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Ruth nodded.“You were always watching, even then.Seeing everything, asking why.”A smile touched her lips.“Your father said you’d make a good scientist.I said you’d make a good listener.We were both right, I think.”

They set the dough aside to rise, knowing it would be ready by morning.Ruth wiped flour from her hands and touched Kari’s cheek in a rare gesture of affection.

“You have your mother’s eyes,” she said.“But your own way of seeing.”

It was as close to approval as Ruth offered.They returned to the main room, the practical activity having created a temporary bridge across their different worlds.

“Well,” Kari said, “I should go.It’s late, and tomorrow will be another long day.”

Ruth nodded.“Sleep in your mother’s house tonight.Listen to what it tells you.”

“Houses don’t talk, Shimásání,” Kari said with a small smile.

“Everything talks,” Ruth countered.“Not everything uses words.”

Kari leaned down to kiss her grandmother’s weathered cheek.“I’ll come by again soon.”

“You’ll come when the questions grow too heavy,” Ruth said, her tone matter-of-fact rather than accusatory.“Like tonight.”

There was truth in that, uncomfortable as it was.Kari had always turned to her grandmother when logical frameworks failed to provide answers.Perhaps that pattern hadn’t changed as much as she’d thought.

The drive back to her mother’s house seemed shorter, the desert night alive with shadows and movement at the edge of her headlights.Rabbits, coyotes, nightbirds—normal wildlife.Yet Ruth’s words echoed in her mind:Not all killers leave footprints.

Inside, the house felt different somehow—not empty as it had when she’d left, but expectant, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath.Kari dismissed the fancy as fatigue, making a quick cup of tea before heading to bed.

Sleep came reluctantly, her mind cycling through the day’s information.Harrington’s battered body.Natoni’s warnings.The strange ceremonial arrangement.Her mother’s research into old stories.The Walking Earth.

When dreams finally claimed her, they were vivid and unsettling.She stood at Canyon de Chelly, the red stone walls stretching above her, the night sky wheeling overhead.Her mother walked ahead of her on a narrow trail, glancing back occasionally but never speaking, leading her deeper into the canyon.Toward Monster’s Hand, its five stone fingers reaching toward the stars.

Not all killers leave footprints.The words seemed to echo from the canyon walls, though no one had spoken them aloud.

Her mother stopped at the base of the formation, pointing to something Kari couldn’t quite make out—markings on the stone, perhaps, or something hidden in shadow.She tried to move closer, but her feet wouldn’t obey.Her mother’s lips moved, forming words Kari strained to hear.

Listen to what it tells you.

Kari woke with a start, her heart racing, the dream already fading like mist in sunlight.The digital clock beside her bed read 3:17 AM.The witching hour, as her mother used to call it—when the veil between worlds was thinnest.

She lay awake for a long time after that, listening to the silence of her mother’s house, wondering what truths it might tell her if only she knew how to hear them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The desert held its secrets best before dawn.

Rachel Delgado had learned this over twelve years of environmental activism across the Southwest.The early morning hours revealed what daylight obscured—tire tracks not yet swept away by wind, equipment moved under cover of darkness, the subtle scars of human intervention on supposedly protected land.

Her breath frosted in the pre-dawn air as she followed a game trail through juniper and sage.At 5:15 AM, the sky remained mostly dark, though a faint grayish-blue had begun to define the eastern horizon, silhouetting the distant mesas.The cold bit through her layers—thermal shirt, flannel, down vest, and a windbreaker that had seen better days.But Rachel had never minded discomfort in service of the cause.

And this cause mattered more than most.

She checked her GPS coordinates against the hand-drawn map tucked in her vest pocket.According to her source—a former Bright Sky Mining employee with an awakened conscience—the company had been conducting exploratory drilling on protected Navajo land for months, operating in darkness and camouflaging their access points during daylight hours.

If true, it would violate not only the tribe’s sovereignty but at least six federal regulations.The class-action lawsuit she was building needed hard evidence, however, not just a whistleblower’s testimony.Today’s mission: document the illegal access road and collect soil samples for heavy metal contamination.

Rachel adjusted the straps of her pack, feeling the reassuring weight of her camera, collection vials, and the small soil sampling kit.At forty-three, she’d spent more than half her life fighting corporations that treated the land as disposable.The victories were rare, the defeats frequent, but she’d long ago abandoned measuring success by conventional metrics.

“Some fights you pick because they’re winnable,” her mentor had told her during her first Sierra Club internship.“Others you pick because not fighting would be unbearable.”

This particular fight had become personal last year, when elevated arsenic levels appeared in her uncle’s well water near the reservation border.Three neighbors with similar contamination.Two cases of rare cancer.Too many “coincidences” near a mining operation that supposedly maintained strict environmental standards.

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