“What?”
“Running in Mom’s circle. Knowing you didn’t deserve to be there.”
“You knew I felt that way?”
“Of course. Mom has a once-in-a-generation mind. I always thought your obsession with following in her footsteps was doomed.”
“My therapists tell me it’s because of Max. When you lose a twin—”
“You lose half your identity. Your connection to Mom served to fill in this other missing part of yourself.”
I said, “I thought about him last night while I was driving. Things I’d long forgotten. Moments I’d only half-remembered. It’s all so clear now. And it hurts.”
Kara smiled. “It doesn’t have to.”
* * *
—
We walked back to the hotel under a deep navy sky bejeweled with stars.
In the center of the plaza, a choir was singing. They held quivering candles, and their voices lilted icily into the sky.
I didn’t see the moment. Not really.
I saw the story behind the moment—a tale passed down over two thousand years that told of a child of a superbeing sent to save the world.
Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers.
Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.
* * *
—
I woke at dawn to the tolling of the bells of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, a mighty stone cathedral across the street from the hotel.
I started coffee and opened the sliding glass door to the balcony.
Walked out onto the veranda.
It was blisteringly cold.
Santa Fe was hushed and still.
Already, I was on edge.
The day felt momentous.
* * *
—
We were on the road before eight, speeding north up US 84 into some of the most stunning landscape I’d ever seen, made all the more vibrant by my new perspective.
Everything seemed lucid and rich.
All colors hypersaturated.
Beyond the outskirts of Santa Fe, the desert unfurled.
The sense of space was breathtaking.
Every passing moment a new color revealed itself.
Perspectives changing second to second.
Light and shadow evolving over sandstone.
Arroyos.
Towering mesas.
Epic monuments.
I felt I was seeing through time as we sped across the transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and the Rio Grande rift.
I saw the landscape in a way I never had before. The flat Mesozoic stratigraphy exposed at the base of the mountains, the younger Cenozoic sediments under the shoulders of the peaks.
For a while, in the distance, we could see the white hyperloop tube stretching across the desert—the line between Denver and Albuquerque.
We crossed rivers I’d heard about while watching Westerns with my father.
To the east, sage-and juniper-covered hills transitioned into conifer forests into high peaks that gleamed brightly with snow above the timberline.
And all under a sky as vast as an ocean, looking down on a desert that 450 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous, had been a shallow sea.
We stopped for a quick charge in Ojo Caliente—the only charge station we’d seen since Santa Fe—and pushed on.
I had put Vallecitos into our navigation app. It was an unincorporated community within Carson National Forest and the closest town to our GPS pin drop.
We arrived at nine thirty in the morning to discover that Vallecitos wasn’t a city or even a town. It was a village from another time. Only a few hundred people called it home, and while some of the dwellings were clearly inhabited, just as many were crumbling.
We passed an old church that had collapsed in on itself.
And then the ruins of a bar. Old neon beer signs hung by their cords in glassless windows, and a wooden sign—MIS AMIGOS—still swung over an entrance to nothing, faded by decades of high-elevation sunlight.
Kara was driving.
I was looking at her phone.
“No cell service,” I said, “but the car’s GPS still works. I’m just going to put the raw coordinates in and see what happens.”
I converted the decimal degrees to standard degrees/minutes/seconds, and then input 36°33′45″N, 106°13′04″W into the GPS.
The map on the enormous display screen changed to show the location of the pin drop, which was 8.7 miles away.
The automated voice said, Warning: Driving navigation can only take you to within point five miles of destination.
* * *
—
Two miles outside the village, the road went from pavement to hard-packed gravel.
We climbed into foothills.
Evergreens crowded up against the shoulder of the road.
After five miles, we hadn’t passed another building or soul.
Just us and the car and a trail of dust in our wake.
At 5.9 miles, we turned onto a road of lesser breadth, more rocks, and melting patches of snow in the shade.
Kara had to slow down considerably, and it was becoming clear that the Google suspension package wasn’t intended for old logging roads.
At the 8.2-mile mark, the road ended.
The navigation assistant said: You have gone as far as possible on known roads. Your destination is approximately two thousand feet north-northwest of your current position.
Kara turned off the car.
I stepped outside.
My door slam echoed through the pine forest.
Kara got out, went around to the trunk, popped it open.
I walked over, saw that she had her duffel bag open. She was pulling out a Garmin minisatellite communicator for off-grid GPS tracking.
She handed it to me. “Can you put the coordinates in?”
While I programmed 36°33′45″N, 106°13′04″W into the device, Kara palmed a magazine into a Glock, which she slipped into a hip holster and secured with a magnetic clasp. Then she loaded shotgun slugs into the same weapon she’d used to shoot me out of the vivarium.
* * *
—
We left the road on foot and headed into the woods, the Garmin taking us on a northerly track.
It was cold and clear.
Sunlight slanted through the trees, creating light wells in the forest.
The air was rife with the smell of pine and spruce.
We climbed a gentle hill.
Despite being at an elevation of almost nine thousand feet, neither of us had any trouble exerting—the hemoglobin in our blood efficiently pulling oxygen out of the thin air thanks to modifications in our EGLN1, EPAS1, MTHFR, and EPOR genes.
The forest was spacious and the underbrush spotty. If we’d had a vehicle with better clearance, we could have driven up this mountain.
I glanced down at the Garmin.
We were fourteen hundred feet from our coordinates.
“There’s something up ahead,” Kara said.
I didn’t see anything.
“Where?”
“Fifty yards straight on. I saw a glint in the trees.”
We went a little farther.
And then I saw the old pickup truck.
The front half was in a patch of sunlight. It was the chrome side mirror that Kara had seen glinting.
We approached.
No sound but our footsteps on the pine needle floor of the forest.
Twenty feet away, we stopped.
It was an old Chevy, yellow and white—one of the first fully electric pickup trucks. Pine needles had nearly pasted over the windshield, and the rear left tire was low.