“So they were here,” she murmured. Her eyes tracked over the petroglyphs—a human, a set of concentric circles, another lizard, bigger than the last one. A human upside down, which generally meant “dead.”
The coyote had stopped grinning and was watching her intently.
“Don’t suppose you can tell me anything,” said Grandma Harken.
“What’ll you give me?” replied the coyote.
“I’ve got sage and cigarettes.”
The coyote scratched pensively at one ear. “Let’s see the cigarettes.”
Grandma Harken took one out and laid it on a stone, then stepped back.
The coyote sniffed at it, unimpressed. “Poor stuff.”
“You eat sheep afterbirths,” said Grandma.
“Yes, but only the quality ones,” said the coyote, and grinned again.
“I should know better than to try and deal with coyotes,” muttered Grandma Harken.
“You should.” The coyote licked up the cigarette and held it dangling in its mouth. “Look! I’m a human. Do this. Do that. Stand here. Don’t eat that.” It cackled at its own cleverness.
Grandma Harken shook her head and turned back to the railroad tracks.
“Go underneath,” called the coyote after her, and when she turned her head back toward it, it was gone.
Go underneath. She turned the words over in her mind. Go underneath.
Coyotes were liars, of course. Worse than ravens. But this one had taken the tobacco.
She walked along the track, into the sharp bend. The rails buckled, and the gaps between the ties were deeper than they should have been. And yet the hillside was seamless, not even a shadow out of place.
Almost perfect, she thought. No one would ever notice, if not for the trains.
She stood at the farthest point of the bend, a foot on each tie. The world dropped away underneath the rails.
Go underneath.
The gap should have been too narrow for a grown human to fit, but one of the ties was twisted out of the way, on the end nearest the ruins. And she was made of bone and sinew and wire, and was no longer young.
She wiped sweat from her palms, grabbed the metal rail—it was hot from the sun and burned her hands—and swung herself down through the gap, and into the next world.
Immediately everything changed.
The hillside was no longer a small rise but a large one, cleft in two, with a narrow stone defile between them. Petroglyphs marked the stones on either side, layered over each other into incoherence.
Grandma Harken took out her water bottle and spilled a little over her smarting palms.
She turned her head and the tracks were gone. That was going to make getting out … interesting.
“Oh well,” she muttered. “If I were sensible, I’d still be at home with my tomatoes.” She started forward into the defile.
There was a dragon in the sand.
It was thirty yards long, thick bodied, with a blunt wedge of head. Its scales were dusty black and mottled orange.
Grandma knew Gila monsters well enough and did not fear them, but the largest one that she had ever seen was smaller than the smallest claw on this one’s foot.
“Oh,” she said aloud. “Oh, my.”
She heard herself say it and hated her voice for sounding like an old woman. But even Saint Anthony, who wrestled demons in the desert, might have been taken aback by the size of this one.
The dragon’s eyes were glossy, beetle shell black, and they were fixed on her.
She swallowed hard.
“Give me water,” said the Gila dragon, in a voice like sand hissing over the desert floor.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Grandma Harken, but she sounded more like herself in her ears.
“They are not here,” said the dragon, “or I would ask them for water.”
And it laughed, then, a little choking hiss, and it seemed to Grandma that it was the sound of a creature in pain, not a monster on the edge of devouring a victim.
Not that that won’t change in very short order, mind you …
Grandma Harken unfastened one of her water bottles. She suspected that she was going to die very shortly, but there were rules. If she lived long enough to talk to the cholla-bone girl again, she would tell her this one.
When someone in the desert asks you for water, you give it to them.
The Gila dragon’s mouth cracked open and a long blue-violet tongue slithered out towards Grandma.
She upended the water bottle over it.
The dragon swallowed, and then there was a crack like thunder.
She hadn’t noticed the shackles on the dragon’s leg. They were the same dusty black color as the scales.
There were three of them. Two still held, and the third had broken and fallen away. The skin underneath was raw and clear fluid oozed from beneath the scales.
“Give me water,” whispered the dragon.
She gave it the next water bottle to drink.
The second shackle broke. She could not see where the chain was anchored. To hold a beast that size, they must have been bolted to the center of the earth itself.
“Give me water,” said the dragon a third time.
One shackle left. And when it breaks, it could lunge forward and devour me. It wouldn’t even need the poison. One bite ought to do it.
Only a fool would set such a monster free.
“Please,” said the Gila dragon.
Grandma Harken cursed herself for a fool and poured the last of her water out over the dragon’s tongue.
The crack that followed was louder than the others and split the air like lightning, like the sound of mountains splitting.
In the silence that followed, she heard the tiny metallic clunk of the shackle falling to the ground.
The dragon looked down at its freed leg. That would have been the moment to run, but Grandma Harken thought perhaps she should just sit down. Her heart was hammering in a way that she didn’t like, and her vision pulsed in time to her heartbeat.
It’d be entirely too stupid, to drop dead of a heart attack out here in the desert before the beast lays a claw on me.
It lifted its great mottled head. It was a low, flat beast, for all its size, so it did not tower over her. She looked into its eye and saw her face reflected back.
“Thank you,” said the dragon. And waited, like a penitent awaiting absolution.
Grandma licked her lips. “Weren’t nothing,” she said.
It moved then. She fell back against the canyon wall and watched it go by. It was like a train-god passing, long and dark, and then it was past and the bright blunt tail was vanishing around the curve of the defile. She heard the sound of its scales scraping the stone, and then, much too quickly for something so large, it was gone.
Stepped out the world, she thought, back into one of the other ones. I hope it doesn’t get hung up on the rails.
She slid down until she was sitting and put her forehead on her knees. There had been a time, when she was young and immortal, when beasts like that were part of her world and she could have danced in the tracks that they left in the sand.
She felt old and mortal now.
She had a few sips of water left in one of the bottles. When the pulsing sparks in her eyes faded, she drank one of the last sips.
She got up.
There was a scale on the ground before her. Not a large one, a little smaller than her palm. She picked it up, and it was warm and felt like leather. She put it in her pocket, because sometimes the desert gives you an answer, and it is your job to find the question.
She had to keep one hand on the stone wall as she walked. She could feel chisel marks under her fingers. The way was mostly natural, but someone had smoothed down the stone a little, long ago.