She shrugged. “We didn’t call ourselves that. The air elementals gave us that name a long, long time ago, and it stuck.”

“Ah.” He poked at the fire some more, glancing up now and then to see her face through the flames. The wood was wet, but that didn’t matter when a Chimeran controlled the blaze. “You’ve been separate from Primaries all this time?”

She bobbed her head from side to side. “Not entirely. Here and there some women have left the valley—if they’re runners or lookouts or something—and came back pregnant. My grandma was one of them. Japanese athlete, she said. She was sent to the Common House for breaking kapu.”

Some blood intermingling in her history and she was still as powerful as the rest of her clan. Interesting.

“The Chimerans seem to have held on to a lot of the old ways,” he noted.

Her brow wrinkled. “We’ve had to, being isolated like we are.”

He considered her. “Do you agree with that?”

Her bottom lip partly disappeared as she chewed it. “Are you trying to politic me? Out here after you chased me down?”

He sighed. “Just trying to learn about you. Just trying to understand.”

“We are who we are, who we’ve always been. And this is how we’ll always be.”

I wasn’t talking about the others, he wanted to say, but didn’t.

“This status code,” he said, “this thing Chimerans have about ranking yourselves through fighting and physical proof, has it always been like that?”

Her back stiffened. “I get what you’re doing.”

“And what is that?”

“Trying to get me to question my own culture. You’re still trying to stop me from going after the Source, only this time with words.”

No point in denying that. He changed tactics. “So the old ways, way back when you lived with the Primaries, were based on this system of learning how to fight, and then climbing the ranks?”

She started to rip out her braid, fingers like claws scraping through the black strands. “No, that was the Queen’s idea. For the Primaries, for the ancient Hawaiians, once you were born into a class you couldn’t ever move out of it. She didn’t like that. When she divided us from the humans, she changed the rules.”

“Which have stayed the same for, what, a thousand years or so?”

She eyed him askance. “Or so.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

She came to her knees in a quick, smooth movement. Her torso loomed above the points of flame, looking like she was growing out of the fire. Maybe she was. “What are you suggesting? That I just leave my people?”

Brilliant, Keko. Bravo. He opened his arms wide. “If the shoe fits. If you’re unhappy, if they’ve shunned you, you have the right to leave. You don’t have to stay there and live with their scorn. You aren’t alone anymore. This isn’t a thousand years ago. Hell, it isn’t even a hundred. You can walk out of that valley and survive in another place.”

Like San Francisco.

That thought made a fist and punched him right in the chest. He tried to ignore it, but the ache, the longing, was too great.

“I can’t do that,” she said, but he saw the conflict marching across her face.

He put every last bit of heartfelt conviction into his voice. “Yes, you can. If you are unhappy, change your life so you can be. If you don’t like the way things are with your culture, leave. By sticking around in that valley and living in that shithole of a Common House because someone told you to, you’re only reinforcing what you hate. You’re giving them power over you, and I can’t believe that you, of all people, would allow that. It’s a different world out there now, Keko.”

Flames flickered in her eyes, but he saw them for what they were: a mask over her sorrow.

“God, you’re so arrogant!” she spit. “You think you have all the answers but you don’t know anything.”

“So tell me!” Now he was on his knees, leaning closer to the heat. “Dying for personal glory is so old-fashioned, so selfish. This isn’t the fucking Middle Ages where you run off to slay the dragon to win the prince. If you think I don’t have the answers, tell me what I need to know so I understand.”

She rocked to her feet and glared down at him. “No.”

“Why not?”

Backing away, out of the firelight, she was almost taken by the darkness before she lowered herself to the ground and stretched out on her side, giving Griffin her back.

He still kneeled there, watching her, until he heard her say, faintly and into the black of night, “Because I don’t trust you.”

“How do you know you’re heading in the right direction?”

Keko didn’t turn around, didn’t even slow down, when Griffin’s voice came up behind her. His eventual arrival had been expected. She hadn’t even bothered to disguise her path.

The first, predawn chirps and squawks of the birds had awakened her. After putting out the fire and taking the ash and smoke back into her body, she’d struck out for the coast without a glance backward.

“Because I know.” She threw the words over her shoulder as she sidestepped a fallen tree, half rotten.

She wasn’t Ofarian but even she could tell she was approaching a place of legend, as though the old magic was calling to her. Excitement mixed with the fire dancing in her belly.

A landmark from the Queen’s lover’s tale appeared on her left: a slope of land that looked like a woman’s body arched up in ecstasy. She would follow that to a specific ravine and waterfall, splash her way to the ocean, then scrabble around a rock ledge lining the harsh coast to find the Queen’s hidden cove and her final prayer.

“The chief told me about a prayer.”

Griffin didn’t sound out of breath today. He sounded strong, alert. Focused.

“What did he say?” Keko asked, feigning boredom.

“That the Queen carved something into a stone in the evening, and in the morning her lover woke up to find her gone. There’re a whole bunch of holes in that story. Care to fill them in for me?”

The thing was, a little part of her wanted to tell him. An even bigger part of her had actually enjoyed their heated discussion last night about religion. She could hear the skepticism in his voice—about what she was doing and about the Queen. Though he’d been fed lies about her true quest and seemed to be eating them up—as she wanted—his cynicism about the Queen bothered Keko greatly. If he would know nothing else, he would know the correct history about the woman Keko revered, religion or not.

“When the Queen split the Chimerans from the Primaries,” she began, “she moved them all around the Big Island trying to find the Source.”

Griffin fell into step beside her, but she didn’t look over at him. She just kept talking, her eyes on a specific place ahead where the land dropped dramatically down to sea level.

“Wherever she moved she carved prayers into the lava rock, pleading with the Source to reveal itself. It never answered, but she could feel it, dream of it. She tried thousands of different prayers and thousands of different pictures, trying to find one to make the Source acknowledge her.”

“What were they of?”

How could he watch her and still walk a straight line? It was disconcerting.

“Mostly people. Chimerans. But she tried animals, objects, ancient symbols from the old world.”

Griffin reached up to lift a branch that dangled across their path, but Keko’s arm shot out to get there first and lift it up for herself. After he went under and she let the branch snap back, he looked at her with odd amusement. She turned and walked on, making him catch up again.

“The prayers are still there, you know,” she said.

“Yeah? Where?”

She shrugged. “All over the island. The state protected all the petroglyphs—that’s what the Primaries call them—and they put up signs about how no one really knows what they mean. You can walk right up to them, I heard. In the middle of golf courses and resorts and stuff.”