Thunderhead

7

IF NORA HAD EVER WALKED INTO A HOTTER, stuffier place than Peter Holroyd’s apartment, she couldn’t remember it. The air was not just dying here, she decided; it was dead and decomposing.

“Got any ice?” she asked.

Holroyd, who had walked down the four flights of stairs to retrieve his mail and open the door for her, shook his shaggy head. “Sorry. Freezer’s busted.”

Nora watched him sort through his mail. Below the mop of sandy hair, the very white skin of his face was stretched over two prominent cheekbones. As he moved, his limbs never seemed to be in the right place, and his legs seemed a little short for his narrow torso and bony arms. And yet the overall impression of melancholy was countered by a pair of intelligent green eyes that looked hopefully out on the world. His taste in clothes was questionable: striped brown polyester pants, topped by a V-neck short-sleeved checkered shirt.

Grimy yellow curtains flapped apathetically in the travesty of a breeze. Nora walked to the window, glancing south toward the dusky boulevards of East L.A. Then she looked down toward the nearby intersection and the front window of Al’s Pizza. She’d spent the last two nights at a friend’s house in Thousand Oaks. This was an ugly little corner of L.A., and she felt a sudden sympathy for Peter and his longing for adventure.

She took a step back. The apartment was so barren she was unable to determine what kind of housekeeper Holroyd was. A small bookcase, made up of plywood strips balanced on cinderblocks. Two elderly Adirondack chairs, festooned with back issues of Old Bike Journal. An ancient motorcycle helmet on the floor, scarred and scuffed. “Is that your bike I saw chained to the lamppost?” Nora asked.

“Yup. An old ’46 Indian Chief. Mostly.” He grinned. “Inherited a basket case from my great-uncle, and scrounged the rest of the parts here and there. You ride?”

“My dad had an old dirt bike I used to ride around the ranch. Rode my brother’s Hog once or twice before he laid it down on Route 66.” Nora looked back toward the window. There was a row of very strange-looking plants: black, crimson, a riot of drooping stalks and pendulous flowers. Must be the only things around here that enjoy the heat, she thought.

A small plant with dark purple flowers caught her attention. “Hey, what’s this?” she asked, reaching out curiously.

Holroyd looked over, then dropped the mail. “Don’t touch that!” he cried. Nora jerked her hand away.

“It’s belladonna,” Holroyd said, bending to pick up the scatter. “Deadly nightshade.”

“You’re kidding,” Nora said. “And this?” She pointed to a neighboring plant, a small flower with exotic maroon spikes.

“Monkshood. It contains aconitine, which is a really terrific poison. In the tray there are the three deadliest mushrooms: the Death Cap, Fool’s Mushroom, and A. virosa, the Destroying Angel. And in that pot on the sill—”

“I get the picture.” Nora turned away from the Death Cap, its horrible mantle resembling plague-spotted skin, and gazed once again around the bare apartment. “Enemies bothering you?”

Holroyd tossed the mail into the garbage and barked a laugh, his green eyes suddenly catching the light. “Some people collect stamps. I collect botanical poisons.”

Nora followed him into the kitchen, a small, cramped area almost as free of furniture as the rest of the apartment. A large wooden table had been pushed up against the old refrigerator. Sitting on the table were a keyboard, a three-button mouse, and the largest monitor she had ever seen.

Holroyd smiled at her appreciative glance. “Not a bad chunk of video real estate, is it? Just like the ones at the Lab. A few years ago Watkins bought these for all his top imaging staff. He assumes that no one who works for him has a social life. Pretty good assumption, at least as far as I’m concerned.” He glanced at her.

Nora raised a speculative eyebrow at him. “So you do bring some homework with you, after all.”

The smile vanished as he caught the implication. “Only declassified homework,” he replied, as he reached into a rumpled Jiffy bag and pulled out a rewriteable DVD disk. “What you asked for doesn’t exactly fit that category.”

“Can I ask how you did it?”

“I took the raw data from the shuttle feed this morning and burned an extra copy onto the disk. I’ve always got a handful of disks in my backpack; nobody would know the difference.” He waggled the disk and it flashed in the dim light, sending out a coruscation of color. “If you have the right clearance, stealing data isn’t difficult. It’s just that, if you get caught, the penalties are much stiffer. Much stiffer.” He grimaced.

“I realize that,” said Nora. “Thank you, Peter.”

He looked at her. “You knew I’d help, didn’t you? Even before you left the pizza parlor.”

Nora returned the glance. It was true; once he’d described the way he could access the data, she felt certain he’d agree. But she did not want to hurt his pride. “I hoped you would,” she replied. “But I wasn’t really sure until you called the next morning. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

Nora realized Holroyd was blushing. He quickly turned his back and opened the refrigerator door. Inside, Nora could see two cans of alcohol-free beer, some V8 juice, and a large computer CPU. Looking more closely, she noticed the computer was connected to the monitor by cables running through a small insulated hole in the back of the refrigerator.

“Too hot out here,” Holroyd said, sliding the disk into the computer housing and closing the refrigerator door. “Put your topo over there, okay?”

Nora began to unroll the map, then paused. “You realize this won’t be like crunching numbers all day long in an air-conditioned lab,” she said. “On a small dig like this, everybody does double or triple duty. You’d be coming along as an assistant, specializing in image sensing. Only they’re not called ‘assistants’ on archaeological digs. They’re called ‘diggers.’ For a reason.”

Holroyd blinked at her. “What are you trying to do? Talk me out of going?”

“I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into.”

“You’ve seen the books I read. I know it won’t be a picnic. That’s part of the challenge, isn’t it?” He sat down at the wooden table and pulled the keyboard toward him. “I’m risking a possible prison sentence, bringing you this data. You think I’m afraid of a little digging?”

Nora smiled. “Point taken.” She pulled up a plastic chair. “Now how does this thing work, exactly?”

“Radar’s just another kind of light. We shine it down on Earth from the shuttle, and it bounces back changed. The Terrestrial Imager simply takes digital photographs of what bounces back, and then combines them.” Holroyd punched some keys. There was a brief pause, then a small window opened at the bottom of the screen, displaying scrolling messages as a complex program began to boot. Several other small windows flew open in corners of the screen, displaying various software tools. Then a large window appeared at the screen’s center. Holroyd moused the cursor through several menus. Finally, an image began rolling down the large central screen, line by line, painted in artificial reds.

“Is that it?” Nora stared at the screen in disappointment. This was the last thing she’d expected: confusing monochromatic patterns like no landscape she had ever seen.

“It’s just the beginning. The Imager takes infrared emissions and radiometry into account, but that would take too long to explain. It also looks at the earth in three different radar bands and two polarizations. Each color represents a different band of radar, or a different polarization. I’m going to paint each color on to the screen, layering one on top of the other. This’ll take a few minutes.”

“And then we’ll be able to see the road?”

Holroyd gave her an amused look. “If only it were that simple. We’re going to have to beat the shit out of the data before we can see the road.” He pointed. “This red is L-Band radar. It has a wavelength of twenty-five centimeters and can penetrate five meters of dry sand. Next, I’ll add C-Band.”

A blue color scrolled down.

“This C-Band has a six-centimeter wavelength, and it can penetrate at most two meters. So what you see here is a little shallower.” More key taps. “And here goes X-Band. That’s three centimeters. Basically, it gives you the surface itself.”

A neon green color rolled down the screen.

“I don’t see how you can even begin to figure all this out,” said Nora, gazing at the distorted swaths of colors.

“Now I’m going to paint in the polarizations. The outgoing radar beam is polarized either horizontally or vertically. Sometimes you send down a beam horizontally polarized, and it bounces back vertically polarized. That usually happens when the beam encounters a lot of vertical tree trunks.”

Nora watched as another color was added to the screen. It was taking longer for the program to paint the image on the screen; obviously, the computational problem was becoming more complex.

“Looks like a de Kooning,” said Nora.

“A what?”

Nora waved her hand. “Never mind.”

Holroyd turned back to the screen. “What we’ve got is a composite image of the ground, from the surface to about fifteen feet deep. Now it’s a matter of canceling out some of the wavelengths and multiplying others. This is where the real artistry comes in.” Nora could hear a touch of pride in his voice.

He began typing again, more quickly this time. Nora watched as a new window opened on the screen, lines of computer code racing as routines were added and deleted. The remote desert vastness was suddenly covered by a thin web of tracks.

“My God!” Nora cried. “There they are! I had no idea the Anasazi—”

“Hold on a minute,” interrupted Holroyd. “Those are modern trails.”

“But this area isn’t supposed to have any roads.”

Holroyd shook his head. “Some of these are probably wild horse trails, deer trails, coyote trails, mountain lion trails, maybe even four-wheel-drive tracks. There was some prospecting for uranium in this area in the fifties. Most of these tracks you wouldn’t be able to see on the ground.”

Nora slumped back in her chair. “With all those trails, how can we ever find the Anasazi one?”

Holroyd grinned. “Be patient. The older the road, the deeper it tends to lie. Very old roads also tend to spread through erosion and wind. The pebbles ancient travelers turned up have been smoothed over time, while new roads are covered with sharper pebbles. The sharper pebbles backscatter more strongly than the smooth ones.”

He continued to type. “No one knows why, but sometimes dramatic things happen if you multiply the values of two wavelengths together, or divide them by each other, or cube one and take the square root of another and subtract the cosine of your mother’s age.”

“Doesn’t sound very scientific,” said Nora.

Holroyd grinned. “No, but it’s my favorite part. When data’s buried as deeply as this, it takes real intuition and creativity to tease it out.”

He worked with steady determination. Every few minutes the image changed: sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly. Once Nora asked a question, but Holroyd merely shook his head, brow furrowed. At times, all the roads vanished; Holroyd would curse, type a flurry of commands, and the roads returned.

Time crawled by, and Holroyd grew increasingly frustrated. The sweat stood out on his brow, and his hands flew across the keys, hitting them with greater force. Nora’s back began to ache, and she found herself shifting constantly in the cheap chair, trying to find a comfortable position.

At last, Holroyd sat back with a muttered curse. “I’ve tried all the methods, all the tricks. The data just won’t put out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Either I get a million roads and trails, or I get nothing.” He got up and went to the refrigerator. “Beer?”

“Sure.” Nora glanced at the clock. It was seven, but the apartment was still insufferably hot.

Holroyd sat down again, passing her the beer and propping a leg up on the computer table. A knobby ankle protruded from below the cuff, pale and hairless. “Is there anything unusual about the Anasazi roads? Something that might differentiate them from all these animal trails and modern stuff?”

Nora thought for a moment, then shook her head.

“What were the roads used for?”

“Actually, they weren’t really roads at all.”

Holroyd pulled his leg from the table and sat up. “What do you mean?”

“They’re still a deep archaeological mystery. The Anasazi didn’t know about the wheel and they didn’t have any beasts of burden. They had no use for a road. So why they would take such trouble to build them has always puzzled archaeologists.”

“Go on,” Holroyd urged.

“Whenever archaeologists don’t understand something, they cop out by saying it served a religious purpose. That’s what they say about the roads. They think they might have been spirit pathways, rather than roads for living beings to travel on. Roads to guide the spirits of the dead back to the underworld.”

“What do these roads look like?” Holroyd took a swig of beer.

“Not much of anything,” Nora said. “In fact, they’re almost impossible to see from the ground.”

Holroyd looked at her expectantly. “How were they built?”

“The roads were exactly thirty feet wide, surfaced with adobe. On the Great North Road it appears that pots were deliberately broken on the road surface to consecrate it. The roads were dotted with shrines called herraduras, but we have no idea—”

“Wait a minute,” Holroyd interrupted. “You said they were surfaced with adobe. What exactly is adobe?”

“Mud, basically.”

“Imported?”

“No, usually just the local dirt mixed with water, puddled and plastered.”

“Too bad.” The excitement left Holroyd’s voice as quickly as it came.

“There’s not much else. When the Great North Road was finally abandoned around 1250, it seems to have been ritually closed. The Anasazi piled brush on the road and set it on fire. They also burned all the shrines along the road. And they burned several large structures too, one of which I excavated a few years ago, called Burned Jacal. Seems it was some kind of lighthouse or signaling structure. God knows what they used it for.”

Holroyd sat forward. “They burned brush on the road?”

“The Great North Road, anyway. Nobody has done much research on the other roads.”

“How much brush?”

“A lot,” said Nora. “We found large swaths of charcoal.”

Holroyd slammed down the beer, swivelled in his chair, and began hitting keys once again. “Charcoal—carbon—has a very specific radar signature. Even tiny amounts of it absorb radar. It has an almost nonexistent backscatter.”

The image on the screen began to shift. “So what we’re going to look for,” he murmured, “is just the opposite of what I’ve been searching for all this time. Instead of looking for a particular reflection, we’re going to look for a shadow. A linear hole in the data.” He punched a final key.

Nora watched as the image on the screen disappeared. And then—as a new image scrolled down the screen with maddening slowness—she saw a long, faint, sinuous black line etch itself across the landscape: broken in countless spots, yet unmistakable.

“There it is,” said Holroyd quietly, sitting back and looking at her, his face shining with triumph.

“That’s my road to Quivira?” Nora asked, her voice trembling.

“No. That’s our road to Quivira.”

8

NORA WORKED HER WAY THROUGH THE early evening traffic, struggling to keep the highway ahead from blurring into parallel images. She was tired, more tired than she could remember being since her marathon study sessions of graduate school. Though Holroyd had offered to put her up in his apartment the night before, she had instead opted to drive straight back to Santa Fe and the Institute. She had arrived a little after ten in the morning. The day had dragged as Nora, exhausted and distracted, tried to wrap up the end-of-term business. Again and again, her mind had turned back to Quivira and what her next step should be. She sensed it was pointless to approach Blakewood again, even with this startling discovery; there was little chance of him changing his mind. She had passed him in a hallway shortly after noon, and his greeting was decidedly cool.

She slowed, downshifting to second as she turned into Verde Estates, her townhouse development. The afternoon had ended on an unexpected note: a call from Ernest Goddard’s office, requesting a meeting the following morning. Nora had never even spoken to the Institute’s chairman of the board, and she could think of no reason—no good reason, anyway—why he would want to see her. She’d been absent from the Institute without notice for two days, and had made no headway on the Rio Puerco ceramics. Perhaps Blakewood had put a bug in his ear about the troublesome junior professor.

Nora switched on her headlights as she navigated through the curving lanes. Verde Estates might be a development, but it was older and it lacked the ludicrous Santa Fe–style pretensions of the newer condo complexes. There had been time for a good growth of fruit and fir trees, softening the edges of the buildings. A calm warmth began to flow into her tired limbs as she maneuvered into her parking space. She’d take half an hour to relax, then fix a light meal, take a shower, and fall into bed. Her favorite way to unwind had always been to work on her oboe reeds. Most people found reed-making a tiresome, endless nuisance, but she had always enjoyed the challenge.

Twisting the key out of the ignition, she grabbed her portfolio and bags and started across the blacktop toward her door. Already, she was mentally laying out the tools she’d need: jeweler’s loup; a piece of good French cane; silk thread; sheets of fish skin to plug leaks. Mr. Roehm, her high-school oboe teacher, had said that making double reeds was like fly-tying: an art and a science in which a thousand things could go wrong, and in which the tinkering was never done.

She unlocked the front door and stepped inside. Dropping her things, she leaned back against the door and closed her eyes wearily, too exhausted for the moment to turn on the lights. She heard the low growl of the refrigerator, a dog barking hysterically in the distance. The place had a smell she didn’t remember. Odd, she thought, how things can grow unfamiliar in just two days.

Something was missing: the familiar click-clack of nails on the linoleum, the friendly nuzzling of her ankles. Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself away from the door and snapped on the lights. Thurber, her ten-year-old basset hound, was nowhere in sight.

“Thurber?” she called. She thought of going outside to call for him, but changed her mind immediately: Thurber was the most domesticated animal on the planet, for whom the great outdoors was something to be avoided at all costs.

“Thurber?” she called again. Dropping her purse on the front table, her eyes fell on a note: Nora, please call. Skip. Reading this, Nora smirked. Must need money, she thought; Skip normally never used “please” in a sentence. And that explained Thurber’s absence. She’d asked Skip to feed Thurber while she was in California, and no doubt he’d taken the pooch back to his apartment to save himself time.

Turning away, she started to take off her shoes, then changed her mind when she noticed a scattering of dust on the floor. Gotta clean this damn place, she thought as she headed for the stairs.

In the bathroom she shrugged off her blouse, washed her face and hands, dampened her hair, and then pulled on her favorite reed-making sweatshirt, a ragged thing from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Walking into her bedroom, she stopped to look around a moment. She’d been so quick to judge Holroyd’s apartment, almost eccentric in its barrenness, its lack of personality. And yet, in its way, her own place was not that different. Somehow, she’d never had time to give much thought to decorating. If furnishings were a window into the soul, what did this jumble of rooms say about her? A woman who was too busy crawling around ruins to fix up her own place. Almost everything she had belonged to her parents; Skip had refused to take anything except her dad’s book collection and old pistol.

With a smile and a shake of her head, she reached automatically for the brush on top of her dresser.

And found it gone.

She paused, hand outstretched, motionless with perplexity. Her brush was always in the same place: the archaeologist in her insisted on keeping her possessions in situ. Her damp hair felt cool on the back of her neck as she mentally went through the motions of three mornings before. She’d washed her hair as usual, dressed as usual, combed her hair as usual. And replaced the brush as usual.

But now it was missing. Nora stared at the strange, inexplicable gap between the comb and the box of tissue. Goddamn Skip, she thought suddenly, irritation mingling with relief. His own bathroom was a solid mass of mildew, and he liked to sneak showers at her place when she was away. He’d probably dumped it someplace, and . . .

Then she paused and took a breath. Something in her gut told her that this had nothing to do with Skip. The strange smell, the dust in the hall, the feeling that things were not right . . . She whirled around, searching for anything else that might be missing. But everything seemed to be in place.

Then she heard a faint scratching sound coming from outside. She looked over, but the black windows only reflected the interior. She turned off the lights with a quick brush of her hand. It was a clear, moonless night, the desert stars spread out like diamonds across the velvet blackness beyond her window. The scratching came again, louder this time.

With a surge of relief, she realized it must be Thurber, waiting at the back door. On top of everything else, Skip had managed to leave the dog outside. Shaking her head, Nora walked downstairs and through the kitchen. She twisted the deadbolt on the door and yanked it open, kneeling as she did so for the anticipated nuzzle.

Thurber was nowhere to be seen. A skein of dust swirled on the concrete step, flaring into sharp relief as the headlights of a car approached along the back alley. The headlights swept across the grass, past a stand of pines, and silhouetted a large presence, furred and dark, springing back into the protective darkness. As she stared, Nora realized she had seen that movement before—a few nights before, when the same object had raced alongside her truck with horrifying unnatural speed.

She stumbled backward into the kitchen in a rush of terror, face hot, gulping air. Then the moment of paralysis passed. Filled with sudden anger, she grabbed a heavy flashlight from the counter and dashed for the door. She stopped at the threshold, the flashlight revealing nothing but the peaceful desert night.

“Leave me the hell alone!” she cried into the blackness. There was no dark figure, no prints in the damp earth beyond the door; only the lost sigh of the wind, the crazed barking of a distant dog, and the rattle of the flashlight in her shaking hand.

9

NORA STOPPED OUTSIDE A CLOSED OAKEN door labeled CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, SANTA FE ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE. Clutching more tightly to the portfolio that now never left her side, she looked carefully down the hall in both directions. She was uncertain whether the nervousness she felt had to do with the events of the night before or with the impending meeting. Had word of her shenanigans at JPL somehow gotten out? No, that was impossible. But maybe this was going to be a dismissal anyway. Why else would Ernest Goddard want to see her? Her head ached from lack of sleep.

All she knew about the chairman was what she had read, along with the rare newspaper photo and even rarer glimpse of his striking figure around campus. Although Dr. Blakewood might have been prime mover and chief architect of the Institute’s vision, Nora knew that Goddard was the real power and money behind Blakewood’s throne. And unlike Blakewood, Goddard had an almost supernatural ability to cultivate the press, managing to get the occasional tasteful and laudatory article placed in just the right venue. She had heard several explanations for the man’s tremendous wealth, from inheriting a motor oil fortune to discovering a submarine full of Nazi gold—none of which seemed credible.

She took a deep breath and grasped the doorknob firmly. Maybe a dismissal would be a good thing at this point. It would free her to pursue Quivira unhindered. The Institute, in the person of Dr. Blakewood, had already passed judgment on her proposed expedition. Holroyd had given her the ammunition she needed to take the idea somewhere else. If the Institute wasn’t interested, she knew she would find a place that was.

A small, nervous secretary ushered her through the reception area to the inner office. The space was as cool and spare as a church, with whitewashed adobe walls and a Mexican tiled floor. Instead of the imposing power desk Nora had expected, there was a huge wooden worktable, badly scuffed and dented. She looked around in surprise; it was the exact opposite of Dr. Blakewood’s office. Except for a row of pots on the worktable, lined up as if at attention, the room was devoid of ornamentation.

Behind the worktable stood Ernest Goddard, longish white hair haloing his gaunt face, a salt-and-pepper beard below lively blue eyes. One hand held a pencil. A rumpled cotton handkerchief drooped from his jacket pocket. His body was thin and frail, and his gray suit hung loosely on his bony frame. Nora would have thought he was ill, except that his eyes were clear, bright, and full of fire.

“Dr. Kelly,” he said, laying down the pencil and coming around the worktable to shake her hand. “So good to meet you at last.” His voice was unusual: low, dry, barely higher than a whisper. And yet it carried enormous authority.

“Please call me Nora,” she replied guardedly. This cordial reception was the last thing she expected.

“I believe I will,” Goddard paused to remove the handkerchief and cough into it with a delicate, almost feminine gesture. “Have a seat. Oh, but before you do, take a look at these ceramics, will you?” He poked the handkerchief back into his pocket.

Nora approached the table. She counted a dozen painted bowls, all peerless examples of ancient pottery from the Mimbres valley of New Mexico. Three were pure geometrics with vibrant rhythms, and two contained abstract insect designs: a stinkbug and a cricket. The rest were covered with anthropomorphics—splendidly precise, geometric human figures. Each pot had a neat hole punched in the bottom.

“They’re magnificent,” Nora said.

Goddard seemed about to speak, then turned to cough. A buzzer sounded on the worktable. “Dr. Goddard, Mrs. Henigsbaugh to see you.”

“Send her in,” Goddard said.

Nora threw him a glance. “Shall I—”

“You stay right here,” Goddard said, indicating the chair. “This will only take a minute.”

The door opened and a woman of perhaps seventy swept into the room. Immediately, Nora recognized the type: Santa Fe society matron, rich, thin, tan, almost no makeup, in fabulous shape, wearing an exquisite but understated Navajo squash blossom necklace over a silk blouse, with a long velveteen skirt.

“Ernest, how delightful,” she said.

“Wonderful to see you, Lily,” Goddard replied. He waved a spotted hand at Nora. “This is Dr. Nora Kelly, an assistant professor here at the Institute.”

The woman glanced from Nora to the worktable. “Ah, very good. These are the pots I told you about.”

Goddard nodded.

“My appraiser says they’re worth five hundred thousand if they’re worth a penny. Extremely rare, he said, and in perfect condition. Harry collected them, you know. He wanted the Institute to have them when he died.”

“They’re very nice—”

“I should say they are!” the woman interrupted, patting her impeccable hair. “Now about their display. I realize, of course, that the Institute doesn’t have a formal museum or anything of that sort. But in light of the value of these pots, obviously you’ll want to create something special. In the administration building, I imagine. I’ve spoken to Simmons, my architect, and he’s drawn up plans for something we’re calling the Henigsbaugh Alcove—”

“Lily.” Goddard’s whispery voice assumed a very subtle edge of command. “As I was about to say, we’re deeply appreciative of your late husband’s bequest. But I’m afraid we can’t accept it.”

There was a silence.

“I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Henigsbaugh asked, her voice suddenly cold.

Goddard waved his handkerchief at the worktable. “These bowls came from graves. We can’t take them.”

“What do you mean, from graves? Harry bought the pots from reputable dealers. Didn’t you get the papers I sent along? There’s nothing about graves in them.”

“The papers are irrelevant. Our policy is not to accept grave goods. Besides,” Goddard added more gently, “these are very beautiful, it’s true, and we’re honored by the gesture. But we have better examples in the collection.”

Better examples? thought Nora. She had never seen finer Mimbres bowls, not even in the Smithsonian.

But Mrs. Henigsbaugh was still digesting the grosser insult. “Grave goods! How dare you insinuate they were looted—”

Goddard picked up a bowl and poked one finger through the hole in its bottom. “This pot has been killed.”

“Killed?”

“Yes. When the Mimbres buried a pot with their dead, they punched a hole in the bottom to release the spirit of the pot, so it could join the deceased in the underworld. Archaeologists call it killing the pot.” He replaced the bowl on the table. “All these pots have been killed. So you see they must have come from graves, no matter what the provenience says.”

“You mean you’re going to turn down a half-million-dollar gift, just like that?” the woman cried.

“I’m afraid so. I’ll have them carefully crated and returned to you.” He coughed into his handkerchief. “I’m very sorry, Lily.”

“I’m sure you are.” The woman spun around and left the office abruptly, leaving a faint cloud of expensive perfume in her wake.

In the silence that followed, Goddard settled onto the edge of the table, a thoughtful look on his face. “You’re familiar with Mimbres pottery?” he asked.

“Yes,” Nora replied. She still could not believe he had turned down the gift.

“What do you think?”

“Other institutions have killed Mimbres pots in their collections.”

“We are not other institutions,” Goddard replied in his soft whisper. “These pots were buried by people who respected their dead, and we have an obligation to continue that respect. I doubt Mrs. Henigsbaugh would approve of us digging up her dear departed Harry.” He settled into a chair behind the worktable. “I had a visit from Dr. Blakewood the other day, Nora.”

She stiffened. This was it, then.

“He mentioned that you were behind in your projects, and that he felt your tenure review might go poorly. Care to tell me about it?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Nora said. “I’ll submit my resignation whenever.”

To her surprise, Goddard grinned at this. “Resignation?” he asked. “Why on earth would you want to resign?”

She cleared her throat. “There’s no way, in six months, I’m going to be able to write up the Rio Puerco and Gallegos Divide projects, and—” She stopped.

“And what?” Goddard asked.

“Do what I need to do,” she finished. “So I might as well resign now, and save you the trouble.”

“I see.” Goddard’s glittering eyes never left hers. “Do what you need to do, you say. Might that be searching for the lost city of Quivira?”

Nora looked sharply at him, and once again the chairman grinned. “Oh, yes. Blakewood mentioned that, too.”

Nora remained silent.

“He also mentioned your sudden absence from the Institute. Did it have something to do with this idea of yours, this search for Quivira?”

“I was in California.”

“I should have thought Quivira was somewhat east of there.”

Nora sighed. “What I did was on my own time.”

“Dr. Blakewood didn’t think so. Did you find Quivira?”

“In a way, yes.”

There was a silence in the room. Nora looked at Goddard’s face. The grin was suddenly gone.

“Would you care to explain?”

“No,” said Nora.

Goddard’s surprise lasted only for a moment. “Why not?”

“Because this is my project,” Nora said truculently.

“I see.” Goddard eased himself off the table and leaned toward Nora. “The Institute might be able to help you and your project. Now tell me: what did you find in California?”

Nora moved in her chair, considering. “I have some radar images that show an ancient Anasazi road leading to what I believe is Quivira.”

“Do you indeed?” Goddard’s face expressed both astonishment and something else. “And just where did these images come from?”

“I have a contact inside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was able to digitally manipulate radar images of the area, canceling out the modern tracks and leaving the ancient road. It leads straight into the heart of the redrock country mentioned in the early Spanish accounts.”

Goddard nodded, his face curious and expectant. “This is extraordinary,” he said. “Nora, you’re a woman of many surprises.”

Nora said nothing.

“Of course, Dr. Blakewood had reasons to say what he did. But perhaps he spoke a little precipitously.” He placed a hand lightly on her shoulder. “What if we make this search for Quivira our project?”

Nora paused. “I’m not sure I understand.”

Goddard withdrew his hand, stood up, and walked slowly around the room, looking away from her. “What if the Institute were to fund this expedition of yours, roll back your tenure review? How would that sound?”

Nora gazed at the man’s narrow back, absorbing what he had just said. “That would sound unlikely, if you don’t mind my saying so,” she answered.

Goddard began to laugh, only to be cut short by a series of coughs. He returned to the worktable. “Blakewood told me about your theories, about your father’s letter. Some of the things he said were less than generous. But it happens that I, too, have long wondered about Quivira. No less than three early Spanish explorers in the Southwest heard these stories about a fabulous golden city: Cabeza de Vaca in the 1530s, Fray Marcos in 1538, and Coronado in 1540. Their stories are too similar to be fiction. And then in the 1770s, and again in the 1830s, more people came out of that wilderness, claiming to have heard of a lost city.” He looked up at her. “There’s never been a question in my mind that Quivira existed. The question was always exactly where.”

He circled the table and came to rest on its corner once more. “I knew your father, Nora. If he said he found evidence for this lost city, I’d believe him.”

Nora bit her lip against an unexpected well of emotion.

“I have the means to put the Institute squarely behind your expedition. But I need to see the evidence first. The letter and the data. If what you say is true, we’ll back you.”

Nora placed a hand on her portfolio. She could hardly believe the turnaround. And yet, she had seen too many young archaeologists lose credit to their older, more powerful colleagues. “You said this would be our project. I’d still like to keep it my project, if you don’t mind.”

“Well, perhaps I do mind. If I’m going to fund this expedition—through the Institute, of course—I would like control, particularly over the personnel.”

“Who did you envision leading the expedition?” she asked.

There was the slightest of pauses while Goddard steadily met her gaze. “You would, of course. Aaron Black would go along as the geochronologist, and Enrique Aragon as the medical doctor and paleopathologist.”

Nora sat back, surprised at the rapidity with which his mind worked. Not only was he thinking ahead to the expedition, but he was already peopling it with the best scientists in their fields. “If you can get them,” she said.

“Oh, I’m reasonably sure I can get them. I know them both very well. And the discovery of Quivira would be a watershed in southwestern archaeology. It’s the kind of gamble an archaeologist can’t resist. And since I can’t go along myself”—he waved his handkerchief in explanation—“I’d want to send my daughter in my stead. She got her undergraduate degree from Smith, just took her Ph.D. at Princeton in American archaeology, and she’s anxious to do some fieldwork. She’s young, and perhaps a little impetuous, but she has one of the finest archaeological minds I’ve ever encountered. And she’s highly skilled at field photography.”

Nora frowned. Smith, she thought to herself. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she said. “It might muddy the chain of command. And this is going to be a difficult trip, particularly for a . . .” She paused. “A sorority girl.”

“My daughter must go along,” said Goddard quietly. “And she is no ‘sorority girl,’ as you shall discover.” An odd, mirthless smile flashed briefly across his lips before disappearing.

Nora looked at the old man, realizing the point was nonnegotiable. Quickly, she considered her options. She could take the information she had, sell the ranch, and head into the desert with people of her own choosing, gambling that she could find Quivira before her money ran out. Or she could take her data to another institution, where it would probably be a year or two before they could organize and fund a trip. Or she could share her discovery with a sympathetic backer uniquely qualified to outfit a professional expedition, leading the top archaeologists in the country. The price of admission was taking the backer’s daughter along for the ride. No contest there, she thought.

“All right.” She smiled. “But I’ve got a condition of my own. I need to take the JPL technician who assisted me along as a remote imaging specialist.”

“I’m sorry, but I’d like to reserve the personnel decisions.”

“It was the price of getting the data.”

There was a silence. “Can you vouch for his credentials?”

“Yes. He’s young, but he’s got a lot of experience.”

“Very well.”

Nora was surprised at Goddard’s ability to take a challenge, parry, and come to a decision. She found herself beginning to like him.

“I also think we have to keep this confidential,” she continued. “The expedition has to be assembled very quickly and very secretly.”

Goddard looked at her speculatively. “May I ask why?”

“Because . . .” Nora stopped. Because I think I’m being shadowed by mysterious figures who will stop at nothing to find the location of Quivira. But she couldn’t say that to Goddard; he’d think her crazy, or worse, and rescind his offer in an instant. Any hint of a problem would complicate, maybe even wreck, the expedition. “Because this information is very sensitive. Think what would happen if pothunters learned about it and tried to loot the site before we could reach it. And on a practical matter, we have to move fast. The flash flood season will be on us soon.”

After a moment, Goddard nodded slowly. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’d like to include a journalist on the expedition, but I’m sure his discretion can be relied on.”

“A journalist?” Nora burst out. “Why?”

“To chronicle what may be the most important find in twentieth-century American archaeology. Imagine the story the world would have lost if Howard Carter had not had the London Times covering his discovery. I actually have somebody in mind, a New York Times reporter with several books to his credit, including an excellent profile of the Boston Aquarium. I think he can be relied upon not only to be a good digger but to produce a highly favorable—and highly visible—account of you and your work.” He glanced at Nora. “You have no objection to ex post facto publicity, certainly?”

Nora hesitated. This was all happening so fast: it was almost as if Goddard had worked it all out before even talking to her. As she thought back over their conversation, she realized he must have. It occurred to her that there might be a reason for his excitement that he was not sharing with her.

“No,” she said, “I guess not.”

“I didn’t think so. Now let’s see what you’ve got.”

Goddard pushed away from the desk as Nora reached into her portfolio and removed a 30-by-60-minute U.S.G.S. topo. “The target area is this triangle just to the west of the Kaiparowits Plateau, here. As you can see, it contains dozens of canyon systems that all eventually drain into Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon, to the south and east. The closest human settlement is a small Nankoweap Indian encampment sixty miles to the north.”

Then she handed Goddard a sheet of paper: a U.S.G.S. 7.5-minute topographic map, onto which Holroyd had overprinted in red the final image from his computer, properly scaled. “This is an image taken from last week’s shuttle overflight, digitally enhanced. The faint, broken black line across it is the ancient Anasazi road.”

Goddard took the sheet into his thin pale hands. “Extraordinary,” he murmured. “Last week’s flight?” Again he looked at Nora, a curious admiration in his eyes.

“The dotted line shows a reconstruction of my father’s route through this country, following what he thought to be that road. When we extrapolated the road from the shuttle radar image onto this map, it matched my father’s route. The road seems to lead northwestward from Betatakin Ruin, through this maze of canyons, and over this huge ridge, which my father labeled the Devil’s Backbone. It then appears to lead into a narrow slot canyon, ending up in this tiny, hidden canyon, here. It’s somewhere in this canyon that we hope to find the city.”

Goddard shook his head. “Amazing. But Nora, all the ancient Anasazi roads we know about, Chaco and the rest, run in absolutely straight lines. This road winds around like a broken spring.”

“I thought of that, too,” Nora said. “Everyone’s always thought Chaco Canyon was the center of Anasazi culture, the fourteen Great Houses of Chaco with Pueblo Bonito at their hub. But look at this.”

She pulled out another map, showing the entire Colorado Plateau and San Juan Basin. In the lower right-hand corner, an archaeological site diagram of Chaco Canyon had been overlaid, showing the huge ruin at Pueblo Bonito surrounded by a circle of outlying communities. A heavy red line had been drawn from Pueblo Bonito, through the circle, through a half dozen other major ruins, and running arrow-straight to the upper left hand corner of the map, terminating in an X.

“That X marks what I calculate to be the location of Quivira,” Nora said quietly. “All these years we’ve believed that Chaco itself was the destination of the Anasazi roads. But what if Chaco wasn’t the destination? What if, instead, it was the collecting point for a ritual journey to Quivira, the city of priests?”

Goddard shook his head slowly. “This is fascinating. There’s more than enough evidence here to justify an expedition. Have you given any thought to how you might get in there? Helicopters, for example?”

“That was my first thought. But this isn’t a typical remote site. Those canyons are too narrow and most are a thousand feet deep. There are high winds, beetling rimrock, and no flat areas to land. I’ve studied the maps carefully, and there’s no place within fifty miles to safely land a helicopter. Jeeps are obviously out of the question. So we’ll have to use horses. They’re cheap and can pack a lot of gear.”

Goddard grunted as he stared at the map. “Sounds good. But I’m not sure I see a route in, even on horseback. All these canyons box up at their sources. Even if you used this Indian settlement far to the north as your jumping-off point, it would be one hell of a ride just to get to the village. And then, waterless country for the next sixty miles. Lake Powell blocks access to the south.” He looked up. “Unless you . . .”

“Exactly. We’ll float the expedition up the lake. I’ve already called the Wahweap Marina in Page, and they have a seventy-foot barge that will do the job. If we started at Wahweap, floated the horses up to the head of Serpentine Canyon, and rode in from there, we could be at Quivira in three or four days.”

Goddard broke into a smile. “Nora, this is inspired. Let’s make it happen.”

“There’s one other thing,” Nora said, replacing the maps in her portfolio without looking up. “My brother needs a job. He’ll do anything, really, and I know with the right supervision he’d be great at sorting and cataloging the Rio Puerco and Gallegos Divide material.”

“We have a rule against nepotism—” Goddard began, then stopped as Nora, despite herself, began to smile. The old man looked at her steadily, and for a moment Nora thought he would erupt in anger. But then his face cleared. “Nora, you are your father’s daughter,” he said. “You don’t trust anybody, and you’re a damn good negotiator. Any other demands? You’d better present them now, or forever hold your peace.”

“No, that covers it.”

Silently, Goddard extended his hand.

10

THERE WAS AN ABRUPT HAMMERING SOUND; Nora almost dropped the artifact in her hands and looked up from her desk in a panic, heart galloping. Skip’s scowling face was framed in the glass window of her office door. She slumped back in her chair and breathed out. Skip raised one hand, and, with an exaggerated gesture, pointed downward at the doorknob.

“You almost gave me a heart attack,” she said as she let him in. Her fingers still trembled as she closed and relocked the door. “Not to mention the loss of two years of my salary if I’d dropped that Mogollon pot.”

“Since when did you start locking your office?” Skip said, slouching into the only chair not covered with books and tugging a large satchel onto his knees. “Look, Nora, there’s something—”

“First things first,” Nora interrupted. “You got my message?” Skip nodded and passed over the satchel. Nora unlooped the leather straps and looked inside. Her father’s old Ruger lay at the bottom, shoved into a battered holster.

“What do you want it for, anyway?” Skip asked. “Some academic rivalry that needs settling?”

Nora shook her head. “Skip, I want you to be serious for a minute. The Institute’s agreed to fund an expedition to Quivira. I’ll be leaving in a couple of days.”

Skip’s eyes widened. “Fantastic! You don’t waste any time, do you? When do we go?”

“You know perfectly well you’re not going,” said Nora. “But I’ve arranged a job for you, here at the Institute. You’ll start work next Monday.”

The eyes narrowed again. “A job? I don’t know jack shit about archaeology.”

“All that time you spent, crawling around the ranch on your hands and knees with Dad, looking for potsherds? Come on. Anyway, it’s an easy assignment, first-year stuff. My associate Sonya Rowling will show you around, get you started, answer questions, keep you out of trouble.”

“She cute?”

“She’s married. Look, I’ll be gone about three weeks. If you don’t like it by the time I get back, you can quit. But it’ll keep you occupied for the time being.” And maybe keep you in a safe place during the day, she thought. “You won’t mind looking after my place while I’m gone? And you’ll leave my stuff alone, for a change?” She shook her head. “You use my shower, you steal my hairbrush . . . I ought to start charging rent.”

“I didn’t steal your hairbrush!” Skip protested. “I mean sure, I used it, but I put it back. I know how neurotic you are about that kind of thing.”

“Not neurotic. Just neat.” She glanced over. “Speaking of looking after my place, where’s Thurber? Didn’t you bring him?”

A funny look came over Skip. “That’s what I wanted to tell you,” he said in a low voice. “Thurber’s missing.”

Nora felt the air leave her lungs in a sudden rush. “Missing?” she repeated.

Skip looked down abjectly.

“What happened?”

Skip shook his head. “Don’t know. It was the second night you were gone. He was fine the first night, or as fine as he ever gets. When I came in the second night and called for him, he was gone. It was weird. The door was locked, all the windows were shut. But there was this funny smell in the air, almost like flowers. There was some dog barking like mad outside, but it didn’t sound like Thurber. I went outside anyway and looked around. He must have jumped the fence or something.” He sighed deeply and looked at his sister. “I’m really sorry, Nora. I looked all over for him, I talked to the neighbors, I called the pound . . .”

“You didn’t leave a door open?” Nora asked. The raw anger she’d felt the night before, the feeling of violation, was gone, leaving only a strange and terrible fear behind.

“No, I swear I didn’t. Like I said, everything was locked up.”

“Skip, I want you to listen to me,” she said in a low voice. “When I got home last night, I could tell something wasn’t right. Somebody had been in the apartment. The place was dirty. My hairbrush was missing. There was a strange smell, the same one you noticed. And then I heard some scratching, and went outside—” She stopped. How could she explain it: the humped, fur-covered figure, the strange lack of footprints, the feeling of utter alienness that had come across her as she stood in the dark, flashlight in hand? And now Thurber . . .

Skip’s skeptical look changed suddenly to concern. “Hey, Nora, you’ve had quite a week,” he said. “First that thing out at the ranch, then this expedition coming together out of nowhere, and Thurber disappearing. Why don’t you go home and rest up?”

Nora looked into his eyes.

“What?” he asked. “Are you afraid to go home?”

“It isn’t that,” she replied. “I had the locksmith out this morning to install a second lock. It’s just that . . .” She hesitated. “I just have to keep a low profile for the next day or two. I can take care of myself. Once I’m out of Santa Fe, there won’t be any more problems. But, Skip, promise me you’ll be very careful while I’m gone. I’ll leave Dad’s gun in the bedside table drawer in my apartment. I want you to have it after I leave. And don’t go by the old place, okay?”

“You afraid the Creature from the Black Lagoon will get me?”

Nora rose quickly. “That’s not funny, and you know it.”

“All right, all right. I never visit that broken-down old shack anyway. Besides, after what happened, I’ll bet Teresa’s watching that place like a hawk, finger on the trigger.”

Nora sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”

“I am right. You wait and see. Black Lagoon, zero. Winchester, one.”

11

CALAVERAS MESA LAY SLUMBERING UNDER the midnight sky, a shadowy island rising out of an ocean of broken rock—the vast El Malpaís lava flow of central New Mexico. A screen of clouds had moved over the stars, and the mesa lay still underneath: silent, dark, uninhabited. The nearest settlement was Quemado, fifty miles away.

Calaveras Mesa had not always been uninhabited. In the fourteenth century, Anasazi Indians had moved into its south-facing cliffs and hollowed out caves in the soft volcanic tuff. But the site had proved uncongenial, and the caves had been abandoned for half a millennium. In this distant part of El Malpaís, there were no roads and no trails; the caves remained undisturbed and unexcavated.

Two dark forms moved among the silent broken rafts and blocks of frozen lava that lapped the sides of the mesa. They were covered with thick pelts of fur, and their movements had the combined swiftness and caution of a wolf. Both figures wore heavy silver jewelry: concho belts, squash blossom necklaces, turquoise disks, and old sand-cast bow guards. Beneath the heavy pelts, naked skin was daubed with thick paint.

They reached the talus slope below the caves and began to ascend, picking their way among boulders and rockfalls. At the bottom of the cliff itself they rapidly ascended a hand-and-toe trail and disappeared into the dark mouth of a cave.

Inside the cave, they paused. One figure remained at the mouth while the second moved swiftly to the back of the cave. He pushed aside a rock, revealing a narrow passage, and wriggled through into a smaller room. There was a faint scratching sound and the wavering light of a burning splinter revealed that this room was not empty: it was a small Anasazi burial chamber. In niches carved in the far wall lay three mummified corpses, a few pathetic broken pots left beside them as offerings. The figure placed a ball of wax with a bit of straw stuck into it on a high ledge, lighting it with an uncertain glow.

Then he moved to the central corpse: a gray, delicate form wrapped in a rotting buffalo hide. Its mummified lips had drawn back from its teeth and its mouth was open in a monstrous grimace of hilarity. The legs of the corpse were drawn up to the chest and the knees had been wrapped with woven cords; its eyes were two holes, webbed with shreds of tissue; its hands were balled up into shriveled fists, the fingernails hanging and broken, gnawed by rats.

The figure reached in and cradled the mummy with infinite gentleness, removed it from the niche, and laid it down in the thick layer of dust on the cave floor. Reaching into the pelt, he removed a small woven basket and a medicine bundle. Tugging open the bundle, he extracted something and held it up to the uncertain light: a pair of delicate bronze hairs.

The figure turned back to the mummy. Slowly, he placed the hairs in the mouth of the mummy, pushing them deep into the mummy’s throat. There was a dry crackling noise. Then the figure leaned back; the candle snuffed out; and absolute darkness fell once again. There was a low sound, a mutter, then a name, intoned again and again in a slow, even voice: “Kelly . . . Kelly . . . Kelly . . .”

A long time passed. There was another scratch of a match, and the wax was relit. The figure reached into the basket, then bent over the corpse. A razor-sharp obsidian knife gleamed in the faint light. There was a faint, rhythmic scraping noise: the sound of stone cutting through crisp, dry flesh. The figure soon straightened up, holding a small round disk of scalp, dotted with the whorl of hair from the back of the mummy’s head. The figure placed it reverently in the basket.

The figure bent once more. There was now a louder, digging noise. After a few minutes, there was a sharp rap. The figure held up a disk of skullbone, examined it, then placed it in the basket beside the scalp. Next, he moved the knife down the mummy until it reached the clenched, withered fists. He gently pulled aside the rotted tatters of buffalo hide from the hands, caressing them in his own. Then he worked the knife between the fingers, methodically prying them loose and breaking them off one at a time. Cupping each finger, he cut off the whorl of fingerprint and placed the desiccated chips of flesh into the basket. Then the figure moved down to the toes, breaking them off the body like breadsticks and quickly carving off the toe prints. Small showers of dust rained onto the cave floor.

The little basket filled with pieces of the corpse as the makeshift candle guttered. The figure quickly rewrapped the mummy and lifted it back into its niche in the wall as the light winked out. Picking up the basket, he left the chamber and rolled the rock back into place. Gingerly, he pulled a buckskin bag from the pelt, unwound the tight knot of leather that sealed it shut, and teased the bag open. Holding it away from himself, he carefully sprinkled a thin trail of some powdery substance along the base of the rock. Then he carefully sealed up the bag and rejoined his companion at the cave entrance. Swiftly and silently, they descended the cliff face and were once again swallowed up in the darkness of the great lava flow of El Malpaís.

12

THE HEADLIGHTS OF NORA’S TRUCK SWUNG across the predawn dark, scissoring through clouds of dust rising from the corrals, highlighting the wooden gates of the dude ranch. She came to a stop in a rutted parking area and killed the motor. Nearby, she could see two dark-colored vehicles, a pickup and a van, each bearing the Institute’s seal. Two slant-load horse trailers had been backed up to nearby horse pens, and ranch hands were loading horses into them under electric lights.

Nora stepped out into the coolness of the early morning air and looked around. The sky would not begin to lighten for another half hour or so, but already Venus was rising, a sharp fleck of light against the velvet sky. The Institute vehicles were empty, and Nora knew everyone must already be at the fire circle, where Goddard planned to introduce the expedition to one another and say a brief farewell. In an hour, they would begin the long drive to Page, Arizona, at the end of Lake Powell. It was time she met the others.

But she lingered a moment. The air was filled with the sounds of her childhood: the slap of latigo, the whistles and shouts of the cowboys, the boom of prancing hooves in the trailers, the clang of stock gates. As the aroma of piñon smoke, horses, and dust drifted near, a tight knot that had been growing within her began to relax. Over the last three days she had been supremely cautious, supremely vigilant, and yet she had seen nothing more to alarm her. The expedition had come together with remarkable speed and smoothness. Not a word had leaked out. And here, away from Santa Fe, Nora found some of the tension that had kept her so painfully on edge begin to ebb. The mystery of who had mailed her father’s letter was never far from her thoughts. But at least, once they were on the trail, she would leave her strange pursuers far behind.

A cowboy in a battered hat strode out of the corral, leading a horse in each hand. Nora turned to look at him. The man was barely five feet tall, skinny, barrel-chested and bandy-legged. He turned and shouted to some hands deeper in the dusty darkness, bracketing the orders with four letter words. That must be Roscoe Swire, she thought: the wrangler Goddard had hired. He seemed a sure enough hand, but as her father had always said, he ain’t a cowboy til you see him ride. She again felt a momentary annoyance at how the Institute’s chairman had taken over the hiring of all personnel, even the wrangler. But Goddard was paying the bills.

She pulled her saddle out of the back of her truck and stepped around. “Roscoe Swire?” she asked.

He turned and removed his hat in a gesture that managed to be both courtly and ironic. “At your service,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice. He had a great overhanging mustache, droopy lips, and large, cow-sad eyes. But there was a certain scrappiness, even truculence, about his manner.

“I’m Nora Kelly,” she said, shaking the small hand. It was so rough and scabby, it was like grasping a burr.

“So you’re the boss,” said Swire with a grin. “Pleased.” He glanced at the saddle. “What you got there?”

“It’s my own. I figured you’d want to load it with the rest in the front of the trailer.”

He slowly placed his hat back on his head. “Looks like it’s been drug around a bit.”

“I’ve had it since I was sixteen.”

Swire broke into another smile. “An archaeologist who can ride.”

“I can pack a set of panniers and throw a pretty good diamond hitch, too,” said Nora.

At this, Swire took a small box of gingersnaps out of his pocket, placed one underneath his mustache, and began to chew. “Well, now,” he said, when his mouth was full, “you ain’t shy about your accomplishments.” He took a closer look at her gear. “Valle Grande Saddlery, three-quarter-rigged with the Cheyenne roll. You ever want to sell this, you let me know.”

Nora laughed.

“Look, the others just went up to the circle. What can you tell me about them? Buncha New Yorkers on vacation, or what?”

Nora found herself liking Swire and his sardonic tone. “Most of them I haven’t met. It’s a mixed group. People seem to think all archaeologists are like Indiana Jones, but I’ve met plenty who couldn’t ride to save their lives, or who’d never ventured beyond the classroom and lab. It all depends on what kind of work they’ve done. I bet there’ll be a couple of sore butts by the end of the first day.” She thought about Sloane Goddard, the sorority girl, and wondered how she, Holroyd, and the rest were going to fare on horseback.

“Good,” said Swire. “If they ain’t sore, they ain’t having fun.” He pushed another gingersnap into his mouth, then pointed. “It’s up that way.”

The fire circle lay north of the corrals, hidden in a stand of scrub juniper and piñon. Nora followed the trail, quickly spotting the flickering fire through the trees. Huge ponderosa logs were arranged in broad rings, three deep. The circle lay at the base of a tall bluff, which was pockmarked here and there by caves, a pendulous overhang across its top. Light from the fire leaped and flickered, painting the sandstone bluff lurid colors against the dark. A fire circle before a long journey was an old Pueblo custom, Nora knew, and after witnessing the incident with the Mimbres pots, she wasn’t particularly surprised Goddard had suggested it. It was another indication of his respect for Indian culture.

She stepped into the firelight. Several figures were seated on the ponderosa logs, murmuring quietly. They turned at her approach. She immediately recognized Aaron Black, the imposing geochronologist from the University of Pennsylvania: six-foot-five-inches tall or more, with a massive head and hands. He held his head erect, chin jutting forward, which both added to his stature and gave him a slightly pompous air.

But the look belied Black’s towering reputation. She had seen him at numerous archaeological meetings, where he always seemed to be giving a paper debunking some other archaeologist’s shaky but hopeful dating of a site; a man of intellectual rigor who clearly enjoyed his role as spoiler of his colleagues’ theories. But he was the acknowledged master of archaeological dating, at once feared and sought after. It was said that he had never been proved wrong, and his arrogant face looked it.

“Dr. Black,” Nora said, stepping forward. “I’m Nora Kelly.”

“Oh,” Black said, standing up and shaking hands. “Pleased to meet you.” He looked a little nonplussed. Probably doesn’t like the idea of having a young woman for a boss, she thought. Gone were the trademark bow tie and seersucker jacket of his archaeological conferences, replaced by a brand-new desert outfit that looked as if it had been lifted straight out of the pages of Abercrombie & Fitch. He’s going to be one of the sore ones, Nora thought. If he doesn’t get his ass killed first.

Holroyd came over and shook her hand, gave her a quick awkward hug, and then, embarrassed, stepped back in confusion. He had the luminous face of a Boy Scout setting out on his first camping trip, his green eyes shining hopefully.

“Dr. Kelly?” came a voice from the darkness. Another figure stepped into the light toward her, a small, dark man in his middle fifties who radiated an unsettling, even caustic intensity. He had a striking face: dark olive skin, black hair combed back, veiled eyes, a long, hooked nose. “I’m Enrique Aragon.” He briefly took her hand; his fingers were long, sensitive, almost feminine. He spoke with a precise, dignified voice, in the faintest of Mexican accents. She had also seen him many times at conferences, a remote and private figure. He was widely considered to be the country’s finest physical anthropologist, winner of the Hrdlicka Medal; but he was also a medical doctor—a highly convenient combination, which had undoubtedly figured in Goddard’s choice. It amazed her again that Goddard could have gotten professionals of the stature of Black and Aragon at such short notice. And it struck her even more forcefully that she would be directing these two men, very much her superior in both age and reputation. Nora shook off the sudden surge of doubt: if she was going to lead this expedition, she knew, she had better start thinking and acting like a leader, not an assistant professor always deferring to her senior colleagues.

“We’ve been making introductions,” Aragon said with a brief smile. “This is Luigi Bonarotti, camp manager and cook.” He stepped aside and indicated another figure who had come up behind him to meet Nora.

A man with dark Sicilian eyes leaned over and took her hand. He was impeccably dressed in pressed khakis, beautifully groomed, and Nora caught the faint whiff of an expensive aftershave. He took her hand and half-bowed with a kind of European restraint.

“Are we really going to have to ride horses all the way to the site?” Black asked.

“No,” Nora said. “You’ll get to walk some, too.”

Black’s face tightened with displeasure. “I should have thought helicopters would make more sense. I’ve always found them sufficient for my work.”

“Not in this country,” Nora said.

“And where’s the journalist who’s going to be documenting all this for posterity? Shouldn’t he be here? I’ve been looking forward to meeting him.”

“He’s joining us at Wahweap Marina, along with Dr. Goddard’s daughter.”

The others began to range themselves around the fire and Nora settled down on a log, enjoying the warmth, inhaling the scent of cedar smoke, listening to the hiss and crackle taunt the surrounding darkness. As if from far away, she heard Black still muttering about having to ride a horse. The flames capered against the sandstone bluff, highlighting the black, ragged mouths of caves. She thought she saw a brief glow of light inside one of the caves, but it vanished as quickly as it had come. Some trick of the eye, perhaps. For some reason, she found herself thinking of Plato’s parable of the cave. And what would we look like, she thought, to those dwellers deep inside, gazing at shadows on the wall?

She realized that the murmur of conversation around her had died away. Everyone was staring at the fire, absorbed in their own thoughts. Nora glanced at the excited Holroyd, pleased that the remote-sensing specialist wasn’t having second thoughts. But Holroyd was no longer staring at the fire: he was staring beyond it, into the darkness of the cliff face.

Nora noticed Aragon look up, then Black. Following their gaze, she again saw a flash of light inside one of the caves beyond the fire, fitful but unmistakable. There was a faint clicking noise, and more yellow flashes. Then a lone figure resolved itself, gray on black, against the darkness of the cave. As it stepped forward out of the shadow of the sandstone bluff, Nora recognized the gaunt features of Ernest Goddard. He came silently toward the group, his white hair painted crimson by the fire, staring at them through the flames and smoke. He moved something within his hand, and the flashes returned yet again, flickering through his narrow fingers.

He stood for a long moment, holding each person in turn in his gaze. Then he slipped whatever was in his hand into a leather bag and tossed it over the flames to Aragon, closest on the circle. “Rub them together,” he said, his whispery voice barely audible above the crackle of the campfire. “Then pass them around.”

When Aragon handed her the bag, Nora reached inside and felt two smooth, hard stones. She drew them out and held them to the firelight: beautiful specimens of quartz, river-tumbled by the look of them, carved with the ritual spiral design that signified the sipapu, the Anasazi entrance to the underworld.

In that instant, she recognized them for what they were. Pulling them out of the glare of the fire, she rubbed them together, watching the miraculous internal sparks light up the hearts of the stones, flickering fiercely in the dark. Watching her, Goddard nodded.

“Anasazi lightning stones,” he said in his quiet voice.

“Are they real?” asked Holroyd, taking them from Nora and holding them to the firelight.

“Of course,” said Goddard. “They come from a medicine cache found in the great kiva at Keet Seel. We used to believe the Anasazi used them in rain ceremonies to symbolize the generation of lightning. But we aren’t sure anymore. The carved spiral represents the sipapu. But then again, it might represent a water spring. Again, nobody knows for sure.”

He coughed lightly. “And that’s what I’m here to say to you. Back in the sixties, we thought we knew everything about the Anasazi. I remember when the great southwestern archaeologist Henry Ash urged his students to seek other venues. ‘It’s a sucked orange,’ he said.

“But now, after three decades of mysterious and inexplicable discoveries, we realize that we know next to nothing about the Anasazi. We don’t understand their culture, we don’t understand their religion. We cannot read their petroglyphs and pictographs. We do not know what languages they might have spoken. We do not know why they covered the Southwest with lighthouses, shrines, roads, and signaling stations. We do not know why, in 1150, they suddenly abandoned Chaco Canyon, burned the roads, and retreated to the most remote, inaccessible canyons in the Southwest, building mighty fortresses in the cliff faces. What had happened? Who were they afraid of? A century later, they abandoned even those, leaving the entire Colorado Plateau and San Juan Basin, some fifty thousand square miles, uninhabited. Why? The fact is, the more we discover, the more intractable these questions become. Some archaeologists now believe we will never know the answers.”

His voice had dropped even further. Despite the warmth of the fire, Nora couldn’t help shivering.

“But I have a feeling,” he whispered, his voice weaker, hoarser. “I have a conviction that Quivira will contain answers to these mysteries.”

He glanced at each of them again, in turn. “All of you are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. You’re headed for a site that may prove to be the biggest archaeological discovery of the decade, perhaps even the century. But let’s not fool ourselves. Quivira will be a place of mystery as well as revelation. It may well pose as many questions as it answers. And it will challenge you, physically and mentally, in ways you cannot yet imagine. There will be moments of triumph, moments of despair. But you must never forget that you are representing the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute. And what the Institute represents is the very highest standard of archaeological research and ethical conduct.”

He fixed Nora with his gaze. “Nora Kelly has been with the Institute only five years, but she has proven herself an excellent field archaeologist. She is in charge, and I have put my complete trust in her. I don’t want anyone to forget that. When my daughter joins you in Page, she will also report to Dr. Kelly; there can be no confusion of command.”

He took a step away from the fire, back toward the darkness of the overhanging bluff. Nora leaned forward, straining to hear, as his whisper mingled with the muttering fire.

“There are some who do not believe the lost city of Quivira exists. They think this expedition is foolhardy, that I’m throwing my money away. There is even fear this will prove an embarrassment to the Institute.”

He paused. “But the city is there. You know it, and I know it. Now go and find it.”

13

THE EXPEDITION PASSED THROUGH PAGE, ARIZONA, at two o’clock that afternoon, the horse trailers followed by the pickup and the van, threading caravan-style down through town to the marina, where they edged into the gigantic asphalt parking lot facing Lake Powell. Page was one of the new Western boomtowns that had sprung up like a rash on the desert, built yesterday and already shabby. Its trailer parks and prefabs sprawled down toward the lakeshore through a barren landscape of greasewood and saltbush. Beyond the town rose the three surreal smokestacks of the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station, each climbing almost a quarter mile into the sky, issuing plumes of white steam.

Beyond the town lay the marina and Lake Powell itself, a green sinuosity worming its way into a fantastical wilderness of stone. It was huge: three hundred miles long, with thousands of miles of shoreline. The lake was a breathtaking sight, a sharp contrast to the banality of Page. To the east, the great dome of Navajo Mountain rose like a black skullcap, the ravines at its top still wedged with streaks of snow. Farther up the lake, the buttes, mesas, and canyons were layered one against the other, the lake itself forming a pathway into an infinity of sandstone and sky.

Staring at the sight, Nora shook her head. Thirty-five years before, this had been Glen Canyon, which John Wesley Powell had called the most beautiful canyon in the world. Then the Glen Canyon dam was built, and the waters of the Colorado River slowly rose to form Lake Powell. The once silent wilderness, at least around Page, was now filled with the roar of cigarette boats and jetskis, the sounds mingling with the smell of exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, and gasoline. The place had the surreal air of a settlement perched at the end of the known world.

Beside her, Swire frowned out the window. They had talked horses most of the trip, and Nora had come to respect the cowboy. “I don’t know how these horses are going to like floating on a barge,” he said. “We might have ourselves a surprise swimming party.”

“We’ll be able to drive the trailers right onto the barge and unhook them,” Nora replied. “They never have to be unloaded.”

“Until the far side, you mean.” Swire fingered the heavy mustache that drooped beneath his nose. “Don’t see any sign of that Sloane gal, do you?”

Nora shrugged. Sloane Goddard was supposed to fly directly into Page and meet them at the marina, but there was no sign of any Seven Sisters sorority types among the fleshy, beer-bellied throngs milling around the docks. Perhaps she was waiting in the air-conditioned fastness of the manager’s office.

The two trailers pulled up on the vast cement apron of West Boatramp. The van and the pickup came up behind and the company emerged into the sweltering heat, followed by the four Institute employees who would drive the vehicles back to Santa Fe.

Down here near the water, Nora could see Wahweap Marina in all its glory. Styrofoam cups, beer cans, plastic bags, and floating pieces of newspaper bobbed in the brown shallows at the bottom of the boatramp. SKI ONLY IN CLOCKWISE DIRECTION read one sign and nearby was another: LET’S ALL HAVE FUN TOGETHER! Endless ranks of moored houseboats lined the shore in either direction, enormous floating metal-sided RVs. They were painted in garish colors—motel greens and yellows, polyester browns—and sported names like Li’l Injun and Dad’s Desire.

“What a place,” Holroyd said, stretching and looking around.

“It’s so hot,” Black said, wiping his brow.

As Swire went to help back the horsetrailers around, Nora noticed an incongruous sight: a black stretch limousine flying down the parking lot toward the docks. The crowds noticed it too, and there was a small stir. For a moment, Nora’s heart sank. Not Sloane Goddard, she thought, not in a limo. She was relieved when the car came to a halt and a tall young man tumbled rather awkwardly out of the back, straightened up his skinny frame, and took in the marina through dark Ray-Bans.

Nora found herself staring at him. He was not particularly handsome, but there was something striking in the high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and especially in the bemused, confident way he surveyed the scene before him. His soft brown hair was wild, sticking out every which way, as if he had just climbed out of bed. Who in the world can he be? she wondered.

Several teenagers in the crowd instinctively moved toward him, and soon a crowd gathered. Nora could see the man was talking animatedly.

Black followed her stare. “Wonder who that guy is?” he asked.

Tearing her glance away, Nora left the group to gather up their gear and went in search of Ricky Briggs, one of the marina’s managers. Her route to the marina headquarters took her past the limo, and she paused at the edge of the crowd, intrigued, glancing again at the man. He was dressed in starchy new jeans, a red bandanna, and expensive alligator cowboy boots. She could barely hear his voice over the hubbub of the crowd, making comments while he waved a paperback book in one hand. As she watched, he scribbled an autograph in it, then handed it to a particularly ripe-looking girl in a string bikini. The small crowd laughed and chattered and clamored for more books.

Nora turned to a woman standing at the fringe of the crowd. “Who is he?”

“Dunno,” the woman said, “but he’s gotta be famous.”

As she was about to walk on, Nora heard, quite distinctly, the words Nora Kelly. She stopped.

“It’s a confidential project,” the man was saying in a nasal voice. “I can’t talk about it, but you’ll read about it soon enough—”

Nora began pushing through the crowd.

“—in the New York Times and in book form—”

She elbowed past a heavyset man in flowered trunks.

“—a fantastic expedition to the farthest corner of—”

“Hey!” Nora cried, bursting through the last of the crowd. The young man looked down at her, surprise and consternation on his face. Then he broke into a smile. “You must be—”

She grabbed his hand and began pulling him through the crowd.

“My luggage—” he said.

“Just shut the hell up,” she retorted, dragging him through the stragglers at the edge of the crowd, who parted before her fury.

“Just hold on a minute—” the man began.

Nora continued to pull him across the tarmac toward the horse trailers, leaving the perplexed crowd behind to disperse.

“I’m Bill Smithback,” the man said, trying to extend his hand as he skipped alongside of her.

“I know who you are. Just what the hell do you mean, making a spectacle of yourself?”

“A little advance publicity never hurt—”

“Publicity!” Nora cried. She stopped at the horse trailer and faced him, breathing hard.

“Did I do something wrong?” Smithback said, looking innocent, and holding a book up to his chest like a shield.

“Wrong? You arrive here in a limo, like some kind of movie star—”

“I got it cheap at the airport. And besides, it’s hot as hell out here: limos have excellent air conditioning—”

“This expedition,” Nora interrupted, “is supposed to be confidential.”

“But I didn’t reveal anything,” he protested. “I just signed a few books.”

Nora felt herself beginning to boil over. “You may not have told them where Quivira is, but you sure as hell alerted them that something’s going on. I wanted to get in and out of here as quietly as possible.”

“I am here to write a book, after all, and—”

“One more stunt like that and there won’t be a book.”

Smithback fell silent.

Suddenly Black appeared out of nowhere with an ingratiating smile, hand extended. “Delighted to meet you, Mr. Smithback,” he said. “Aaron Black. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

Smithback shook the proffered hand.

Nora watched with irritation. She was seeing a side of Black that wasn’t obvious from the SAA meetings. She turned to Smithback. “Go tell your chauffeur to bring your stuff and put it with the rest. And keep a low profile, okay?”

“He’s not exactly my chauffeur—”

“Do you understand?”

“Hey, does that hole in your head have an off switch?” Smithback asked. “Because it’s getting a little strident for my tender ears.”

She glared at him.

“Okay! Okay. I understand.”

Nora watched as he went shambling off toward the limousine, head drooping in mock embarrassment. Soon he was back, carrying a large duffel. He slung it on the pile and turned to Nora with a grin, bemused composure regained. “This place is perfect,” he said, glancing around. “Central Station.”

Nora looked at him.

“You know,” he explained, “Central Station. That squalid little spot in Heart of Darkness. The last outpost of civilization where people stopped before heading off into the African interior.”

Nora shook her head and walked toward a nearby complex of stuccoed buildings overlooking the water. She found Ricky Briggs ensconced in a messy office, a short, overweight man yelling into a telephone. “Goddamned Texican assholes,” he said, slamming the phone into its cradle as Nora entered. He looked up, his gaze traveling slowly up and down her body. Nora felt herself bristling. “Well, now, what can I do for you, missy?” he asked in a different tone, leaning back in the chair.

“I’m Nora Kelly, from the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute,” she said coldly. “You were supposed to have a barge here ready for us.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, the smile vanishing. Picking up the phone again, he punched in a number. “They’re here, the group with the horses. Bring the barge around.” He replaced the phone, then turned and without another word charged for the door. As she scrambled to follow, she realized she was showing a little more bitchiness than was good for a leader of an expedition. She wondered what it was about Smithback that had suddenly made her flare up like that.

Nora followed Briggs around the side of the complex and down the blacktop to a long floating dock. Planting himself at the edge of the dock, Briggs began yelling at the nearby boaters to clear away their craft. Then he swivelled toward Nora. “Turn the horse trailers around and back ’em down to the water. Unload the rest of your gear and line it up on the dock.”

After Nora gave the orders, Swire came around and jerked his head in the direction of Smithback. “Who’s the mail-order cowboy?” he asked.

“He’s our journalist,” said Nora.

Swire fingered his mustache thoughtfully. “Journalist?”

“It was Goddard’s idea,” said Nora. “He thinks we need someone along to write up the discovery.” She stifled the comment that was about to come; it would do no good to badmouth either Goddard or Smithback. It puzzled her that Goddard, who had chosen so well with the rest of the expedition personnel, had picked someone like Smithback. She watched him hefting gear, his lean arms rippling with the effort, and felt a fresh stab of irritation. I go to all this trouble to keep things quiet, she thought, and then this smug jerk comes along.

As Nora returned to the ramp to help guide the trailers, a great barge hove into view, davits streaked with dirt, aluminum pontoons stoved and dented in countless places. LANDLOCKED LAURA was stenciled across the tiny pilothouse in rough black letters. The barge eased around a bend in the harbor, its engines churning in reverse as it approached the cement apron.

* * *

It took a half hour to load the trailers. Roscoe Swire had handled the horses with great skill, keeping them calm in spite of the chaos and noise. Bonarotti, the cook, was loading the last of his equipment, refusing to let anyone else lend a hand. Holroyd was checking the seals on the drysacks that held the electronics gear. Black was leaning against a davit, tugging at his collar and looking overheated.

Nora looked down at her watch. Sloane Goddard had still not shown up. They had to make the sixty-mile trip to the trailhead by nightfall: offloading the horses after dark would be too complicated and dangerous.

She jumped aboard and entered the tiny pilothouse. The barge’s captain was fiddling with a sonar array. He looked like he might have just stepped off a porch in Appalachia: long white beard, dirty porkpie hat, and farmer’s overalls. WILLARD HICKS was sewn in white letters on his vest pocket.

The man looked over at her and removed a corncob pipe from his mouth. “We need to shake a leg,” he said. “We don’t want to piss him off any more than he is already.” He grinned and nodded out the window toward Briggs, who was already bawling to them, Move out, for chrissakes, move out!

Nora looked up the ramp toward the parking lot, shimmering in the heat. “Get ready to shove off, then,” she said. “I’ll give the word.”

The expedition was gathering forward of the pilothouse, where some grimy lawn chairs had been arranged around an aluminum coffee table. A dilapidated gas grill stood nearby, coated in elderly grease.

She looked around at the people she would be spending the next several weeks with: the expedition to discover Quivira. Despite impressive credentials, they were a pretty diverse bunch. Enrique Aragon, his dark face lowering with some emotion he seemed unwilling to share; Peter Holroyd, with his Roman nose, small eyes, and oversized mouth, smudges of dirt decorating his workshirt; Smithback, good humor now fully recovered, showing a copy of his book to Black, who was listening dutifully; Luigi Bonarotti, perched on his gear, smoking a Dunhill, as relaxed as if he were sitting in a café on the Boulevard St. Michel; Roscoe Swire, standing by the horse trailers, murmuring soothing words to the nervous horses. And what about me? she thought: a bronze-haired woman in ancient jeans and torn shirt. Not exactly a figure of command. What have I gotten myself into? She had another momentary stab of uncertainty.

Aaron Black left Smithback and came over, scowling as he looked around. “This tub is god-awful,” he winced.

“What were you expecting?” Aragon asked in a dry, uninflected voice. “The Ile de France?”

Bonarotti removed a small flask from his carefully pressed khaki jacket, unscrewed the glass top, and poured two fingers into it. Then he added water from a canteen and swirled the yellowish mixture. He rehung the canteen on a davit bolt and offered the glass around.

“What is that?” Black asked.

“Pernod,” came the reply. “Lovely for a hot day.”

“I don’t drink,” said Black.

“I do,” Smithback said. “Hand it on over.”

Nora glanced back at Willard Hicks, who tapped an imaginary watch on his wrist. She nodded in understanding and slipped the mooring lines from the dock. There was an answering roar from the diesels, and the boat began backing away from the ramp with a hideous scraping sound.

Holroyd glanced around. “What about Dr. Goddard?”

“We can’t wait around here any longer,” Nora said. She felt a strange sense of relief: maybe she wasn’t going to have to deal with this mysterious daughter, after all. Let Sloane Goddard come after them, if she wanted.

The team looked at one another in surprise as the barge began a slow turn, the water boiling out from the stern. Hicks gave a short blast on the airhorn.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Black cried. “You aren’t really leaving without her?”

Nora looked steadily back at the sweaty, incredulous face. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m really leaving without her.”

14

THREE HOURS LATER, THE LANDLOCKED Laura had left the chaos of Wahweap Marina fifty miles behind. The wide prow of the barge cut easily through the turquoise surface of Lake Powell, engines throbbing slightly, the water hissing along the pontoons. Gradually, the powerboats, the shrieking jetskis, the garish houseboats had all dropped away. The expedition had entered into a great mystical world of stone, and a cathedral silence closed around them. Now they were alone on the green expanse of lake, walled in by thousand-foot bluffs and slickrock desert. The sun hung low over the Grand Bench, with Neanderthal Cove appearing on the right, and the distant opening of Last Chance Bay to the left.

Thirty minutes before, Luigi Bonarotti had served a meal of cognac-braised, applewood-smoked quail with grapefruit and wilted arugula leaves. This remarkable accomplishment, achieved somehow on the shabby gas grill, had silenced even Black’s undertone of complaints. They had dined around the aluminum table, toasting the meal with a crisp Orvieto. Now the group was arranged around the barge in lethargic contemplation of the meal, awaiting landfall at the trailhead.

Smithback, who had dined very well and consumed an alarming quantity of wine, was sitting with Black. Before dinner, the writer had made some cracks about camp cooking and varmint stew, but the arrival of the meal changed his tone to one approaching veneration.

“Didn’t you also write that book on the museum murders in New York City?” Black was asking. Smithback’s face broke into an immensely gratified smile.

“And that subway massacre a few years back?”

Smithback reached for an imaginary hat and doffed it with a grandiose flourish.

Black scratched his chin. “Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great,” he said. “It’s just that . . . well, I’ve always understood that the Institute was a low-profile entity.”

“Well, the fact is I’m no longer Bill Smithback, terror of the tabloids,” Smithback replied. “I work for the buttoned-down, respectable New York Times now, occupying the position formerly held by a certain Bryce Harriman. Poor Bryce. He covered the subway massacre, too. Such a pity that my masterpiece of investigative reportage was his lost opportunity.” He turned and grinned at Nora. “You see, I’m a paragon of journalistic respectability that even a place as stuffy as your Institute can’t object to.”

Nora caught herself as she was about to smile. There was nothing amusing in the journalist’s braggadocio, even if it was tempered with a touch of self-deprecation. She looked away with a stab of irritation, wondering again at Goddard’s idea of bringing a journalist along. She looked toward Holroyd, who was sitting on the metal floor of the barge, elbows on his knees, reading what to Nora’s mind was a real book: a battered paperback copy of Coronado and the City of Gold. As she watched him, Holroyd looked up and smiled.

Aragon was standing at the bowrail, and Roscoe Swire was again by the horses, wad of tobacco fingered into his cheek, jotting in a battered journal and occasionally murmuring to the animals. Bonarotti was quietly smoking a postprandial cigarette, one leg thrown over the other, head tilted back, enjoying the air. Nora was surprised and grateful for the cook’s efforts on this first day of the journey. Nothing like a good meal to bring people together, she thought, replaying in her mind the lively meal, the friendly arguments about the origins of the Clovis hunters, and the proper way to excavate a cave sequence. Even Black had relaxed and told an exceedingly foul joke involving a proctologist, a giant sequoia, and tree-ring dating. Only Aragon had remained silent—not aloof, exactly; just remote.

She glanced over at him, standing motionless at the rail, gazing out into the fading light, his eyes hard. Three months on the Gallegos Divide, excavating the burned jacal site, had taught her that the human dynamic in an expedition of this sort was of crucial importance, and she didn’t like his resolute silence. Something was not right with him. Casually, she strolled forward until she was standing at the rail beside him. He looked over, then nodded politely.

“Quite a dinner,” she said.

“Astonishing,” said Aragon, folding his brown hands over the railing. “Signore Bonarotti is to be complimented. What do you suppose is in that curio box of his?”

He was referring to an antique wooden chuckbox with innumerable tiny compartments the cook kept locked and under jealous guard.

“No idea,” Nora said.

“I can’t imagine how he managed it.”

“You watch. It’ll be salt pork and hardtack tomorrow.”

They laughed together, an easy laugh, and once again Aragon gazed forward, toward the lake and its vast ramparts of stone.

“You’ve been here before?” Nora asked.

Something flitted across the hollow eyes: the shadow of a strong emotion, quickly concealed. “In a way.”

“It’s a beautiful lake,” Nora went on, uncertain how to engage the man in conversation.

There was a silence. At last, Aragon turned toward her again. “Forgive me if I don’t agree.”

Nora looked at him more closely.

“Back in the early sixties I was an assistant on an expedition that tried to document sites here in Glen Canyon, before it was drowned by Lake Powell.”

Suddenly, Nora understood. “Were there many?”

“We were able to document perhaps thirty-five, and partially excavate twelve, before the water engulfed them. But the estimate of total sites ran to about six thousand. I think my interest in ZST dates from that event. I remember shoveling out—shoveling out— a kiva, water lapping just three feet below. That was no way to treat a sacred site, but we had no choice. The water was about to destroy it.”

“What’s a kiva?” Smithback asked as he strolled over, his new cowboy boots creaking on the rubber deck. “And who were the Anasazi, anyway?”

“A kiva is the circular, sunken structure that was the center of Anasazi religious activity and secret ceremonies,” Nora said. “It was usually entered through a hole in the roof. And the Anasazi were the Native Americans who peopled this region a thousand years ago. They built cities, shrines, irrigation systems, signaling stations. And then, around 1150 A.D. their civilization suddenly collapsed.”

There was a silence. Black joined the group. “Were these sites you worked on important?” he asked, working a toothpick between two molars.

Aragon looked up. “Are there any unimportant sites?”

“Of course,” Black sniffed. “Some sites have more to say than others. A few poor outcast Anasazi, scrabbling out a living in a cave for ten years, don’t leave us as much information as, say, a thousand people living in a cliff dwelling for two centuries.”

Aragon looked coolly at Black. “There’s enough information in a single Anasazi pot to occupy a researcher for his entire career. Perhaps it’s not a matter of unimportant sites, but unimportant archaeologists.”

Black’s face darkened.

“What sites did you work on?” Nora asked quickly.

Aragon nodded toward an open reach of water to starboard. “About a mile over there, maybe four hundred feet down, is the Music Temple.”

“The Music Temple?” Smithback echoed.

“A great hollow in the canyon wall, where the winds and the waters of the Colorado River combined to make haunting, unearthly sounds. John Wesley Powell discovered and named it. We excavated the floor and found a rare Archaic site, along with many others in the vicinity.” He pointed in another direction. “And over there was a site called the Wishing Well, a Pueblo III cliff dwelling of eight rooms, built around an unusually deep kiva. A small site, trivial, of no importance.” He glanced pointedly at Black. “In that site, the Anasazi had buried with loving care two small girls, wrapped in woven textiles, with necklaces of flowers and seashells. But by then there was no time left. We couldn’t save the burials; the water was already rising. Now the water has dissolved the burials, the adobe masonry that held the stones of the city in place, destroyed all the delicate artifacts.”

Black snorted and shook his head. “Hand me a tissue, somebody.”

The boat moved past the Grand Bench. Nora could see the dark prow of the Kaiparowits Plateau rising far behind it, wild, inaccessible, tinged dusky rose by the setting sun. As if in response, the boat began to turn, heading for a narrow opening in the sandstone walls: the foot of Serpentine Canyon.

Once the boat was inside the narrow confines of the canyon, the water turned a deeper green. The sheer walls plunged straight down, so perfectly reflected it was hard to tell where stone stopped and water began. The captain had told Nora that almost nobody came up into that canyon: there were no camping sites or beaches, and the walls were so high and sheer that hiking was impossible.

Holroyd stretched. “I’ve been reading about Quivira,” he said, indicating the book. “It’s an amazing story. Listen to this:

The Cicuye Indians brought forward a slave to show the General, who they had captured in a distant land. The General questioned the slave through interpreters. The slave told him about a distant city, called Quivira. It is a holy city, he said, where the rain priests live, who guard the records of their history from the beginning of time. He said it was a city of great wealth. Common table service was of the purest smoothed gold, and the pitchers, dishes and bowls were also of gold, refined, polished and decorated. He said they despised all other materials.”

“Aaah,” Smithback said, rubbing his hands with an exaggerated air. “I like that: they despised all other materials. Gold. Such a pleasant word, don’t you think?”

“There isn’t a shred of evidence of any Anasazi Indians having gold,” Nora said.

“Dinner plates made of gold?” Smithback said. “Excuse me, Madame Chairman, but that sounds pretty specific to me.”

“Then prepare to be disappointed,” said Nora. “The Indians were only telling Coronado what they knew he wanted to hear in order to keep him moving on.”

“But listen,” Holroyd said, “it goes on: ‘The slave warned the General not to approach the city. The Rain and Sun Priests of Xochitl guard the city, he said, and call down the God of the Dust Devil on those who approach without their leave, and thereby destroy them.’”

“D-d-d-destroy them?” Smithback leered.

Nora shrugged. “Typical in these old reports. A hard kernel of truth at the center, embellished to increase dramatic effect.”

Hicks stepped out of the cabin, his stringy form framed in the battered pilothouse light. “Sonar’s giving me shoaling water here,” he said. “The canyon bottom’s coming up. We’ll probably be hitting the end of the lake ’round another bend or two.”

Now everyone came to the front rail, peering eagerly into the gloom. A searchlight snapped on above the pilothouse, illuminating the water ahead of them. It had changed color again to a dirty chocolate. The barge nosed its way past battered tree limbs, around dark curtains of stone that rose hundreds of feet.

They passed another sharp bend and dismay suddenly dragged at Nora’s heart. Blocking the far end of the canyon was a huge mass of floating debris: scarred tree trunks, branches, and stinking mats of rotting pine needles. Some of the tree trunks were five feet in diameter, horribly gouged and ripped as if by supernatural force. Beyond the tangle, Nora could make out the end of the lake: a wedge of sand at the mouth of a creek, deep crimson in the gloom.

Hicks threw the engine into neutral and came out of the pilothouse, puffing silently and staring down the beam of the searchlight.

“Where did all those huge trees come from?” Nora asked. “I haven’t seen a tree since we left Page.”

“Flash floods,” said Hicks, chewing on his corncob. “All that stuff gets washed down from the mountains, hundreds of miles sometimes. When the wall of water hits the lake, it just dumps everything here.” He shook his head. “Never seen such a snarl.”

“Can you get through it?”

“Nope,” said Hicks. “Tear my propellers right up.”

Shit. “How deep is the water?”

“Sonar says eight feet, with holes and channels down to fifteen.” He gave her a curious look. “Might be a good time to think about turning around,” he murmured.

Nora glanced at his placid face. “Now why would we want to do that?”

Hicks shrugged. “It ain’t no business of mine, but I wouldn’t head into that backcountry for all the money in the world.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Nora said. “You have a life raft, right?”

“Yup, inflatable. You sure can’t load horses into it.”

The expedition had gathered around, listening. Nora heard Black mutter something about knowing horses were a bad idea.

“We’ll swim the horses in,” Nora said. “Then we’ll bring the gear on the raft.”

“Now, hold on—” began Swire.

Nora turned to him. “All we need is a good horse to lead and the others will follow. Roscoe, I’ll bet you’ve got a good swimmer in that bunch.”

“Sure, Mestizo, but—”

“Good. You swim him in yourself, and we’ll push the others in afterward. They can swim through one of those gaps between the logs.”

Swire stared at the blockage before them, a crazy dark tangle in the ghostly illumination of the searchlight. “Those gaps are pretty small. A horse could get snagged on brush, or maybe gut himself on an underwater limb.”

“Do you have another idea?”

Swire looked out over the water. “Nope,” he said. “Guess I don’t.”

Hicks opened a large deck locker and, with the help of Holroyd, pulled a heavy, shapeless rubber mass out of its depths. Swire led a large horse out of one of the trailers, then threw a saddle over his back. Nora noticed he did not put on a halter or bridle. Aragon and Bonarotti began to move the gear toward the raft, readying it for transport. Black was standing near the trailers, watching the proceedings with a doubtful expression. Swire handed him a quirt.

“What’s this for?” Black asked, holding it at arm’s length.

“I’m going to swim this horse in to shore first,” Swire replied. “Nora will lead the rest out one by one. Your job is to make them jump into the water after me.”

“Oh, really? And just how do I do that?”

“You quirt ’em.”

“Quirt them?”

“Whip their asses. Don’t let them stop to think.”

“That’s insane. I’ll be kicked.”

“None of these horses are kickers, but be ready to dodge anyway. And make a sound like this.” Swire made a loud, unpleasant kissing sound with his lips.

“Maybe flowers and a box of chocolates would be easier,” Smithback cracked.

“I don’t know anything about horses,” Black protested.

“’Course you don’t. But it don’t take a professional waddy to whack a horse’s ass.”

“Won’t it hurt the horses?”

“It’ll sting some,” Swire replied. “But we don’t got all night to sweet-talk ’em.”

Black continued to stare at the quirt with a frown. Watching him, Nora wasn’t sure what the scientist was more upset by: quirting the horses or being ordered about by a cowboy.

Swire vaulted into the saddle. “Keep ’em coming one at a time, but let the water clear so they ain’t jumping on each other’s backs.”

He turned and shoved the spurs to his horse. The animal obeyed instantly and leaped into the water, momentarily disappearing and then surfacing again, blowing hard, nose up to the air. Expertly dismounting in midair, Swire had landed beside the horse, hand on the saddlehorn. Now he began urging the animal forward in a low voice.

The rest of the horses pranced restlessly in the trailers, snorting through dilated nostrils and rolling their eyes with apprehension.

“Let’s go,” Nora said, easing the second horse forward. It stepped toward the edge of the barge, then balked. “Quirt him!” she cried to Black. To her relief, Black stepped forward with a determined look and smacked the horse across the rump. The horse paused, then leaped, landing with another roar of water and struggling after Swire’s horse.

Smithback was watching the proceedings with amusement. “Nicely done!” he cried. “Come on, Aaron, don’t tell me that’s the first time you’ve handled a whip. I’m sure I’ve seen you hanging around the West Village leather bars.”

“Smithback, go help Holroyd with the raft,” Nora snapped.

“Yassuh.” Smithback turned away.

One at a time, they coaxed the rest of the horses into the water until they formed a ragged, struggling line, nose to tail, threading their way through a gap in the tangle of trees and heading for the beach. Nora locked down the trailers, then turned to watch Swire clamber out of the water at the far end, bedraggled and dripping in the yellow glow of the searchlight. Securing his horse, he waded back into the water with yips and shouts, herding the rest onto dry land. Soon he had gathered them into a disconsolate mass and pushed them upcanyon, clearing the landing site.

Nora watched a moment longer, then turned to Black. “That was very well done, Aaron.”

The geochronologist blushed with pride.

Nora looked at the rest of the group. “Let’s get this gear offloaded. Captain, many thanks for your help. We’ll make sure the raft is well hidden while we’re upcanyon. See you in a couple of weeks.”

“Lest I see you first,” Hicks replied dryly as he disappeared into the pilothouse.

Around eleven, in the intense silence of the desert night, Nora took a last tour of the somnolent camp, then threw her bedroll some distance from the others, carefully sculpting the sand underneath for her hips and shoulders. To minimize the panicky, last-minute adjustments that always seemed to accompany packtrips, she had seen to it that the gear was already weighed and stowed in the panniers, ready for loading in the morning. The horses were hobbled some distance away, contentedly chewing the last of their alfalfa. The rest of the group was either asleep in their tents or quickly nodding off in their sleeping bags by the dying light of the fire. And the Landlocked Laura was well on her way back to the marina. The expedition had begun in earnest.

She eased into the bedroll, breathing easily. So far, so good. Black was a pain in the ass, but his expertise outweighed his querulous personality. Smithback was an annoying surprise, but with that strong back and arms he’d make a good digger, and she’d make sure he was well occupied with the shovel, whether he liked it or not. Before going to bed, he had insisted on pressing a copy of his book into her hands; she’d dumped it unceremoniously into a duffel.

On the other hand, Peter Holroyd was proving to be a real trouper. She’d caught him giving her several furtive glances during the ride up Lake Powell, and Nora wondered if he wasn’t a little bit infatuated. Perhaps she’d inadvertently played on that in persuading him to steal the data from JPL. She felt a momentary twinge of guilt. But then again, she’d kept her promise. He was on the expedition. The boy’s probably mistaking gratitude for puppy love, she thought, moving on. Bonarotti was one of those unflappable people who never seemed put out by anything, as well as being a fabulous camp cook. And Aragon would probably open up once they got away from his hated Lake Powell.

She stretched out comfortably. It was shaping up to be a good group. Best of all, there was no Sloane Goddard to deal with. Among Black, Aragon, and herself, there was more than enough expertise to go around. Dr. Goddard had nothing but his own daughter’s tardiness to blame.

Starlight glowed faintly from the distant bluffs and turrets of Navajo sandstone. A chill had crept into the air: in the high desert, night came on fast and sure. She heard a low murmuring, the drifting smell of Bonarotti’s cigarette. Into the silence the faint calls of the canyon wrens echoed back and forth, tinkling like bells, mingling with the faint lapping of water on the shoreline just below the camp. Already they were many miles from the nearest outpost of humanity. And the distant, hidden canyon they were headed to was much farther still.

At the thought of Quivira, Nora felt the weight of responsibility return again. There was a potential for failure here, too, she knew: a tremendous potential. They might not find the city. The expedition might break up over personality conflicts. Worst of all, her father’s Quivira might turn out to be some ordinary five-room cliff dwelling. That was what worried her the most. Goddard might forgive her for leaving without his daughter. But despite all the fine words, he and the Institute would not forgive her if she returned with a superb site report on a tiny Pueblo III cliff dwelling. And God only knew what kind of withering article Smithback might write if he felt his precious time had been wasted.

There was the distant yipping of a coyote, and she wrapped the bedroll more tightly around her. Unbidden, her thoughts returned to Santa Fe, to that night in the deserted ranch house. She’d been very careful to keep the maps and radar images under her control at all times. She’d impressed everyone with the need for discretion, citing pothunters and looters as her concern. And then into the midst of her careful plans blundered Smithback. . . .

Still, she knew it was unlikely that Smithback’s comments would filter back to Santa Fe, and beyond the mention of her name nothing he’d said was specific enough to give away the purpose of the expedition. And most likely, the bizarre figures who had attacked her had given up by now. Where she was going, it would take a determined, even desperate person to follow, someone who knew the craft of desert travel far better than even Swire did. Certainly no boats had followed them up the lake. The fear and annoyance subsided, and in their absence came sleep, and dreams of dusty ruins, and nodding columns of sunlight cutting through the murk of an ancient cave, and two dead children draped in flowers.

15

TERESA GONZALES SAT UP SUDDENLY, LISTENING in the dark. Teddy Bear, her giant Rhodesian Ridgeback, who generally slept outside in the summer, was whining at the back door. Ridgebacks had been bred to hunt and kill lions in Africa. He was a very gentle dog, but he was also extremely protective. She had never heard him whine before. He was just back from the vet’s, where he’d been languishing for two weeks, recovering from a nasty infection; maybe the poor thing was still traumatized.

She got out of bed and went through the dark house to the door. The dog came slinking in, whimpering, its tail clamped between its legs.

“Teddy,” she whispered, “what’s wrong? You all right?”

The dog licked her hand and retreated across the kitchen, sliding his huge bulk under the kitchen table. Teresa looked out the kitchen door, down into the sea of darkness toward the old Las Cabrillas ranch house. There were no lights in the draw, and without a moon Teresa couldn’t see the outlines of the abandoned house. Something out there had scared him half to death. She listened, and thought she heard a faint sound of breaking glass and the distant howl of an animal. Definitely too low-pitched and hoarse to be a coyote, but it didn’t sound like any dog Teresa had heard, either. It sounded like a wolf, if you got right down to it. But Teddy would never have retreated like that from a lone wolf, or even a cougar. Perhaps it was a whole pack of wolves.

The muttered low howl was answered by another, a little closer. The dog whined again, louder, and pressed itself back into the darkness under the table. There was a dribbling sound, and Teresa saw he was urinating in his fright.

She paused, hand on the doorframe. Until two years ago, there had been no wolves in New Mexico. Then the Game and Fish Department introduced some into the Pecos Wilderness. Guess a few have wandered down from the mountains, she thought.

Teresa went back to her room, peeled off her nightgown, slid on her jeans, shirt, and boots, then walked across the room and opened the gun locker. The weapons gleamed dully against the darkness. She reached for her current favorite, a Winchester Defender, with its 18½-inch barrel and extended magazine tube. It was a good, light gun, billed as a defensive weapon with unparalleled stopping power. Just another way of saying it was very good at killing people. Or wolves, for that matter.

She slid in a magazine: eight Federal ammo casings of 12-gauge double-ought lead buck. This wasn’t the first time since the attack on Nora that she’d heard sounds from the Kelly ranch. And once, driving back from Santa Fe, she’d seen a low, dark shape skulking around the old mailbox rack. Had to be wolves; nothing else made sense. They’d confronted Nora in the farmhouse that night. Must have rattled her so badly she thought she heard them speak. Teresa shook her head. Not like Nora to wig out like that.

Wolves that didn’t fear humans could be dangerous, and Teresa didn’t want to meet up with them without a gun. Better to deal with the problem directly. If Game and Fish wanted to make a stink, let them. She had a ranch to run.

She tucked the shotgun under her arm, shoved a flashlight into her back pocket, and crept back to the kitchen door, careful not to turn on any lights. She heard Teddy whining and snuffling as she left, but he made no move to follow her.

She stepped onto the back porch and eased the door shut behind her. There was a faint creaking of floorboards as she moved down the steps. Then she angled toward the wellhouse and the trail that began just beyond. Teresa was a large, heavy-boned woman, but she had the natural stealthy movements of a feline. At the wellhouse she inhaled deeply, steadied the gun, then eased down the trail in the inky blackness. She had descended the trail countless times to play with Nora when they were children, and her feet remembered the way.

Soon she was on the flat. The Kelly ranch house stood across the draw, just on the side of the rise, its low roof outlined against the night. In the faintest starlight, she could see the front door was open.

She waited for what seemed a long time, listening, but there was only the susurrus of wind in the piñon trees. The shotgun felt cold and reassuring in her hands.

She sampled the breeze: she was downwind of the house, which meant the wolves couldn’t scent her. There was a strange odor in the air that reminded her of morning glories, but nothing else. Perhaps the animals had heard her and run off. Or perhaps they were still in the house.

She snapped off the safety and gripped the flashlight tight against the Winchester’s barrel. Then she moved toward the front of the house. The building was striped in wavy starlight, looking strangely like a drowned, abandoned temple. She could use the light to freeze any animal that came into view, giving her a stationary target.

And then Teresa heard something, at the edge of audibility, that was not a wolf. She stopped to listen. It was a low, monotonous chanting drone, a hoarse, guttural cadence, dry and faint as parched leaves.

It came from inside the house.

Teresa licked her dry lips and took a deep breath. She stepped onto the front porch and waited for a minute, then two. As quietly as she could, she took two more steps forward, covered the inside of the house with her gun, and switched on the flashlight.

The house was as she remembered it from the previous week: a hurricane of ruin, dust, and old decay. The smell of flowers was stronger here. Quickly, she probed the corners and doorways with the light, seeing nothing. Through a broken rectangle of window, the night wind gently swelled the stained curtains. The chanting was louder now, and it seemed to be coming from upstairs.

She crept to the bottom of the stairs, switching off the light. These were obviously not animals. Perhaps Nora had been right after all: she’d been attacked by men wearing masks, rapists perhaps. She remembered how uncharacteristically frightened Teddy Bear had been. Perhaps it would be better for her to creep quietly home and telephone the cops.

But no—by the time the cops arrived, with their flashing lights and clomping boots, these bastards would have slipped away into the shadows. And Teresa would be left with the nagging worry about when they might show up again. Perhaps they’d try her house next time. Or perhaps they’d catch her out away from home, when she was unarmed . . .

Her grip tightened on the shotgun. The time to act was now, while she could. Her father had taught her how to hunt; she was an expert stalker. She had a weapon that she knew how to use. And she had the advantage of surprise. With infinite caution, she began to ascend the stairs. She moved instinctively, shifting her weight from foot to foot with extreme deliberation.

She paused again at the top of the stairs. The starlight filtering through the windows below was too faint here to make out anything but the vaguest of shapes, but her ears told her that the sound was coming from Nora’s old room. She took two steps, then paused to take several breaths, check her control. Whoever it was, she was taking no chances.

She braced herself, gun in both hands, the flashlight firm against the barrel. Then with one smooth, swift motion she stepped forward, kicked the door fully open, swivelled the gun into position, and snapped on the flashlight.

It took a moment for her brain to register what her eyes saw. Two figures, covered head to toe in heavy, dank pelts, crouched in the center of the room. Their red eyes turned toward the light, unblinking, feral. Between them rested a human skull, its top missing. Inside the skull was a small collection of objects—a doll’s head, some hair, a girl’s barrette—Nora’s old things, Teresa realized, frozen with horror.

Suddenly one of the forms leaped up, moving faster than she thought possible. It passed out of the beam of her flashlight as she jerked the trigger. The shotgun bucked in her hands and the deafening roar seemed to shake the house itself.

She blinked, straining to see through the dust and smoke. There was nothing but a ragged, smoking hole in the bedroom wall. Both figures had now vanished.

She pumped another round into the chamber and pivoted, covering the room with the yellow pool of light. Her breath rasped in and out as the noise fell away and the dust settled back into the gloom. People didn’t move like that. Here, by herself, behind the flashlight, she felt suddenly, terribly vulnerable. She had a momentary impulse to turn off the light, find shelter in the darkness. But she sensed that darkness alone would not protect her from these creatures.

Teresa had grown up a brave girl, big and strong for her age. She’d had no older brothers to keep her in line, and she had been able to beat up anybody in her class, boy or girl. Now—standing in the darkened doorway, breathing hard, eyes alert to any movement—Teresa felt an unfamiliar sense of panic threaten to envelope her.

She tore her gaze from the dark emptiness of the room, pivoted again, and scanned the hallway. The house was utterly silent except for her breathing. Other darkened bedroom doors, black on black, opened to the wrecked hall.

She had to get downstairs, she realized. There, she could switch off the light, let the starlight aid her. She glanced toward the stairs, imprinting their location in her mind. Then she switched off the light and darted forward.

A black shape lunged diagonally out from a far bedroom. With an involuntary cry, Teresa turned and jerked the trigger. Eyes blinded by the muzzle flare, she stumbled backward and half rolled, half fell down the stairs, shotgun clattering away into the darkness. She scrambled to her knees at the bottom step, a sharp pain spiking through one ankle.

At the top of the stairs a large shape crouched, staring silently down at her. Teresa whirled, searching in the faint starlight for her weapon. But instead of the shotgun, her gaze fell upon the second shape, framed in the kitchen doorway, coming toward her with a slow confidence that was somehow terrible.

Teresa stared at the figure for a moment, paralyzed with terror. Then she turned and limped toward the door, scattering glass, a low whimper escaping her throat.