"No," Dana said. "Hassan. No."
"I won't cross," Hassan said. "I'll stand on this side."
"You don't answer her," said Leah. "You talk. You don't answer. You know the difference?"
He thought he did. He wasn't sure. He looked once at Adam, sitting up on the bed at the end of his rope, and went out into the cold blue yard, past Josu standing silent in the barn door. The hatchet was in his belt. His hand was on Rania's compass in his pocket. He walked to the line of whitewashed stones and stopped with the toes of his boots an arm's length from it.
Mae stood on the other side, ten feet back, in her blue dress and apron. Behind her, far off in the sage, the ring of shapes waited with their faces turned toward them.
"Thank you," said Mae.
She came a few steps closer, then a few more, until she stood a yard from the stones. With each step her face changed.
It didn't slip, the way the painter's had in the street. It shifted, smoothly, the way a face in a dream becomes another face without your noticing until it's done. The round cheeks narrowed. The pinned brown hair grew darker and longer and came loose. The eyes went dark. The mouth.
Hassan knew the mouth.
"My darling," said Rania, in Arabic.
She was twenty-nine, the age she'd been in February 2014, and she smiled at him the way she'd smiled the morning she walked to the bakery. Her voice was her voice. The little catch in it, the Homs vowels, the way she said his name as if it were a joke between them.
"You look tired," she said. "You've gone gray. Look at you."
"You're not her," said Hassan.
"No," Rania agreed, gently. "I'm not. You were always right about everything." She tilted her head, the way Rania had. "But I can be her. Every night. Every morning when you wake up. I have her voice. I have her face. I have the name she called him." She glanced past him at the window where Adam's pale face showed, and said a small soft baby word in Arabic, and behind the glass his son made a sound like he'd been hit.
"Stop," said Hassan.
"I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to make a deal."
"You've stirred up an old woman's village," she said. "I can hear the grindstone from my porch. They mean to walk into my town at nine o'clock and dig up my people while they sleep." Her mouth trembled, Rania's mouth. "Children's grandmothers in those graves, Hassan. Old ones. Sick ones."
He said nothing.
"You went up the north draw," she said. "You sat on his step and read his little book." She looked at the ground between them. "Forty years ago a man like you lived in that hut and wrote us down, and called his prayers from the door, and I couldn't go near him either. So I asked her husband, and her husband went up with his axe. Once. They're very proud of once." She tilted her head toward Leah's window. "She won't do it again. She'd let me take the children first. So now I have to ask you myself."
"So stay," she said. "You. Only you. Come to Sweetwater. Live in the room above the diner. Have supper with us every night, and I'll wear her face across the table for the rest of your life. A long, warm, easy life. No night shifts. No funerals." She spread her hands. "And when you're lonely, call your friends in Reno. Your neighbors. The men from your mosque. Invite them up. It's beautiful here in the fall. And in return I open the road for your boy. I send back the Swede and the hunter. Iturri keeps its peace. Nobody digs in my graves."
"And me."
"You stay with me," said Rania. "You've been alone twelve years, my darling. Aren't you tired?"
He was. He was so tired. He stood in the cold and felt it in his bones, twelve years of it, the border and the camp and the two apartments and the night shifts and the boy who wouldn't look at him. The face in front of him was her face. The voice was her voice. She was offering him his son's life, and the lives of men with axes who had children of their own.
He thought: it's a fair trade. He thought: any father would.
He took his hand off the compass.
Something in his pocket clicked.
It was the lid of the compass falling shut on its dented hinge. A small sound. He felt it through the cloth against his leg, the little brass weight of the thing she had bought him in the covered market in Damascus as a joke about how often he got lost.
"Don't take directions from pleasant strangers," Teta said, on the roof, under the blanket.
And the line from the ledger, in a dead man's pencil, that he had read aloud on the step of the hut: there is no ghul over the one who knows which way he faces.
He looked at the face in front of him the way he would look at a needle. Rania had a small brown mole beside her mouth, on the left. He had kissed it ten thousand times. This face had it on the right.
It had built her. From him. From everything he carried.
And it had been telling the same lie all week. It's lions. Call your people. There's nothing in the cornbread. Come in, it's dark. Every word it said was a road that bent back to the barn. Now it was telling him the only way out was through it, and that afternoon he had stood on the pass with his son and watched a stock trailer raise its dust in the valley beyond.
It was afraid. He was sure of that now. It had begged for its sleepers before it ever bargained for him. Forty years ago it had borrowed Mikel's axe for Yusuf. Now there was no axe to borrow, and a village was coming at nine o'clock with the dead man's map, and the only way to stop it was for the man who could read the map to cross the line by himself.
"No," Hassan said.
Rania's face went on smiling at him tenderly. "Think about it. You have till dawn."
"I don't need till dawn."
"Everybody needs till dawn," said Rania, and her smile grew wider, too wide for a human mouth, until the corners were up by her ears. "Bring your axes, then. Dig in my graves. And afterward I'll have the boy."
She turned and walked back into the sage, and with every step she was Mae again, and then not Mae, and then only a shape among the others.
Hassan walked back to the house. His legs were shaking. He sat down on the bed beside his son and untied the knot at the bedpost, and left the one at Adam's waist alone.
"Was it really her voice?" Adam said. His face was wet. "Mama's?"
"No," said Hassan. "It's a thing that steals recordings." He pulled his son in hard. "Listen. When the light comes, for the dawn prayer, stand beside me and face where I face. When I say Allah is greatest, you say it after me. That's all."
"I know the words now," Adam said. "Some of them."
"Then say the ones you know."
Out in the sage, all the way round the stones, the ring of shapes began, very slowly, to back away toward the ridge.
Iturri gathered in the dark at the south stones.
Nobody had called them yet and they came anyway, out of the houses in ones and twos with their tools on their shoulders, and stood in the frost without talking. Fourteen men and women. Splitting axes, mattocks, lambing knives, spades, and the herders' oil lanterns, filled the night before, for the cellar under the church that Yusuf's map marked with a square. Josu had his long-handled axe. His wife stood beside him with a spade. The children stayed in the stone barn with the oldest women and the dogs, still roped to the posts, and one of the women sang to them in Basque, very quietly.
Wes stood at the end of the line with Kurt's rifle. Dana stood beside him with Theo's recorder clipped over her heart. Leah walked down the line and touched each of them once on the arm and said the same word to each, and Hassan knew the word now.
He went to the creek and washed for prayer, slowly, in water so cold it made his teeth ache. Then he stood on the bank with his son beside him and faced the notch, and waited for the sky.
Something made him look up the ridge.
The shapes were gone over the crest, all but one. An old man sat on a flat rock above the village with his hands folded on a cane, the way he had sat in the porch rocker in the shade the afternoon they walked Sweetwater by daylight. He wasn't calling. He was looking down at the line of people by the stones, and his lips were moving, and one finger lifted on the cane and dropped, lifted and dropped, for each axe.
He was counting.