Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)
Rebecca Roanhorse
To my shí heart, Michael.
Couldn’t have done it without you.
Chapter 1
The monster has been here. I can smell him.
His stench is part the acrid sweat of exertion, part the meaty ripeness of a carnivore’s unwashed flesh, and part something else I can’t quite name. It fouls the evening air, stretching beyond smell to something deeper, more base. It unsettles me, sets my own instincts howling in warning. Cold sweat breaks out across my forehead. I wipe it away with the back of my hand.
I can also smell the child he’s stolen. Her scent is lighter, cleaner. Innocent. She smells alive to me, or at least she was alive when she left here. By now she could smell quite different.
The door to the Lukachukai Chapter House swings open. A woman, likely the child’s mother, sits stone-faced in an old dented metal folding chair at the front of the small meeting room. She’s flanked by a middle-aged man in a Silver Belly cowboy hat and a teenage boy in army fatigues who looks a few years younger than me. The boy holds the woman’s hand and murmurs in her ear.
Most of the town of Lukachukai is here too. For support or for curiosity or because they are drawn to the spectacle of grief. They huddle in groups of two or three, hunched in morose clumps on the same battered gray chairs, breathing in stale air made worse by the bolted-up windows and the suffocating feel of too many people in too small a space. They are all locals, Navajos, or Diné as we call ourselves, whose ancestors have lived at the foothills of the Chuska Mountains for more generations than the bilagáanas have lived on this continent, who can still tell stories of relatives broken and murdered on the Long Walk or in Indian boarding schools like it was last year, who have likely never traveled off the reservation, even back when it was just a forgotten backwater ward of the United States and not Dinétah risen like it is today. These Diné know the old stories sung by the hataa?ii, the ancient legends of monsters and the heroes who slew them, even before the monsters rose up out of legend to steal village children from their beds. And now they are looking to me to be their hero.
But I’m no hero. I’m more of a last resort, a scorched-earth policy. I’m the person you hire when the heroes have already come home in body bags.
My moccasins make no noise as I cross the cracked tile floor to stand in front of the mother. Whispered conversations hush in my wake and heads turn to stare. My reputation obviously precedes me, and not all of the looks are friendly. A group of boys who must be the teenage boy’s friends loiter along the far wall. They snicker loudly, eyes following me, and no one bothers to shush them. I ignore them and tell myself I don’t care. That I’m here to do a job and get paid, and what Lukachukai thinks of me beyond that doesn’t matter. But I’ve always been a terrible liar.
The mother has only one question for me.
“Can you save her?”
Can I? That’s the real question, isn’t it? What good are my skills, my clan powers, if I can’t save her?
“I can find her,” I say. And I can, no doubt. But saving and finding are two different things. The mother seems to sense that, and she shuts her eyes and turns away from me.
With a clearing of his throat, the man in the cowboy hat pushes himself up from his chair. He’s wearing old faded Levi’s that probably fit ten years ago but now shrink back to leave his belly protruding over his belt buckle. A similarly ill-fitting cowboy shirt covers his aging paunch, and the look he gives me through bloodshot eyes tells me he’s already in mourning. That maybe he doesn’t believe much in saving either.
He introduces the mother, the boy, and then himself. First and last name, and then clans, like you’re supposed to. He’s the missing girl’s uncle, the boy is her brother. They are all Begays, a last name as common here as Smith is to the bilagáanas. But his clans, the ancestral relations that make him Diné and decide our kinship obligations, are unfamiliar to me.
He pauses, waiting for me to give my name and clans so he and the others can place me in their little world, decide our relations and what k’é they might owe me. And what k’é I owe them. But I don’t oblige him. I’ve never been much for tradition, and it’s better all around if we just stay strangers.
Finally, the older Begay nods, understanding I’m not inclined toward proper Diné etiquette, and gestures to the cloth bag at his feet. “This is all we have for trade,” he says. His hands tremble as he speaks, which makes me think he’s as bad a liar as I am, but he raises his chin defiantly, eyes wide under the brim of his hat.
I step forward and crouch to look through the bag, doing the quick math in my head. The silver jewelry is nice—beads, old stampworked bracelets, a few small squash blossoms—even if the turquoise is sort of junk, missing the spidery veins that make the rocks worth big trade. I can exchange the silver for goods at the markets in Tse Bonito, but the turquoise is useless, no more than pretty blue stones.
“The turquoise is shit,” I tell him.
A loud grunt and the brother pushes his chair back. The metal feet screech across the tile in protest. He makes a show of crossing his arms in disgust.
I ignore him and look back at the uncle. “Maybe you should find someone else. Law Dogs or Thirsty Boys.”
He shakes his head, his moment of bravado leaking away under the weight of limited options. “We tried. Nobody came. We wouldn’t have sent a runner if we weren’t . . .”