I felt a tear roll down my cheek. “And what if we get caught?”
“Then we are caught, and we will die. But we will have been happy first, and it will be a good death.”
A good death. That wasn’t what I had planned for. No death—that was what I wanted. I wanted to keep my friends safe. Coya and Suski hadn’t mutinied just so they could be torn to shreds by the Masters here on Earth. And Brynne, Rachel, and Kurt—they didn’t sign up for any of this. They shouldn’t be in the line of fire. They didn’t know what they were in for when they came on this trip, when they became friends with the Guides.
The sun was down over the horizon when we rolled into the dusty cutoff of my grandma’s town. There wasn’t much there—the chapter house, three houses, and a water tower. It wasn’t even really a town—it was a collection of dirt roads. If you drove down any of the roads far enough, you’d eventually run into a house.
I turned at the fence post that I recognized as hers. There was a pattern of reflectors on the steel pole so you could identify it in the dark.
We drove over a cattle grate and onto a hardpacked dirt road. A mouse skittered across our path in the headlights and disappeared into the brush at the side. I felt a lump in my throat—was I getting my grandma involved in our deaths, too? If the aliens were waiting for dark before they attacked, then shouldn’t we expect them now?
The road wound around half a dozen bends in the mesa, and we passed a few houses before finally reaching a broad clearing. I pulled into the center, my lights resting on Grandma’s hogan. It was the traditional home of the Navajos—round, made of logs, with a log-and-mud roof. A stovepipe came out of the center, and I saw smoke puffing out of it. Warm yellow light shone through the cracks around the door.
“Let me go explain, guys,” I said, and pulled off my seatbelt. In Navajo tradition it was good manners to wait in the car until the person came out of her house and invited you up, but it was my grandma, and I figured it would be okay to break with tradition just this once.
I opened the car door just as she did, her short, thin frame silhouetted against the firelight behind her.
“Ya’at’eeh,” she called out.
“Grandma,” I replied, and hurried across the dirt to where she was standing.
“Is that my Alice?” she asked with a gasp. “Sh’atsóí.”
“Shimasani,” I said.
“You’re so big,” she said, reaching her arms out to me. “Come here, you beautiful girl.”
I grabbed her in a bear hug. We were so alike, my grandma and me—same height, same hair color. I was even named after her.
“I’m in trouble, Shimasani,” I said, starting to cry. “We came here because we didn’t know where else to go.”
“Come in, child,” she said, her voice strong and heavily accented. Her hogan smelled of cedar smoke and tea, and she pulled me inside, setting me on the bed beside her. She hugged me close. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I told you what’s wrong when we talked on the phone. I’m in the middle of it,” I said, and through sobs I explained how I’d ended up as friends with Coya and Suski, how I’d promised to protect them, and how we were on the run. I explained the parts that she probably didn’t hear without a television or radio: about the mutiny, about the horrible life they’d had on the ship, always expecting death. And I told her how I’d come here, foolishly, seeking some kind of asylum—a refuge from all the problems of the world.
“We’ll take care of you, baby girl,” she said, rocking me in her arms. “We’ll take care of you, nizhóní.” She held my hand loosely in hers—her skin weathered from a life of living off the land.
I sniffled. “There are six of us,” I said. “Your hogan is so small.”
She laughed. “You are too used to your big house. We can all fit. Have you eaten?”
I nodded.
“Well, take me out to meet these friends of yours.”
I stood on shaky legs and led her by the hand to Bluebell. My friends were waiting by the car.
“Come meet my grandma,” I said.
They came forward, Rachel first—she hugged Grandma and thanked her—and then Brynne. Kurt shook her hand, and Grandma turned to me and whispered far too loud, “I like him.”
Then it was Coya’s turn, and she stepped up to Grandma.
“Ho’ Coya leshhina,” she said, and the translator said, “I am Coya.”
“Shimasani,” I said. “This is going to sound crazy. Coya and Suski are Anasazi.”
Grandma cocked her head and grinned wide, showing a few missing teeth. “So that’s the magic in the Minnesota.”
SEVENTEEN
We were all in the hogan, the door closed to shut out the cold, and we sat in a circle against the walls of the small house. Coya and Suski were speaking to Grandma. They were explaining everything that we had figured out. Brynne spoke up when her genetics research was needed, and I filled in a few gaps.
I leaned against Kurt’s shoulder as we listened to the conversation. Coya explained her name, holding out her hair just as she had done with me—that Coya meant “beautiful.” Suski meant “great warrior.” Grandma laughed at that.
“We could use a great warrior,” she said.
“A huge alien abduction,” Kurt whispered to me. “I wonder if they left a crop circle.”
Something changed in the conversation between Grandma and the Guides, and she stood up and came and sat by me. “Shoo, little ginnis glizhee,” she said to Kurt and the girls, and they all moved across the hogan. “I have to go speak with the Elders.”
I got to my feet. “Do you want me to go with you?”
“No,” she said. “Sleep. I fear we have a long way ahead of us.”
“Why?”
She looked at the Guides. “I do not know what to do. I’m worried for you. You’ve seen much danger, and you’ll see much more.”
Grandma took a red velvet shawl from the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders, and then she placed a wide-brimmed hat on her head. I followed her to the door.
“Be careful,” she whispered to me.
“I’m always careful,” I lied.
“You’re like your mother. You take risks.”
“Hopefully they’re good risks,” I said.
“I’ll be back,” she said, and hugged me. “Hágoónee’.” I watched from the door as she walked down the low slope to an old rusty pickup truck. She backed onto the road, and a moment later she had disappeared around a bend.
I felt a hand on my back and knew without looking that it was Kurt.
“Didn’t you say something about hiding your car?”
I sighed. “Yeah. We’d better do it.” I closed the door behind us, and we stepped out into the dark. I shivered. It might not be as cold here as it was in Minnesota, but I wasn’t wearing a coat, and it was still October.
Kurt walked around the south side of the hogan and poked through a few shelves.
“So what’s your big secret?” I asked. “We’ve figured out Coya and Suski are human—Anasazi. What is it that you’re hiding?”
“I’m not Indian,” he said. “I’m Irish.”
“You hide it
well,” I said, and let my fingers drag across his back as I stepped around him toward a shed.
“Maybe I’m secretly from Miami,” he said. “Or how about I’m interning at NASA?”
“If we make it out of here alive, I bet we’ll all be interning at NASA. We’re going to have a spaceship-based economy.”
I peered into the darkness of the open shed, trying to see if there was anything in there.
“Do I detect a hint of hopefulness in your voice? You’re assuming we’re not going to die?”
“Not assuming anything,” I said. “You know what assuming does.”
“I do indeed,” he said, and squeezed past me into the darkness. “Chicken.”
“I’m not a chicken,” I said. “I was afraid I’d step on a rake or something.”
He looked back at me, but all I saw was moonlight reflecting on his glasses. “You really think your grandma has a lot of rakes? To keep the sand off of the sand?”
“There are trees,” I said.
“Not trees with leaves,” he said. “Here we go. A tarp!”
“You win,” I said.
And then he appeared out of the darkness and before I knew it was happening, he was kissing me. Full-on kissing me. For a moment I was too stunned to react, but instinct kicked in and I grabbed his shirt, pulling him closer. The kiss was hard and frantic, as though each of us suddenly couldn’t breathe without the other. He stepped closer, and my back bumped into the door frame. I felt like we were going to knock the shed down, and I didn’t care—he was pushing against me and I was pulling him toward me, desperately, our lips and bodies moving together.
The wood of the shed creaked, and I laughed, breaking the kiss for just a moment before sliding my fingers through his hair and pulling his mouth back to mine. He tasted like he smelled—that perfect autumn scent, now combined with wood smoke.
He pulled away just enough to talk, his lips flicking against mine as he spoke. “We could have been doing this in a more comfortable place than a shed. Remember that next time you want to fall asleep on a couch.”
“I’m not the one who cut our date short,” I said. “Blame the aliens.” I kissed him again.
“Damn aliens,” he said, and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, pulling me all the way to him, kissing my ear and my hair.
“You know,” I said. “I don’t normally do this. Kiss boys I’ve only known for a couple of weeks.”
“You usually wait at least three, huh?”
“At least.”
I kissed him again, slow and lingering. I didn’t know when I was going to get to do it again. Finally, I let him go, and we split apart. I was breathing heavily and could feel my face flushed. I wasn’t shivering anymore.
“Where’s that tarp?” I asked.
He took a deep breath. “Oh yeah. The tarp.”
I pulled Bluebell around the back of the hogan—not that that would matter to a spaceship, but it made me feel better to have it out of sight of the road—and we unrolled a canvas tarp over the car. I cringed with every roll, worried it was rubbing sand against the paint and scratching my baby. When it was done, I took Kurt by the hand and we walked back to the door of the house.
I wanted to kiss him again—and again and again—but if we kept at it we’d never stop, and there were other things going on that were more important. I opened the door and went inside.
It was warmer now, the flame in the stove glowing brighter than it had been. We sat down in the circle around the stove. Rachel held up a box of crackers and another box of cookies. I reached for the cookies.
“So,” Brynne said, looking at Coya. “Does this make sense to either of you? The whole ‘you used to live out here and got abducted’ thing?”
Suski shook his head, but Coya nodded slightly and spoke. “Tell them about the return voyage.”
“We don’t know if that’s true,” he said.
“Then tell them what we know,” she said, and then, “I’ll tell them. The thing is, we don’t know how the ship was piloted. We don’t know who steered it toward this planet, because, like you’ve seen, none of us can read. Even our father couldn’t read. But someone directed the ship. And when we mutinied, we asked our father where we were going, and he simply told us we were going home. He told us that many times—it was a very long voyage.”
I thought of the mess in the ship, of the blood that had never been cleaned up. “It was a long voyage?”
“It was a difficult voyage,” Suski said. “We did not know how to operate the ship. There were places in the ship where it was difficult to breathe. There were times when the whole ship would shake, knocking us to the ground.”
“How long did the journey take?” Brynne asked.
“We don’t keep time the same way you do. We worked when we were told to work, and we stopped when we were told to stop, and we slept when we were told to sleep.” Suski looked at me. “You’ve noticed I do not sleep as much as others do. It’s how I’ve been trained.”
“For me, it was possibly fifty sleeps,” Coya said.
Rachel bit off a piece of cracker. “And you were told you were going home?” She looked at me and Brynne. “Maybe they were able to program the autopilot to take them back to the planet they’d come from. Maybe there was something in the computer that reminded them of home, and they were able to select a course here?”
“Possibly,” Suski said. “We do not know. Perhaps my father knew. Perhaps someone in the tents knows.”
“The computer would have to have some record of where they’d been,” Rachel said. “Maybe there were even slaves who were forced to work on the bridge, and they observed enough to pilot the ship.”
“I do not think there was a pilot,” Coya said. “It did not seem like it. I think the ship directed us.”
“Either way,” Brynne said with a smile. “I’m claiming you guys as my science thesis.”
“You were abducted from lands not far from here. We can go to them soon, so you can see, although you won’t remember. Maybe you’ll have stories. But maybe all you had to do was tell your computer to return you to your home planet, and it did.”
“Possibly,” Suski said.
My grandma was gone for a long time—long enough that we lay down on the blankets on the floor and did our best to sleep. The hogan held in the heat well, and I was warmer when Rachel rolled over and put her back against mine. Suski didn’t sleep, but sat by the fire, staring through the grate into the stove. He kept it stoked with wood—fire was a new concept to him, and I could tell he found it fascinating.
I listened as one by one everyone in the room began to breathe more slowly and drift away. I thought about Coya as I watched her sleep, about the life that she’d come from, trying to lead people who had all accepted the reality of their own deaths. I thought about Suski, who had to have been involved in the mutiny—he was Mai’s son.
I felt a funny sort of comfort that horrible things happened everywhere, not just here on Earth. The Masters were bad—so bad that it made Earth, with all its problems, seem peaceful and welcoming. It felt like, if we could just get rid of the Masters, then everything was going to be okay. I knew it wasn’t as easy as that, but that night in the hogan it felt that way.
And I felt safe. Like there was something about the hogan that was keeping the evil at bay—something about the fire, or the steeped tea, or the patterns in the wool rugs. We didn’t have a lock on the door, but I felt safer there than I had the entire drive from Minnesota.
The aliens hadn’t attacked. That meant one of two things. They either couldn’t attack, which was unlikely, or they were waiting. Perhaps they didn’t know where we were.
And at some point, when Suski had finally dozed off and the fire started to die down, I fell asleep.
When I awoke there was coffee brewing on the stove—harsh, black stuff that my grandma always made and I’d always been too young to try. This morning she handed me a cup, though, and coaxed me up. She had metal cups for Brynne and R
achel, too. Kurt was already standing, a bundle of newly chopped cedar in his arms. He laid it in a neat pile where Grandma showed him.
“Where are Suski and Coya?” I asked, getting up to my knees.
“Outside,” Grandma said. “With the Elders.”
I rubbed my face and dug through Brynne’s bag for a hoodie. I found one with “National Science Foundation” embroidered on the chest. “Nerd,” I said with a yawn.
“You’re the one wearing it,” she replied, sipping at the coffee and making a face.
All of my friends were asked to leave the hogan except for me—Brynne and Rachel gave me smiles of encouragement, and the Guides and Elders joined us. The chief singer took a seat on a buckskin and an even older man stood, his frailty showing in his trembling hands, but not on his firm-set jaw and wrinkled face. This man was not Navajo. He was Hopi—I could recognize it in the features of his face and the clothing he wore. He must have driven all night to get here.
“It is said that long ago our people were taken from us,” he said. “This is not sung in the songs and not recorded in the histories. It is told from father to son—a knowledge that will save our people one day. I have traveled from my home in the Waalpi, First Mesa, to pass on this knowledge. All of the Elders here know the stories.”
A man started to sing, low and quiet, as he pulled materials from his bag.
The Elder continued speaking while the other man worked. “It is said that monsters came from the sky, a thousand generations ago. Benny Selestewa’s grandfather’s grandfather was digging for a well out by Chaco Canyon. He found this.” He patted the back of the man who was unwrapping the package. “Benny is Hopi. He has been given his weight to bear.”
As the Elder spoke he began a sandpainting, drawing with black sand. He drew for what seemed like hours, alternating talking and singing. I had heard once that a Navajo hata’lii had memorized the equivalent of all of Shakespeare’s plays. Never once did he falter in his singing or painting, never did he even take a rest.
Benny Selestewa spoke. “It is said they could travel faster than our fastest horses, higher than the highest eagle. They were powerful, with knives that could kill with an eyeblink and guns that fired the sunlight. And they took many of our people before we learned a way to fight back.”