Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(24)
“Bad Men,” he corrects me, his face tightening. “Bad Men” is a legal designation, language held over from treaty days that gives us the right to hunt monsters, human or otherwise, without the authorities getting their panties in a wad if someone ends up dead. Why the treaty language matters at all when there’s no United States left isn’t quite clear to me, and it’s not like the Feds ever upheld their side of the treaty anyway. But the term has stuck around. Seems a little silly to care either way what you’re calling someone you’re about to kill.
“They’re still men,” he says, his voice a deep roll of thunder. “They are still five-fingereds. To call them monsters is to misname them.”
“I don’t see how it matters what we call them. Dead is dead.” To me it’s splitting hairs not to think these men monsters. After all, there are plenty of human monsters too, just as twisted and evil as anything supernatural.
He turns fully to me, his sweep of broad shoulders blocking my view of the slurry tower and filling the space between us. “Words matter,” he says. “The name you give things, it forms them when you speak. You must always be careful with your words.” The look he gives me is dark and studied, and suddenly I worry that maybe I’ve gone too far.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” I apologize.
He grunts something noncommittal. The rebuke stings, and I cringe under his judgment. I know he’s trying to teach me to be a good Diné, but I figure it’s a waste of time. We both know why he keeps me with him. I’m a killer, and even if Neizghání is continually trying to counsel me to something greater, he’s never minded bloodthirsty when he needs me. I may be a terrible student, but he can’t deny that I get the job done.
Finally, he senses something in the tilt of the sun or the scent of the air. Something that tells him we should move. I douse the fire eagerly and bend to gather our camp supplies.
“Leave them,” he tells me.
A change of our usual routine, but it makes no difference to me. And frankly, the sooner we get going, the better. I’m happy to leave the camp made as-is.
We make fast time running across the open land toward the mine. The men are where we expect them to be. And from the paleness of their skin, my guess is that they’re refugees who made it past the Wall, here to steal what they can for their own malignant purposes. I rush forward, eager to remind Neizghání why he saved me. One of the men raises a gun, points it toward me. I laugh and K’aahanáanii trills a deathsong that becomes a full-throated dirge. I knock the gun from his hand, send it spinning. He grunts, tries to strike me with his fists. My B?ker takes his hand off for the transgression. I turn, rip my knife across his throat, as inexorable as rushing water cutting through mesa rock. Blood sheets the air like rain, and where it falls, the black coal stains blacker.
Another man rushes me, swings at my head with the flat of his shovel. I duck, come up under his arm, plunge my knife into his belly, and rip him open. Viscera pools at my feet. It should horrify me, but I can’t stop grinning. Laughing.
Then they all come, shouting, with weapons. One by one, I take them down.
When I finally rest, giddy and breathless, I am surrounded by the dead.
I bend over, hands to knees, to catch my breath. Grab the nearby edge of one of the dead men’s coats to wipe the gore from my knife.
“See,” I say to Neizghání, my voice a little high and excited. I clear my throat and try to contain my awful joy. “See. It doesn’t matter what you call them. They all die the same.”
He’s standing, staring at me. He didn’t engage in the fight at all, his lightning sword still holstered across his back, his armor unblemished. His arms hang loose and empty at his sides.
I hesitate, my next words forgotten under his gaze. My pulse accelerates, faster than can be explained by the adrenaline. The distance between us lengthens. I swallow, suddenly aware that I’m standing on a precipice I was too stupid to see before.
“Evil is a sickness,” he says to me.
He’s gone the next morning. I wait at our camp in the shadow of the Black Mountain. A week. Two. Afraid that if I leave he won’t be able to find me again, or if I abandon the camp, it will portent something bad, something I won’t be able to walk back. But I am only a five-fingered in the end, and my body needs food. Water. Warmth. I last a month, sleeping on rocky ground, eating what’s left of the Bad Men’s rations and collecting morning dew to drink, before I admit that he’s not coming back for me. A week after that, I stumble into Tse Bonito dehydrated, my moccasins worn thin and my feet bloody, asking Grandpa Tah for help. I don’t know where else to go, I mumble to him through cracked lips, and he assures me I am welcome. But the shame, the confusion, is more than I know what to do with. I know I can’t stay with the medicine man, no matter how kind he is to me. So I find a trailer, a truck. I try to work for the local mercenary crew, but they capture people alive mostly, and once they understand what I am, they want nothing to do with me. So I sit in my trailer and stare at the walls, day after day. Month after month. Until Lukachukai comes calling.
And now I’m in Crownpoint, looking at lightning burns and learning nothing. Except how much I want to go back and fix whatever it is I broke with Neizghání.
Chapter 10