Waiting is something she has never had a talent for. Fifteen minutes of wild running about the small clearing and the desperate relief of a leg lifted against a tree burn off at least some of Asi’s tight-held energy, but Kirsten feels as though her nerves have wound into a tight spiral within her. Gods, what I wouldn’t give for a drink. Just a shot of bourbon, just one. Or a mouthful of old man Kriegesmann’s brandy.

But no such luxury is available, and she lays out a few strips of jerky for Asi and sets about rebuilding the fire. When it is burning nicely, she turns to Dakota. In the red light of the flames, her face seems touched with flame from within, the fever eating its way to the surface to show the white bone beneath. Carefully, Kirsten removes the bandages from the injured arm and hand; the skin lies drum-tight over the distended flesh. More carefully still, she wipes the dark blood and serum and oozing pus from the punctures made by the wolverine’s teeth. Red streaks run through the purpura that surrounds the wounds, and Kirsten forces down her fear, feeling the spring within her tighten another turn. “All right,” she mutters. “All right, damn you, you masked quack. You promised she’d be all right. She damned well better be, do you understand? Do you understand?”

That is not quite true, but she has no time for nuances. She intends to hold her delusion accountable, promise or not.

But all she can do now is replace the bandage, tuck the arm underneath the sleeping bag and wait. Somehow she manages to choke down a few bites of jerky, then settles in the one serviceable chair to keep vigil, Asi beside her.

She is never sure, after, what wakes her. She claws herself up out of the depths of a sleep she never intended to Asi’s sharp barking, the rustle of cloth, the sound of a voice. Weak and scratchy, vile with every four-letter word in the English language and others in a language she does not understand, but a living voice. Koda’s voice.

“Fuck. Shit. Burning up. Goddam. Gotta pee.” More rustling. “Damn. Hurts.”

Kirsten starts upright to see Koda struggling with the sleeping bag, half sitting up with one leg over the side of the bed. Her face, her hands, her throat are bright with sweat, her lank hair lying over her shoulder as wet as if she’d been standing in the rain. A huge wave of relief washes over Kirsten, and she throws her arms around Dakota. “I got you, love . I got you. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Goddam arm. Hurts like hell.”

“It’s okay, I’ve got something for it. What do you need?”

“Pee,” Koda says succinctly, and, wrapping her in the sleeping bag, Kirsten helps her outside into the first light of morning, the sun barely brushing the peak of the mountain behind them. Half, supporting, half carrying, Kirsten steers her back into the cabin, back to the bed. Lucid she may be, but Koda remains catastrophically weak, and subsides onto the narrow cot with a sigh. “How long?” she says.

Kirsten pauses to do the calculus of her journey. “A couple days, maybe three.” Gently she strokes Koda’s forehead, cool now beneath her touch. “You can go back to sleep in a few minutes. Just let me change the dressing again and give you your shot.”

“Mffph,” Koda says, covering her face with her good arm. “Gods. Stink. Mouth feels like a regiment camped in it for a month.” Then, “What shot?”

“Antibiotic. Levaquin,” Kirsten replies, pulling the injured hand toward her and beginning to unwind the gauze. It comes off slackly, the swelling already visibly reduced. The discoloration has also receded, crimson and purple lingering around the wounds themselves, but the surrounding flesh is clean, normal color returning. Koda flinches under her touch, and she bites her lip. “I’m sorry, love. It looks better, though.”

“Goddam nerves waking up. Where’d the AB come from?”

“A clinic a few miles away,” Kirsten lies without even thinking about it. She can tell Koda later about her dream, about the trek across the state line, about the wolf.

About the dead children.

Later. Much later.

She rewraps Koda’s arm and reaches for the Levaquin and the packet of syringes. Koda’s eyes follow her movements, and she gives the second injection with what she hopes is more aplomb than the first. Rummaging in her pack then, she finds the Vicodin and taps a pill out into the palm of her hand. “Here you go,” she says. “Something for the pain.”

“Dr. King,” Koda says, a faint smile turning up the corners of her mouth as she swallows the tablet. “How’d you know where to find an unlooted pharmacy?”

“Just followed directions.” And as Koda glances sharply up at her, “Later. Can you eat something?”

A half hour later, with Koda sleeping soundly, her breath slow and easy, Kirsten leans back in the chair, propping her feet up on the edge of the mattress. Dreamless sleep rises up about her, and she surrenders without a struggle.

CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN

KODA STIRS HER soup slowly, savoring the aroma of parsley and bay. For the first time since her fever broke, she can smell something besides her own tainted breath, and the steam from the dried herbs and reconstituted vegetables is the very perfume of Paradise. The bowl’s warmth also soothes her injured hand, and she shifts her grip to lay her wrist against the heat. That’s not to say that the Vicodin doesn’t help, too. So does the burnished feeling of her clean skin beneath clean clothes. It required a dozen pans of heated snowmelt and almost two hours, but with Kirsten’s help she has at last scrubbed the stink of illness off her.

She glances out the window of the fishing shack to where Kirsten has carried the sleeping bags to lay them in the open on a slab of dry stone. Snow still lies blue in the shadows under the pines, but where the sun strikes it has melted, running down the slope to swell the stream below. Kirsten stands just at its edge, spreading their laundry on a sandstone boulder that juts out into the water, making a narrow rapids. Asi has made himself comfortable on the grass beside her, belly turned up to the summer warmth, tongue lolling. A dark-crested Steller’s jay, its vivid blue a splash of color amid the dark needles of a balsam pine, pries at a cone with its bill, ignoring Wiyo where she floats high above aginst the open sky. Her cry floats down on the breeze, mingling with the song of a cardinal hen and the scolding of a tuft-eared squirrel. It is not a day to stay inside.

Carefully Koda pushes herself up from the edge of the bed. The Levaquin has done its work, and the infection is clearly under control. She is not so sure about her legs. Transferring her spoon to her bowl, she uses her right hand to steady herself as she progresses from bed to table, from table to door, and finally from the door to the trunk of a fallen larch halfway down to the water. She reaches it gratefully, steadying herself again as she sits and gives herself a moment to catch her breath.

I made it, though. Made it without help.

For a moment she simply sits, idly eating the soup and watching Kirsten’s neat, economical movements as she rinses out their spare shirts and underwear in the churning water, slapping them against the rocks, then smoothing them out to dry. In the past months, her skin has tanned to a rich bronze, her hair lightened under the sun and rain to the color and sheen of cornsilk. The waifish prettiness of the Kirsten King she had first met at the Minot android facility has gone, transformed into the taut beauty of a woman at home beneath earth and sky. Almost she could be Lakota.

But she is Lakota. Little by little, she is becoming a walker in two worlds. Kirsten King, President of the United States. Inktomi Zizi, warrior of the Lakota, wife of Tshunkmanitu-wakan Winan. That is something even Themunga will have to acknowledge.

Wanblee Wapka will help. So will Tacoma and her other brothers and sisters. Even Wiyo.

Her soup finished, Koda sets the bowl on the ground and slides down to sit in the grass, her back braced against the log. Lulled by the warmth, she feels her body grow heavy, her eyelids sliding shut. She should get up and go help Kirsten. But maybe a little nap first. Just a little one. Just a. . ..

She wakes to pressure of Kirsten’s body against hers, her still-bandaged left hand held lightly in her lover’s right. The bright head rests just as lightly on her shoulder, and she opens her eyes to its silver-gilt sheen. “Nun lila hopa.” She barely breathes the words, not wanting to wake Kirsten. “Nun lila hopa.”

“Thank you,” Kirsten says quite clearly, and Koda can just see the twitch of her mouth as the corners turn up in a smile. “I’m not asleep.”

“You should be, cante sukye. You need rest worse than I do.”

Kirsten lifts her head with a sigh. “I’m fine. Really. All it took was a couple nights’ good sleep.”

“That was quite a hike.” Koda cannot quite picture the map of northern Colorado and is not quite sure she would know Craig if she saw it, but she knows how far they are from the state line here on this mountain. She knows that the country gets no easier for a hundred miles or more. It is mostly vertical, just as this narrow valley is.

Kirsten shrugs. “Piece of cake, compared to that last high pass over the Medicine Bows. I went, I got the stuff, I came back. Nothing to it.”

“Mmm,” says Koda.

“What?”

“You never have said just what decided you to go to Craig. Instead of, say, Columbine. Or Steamboat Springs—that’s pretty close, too.”

Kirsten does not answer, and Koda begins to think she will not. Then she says, “It was him.”

Koda takes note of the unspoken capital H and italics. Him. “Who’s him?”

“Him. My pet delusion.”

There is only one male creature that Koda knows of that Kirsten regards, sporadically, as an hallucination. “Your raccoon, you mean? Your spirit animal?”

“Yeah.” There is a long pause. Then, “He showed up in a white coat and wrote a prescription. Dr. Kunz.”

The image floats up in her own mind, vivid, of a raccoon in a lab coat, stethoscope slung across his shoulders. With an effort, she keeps her face straight and says seriously, “For the Levaquin?”

“Yeah. And then he told me where to find it. I went, and it was there.”

Koda strokes Kirsten’s hair, running the fingers of her good hand through the silky strands. She may be Inktomi Zizi the warrior, but as a Lakota, she is still a work in progress. “You know, you’re going to offend him if you keep calling Wika Tegalega a delusion.”

“All right. An hallucination.”

“How would an hallucination know where to find the antibiotic?”

“My subconscious, that’s all.”

For a long moment, Koda remains silent. She can sense something held back, something besides Kirsten’s ambivalence about her encounter with another walker between worlds. Gently she says, “Do you think Wa Uspewikakiyape was an hallucination?”

“Your wolf? No!” Kirsten’s head comes up sharply. “I mean—I saw him, I—”

“And you saw your raccoon, too, didn’t you? I seem to remember he messed up your shoes in a very visible, tangible way.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But what?”

Very carefully Kirsten draws away from her, sitting back on her heels so that she can face Dakota. She says, “But it wasn’t just him. There was another—creature. A black wolf, with blue eyes. It pulled me up a snowbank when I twisted my ankle. It brought me a crutch. That’s what St. Bernards do. Not wolves.”

“Well, not as a rule,” Koda says mildly.

“But they do occasionally, huh? Black, blue-eyed wolves? Lakota shaman wolves.”

“Occasionally, yes.”

The breath goes out of Kirsten in a rush. “Oh boy. I’m not sure I— Shit.” She shakes her head as if to clear it. “But that’s normal in your culture, isn’t it? The fox out in the chicken house just may be Aunt Matilda, huh?”

“Great-Aunt Matilda,” Koda says solemnly, “is very fond of chicken. But she likes it fried. With gravy.”

“You’re laughing at me!”

“No.” She reaches out to draw Kirsten close again. “If it’s hard for you now, just let it go. No one’s going to ask you to accept things you’re uncomfortable with. Give it time.” Then, “What is it? There’s something else, isn’t there?”

With that, Kirsten turns to her again, her face against Koda’s shoulder, her hand gripping fiercely. Dakota feels her nod, an abrupt movement against her arm. “I didn’t want to tell you when you were so sick. I wanted to wait another day or two.”

“Tell me now. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it together.” Koda feels Kirsten’s muscles tense under her hand, her whole body going rigid. “Tell me.”

“They’re killing babies.” It comes out on one breath, desperate as a gasp for air in drowning water. “Newborns, infants, toddlers. They were all tossed out into a pit at the back of the clinic.”