“Give me my clothes back!” she cried — and the Apache smirked, “Then come take them from me.”

Chapter 6

She fled with the women through the tunnels, crawling through darkness so complete it seemed to swallow time itself. Behind her, she heard the first cannon blast—a sound like the world splitting open. Then another. And another.

The tunnels went on for hours. When they finally emerged, blinking, into a narrow canyon on the far side of the ridge, Emily looked back.

Smoke rose from the valley. Black and thick, curling against the red sky like a wound in the earth.

She fell to her knees.

The women around her wept. The children clutched their mothers’ hands. But Emily did not weep. She could not. The grief was too vast, too formless, too much like the desert itself—empty and endless and silent.

She held the stone in her hand and pressed it to her chest.

*Be the stone.*

—

She waited three days.

Three days of hiding in the canyon, eating dried meat, drinking from a stream that tasted of ash. Three days of watching the smoke fade, of listening for footsteps that never came, of telling herself the same lie: *He is alive. He promised. He is alive.*

On the fourth morning, a scout found them.

He was young—maybe sixteen—and his face was streaked with dirt and dried blood. He spoke rapidly to the elder’s wife, gesturing toward the valley. She listened, her face growing pale, then turned to Emily.

“The soldiers are gone,” she said. “They burned the village. They took the bodies.”

“Took?” Emily’s voice cracked.

“They want to count them. To prove they won.”

“And Koa?”

The woman hesitated. That hesitation told Emily everything.

She ran.

She ran through the canyon, through the tunnel, through the smoke that still clung to the air. She ran past the ruins of the village—the charred shelters, the scattered grain, the child’s moccasin lying in the ash. She ran until she reached the center of the clearing, where the fire pit had been, where she had danced with him under the stars.

And she stopped.

He lay face-down in the dirt, his body still, his hand stretched toward something she could not see.

She fell beside him. She turned him over.

His eyes were closed. His face was calm. The wound in his chest had stopped bleeding.

“Koa.”

She touched his cheek. It was cold.

“Koa!”

Her scream tore through the canyon, raw and animal and broken. She gathered him in her arms, his head against her chest, and she rocked him the way her mother had rocked her when she was small and afraid.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please. You promised. You *promised.*”

The wind carried her voice away.

She stayed there, holding him, as the sun climbed and fell and climbed again. She stayed as the women returned, as they built a pyre, as they prepared his body for the fire that would carry him to the spirit world.

But when they tried to take him from her arms, she would not let go.

“No,” she said.

“Daughter,” the elder’s wife said gently, “he is gone.”

“Then I am going with him.”

The woman’s eyes filled with tears. “That is not what he would want.”

“I don’t care what he would want.” Emily’s voice broke. “I care what I need. And I need *him.*”

The elder’s wife sat down beside her and took her hand.

“I know,” she said. “I know. But the living must carry the dead forward. That is our way. We do not bury them and forget. We carry them in our blood, in our breath, in every step we take. He is not gone, daughter. He is in you now.”

Emily closed her eyes.

The stone was still in her hand. *Túsă.* The first word he taught her. The first gift he gave her.

She pressed it to her lips.