A few steps more, and at last she gazed down at the carving made by the Queen’s own hand over a thousand years ago. The slab of lava rock tilted sharply to the left now, the treeman’s uprooting creating a pile of disturbed ground right next to it, but the image of the carved person was still clear. A figure made of simple, clean lines, arms bent at the elbow in supplication. Tiny brown leaves and golden seeds and little piles of dirt clung to the shallow grooves. Keko gently blew them away.

“What does it mean?” Griffin’s voice was soft, inquisitive.

Keko frowned at it. “She is asking the Source to reunite her with her element. Her final wish.”

He moved closer to her side. “You said this thing told her where it was located. Can you read it? Do you know where the Source is?”

When she glanced up at him he wasn’t looking at the petroglyph, but scanning the canyon in a measured soldier’s way, wariness painted across his face.

“No. I can’t.” A feeling of unease and hopelessness skated down her spine. “It doesn’t say anything about where the Source is.” She dropped to her knees and frantically scraped away all the vines and dead brush and leaves from the waves of lava rock immediately surrounding the prayer. “There’s nothing more. Nothing more here.”

Griffin waved his hand, gesturing her to come to him. “Then I think you should get up and we should get out of here. We don’t know if that thing will come back. Or if he’ll bring friends.”

“No.” She reached out and placed a hand over the figure’s body, and suddenly realized what she must do. “I have to carve my own prayer.”

“What?”

“The Source answered the Queen’s final prayer in her hour of desperation, when she wanted it the most. I have to do the same, and there is no time more desperate than now. This was her prayer. I have to carve my own.”

“We should really get out of here.”

“We?” She met his eyes. “I’m not asking you to stay, but I’m not leaving either.”

Keko searched around and found two rocks, one that had been broken into a point that she aimed against a new lava slab. She used the wide edge of the other rock to make the first chip. It fell away and she breathed with satisfaction and growing excitement.

She carved for a long time, echoing what the Queen had drawn and whispering prayers and pleas to both the Queen and the Source. Griffin paced at her back but did not otherwise try to dissuade her.

As the day’s light began to leave the canyon and her work was thrown into shadow, Griffin’s silent worry had reached fever pitch. She didn’t allow herself to feel the same, because if the treeman had wanted to come back and attack, he would have done it by now.

“It’s dark,” Griffin said, as if she couldn’t read the sky. “We’re stuck here until morning. I don’t trust even you to negotiate that ledge at night.”

Keko unfolded her legs and gave her back a good stretch, the tightness in her wound making her feel alive, not halfway dead as before. The two rocks she’d used to carve her prayer were well worn down, as was she, but the prayer was complete.

“I’m staying here tonight.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, I hope glory is worth it.”

She tilted her head to one side, and then the other, stretching her neck. “You keep assuming I’m doing this for me.”

His pacing stopped. “You’re not?”

She met his shocked stare with her even one. “No.”

She could sense his question before he asked it.

“What are you talking about?” When she didn’t answer, he dropped his voice. “What the hell do you mean?”

But Keko just shook her head and looked to the indigo sky. “And now we wait.”

The answer had come to her as she’d chipped rock into rock. The legend said that the Queen had carved her prayer in daylight and the location of the Source had been revealed under the moon. Keko would sit here and watch the rock until the same happened to her. And she had every bit of faith that it would.

“Keko—”

“I didn’t ask you to stay, Griffin.”

He regarded her for a long time before lowering himself to the lava rock on the opposite side of the prayer, making himself comfortable by sitting on a balled up T-shirt he pulled from his pack.

They sat in silence, until the moon came out and the prayer came alive.

At first she thought it a trick of her eye—an aftereffect of the wound and the pain, coming on the heels of days of being chased. Fatigue, hunger, desperation, all pounding into her brain.

But no. The air above the prayer—her prayer, not the Queen’s—sparkled. Tiny winks of blue light hovered in space a couple of feet above the rock, growing in number and density with every passing second. Keko scrambled to her feet, heart hammering.

The chest of the basic figure she’d carved glowed blue-white. The figure was her, Keko, bearing the Queen’s treasure. Crowning her effigy, twinkling in stasis above the rock, were hundreds of little lights, like stationary fireflies.

The answer—the location—was in there. Somewhere.

The euphoria of the magic, of the Source actually acknowledging her and answering her prayer, died. Keko began to panic and scratch at her arms.

“But . . . what does it mean? How am I supposed to figure this out?”

Griffin’s knitted brow smoothed and he slowly rose to standing. “I think I know.”

She grabbed his arm above the elbow. “You do? Tell me.”

He tore his gaze away from the lights and looked at her with frightening calm.

“It’s a star map,” he said.

Her grip on him fell away and she whirled back to the prayer, trying to see what he did. “A star map? How do you know?”

He just looked at her. And looked. “Because I know the stars. Every single one of them.”

Their conversation from last night came roaring back.

“It seems to me,” he said, coming to her side, his hand waving just above the floating pinpricks of light, “that if the Chimerans came from the stars, too, in a way, that the stars would be the ones to guide you in the end. Maybe they have something to offer your people as well, not just the Ofarians.”

His words were drifting around in her head, bouncing off her desperation and adding to her confusion. “But what am I looking at?”

He pointed to the glowing blue-white spot on the figure’s chest. “That’s the Source. Positioned under certain stars, at certain angles right now. It would have been a different configuration for the Queen, all those years ago. Maybe back then, since she used the stars to guide her people across the ocean, she knew how to read them.”

“I . . .” It was too conceptual for her, too outside of any way of thinking she’d ever been exposed to, and it wasn’t clicking in her head. She turned her face to the sky and all she saw was a maze of light. She was so close. So close. And now this?

She looked back at Griffin, whose expression was watchful and utterly frustrating.

“Can you read it?” she asked.

He nodded.

Excitement spiked in her heart and made her fire flare in anticipation. “Well? And?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “How about a trade? I decipher the star map and you tell me why you are really doing this.”

She went cold. “What?”

He nodded to the place where she’d sat to do her carving. “What you said earlier, about how this whole thing wasn’t really about you. I can help you, but I need to know what I’m contributing to. You can understand that, can’t you?”

With a snarl of aggravation she swiveled away to stare into the darkest point of the canyon. The star map glowed at her back, sending diffused blue-white light into the reaches.

Of course she understood what he was asking. She’d want the same thing. You never got something for nothing. Only she didn’t think she could give him what he was asking.

“The star map is fading,” Griffin said behind her. Not taunting, not demanding. “If you want to go it alone, you could memorize as much detail as possible now, and then probably plug the points into a computer program to find the general location.”