The sign said Phoenix and the temperature said one hundred and fifteen. Kate Calloway sat in the bus station with her bag on her lap and waited for the bus that would take her to the border. She had been waiting for forty minutes. The bus was late. It was always late. Her鉴定 shop on East McDowell had been empty for three weeks. The landlord had left a note on the door that said "lease termination—effective immediately" in a handwriting that suggested he was angry about something. He probably was. Kate had not paid rent in two months. The last customer had been an old Mexican woman who brought in a copper bowl and said it was her grandmother's. Kate had told her it was a reproduction from the nineteen sixties, made in Guadalajara for tourists. The woman had looked at her with tired eyes and said, "My grandmother would be very upset." Then she walked out and did not come back. Kate understood. She did not blame them. Truth was not what people came to her shop for. They came for confirmation—for someone to tell them that their grandmother's bowl was genuine, that their great-uncle's sword was a real cavalry piece, that the "antique" they had bought at an estate sale was worth more than the five dollars they had paid for it. Kate was not in the business of giving people what they wanted. The Greyhound bus arrived two hours late. It was hot inside, the kind of heat that pressed against your skin and made breathing feel like work. Kate found a seat near the back and pressed her forehead against the window. The desert outside was flat and brown and empty, stretching to a horizon that seemed to be moving further away the faster the bus went. She slept. She woke when the bus stopped at a station in Benson, Arizona—a place with one gas station, one diner, and a sign that said ELEVATION 4,380 FT. She got off, bought a bottle of water, and went back on. The driver was a man with a face that looked like it had been carved from sandstone. He did not speak. Neither did she. The border station was after midnight. The bus pulled into a parking lot that existed primarily to collect exhaust fumes and tired people. Kate stepped out into air that was cooler but not comfortable—dry and thin and smelling of diesel. She had no plan beyond this moment. The anonymous phone call that had brought her here had given her an address in Cochise County and a name—Ray Dominguez—and told her to find him at the Greyhound stop at seven in the morning. It was now after midnight. She sat on a bench outside the station and waited. A truck pulled into the lot. It was old, rusted along the wheel wells, with a camper shell on the back. The driver's door opened and a man stepped out. He was tall, dark-skinned, wearing a jacket that had seen better years and boots that had walked too many miles. He looked at her. She looked at him. "Ray Dominguez?" she said. He nodded. "Kate?" "Yes." "Bus was late." "So I heard." He opened the passenger door of the truck. "Get in. We don't have much time." "What's the time constraint?" "Dust storm. Barometer is dropping. If we don't cross the ridge by morning, we're stuck." Kate looked at the sky. It was clear, with a thin layer of stars that she could not see because of the fluorescent parking lot lights. "You predict weather now?" "I lived here a long time." She got in the truck. The cab smelled of tobacco and old coffee and something she could not identify. The engine turned over with a sound like gravel in a mixer. They drove for two hours in darkness. The road was unpaved—gravel and dirt and the occasional pothole that made the truck jump. Ray drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the gear shift. He did not turn on the radio. He did not speak. Kate watched the landscape through the window. Desert scrub, mesquite trees, the occasional saguaro that stood like a sentry in the moonlight. Somewhere out here was a place where people had been digging up artifacts that belonged to nobody and everybody. "Who called you?" Ray said finally. His voice was low, the kind of voice that did not carry. "Anonymous. Left a number. Told me to find you." "What did they say?" "That there were artifacts stolen from a site in this area. That I could help identify them." "Who stole them?" "The usual suspects. collectors. dealers. people who think things in the ground don't belong to anyone." "And you believe that?" "I believe that objects in the ground belong to the people who were here first." Ray was quiet for a while. Then: "You're idealistic." "I'm accurate." "Same thing, sometimes." They drove past a sign that said DOVER AZ POP 214 and turned onto a road so narrow that only one truck could pass. The desert on either side was featureless—brown earth and scattered rocks and nothing else for miles. "My father was from here," Ray said suddenly. "Sonora. He crossed when he was nineteen. Worked in the copper mines here for twenty years. Died in a cave-in." "I'm sorry." "Don't be. It was a good life." He paused. "My mother was Navajo. She raised me alone after he died. We lived on the reservation outside Bisbee. I learned to hunt before I learned to read." "Did you learn to read?" "After the Marines. G.I. Bill. Learned a little. Not enough." "What did you do in the Marines?" "Nothing worth talking about." Kate looked at him. His face was a mask in the dashboard light. She had the impression that this was intentional—that he kept his face arranged in a way that discouraged questions. They arrived at the site just before dawn. It was a small excavation—a few trenches cut into the side of a low hill, marked by white flags that fluttered in a wind Kate could not feel. A canvas tent sat in the center. A fire had been built the night before and was now cold ash. "This is it?" Kate said. "This is it." "Where are the workers?" "Gone. For the night. They won't be back until afternoon." "Then what are we doing here?" "Looking for what was stolen." Kate got out of the truck. The air was cool and still. She walked toward the trenches and looked down into the first one. The walls showed layers of earth—brown on top, then gray, then a layer of dark soil that she recognized as a midden deposit. People had lived here. Not for a week or a month. For generations. She knelt and picked up a fragment from the trench floor. It was a piece of pottery—coarse, hand-made, with a design that she recognized as Jornada Mogollon. Possibly eight hundred years old. "How many artifacts are we talking about?" she asked. "Seven. Copper and jade combination pieces. Ritual objects from the Navajo-Hopi border region. Date to the eighteenth century at the latest." "Seven pieces?" "Originally eight. One is missing." "Who has it?" Ray looked at the eastern horizon, where the sky was beginning to lighten from black to dark blue. "That's what I'm trying to find out." He led her to the second trench. This one was deeper—perhaps six feet down. At the bottom, wrapped in oilcloth, was a small bundle. Ray unwrapped it carefully. Inside were five stone and copper objects—each no larger than a deck of cards, each bearing symbols that were half geometric, half pictographic. Kate held them in her hands and felt the familiar weight of objects that had been made by human hands for a purpose that was no longer understood. She examined each one with the systematic patience of her profession—surface, edge, weight, patina. "These are genuine," she said. "Eighteenth century, possibly earlier. The copper has been cold-hammered, not cast. The stone is a serpentine—local, probably from the Dragoon Mountains." "And the missing one?" "Could be anywhere. A private collection in Phoenix. A dealer in Tucson. A museum that acquired it through questionable means." Ray wrapped the five pieces back in oilcloth. "We need to find it." "Why? Five pieces are almost the same as seven." "Almost isn't. These objects were made as a set. They function together. One missing changes everything." Kate looked at him. In the pre-dawn light, his face was all angles—sharp cheekbones, a jaw set hard, eyes that held something she could not read. "You care about these objects," she said. "They were made by people I share blood with. Of course I care." "Most people don't." "Most people don't look." The sky was lightening now—pink and orange bleeding into the blue. The desert was waking up. A roadrunner crossed the trench in three quick jumps and disappeared into the scrub. "What happens after we find the eighth piece?" Kate asked. "We put them all together. And then we decide what to do." "Who decides?" "We do." Kate set the five pieces back in the trench and covered them with earth. It was a habit she had developed over the years—never leave artifacts exposed. Sunlight and moisture were the enemies of everything old and fragile. "Alright," she said. "Where do we start looking?" Ray looked at her. For the first time, something shifted in his face—a crack in the mask, barely visible. "You're not going to turn back?" "I didn't come this far to turn back." They got into the truck and drove toward the first lead—a dealer in Bisbee who had been mentioned by a worker at the site. The road was rough and the truck bounced. Kate held onto the handle above the door and tried not to think about how little she had and how much she did not know. Ray drove in silence. The desert passed by. The sun rose. ##