“I see it. I see it as clearly as I see you, tanski.”

“And was it necessary to desecrate Igmu Tanka Kte’s body for your vision, thiblo?’ The edge is back in Koda’s voice. “Do you think Ina Maka can’t do it without you? That is pride speaking.”

“And that is pain speaking, Dakota.” The soft voice is Kirsten’s. The young woman’s face is pale as moon shadow on snow, but her eyes are resolute. “He was your teacher, wasn’t he? Let him teach others, too.”

“Don’t let his death go for nothing, tanksi.” Tacoma reaches for her hand, and this time Dakota allows him to enfold it in his own. “Neither you nor I nor Kirsten can say anything that will speak as clearly as his suffering.”

“You know there will be attempts to excuse Dietrich, Dakota,” Kirsten says. “People will tell themselves and each other that he was only trying to make a little extra money for his family, if he had one. They will say that we need fur now to keep us warm. That he was doing a service and that the uprising has made all our environmental protections obsolete. If we are to keep those laws, as we must, abstract arguments won’t work. What happened to your wolf will.”

Trapped.

Koda is pinned like a display specimen between their love and their logic, nowhere to go. Salt stings her eyes, tears she will not permit herself. She lowers her face so that they cannot see and says quietly around the cold that still burns raw in along her nerves. “He taught and protected me, and there was nothing I could do when he needed me.” Suddenly her rage tears through the wall she has built around it, ripping through her like a terrible birth. “I didn’t even know, goddamit. I should have known. I should have.”

Should have known he was in trouble. Should have known he was dying.

Should have known better than to leave him lying in the melting snow, no matter how burying him would have gone against tradition and her own deeply held conviction of the interdependence of all life.

He never failed me, and I have failed him when it counted most.

Gently she removes her hand from Tacoma’s. “Wicate,” she says.

Stepping away, she lets herself out into the spring morning, her feet carrying her blindly where they will.

*

The door closes behind Dakota with a snap like a spine breaking. Without volition, Kirsten takes a step forward to follow her, then checks herself abruptly. The jolt of it goes through her body as sharply as if she had walked into plate glass; the barrier transparent, invisible, strong. Over her shoulder, she looks up at Tacoma, whose eyes are as wide and dark with pain as his sister’s. He turns back to the fireplace, supporting himself against the mantel with both hands, his head bowed. “Christ,” he says, between his teeth. “Jesus. Fucking. Christ. Is there any way I could possibly have done it any worse than that?”

Kirsten steps up behind him and silently lays a hand on his shoulder. “Is there any way you could have done it that would have been less painful? No matter what you did or said, it was going to hurt her.” After a moment, she says, “You’re right, you know.”

“Oh, I know that.” He shakes his head, the dark hair spreading across his shoulders like a lion’s mane. “She knows it; you know it, everybody and his bastard brother knows it. And it doesn’t really matter a damn.”

“What we make of our world from now on matters. She knows that, too.”

“She knows that better than most of us.” Tacoma pushes himself away from the fireplace, turns again to face her. “Give her a while, then go after her. She’s going to need you.”

Kirsten feels the heat spread up her throat and into her face. Is it as obvious as that? Aloud she says, “Shouldn’t you—?”

“No. Not now.” From his pocket, he produces a pair of silver keys on a ring. “Give her these. I’ve got to get a team together to try to move a couple of generators from the wind farm. I’ll see her before I go.”

For long moments after the door shuts for a second time, Kirsten stands starting at the two small pieces of metal in her palm. From somewhere deep in her memory comes the image of a blue butterfly, fluttering its wings; the flutter starting a breeze; the breeze becoming a wind; the wind feeding a hurricane. Not even in Minot, with her fingers on the keys of the one computer whose codes could set the world to rights, did she feel the future so light in her hand.

She can hide the keys. She can take them back to the clinic and hang them in their accustomed place on the board.

Or she can take them to Dakota and trust her to make the right choice through her anger and her pain.

For a moment she turns the keys over in her fingers. They take the light from the window, glinting in the strengthening sun. Truth or dare. Truth or risk the loss of something she has never dared hope for, in all her life, for whatever life there may be left.

No choice at all, really. She slips the keys into her pocket and goes in search of her windbreaker.

Half an hour later she stands beneath the sycamore tree where the land falls away toward the woods. The snow has melted from the pavement; elsewhere it lies in meager patches, cupped in tangles of root and the blue shadow of the hollow slope. There is nothing to hold the print of a foot, only the smooth surface of the cement and the remains of last summer’s grass, the faintest hint of green just visible through the matted stalks. A gust of air ghosts over the dry meadow, further obliterating any sign of passage. Dakota might be able to track her quarry down a sidewalk or over dead grass, but Kirsten has no such skill, and she has left Asi at home.

Now what?

The veterinary clinic is a possibility. The memory of Dakota sleeping beside the widowed she-wolf and her pup comes to Kirsten as intensely as if she still stood at the door of the isolation ward. Koda might go there again in search of comfort, but the clinic also houses the body of her beloved companion. A shiver passes over Kirsten’s skin at the thought: the clinic seems haunted now, not so much by the wolf’s spirit as by the human memory of his death. Or Dakota may have left the base altogether, gone out into the solitude of the surrounding hills.

Kirsten does not know her way through the countryside here. If she is to leave the Base, she will have to return for Asi, possibly requisition a vehicle. The idea of tracking Dakota cross country with a dog, even Asi who clearly regards Koda as his second human, revolts her. Shading her eyes with her hand, she squints into the sun, standing down now halfway from noon. A ray catches the handful of snow still lingering in the fork of a limb directly above her, and it shatters into rainbows, light spiraling outward in all the shades of the spectrum. Perched on the branch, just visible within the spinning brilliance, sits a dark shape with a masked face and golden eyes. “Lost, are you?”

Kirsten cannot tell whether the voice speaks in the lifting breeze or only in her head. “You again,” she snaps. “Go away. I don’t have time for hallucinations right now.”

“Don’t you want to know what I can tell you?”

“I want to know where Dakota Rivers is. Can you tell me that?”

A grin splits Wika Tegalega’s face. “Of course I can. Ask me nicely, and I might even answer.”

Kirsten’s patience, what there is of it, snaps. “Then tell me, goddammit! You’re nothing but a figment of my unconscious mind, anyway!”

“Tch,” says Tega mournfully, shaking his head. “Was that nice?” His image seems to recede behind the shifting light, itself fading back into the deep blue of the sky.

“Wait!” she cries, reaching out toward the branch above her head. “Please! Tell me.”

“Go fish,” he says, and is gone. When Kirsten lowers her hand, blinking against the sun, there is only the empty sky and the branch, the last handful of snow trickling down the channels of its pale bark.

Kirsten shakes her head in disgust. She needs desperately to find Dakota; she has no idea where to look; and the most constructive thing she can do is stand bemused, conversing with an imaginary raccoon with a warped sense of humor. It occurs to her that she may well have lost her mind, or at least a significant portion of it.

And not a shrink within a thousand miles, maybe more.

Go fish.

Fish. A small silver fish wriggling in a furry, long-fingered hand. A stream and a tree arching over it.

As certainly as she had known of Dakota’s return from her solo raid on the birthing center, Kirsten knows where she can find the other woman. It is an unaccustomed sort of knowledge, rooted somewhere beyond the borders of rationality, direct and unmediated. It does not even occur to her to question it. Deliberately at first, then almost running across the uneven ground, Kirsten sets off toward the woods.

Once in the trees, she slows her pace. She does not have the habit of silent movement that she has seen in Dakota, but she can avoid crunching dead bark underfoot or tangling herself in the tough, dry stems of trailing vines. The afternoon light filters through the woven branches overhead, laying a sheen of gold and copper over the brown stalks of last summer’s undergrowth, striking the sycamores’ skin to silver. A red squirrel, its coat glinting like russet velvet in the sun, scampers among the slender twigs of the canopy. From deep in the trees comes the trip-hammer drumming of a early woodpecker, his rhythm making point counterpoint to the beating of her own heart. Here and there the branches bear the first swellings of burgeoning leaves. The ground beneath her carries the musty odor of mold, mixed with the green life to come.

Though she has been here twice, Kirsten does not know the woods, and she lets her feet and her instinct carry her unerringly to the streamside where she first encountered Wika Tegalega. A deep quiet descends upon her as she moves deeper into the trees, slowing her pulse, stilling the rustling of the dead leaves and the small life that inhabits them. The birds and the squirrels’ feet grow silent. The feeling is not unfamiliar; she has known its among the standing stones at Amesbury, in the angled light and lingering incense of Notre Dame. The sacredness of the place prickles along her skin.

Kirsten hears the stream before she can see it. The water, swollen with snow melt, makes a soft rushing sound as it pours over the low cataracts of its limestone bed and swirls around the roots of the centuries-old sycamores that march along its banks. When she emerges, still soundlessly, from the screen of the trees, Kirsten can see that its speed casts a fine spume into the air, misting the surface of the water and the slopes leading down to it. One tree, larger than the others, looms over the breadth of the stream, its roots, thick as a man’s body, woven into the living rock at its base. Dakota sits among them, her feet braced against a humped root. Her elbows rest on her bent knees, her chin on her folded hands. For a moment it seems to Kirsten that the other woman has been weeping; but fine droplets spangle her dark hair as well as her cheeks. And then Kirsten catches sight of Dakota’s eyes, dry and grey and empty as a winter sky.

The sight stops Kirsten in her tracks, her breath catching in her throat. Christ. Now what? I don’t know what to say to a face like that.

A month ago, a week ago, she would have turned away, retreating behind the barricades of her mind, into the silence a mere touch behind her ear could bring. Even now, her first impulse is flight, the long muscles in her legs spasming in her urgency to be gone.

Her fear has no place in this clearing. The power of earth and air and water here is an almost palpable thing, holding her fast. For a long moment she stands and watches the motionless form beside the swirling water. There is no acknowledgement, nothing that signals acceptance or even consciousness of her presence.

What can I say to her?

But that is the wrong question.

Silently as a shadow, she crosses the small open space beneath the sycamores. Half a dozen steps bring her close enough to see the minute rise and fall of the dark blue and green plaid flannel across Dakota’s shoulders, and the relief that washes through her tells her just how much she has feared. A few more steps carry her to the tangle of roots that spread out almost as widely as the crown of the tree. Koda still gives no sign that she is aware of Kirsten’s presence.

What if—?

She has heard that it is dangerous to touch a person who is in a trance state. An out-of-body soul might lose its lifeline and never come home, wandering forever in the grey interstices between worlds.

And that, she thinks with the certainty of recognition, is what I am. Have been. A homeless soul.