The Wind Thief (Vanished, #4), page 21
Joey sings more loudly. He thumps his chest with the fist in which he’s clasped the feather. He stomps his feet to the driving drumbeat of the song, and in a definite moment, the song crosses over to become a chant, a call, an order.
I feel it calming the wind.
Just as I allow myself to think we might get off this mountain in one piece, something else catches my ear. A higher sound, raking, clashes with Joey’s chant.
Jacob Dark Sky crests the stairs, belting his Windway chant as if he’s been singing the entire way from the trading post to the mountain. He’s leading a long line of followers, and the dark wind rises again.
23
THE WALKER
Dark Sky may be singing the song, but I am the reason the dark wind is ripping through the thin place and into the land of the living. It’s my fault—not what I did but what I didn’t do.
I forgot who I was.
I became the Walker and left Ben forever behind, spreading myself thin over all the living souls of the world.
I became a faceless cloud with a scythe, a mere tool for the veil. I lost my own anchor. I bet it started as no big deal. I probably allowed myself to fog over one or two memories here and there, to zone out during one or two tough jobs—just the flutter of a butterfly wing. And now the storm has hit: Grant, about to throw himself past the point of no return after Kai, who might already be there, half in and half out of two worlds, and Hosteen, going to meet Dark Sky, joining in a chant that likely hasn’t been sung since Wind used it to crack open the second world and lead the Air Spirit people away.
The song is the sound of the sky breaking.
All Dark Sky needs to do is look at a thing, and his blind eyes rip into it, changing it, conforming it, opening it up.
Tendrils of white, now as thick as my arm, brace either side of the vortex and pull. Bits of the living world crumble to the ground like eggshell, and the sepia whirlwind that is the thin place is revealed.
When Ana and I met and she passed the torch to me, she said, “It’s a hard thing you go to do.” I was so high on seeing her again, even for an instant, that I sort of filed that away in the back of my mind, but she was right. Boy was she right. She was only six years into the job then and ready to float that river to peace. I’m about to lap her. And what do I have to show for it? My home is breaking down. My people are fleeing.
Joey’s singing puts up a good fight. Gam’s spirit power packs a punch. It always has and always will, but that’s not enough to stop our people from going, not if they want to go. Kai is there at the break, beckoning, and they come.
One by one, they duck under, in, and through, and as each leaves, I feel it. I feel a part of this land being chipped away just as the wind wears down the mountain. And the way they look at Dark Sky as they pass, the grateful desperation in their eyes, breaks my heart.
I see them as they go, and I remember them. The Nageezy kids, boys when we used to play kick the can with them, are all grown now. Shilah Yazzie limps through after his father, with Jonah Nez, too, who gave me my first cigarette—three, actually, traded for some leftovers I stole, of Gam’s chicken posole. I coughed myself blue after half of the first one, and Joey snapped the rest and tossed them into a fire.
These are Arroyo people, mostly. I know them. Each that bends their way through puts a piece of my memory back in place, setting my past right, which anchors my present.
Chooli Running Water walks through, the only constant rock left of her clan. Her soul thread says she’s sixty-two, but her body is at least a decade older. You can see it in her stoop and the way her face droops with that kind of tiredness that no amount of sleep can fix. That’s what happens when someone gives and gives. She tried to hold together a broken family—two of her own kids walked right off the Navajo Way. One huffed himself to death in a paint bag, and the other got into a head-on with a semi on I-70 in a stolen truck. She was never the same again.
Others pass, too, with no hogan to speak of but the Arroyo. Maria Bodaway walks through with her hands clasped behind her back, not a second’s hesitation. I remember now that I showed up at the Bodaway trailer a few years back and picked up two of her three grandchildren at once, blasted from the world by Fentanyl-laced heroin. The third lingered for a bit at the CHC before I picked him up too.
There goes Yas Hathali, one of Maria’s cousins who lived across from her at the Boxes. He does look back but not for long. He’s as set on leaving as the rest of them. No drug deaths have taken the Hathalis so far, just cards and liquor, the two oldest bullets in the book. I remember the council blackballed him and his brother Atsa from the Wapati casino when I was still in high school. Somehow, Atsa got a marker for more than he would ever make in a year by staking what was left of his eighteen money, and he lost it in one day. The tribe giveth, and the tribe taketh away. That night, he drank himself into oblivion with bootleg liquor and walked out into the winter without a coat or even shoes. I escorted him across not long after.
The Smoker! The gatekeeper for the Arroyo is the one who held vigil over Oka Chalk’s totem pile when he died, the one who helped translate the stories of the elder twins.
“You can’t leave!” I say. “The elder twins need you! The Arroyo needs you!”
He doesn’t even look back when he steps through.
Everything is coming together now, as so many things do, only when we’re losing them. Ten, twenty, thirty brothers and sisters are gone, one by one. Joey is holding the feather high and singing with tears streaming down his face. Grant is trapped with his neck in the noose, grasping for Kai, who is both here and there, living proof that pain does exist where these people are going. At the threshold, she strains like she’s holding it open herself.
Joey is faltering. He holds the feather like it’s a lodestone. His arms shaking, he marks each loss with his eyes shifting left to right like he’s counting the beads on an abacus. Chooli and a bunch of the other Running Waters live ten or so cars down from him. The Nageezy boys live—or lived—across the way. These people are his neighbors, his friends.
The feather lowers. Caroline leans against him, closing her eyes, humming. Owen is trying to pull Grant back, and I can see he’s thinking about phasing again if that’s what it takes.
In short, we’ve lost.
But if I have to lose, I want to lose like my Gam did, singing my people away.
I walk over to Joey and stand face-to-face with my oldest and best friend, and I clasp both hands around the feather, and I sing. I put all the names to all the faces and all the places that make up my Dinétah, and I sing it the way Gam did. I sing farewell.
I am going in freedom.
I am going, I am going,
I am going in beauty.
I am going, I am going,
I am going. Beauty is all around me.
I can hold only the feather, not my friend, not today. But the feather is what’s heavy today, and Joey senses my grasp instantly. His eyes snap open, searching, sweeping over me but still recognizing.
“Help me, brother,” he whispers. “Help me close this.”
Together, hand in hand, we raise the feather higher. I hold my people in my head, each a missing puzzle piece in my mind, and as each piece clicks, the wind dies a little more.
Right away, I know Dark Sky doesn’t like that one bit. His chant dries up, his face turning ugly as he grabs Hosteen.
“Quickly,” he snarls. “Get them through.”
Hosteen looks lost, over his head, but he’s always been a stubborn ass, and he’s not about to turn back now. He pushes Kai through the unraveling with one hand, and I watch, helpless, as Grant follows, dragged by his own refusal to let her go.
I know enough about the thin place to know that once they’re inside, they’re gone. All it takes is a step to disappear. Owen knows it, too, and he slams the full whip-strength of his lanky frame into Hos from the ground up. His shoulder connects at Hosteen’s neck, and both fly through the unraveling into the thin place. Kai and Grant tumble in afterward. The bell lights up with the fire of the desert sun and pulses once with a visible sound wave that passes through the portal and flattens everyone, me included.
Dark Sky steps through, last in the line, and as he does, he starts to transform.
That hellish white smoke wraps his face in an insect mask. White antennae sprout, wisplike, from his head. More smoke pours down his body, layering itself heavy and milk-white into twitching wings that waterfall down his back as he stands tall, a creature of shifting smoke, one of the ancient Air Spirit people come alive again.
He stretches and sighs with contentment. He turns toward the unraveling and bends his neck to look through, antennae seeking. “When I have the bell, this doorway will be open to all Diné forever,” he says with infuriating calm, in the exact same booming voice as Jacob Dark Sky. “And believe me when I say they will come. If not now, then soon. Eventually, the call will be too strong to ignore.”
His tendrils sweep out over the broken people who followed him, and as they are touched, the burn of the thin place seems to lessen. They become more docile, forming up in a line, as if to continue their march. A quick check of their threads shows that while the colors have been bleached and their story is impossible to read, the integrity still stands. These people will not die here as long as they have Dark Sky’s touch.
Grant gets no such protection.
The pain of the thin place is already needling him. He struggles to breathe. He’s turning a different kind of white, a dead kind.
Dark Sky watches with his bloodless gaze, waiting with Hosteen by his side. “This is how you hand it to me, Keeper. When the Walker escorts you to the river beyond. All I have to do is pick it up. The key to the next world will be mine.”
Grant is too weary to fight. He’s beaten down, burned out by the job. I know that feeling. Under other circumstances, if he still had the same strength in his soul as he did when he was eight, he’d probably find a way to break Dark Sky’s hold. But that child is gone. He’s a man now, one that has been carrying a heavy thing for most of his life. And it’s taken a toll.
I look to Joey, like I always used to when I had no idea what to do, but he’s just searching for me. Without Gam’s song pushing back against Dark Sky, the wind is rising again. But if we do sing, somehow managing to close the vortex, we’ll lose the people of the Arroyo on the other side. We can save the Rez at the cost of its heart, at the cost of ripping my friends apart.
Owen’s face falls, and he spins that old beaded bracelet around his wrist a few times. That’s twice now Dark Sky has hit at his family. But rather than start swinging, like I would’ve done—starting with that prick Hosteen Bodrey, who could use a few to the face—he kneels down by Grant and puts an arm around his son.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says softly, as if they were doing nothing more than bouncing from the local greasy spoon.
He sees all too clearly what I’m only now coming around to. As long as Dark Sky keeps Grant here, he wins. The power is in Grant’s hands and always has been. Part of Grant is reaching for Kai, gently grasping her arm. But his other hand is gripping the bell like a noose around his neck, and that’s what Owen sees.
I kneel down to the other side of him and speak before I have any chance to second-guess.
“Let it go, Grant.”
I don’t expect to be heard, don’t expect anything more than to be the ghost I always am, but something, some whisper, seems to reach him. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s split between worlds, balancing on the bell. Maybe it’s the fact that Chaco was his brother just as he was mine.
Or maybe it’s that his mom comes up behind me, then to me, then through me, and in an instant, I can see in her face that she and I are of the same mind.
“This is not the end,” Caroline says. “Everything comes around again.”
Those are Chaco’s words, but not like Chaco said them, not like I’ve held them in my mind. The way she says it, the old phrase rings with hope.
Grant swallows hard then smiles. It’s a sad smile, but it breaks the spell. That’s what he needed, his mom saying it’s okay to let it go.
He takes the bell off. He hands it to Dark Sky, and in an instant, the smug satisfaction of a plan well executed is wiped from him. I can see it in the way he backs up, antennae twitching.
Grant’s face is contorted with grief, but his voice is rock-solid. “Careful what you wish for.”
Dark Sky looks strangely at the bell, mandibles clicking. Joey starts to sing again, and the vortex begins to close. Owen looks at Grant, and his meaning is plain: You get out first.
But he’s not the only one. Kai Bodrey looks at Grant too. For the first time since Dark Sky poisoned her mind, her eyes seem clear. Maybe Grant’s selflessness stunned some life back into her.
I wasn’t there for the history of these two. That’s one of the things I missed in my fog. But a guy like me can read a lot in the thread that connects them on the soul map. It’s delicately woven when it comes to letting go. Kai seems to have thought it meant one thing for a long time: getting out and starting new.
But now, as she looks at Grant, their shared thread is changing. Something is shifting her perspective. Maybe she’s learning that “starting new” and “giving up” are two sides of the same coin, a bit too close for comfort. I can’t blame her for struggling with that balance. I’m still trying to figure it out myself.
She slowly drops to her knees and crawls toward him, and he stops rubbing at his newly freed neck long enough to hold out a hand again, breathless hope in his eyes and dripping down his soul thread with the rich color of honey.
She slows, unsure. The problem isn’t Dark Sky’s pull so much as the way her heart is tied up with her shithead brother. Abuse sucks like that. Sibling blood is strong, even when half of it has gone bad. She still feels like she’s abandoning him.
She grasps for Grant and utters something I think might be new for her. It’s something I can’t see anywhere in her thread, something foreign.
“Help me,” she whispers.
And Grant does. He pulls her, gently at first, then when he knows she’s on board, he pulls with more force until both of them tumble back out into the land of the living, their cold skin smoking in the blasting morning sun.
Owen follows right after, his thin frame nicking the shrinking walls as he dives through. The last of the vortex clips his shoe as he slides free on the sand of Knifepoint, then it’s gone. Joey’s voice is all that can be heard. As he lowers the feather to the gap, his song now sounds of mourning, of farewell.
I grasp the feather from the other side, and together, we seal it in the gap of Knifepoint. The turquoise clicks with the sound of a lock snapping shut. As it settles, the aquamarine color of the stone melts and spreads until it’s the same dusty red as everything else. The rock is seamless once more. The anchor is whole.
The wind drops entirely. The feather seesaws slowly to the mesa floor. All of us stand in silence. The blue sky above feels very close and spreads out over the cliff like a vast, still ocean where we float, marooned.
But at least we’re together.
Almost together, that is—we’re missing one very important member of the crew. All that’s left of Chaco is that feather, and I think the rest of the party is so stunned at the sudden stillness that nobody but me sees it smoking, slipping away one black thread at a time, now that its job is done.
Something about that doesn’t sit right with me, so I do what I always do when I don’t know what I’m doing or feeling. I just do something—anything.
I grab the feather and eat it. I swallow it just like I swallowed the whole bird. And my mind is blasted away once more into my grandmother’s past and into my own.
24
MANABA MORNING ROCK
My granddaughter is dying. I have to tell myself this over and over again even as I sit knitting at her bedside, surrounded by the foul smells of the white man’s medicine at the Albuquerque hospital where she will breathe her last breath. I tell it to myself because it is the only way I can come close to convincing myself that what I must do is right.
Nothing can save Ana now, not the white man’s medicine, not the Diné medicine. She is beyond all of it. My son knows it. Sitsi knows it. Even my grandson knows it. I can tell by the way they walk in and out of the room for no reason, as if the truth was a bear here, waiting, one they can’t stand for long.
I feel the bear, too, but I am too old to sit then stand, come then go. I knit to run away. And right now, I knit next to my granddaughter, who is dying. The two of us are the only ones in this cold, hissing, beeping room, so far from our people’s hogan.
This isn’t right. But it is what it is.
The only one who doesn’t seem to know that she is dying is my granddaughter herself. Our bodies are strange like that. We lie to ourselves. We lie especially when a truth as huge as the Black Bear begins to awaken.
Our people are built to survive, to struggle, to stay. Going is a hard thing to take, especially for a child of nine. She watches the sun play with a dream catcher that hangs above the window facing the east—always the east and the sun. At least this room has that.
Her breath is shallow. Her beautiful copper skin is gray. This disease of her heart has somehow eaten away at her face too. She is sunken, but when the dream catcher spins in the freezing air of this place and the sunlight plays with it, she still smiles. She looks at things as though she will still be looking at them tomorrow.
So it is up to me, then. I can see no path where what I am to do will not rip my family to pieces. They will not understand. But then, they cannot. The dream catcher spins in a wind made by man, but another wind still rages outside, one that Blackfeather still recovers from, one that nearly took him away from me, and one that is not done with my people just yet.
