Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(22)

“Where to?” I ask, and my voice echoes back to me off the cavernous ceiling.

His eyes rove over the dusty rows of stacks, the long empty tables. “Archives,” he says. “Who knows. We might even find some of the stuff my dad worked on.”

“Monster stories?”

“Well, more than that. These are oral histories. Knowledge from elders about their lives, their time in residential schools, stories of parents who survived the Long Walk. Anything they were willing to share, really. Navajo scholars were afraid we’d lose the knowledge when the elders passed on. Maybe if they’d known the United States was going to crash and burn and Dinétah would be one of the last places standing, they might not have worried as much. But you can’t predict everything.”

“A lot of people did. Predict the Big Water, I mean.”

“Sure, but not like it was.” He leads us down a long hallway, walls dotted with posters—the 2030 Walk for Diabetes and the Crownpoint Fair of ‘29—that break up the blank expanse at regular intervals. “I mean, climate change was Florida flooding and California drought. Not two-thirds of the continent underwater.”

I keep the shotgun raised as we turn the corner and head into a reference room, filled with oversize books containing big maps of the earth. Maps that are now obsolete. Next to the maps are old encyclopedias holding the history of a world that no longer exists as pictured. It’s eerie, and it leaves me thinking of the places outside of Dinétah in a way I haven’t in a long time. Or maybe it’s Kai who’s got me thinking that way. I wonder if there are other places like this, other homelands where the old gods have risen, where monsters threaten the five-fingereds, where death stalks the few who still live on the land of their ancestors.

“Plus they didn’t consider the New Madrid earthquakes,” Kai continues. “The chaos and riots of the Energy Wars. Put all that together in a period of a few short years under an incompetent government . . . Even without the Big Water, bad things are going to happen.”

“My nalí said it wasn’t those things at all.”

He pauses and I almost run into him, my thoughts still stuck in distant drowned lands.

“What do you mean?” he asks, voice curious.

“Just a lot of traditional Diné tell the story of the first flood. Of how Coyote stole the Water Monster’s babies and the Monster flooded the world to get them back. They think maybe the Big Water was more like that.”

Kai frowns. “Coyote did it?”

“Hey, I’m not arguing.” I gesture for him to keep moving. The less time we spend in this place, the better. “I’m just saying that maybe there’s more to it. You of all people should know that.”

“Why me?” he asks. His back is to me, so I can’t see his face, but his voice sounds offended.

“You’re the med—”

He stops again. “This looks like it,” he says.

“It” is a long row of horizontal filing cabinets, the kind behind a drawer but divided into individual trays for organizing audiotapes. The drawer Kai points to is marked “Oral Histories,” divided into year and last name. The filing cabinets stretch the length of the entire wall, at least four deep.

“There’s no way,” I say, dismayed.

“More than I thought,” Kai admits, “but maybe there’s a way to narrow them down. Let’s take a look.”

I prop the shotgun up against one of the nearby shelves and jiggle the handle of the first drawer, marked “1971 A–C,” but it stays stubbornly closed. I try the second one just to check, and it’s locked tight too.

“Looks like we break in,” Kai says.

I raise my shotgun, stock pointing down. If I hit it hard enough, the lock should shatter.

Kai clears his throat. I pause, look over. He lifts a perfectly arched brow in my direction.

I say, “I know it’s a little heavy-handed, but it should get the job done.”

“Or . . .” He points to the B?ker strapped to my hip. “May I?” he asks.

“You want to use my knife?”

“I’ve got a talent with locks.”

I make a disapproving noise. “Lying to authority figures, picking locks, hoarding bootlegged whiskey. And here I was thinking you were some kind of scholar.”

He gives a look of mock outrage. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Does your grandfather know?” I ask, handing him my knife.

“My cheii was pretty notorious in his day.”

“Tah?” I ask, surprised.

“Don’t let a pretty face fool you.”

I lean against the filing cabinet, amused. “You know, now that you mention it, I bet Grandpa Tah was a looker. He’s still got that twinkle in his eye.”

He gives me an exaggerated sigh. “I meant me. I’ve got the pretty face.”

He’s bent down, studying the lock, a long-fingered hand braced against the cabinet door, his profile to me.

“That face must let you get away with a lot of things,” I say.

He shimmies the tip of my knife down between the lock and the cabinet. Works the mechanism a little. “What do you mean?”

“I just mean someone as good-looking as you . . .”