Should she text Mari the coordinates? Should she leave a note?

Just, go. Get going, you. big. baby. She had Lady. She had food and water. She had a plan. Shackleton didn’t text people. She had a coat and hat and gloves and food. Self-reliance was a lost art.

She headed first to the rock outcrops where she’d last seen Kit near the rutted dirt road. There were footprints in the sand, to be sure, and the firepit, and a small cave she’d not seen before, where, she supposed, a cooler could be placed and kept in the shade. But there was no sign of a cooler or anything else. No sign of camping. Nothing being built. She kicked at the dirt, wondering what he had meant about monkey-wrenching. Like, putting sugar in a politician’s gas tank? Like, blowing up a switching station at a gas rig? Like, sending some evil substance to an Exxon official who was burning up the Amazon jungle? Like, blowing up part of the Nestlé plant that was pumping water from an aquifer for stupid plastic bottled water near the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado, which he’d told her about? Suddenly the possibilities seemed endless, and she had to admit, she approved of nearly all of them.

She needed to forget about Kit, she needed to forget about Levi, she needed to stop wondering about Dan’s intent, she needed to stop hoping for love, she needed to stop navigating her life around men, she needed to change her brain. She needed to be a strong solo explorer. She hefted her backpack to her shoulders and set off to the south, breath misting from both her and Lady’s mouths. She knew this was called Bootheel country, and it did feel like a bootheel; rather, her soul felt trampled like a bootheel. She had to step between barbed wire twice—surely she was trespassing on private land, but no one was in sight. She moved up what looked like a deer path, which reminded her of what the thief in Colorado had said—that roads were built on animal paths, that they had a wisdom about the best way across valley or slope.

She hiked on and paused, suddenly aware of how easy it would be to get lost. Okay, she had to be smart here. She took small bits of twine from her backpack and tied them to trees, snapped photos of the landscape around her. She could still see Dart, could also see how it was positioned in the long flat valley, a solitary dot in a huge landscape.

After an hour, the land began to incline more fully with rock outcroppings and more trees. Her legs pushed her up; her head was clearing and she wasn’t out of breath and she felt strong and capable. Despite drinking too much and her mushy soul, she was in better shape than she’d been for…well, a decade, at least. She stopped to get her bearings often—the bluff to the south, the distant peaks to the west, the location of the sun, and petted Lady, who was trotting happily beside her, darting off occasionally to smell something but always coming back.

She stopped under a paloverde tree so they could both eat lunch, and she estimated she’d been hiking for a little over two hours with a few breaks, so perhaps had gone five or six miles, and now she’d have to double back, which scared her a little. Why’d she come so far? Well, nothing like putting oneself into a situation to force a push into new territory!

The sheer expanse was the stunner here—the land stretched so far that she felt she could even sense the curve of the earth. That, and the solitude. She was truly alone, and the hairs on the back of her neck pricked, even with Lady panting nearby. Planet of the Apes, that’s what it felt like. But it had been invigorating—and she’d not been too cold, nor was it windy. The air was crisp, her cheeks pleasantly chilled, her lungs and heart and leg muscles strong. She was alive.

She closed her eyes and tried to feel the place, the joy of the place, to practice her gratitudes for sitting here. It didn’t matter that Vincent would love it, or that Powell should someday see it, or that Apricot would never bother to even wonder about it, or that she’d tell Mari about it. It didn’t matter that Levi or Dan or Kit should see her out here. It was just her. Ammalie. She was the one whose eyes sought out the cactus wren on the cholla, she was the one who sensed that the air was cooler in the draw where a creek normally ran, and she was the one who could smell the sunlight in the sunny patches. She tapped her hiking boots on the ground. She meditated on her feet, about how they connected her to the planet, about all the steps they had ever taken for her.

As she chewed her apple, she felt too the expanse of time, and tried to recall the history of this general area—Cochise, the great chief, and the Hohokam people, how this land had been taken, stolen, from them, violently. She remembered something about Pancho Villa and Geronimo, but she thought too of the women, the untold-of, unsung, strong, and kind women. She could also understand why so many people came here for vision quests or mystical experiences. She could feel how magical this place was—Chihuahuan Desert to the east, the Sonoran Desert to the west, the Rocky Mountains to the north, and the Sierra Madre to the south. The place had a vibe, a storied history, a crazy topography. It was a place of interest, as the placard had declared, and her getting here made her a person of interest.

As she gathered up her supplies to head home, a texture caught her eye. Smooth human-made something under a nearby tree—something out of place. She approached carefully: It was a filthy olive-green plastic storage tub, similar to the one she kept her food in, but much older and battered, upside-down with a very large rock on top of it. It was alongside an animal trail in a wash. She looked around for a minute and then walked right up to the tub. On it were words, scrawled in black marker and sloppy handwriting: Go in Peace, Traveler. Paz.

She took off the rock—heavy and nearly all she could manage—and lifted the tub. There were three dusty gallon jugs of water and two very rusted cans of beans titrated tightly together. She considered it for some time, was aware of how slowly her mind was working. Ah, for migrants, for those who were walking up from the Mexico border. Two of the gallons had writing on them. One had a peace sign and the other said Aqua Pura.

Huh. Someone bringing water. To keep someone alive. Exactly what she’d done, only this water was useful.

She put the tub back, adding the freeze-dried snacks she had in her pack, put the rock back on top, and turned around, retracing her steps, feeling surprised. Surprised that a water drop would be this far north. Was that normal, to have water drops here? Also, perhaps she was less alone than she thought. There were people wanting to be unseen everywhere. Her bitterness about middle-age-woman-unseenness suddenly felt deeply, deeply silly and petty—here she was, moaning about growing older, being alone, being without a job, sad about dumb things like her eyesight deteriorating and the necessity of five different kinds of eyeglasses, but who had the capacity to get all those glasses, and all this while someone else was wanting to be invisible to survive. To live!

No more of this, she thought. No more of this whining. You’re embarrassing even me. How lucky you are. Not another word of whining. Then she glanced at the angle of the sun and figured she’d better pick up the pace. Tiny rocks under her feet rolled like BBs and she had just enough time to glance down at them with curiosity when her right foot started to slide, her body tilted backward, instinctually tried to correct itself and lean forward, and then, horribly, she felt the pebbles under her left foot give. Air. Ooof. She was aware of her feet floating in air, time speeding up, her ass hitting hard ground, a zing in her tailbone, and a twist sending her sideways into a long-fallen branch and the rock beneath it. A moment of quiet. Of startle. Of Lady’s whine. Of the sound of pebbles still rolling downhill. Then the pain hit.

She sat up and covered her mouth with her palm to hold in the moan and rising vomit, then moved those fingers to her temple. They came away bloody. “Oh, okay, no thanks,” she said to them. “Oh, fuck.” And to Lady, she said, “It’s okay, girl, it’s okay,” because Lady was trotting around her, whining.

Awe. That was her main emotion. Awe that life was so predictable. She had forecast such a thing when packing the first aid kit, and such a thing had happened.

Then, more pain. In her tailbone and in her head. Lady whined; she whined. She put her hand back up to her head and looked. A palmful of blood. Head wounds just bled a lot, right? But warm sticky ooze was seeping down her cheek and neck and she looked down and pulled her shirt away to find a thin stream already between her breasts. It had all happened so fast.

Stay calm. Ammalie, stay calm.

My head feels torn.

Stay calm.

With shaking hands, she got out her first aid kit and unwound the long piece of white bedsheet she’d rolled long ago. Breathed in, breathed out. Put a thick piece of gauze and applied pressure to the wound. Flung it to the side when it was pure red, then put new gauze on, held it tight as she quickly wrapped the bandage around her head. Over this she put her baseball cap, in order to hold it all tightly to her head, though there was a piercing pain, and her teeth were chattering now, and not from the cold.

She rinsed the blood from her hands with water from one of her bottles, made sure to drink the rest of it as she swallowed two ibuprofen. Her hands were still sticky, especially in between her fingers, but she didn’t want to waste more water. She sat there until she felt she was okay, and then stood slowly. It was fine. The world wasn’t wobbly, though there was a stinging burn and an ache in her head, two separate sensations.

“Ut-oh,” she said to Lady. “Ut-oh ut-oh ut-oh.”

She turned and stumbled down the path, in the direction of Dart. Her heart throbbed along with her head.

Think, Ammalie. It had taken her a few hours to get here, and then she’d paused, and if it took her a few hours to get back, she’d make it in daylight. Barely. But if she had to stop and rest, then it would get colder and dark, and although she had a headlamp, the idea of tripping or stepping on cactus or animals…oh, god, there were bears and jaguars. She tried to pick up her pace, but she stumbled, and slowed.

Slow, Ammalie, slow.

Her brain whirred and blurred. She felt high again—were the edibles kicking in now? She touched her greenstone necklace and the key that hung next to it. She hummed a song. Some creature moved in the bush beside her and her yelp sent her head into a new level of thrumming.

“Oh my god,” she mumbled to Lady, trotting alongside her and also looking tired. “Oh, god. What have I done? I need…help. I’m so stupid, I’m so fucked!”

Against all odds of the universe, a calm, quiet voice responded. A voice that was not her voice, but more like an echo of a voice, as if coming from a different plane of existence, as if coming from others who had been here. Keep going.

Oh, god, she was going crazy. She was high! She touched her ears, as if they were the problem. Auditory hallucinations. She’d heard of such a thing. The pot…the loss of blood…the loneliness…she really had broken. Into shards! She didn’t realize how many breaks there could be! No one had ever bothered to tell her that when you thought you’d hit rock bottom, there were way more bottoms to go!

She sat down and started weeping, hiccupping and wiping snot on her sleeve. She was woozy, then nauseous, then trembling from cold and fear, then woozy again. She’d bled through her tampon and pad and could feel warm wet turning cold in her crotch, where there was also cold pee, and so she struggled with her pants and her backpack and supplies and managed to deal with all that, and then rested again. Now her head was bleeding through the bandage. Her tailbone zinged wildly from her fall. Her head felt like a balloon about to burst.

A contorted ironwood tree next to a dilapidated barbed-wire fence was nearby; she got up and stumbled over to it, sat on a rock at its base, heard herself whimper. If she had been hiking with someone, this would be so different.

She wanted one of her three keys.

She wanted to go back in time.

She wanted to do things differently.

Head resting on the tree, she could gaze at the sky. Now the sun was tilting to the horizon and the temperature was dropping. Though it was still light out, the moon was up and visible and something was fluttering above—bats, she realized. She murmured the children’s poem while staring at the first stars and applying pressure to her head by pressing her palm into it. If she could just quit resisting this…If she could just accept this place, and the night, and the unexpected situation…She had some sense that this was not her plan, but it was okay…If she could just rest. She was cold. She pulled Lady to her and hugged her, and Lady stayed still, quietly panting.

Some part of her brain told her to move, and another part told her to stay. As ever, two opposing truths existed at once. Get up. Move on. Onward. Rest, rest, you need rest. Some indeterminate amount of time went by, and then she heard Lady woof.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a figure, and oh, fuck, she was hallucinating or had a concussion.

“Hey, Kat.” His voice was low and full of concern.

“Kit?”

She reached out and poked him hard in the stomach to see if he was real. He gently held her hand. “Where’d you come from? What are you doing out here, Kat?”

“I was on a hike. I fell.”

He was on one knee in front of her, holding her hand, then shining a light into her pupils and putting his hands on her neck. “I’ve been watching you for a bit…hoping you’d make it on your own, I guess. You seemed to be doing okay until now.” He sighed. “Debating. My life or yours?”

“Why is it one or the other? Why’d you leave?” Her voice was whiny.

“Can you walk? It’s getting colder. Push on. Like Shackleton, eh? You can do it.”

He reached out to pull her up, and they took some small steps. He had a backpack on, a cooler in one hand, a nearly empty gallon jug of water in the other, but he set the water down and abandoned it so that he could use one arm to prop her up. In the other hand, he held her backpack. For a long time, they shuffled in silence, and she found herself counting things in three to the fall of a footstep.

Step—by step—by step.

Key—by key—by key.

Pow-ell, Mar-i, Apri-cot.