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  “The land . . . your reservation. The mineral rights. This building and the mission sit atop a deposit of uranium, a mineral we find ourselves in need of at the moment. Your Bureau of Indian Affairs has already agreed to the sale, pending approval from you and your tribe. We believe the price offered is more than fair.”

  Kim bit back her sarcastic reply; ten cents an acre had often been considered a “fair price” for Indian land—when they were offered any payment at all—and she could only imagine what the tribal council would have to say to such a statement, if any of them could stop laughing long enough to compose a response. And though the Taovaya had received federal recognition, they were still technically landless—the acreage on which the Cultural Center and mission stood was not a reservation, but a census-designated place where a concentration of Native Americans once identifying themselves as Wichita happened to live. Still, whatever term the aliens used, it was a legitimate offer, and it was her duty to bring it to the council, no matter how ridiculous. Or offensive.

  “I’ll discuss it with the council,” she said, a polite smile plastered to her face. “Someone will get back to you.”

  She didn’t say when, though she imagined it wouldn’t take long for a unanimous “no.” Better to give the Mahk-Ra that answer via means that didn’t involve physical proximity. She knew enough of her own people’s history to know what invaders liked to do to messengers.

  The shorter Mahk-Ra nodded and the two took their leave, the door chiming as it closed behind them.

  “You can’t do it!”

  Daniel’s voice was loud in the quiet room, ringing off the glass and making Kim jump. He must have seen the Mahk-Ra enter and come in through the delivery entrance in back so he could see and hear what was being said without being seen himself. He was good at that.

  “You can’t let them take our land!”

  She wasn’t sure why he would suddenly care; half the time he seemed to want to leave it all far behind. But she had to admit that the other half was a wannabe Indian activist, repeating AIM slogans from long before his birth as if they were brand new. Ah, the inconsistency of youth; it crossed all cultural barriers.

  Kim turned slowly to face him, holding the paper in front of her like it was a poisonous snake and only her grip on its head was keeping her and her son safe.

  “No, Daniel,” she said, the insults exchanged between them earlier forgotten in the face of this new threat. “You’re right. I can’t.”

  She looked down at the paper that could alter the fate of her people, feeling echoes of the past, of a hundred other brown hands grasping a hundred other pieces of white paper—full of lies, broken promises, and slow, disgraceful death—and her next words were as much a vow to those ghosts as they were to her son.

  “I won’t.”

  THE COUNCIL met in a one-room building that had been constructed of concrete block a few years after the Red River Stone had been unearthed, bringing the remnants of the Taovayas back together. It was all the grant money would pay for, and that only with a lot of volunteer labor from the tribe, sanding and hammering nails and laying pipe and painting the blocks. There had been a mural on the west exterior wall depicting tribal history, centered largely around an image of the mission in flames, with thick black smoke roiling into the sky, where it broke apart and became the wings of vultures. As an unmarried teenager, pregnant with Daniel, Kim had thought it was the most glorious thing she had ever laid eyes on. But it hadn’t been properly sealed, or had been done with cheap paint, or the wind and weather that scoured the landscape had been too much for it; now, only patches of faded color remained, and she couldn’t even make out where those clouds of smoke had been.

  “One-room” wasn’t exactly true. The large room was furnished with cast-off folding tables and chairs from a church group in Wichita Falls, and at the back of the room was a single washroom. The toilet flushed so loudly that everyone in the room could hear it and the plumbing under the sink had been repaired more times than anyone could remember, although sometimes the old men argued about that.

  Kim stood at the front, looking at the five members of the council and other tribal members who’d gotten word of the meeting and had come to find out what was going on, even if—like her—they had no say in the matter. Back when the Taovaya had been a recognized tribe apart from the Wichita, their council had been comprised only of old men. Now there were three female members, including Linda Wahpepah, who had taught Kim most of what she knew about the old ways. For years, Linda had been a science teacher at a white school, but she had finally had enough of that and come back for good. She had taken an interest in educating the young girls about what it meant to be Taovayan, and Kim had taken up the cause with a fervor of her own when Daniel was born. She found the other woman’s presence here calming, and the way Linda beamed at her former student, eyes narrow but bright behind thick-lensed glasses, smiling so broadly that her cheeks stood out like ripe plums, made Kim feel comfortable enough to begin.

  She talked around the subject for a couple of minutes, complimenting Charley Winterhawk on a new vest he wore, with intricate beadwork done in the old way, teasing Betty Little Sister about the amount of white in her long hair, before finally coming to the point. “I was visited today at the Cultural Center by some of . . . some of them. The aliens.”

  “Mahk-Ra,” Charley corrected.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “They can kiss my red ass.”

  The council members burst out laughing, except for Irene Swake, who sat with her arms folded over her chest and a stern expression cemented on her face. She disapproved of profanity of any kind, and, Kim suspected, of every other sort of merriment there was, too.

  “That’s how I feel, more or less,” Kim said when the laughter died down. “But they brought me an offer, and I have to share it with you.”

  “An offer for what?” Irene asked, obviously glad to get back to business.

  “Mineral rights. Uranium, specifically. Apparently what we’ve got, they need.”

  “It has never been concentrated enough for use in nuclear power plants or anything else,” Betty said. “Even when the council wanted to sell it, there were no buyers.”

  “Not concentrated enough for human technology,” Linda said. “Who knows what processing capabilities the Mahk-Ra have? Our uranium might be just what they’re looking for.”

  “They can’t have it,” Charley said.

  “We haven’t heard the offer yet,” Irene countered.

  Johnny Redbird rapped his knuckles on the table. A throat injury had left him perpetually hoarse, making it hard to speak above a loud whisper. He wore his wispy hair in twin braids, which Kim thought made him look like a cartoon, but as a teenager, he’d been an AIM member and participated in the Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1970, and even near ninety, he commanded respect everywhere he went.

  “Let the young lady finish,” he rasped. “Let’s hear the offer. Then we can decide how to tell them to kiss Charley’s ass.”

  Rather than just put a number out there, Kim read the offer letter in full. When she got to the actual dollar amount, the room went silent. After a minute, Charley let out a guffaw. “What?” he asked when he had caught his breath again. “We aren’t actually considering that, are we?”

  “That much would buy a lot of furnaces,” Redbird said. “Rebuild a lot of houses. Send a lot of kids to school. Put dinner on a lot of tables.”

  “Johnny’s right,” Linda said. Kim was shocked to hear her seeming to take the Mahk-Ra’s side. “We can’t afford to just ignore it.”

  “Sure we can,” Charley argued. “How many promises were made to our people, over the years? How many of those ever happened? We let them take the uranium, and then what? Take them to court when they don’t pay up? They’re not even from Earth, what makes anybody think they’d accept the validity of any human court?”

  “They do follow the law,” Redbird pointed out. “They make their own law, some
times. But once their puppets in government pass those laws, the Mahk-Ra stick to it, and they don’t go easy on their own when they break it.”

  “We’re not using the uranium anyhow,” Linda said. “What do we care if they take it? If they pay up front—”

  “Hah!” Charley said. “They’ll write a check, or do a transfer, or something, that they can worm out of later.”

  Other voices joined in the fray, and Kim’s stomach churned as she realized that those in favor of the deal seemed to outnumber those opposed. For Linda and Johnny Redbird to be arguing the way they were shocked her, made her feel like the world had tilted sideways beneath her feet. Finally, Redbird brought his knuckles down on the table again.

  “Kimberly,” he said. She strained to hear him over the murmuring behind her. “We need to take a vote. Maybe a few of them. Thank you for bringing us this offer, but you can’t stay for that part.”

  He looked out at the other tribe members who’d gathered during the course of the debate—it was standing room only, now.

  “Same for the rest of you. We’ve heard your concerns, and we’ll take them into consideration and do what’s best for the tribe.”

  Kim didn’t mind getting kicked out with the others. If the council was going to vote to sell a single grain of Taovayan sand to those aliens, she didn’t want to be in the room when it happened.

  Daniel was waiting for her outside the building with a couple dozen of their closest friends and relatives, who milled around, seemingly aimless. And then a table appeared, and moments later, food and drinks atop it—coffee, frybread, refried beans. Someone produced a drum and started playing and the wait became a sort of impromptu powwow.

  “They’re going to vote to sell.”

  “You don’t know that,” she protested, but her son just rolled his eyes disgustedly, and she couldn’t blame him.

  They were going to vote to sell, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it. Daniel rolled his eyes again when she said as much.

  “Nothing you’re willing to do about it.”

  “What would you have me do? Force the vote at gunpoint? I’d be arrested and they’d just retake the vote, and vote more cautiously the second time around.

  “Or maybe attack the Mahk-Ra when they come back? Kill them? They’ll just send more, and it’ll be the whole tribe that suffers, not just me. Or did you forget about Iran?”

  Not that such a thing was possible, of course. In the second week of the Invasion, Iran had struck back with a long-suspected but never-proven arsenal of nukes. They had succeeded in destroying one of the Mahk-Ra’s Mother Ships, and for the space between two breaths, mankind felt their first—short-lived—glimmer of hope.

  Then the Mahk-Ra responded, converging on the small Middle Eastern nation and spending the next week turning it into a parking lot.

  It was a lesson the entire planet had taken to heart—Native Americans, perhaps more deeply than most, with primers like Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears in their collective consciousness.

  “So, what?” Daniel asked, frustration making his question a dagger aimed straight at her chest. “We dance, and wait for a miracle that will never come?”

  The Ghost Dance was a sore subject among Daniel’s generation, who couldn’t understand the depth of despair that had led so many to dance themselves to death, either through exhaustion and malnutrition or through disobedience to the white man. The whites didn’t comprehend the dance and so feared it, and conquered that fear most often with a bullet and a muzzle flash.

  They had danced for a peaceful end to white encroachment, but in the end it was the white man who remained and they who had passed, becoming like ghosts themselves.

  Kim had no good answer for him, and the disappointment she read in his face cut her to the core. Maybe the loss he sensed on the near horizon had finally made him understand what he would be giving up if he left.

  “You go ahead and dance with your ghosts, Mother. As for me, I’d rather make them than be one.”

  And before she could reply, he disappeared into the crowd, drumbeats sounding in his wake like a call to a war that simply could not be won.

  IT WAS nearing midnight when the unanimous vote was finally reached. The crowd had only grown in the intervening hours, though the youngest and oldest had eventually given in and been taken home to cribs and rockers while their parents and children stayed behind. It was a verdict that affected them all; they would hear it together, unanimous in the vote and united in its implementation, whatever that might be.

  As Redbird came out of the building followed by the others, Kim craned her neck, looking around in vain for Daniel. Though he was a head taller than most of the tribe, she couldn’t find him.

  If he was even still there.

  Ignoring the pang his absence brought even as other family units gathered closer to one another to hear the news, Kim turned to face Johnny Redbird, alone in the midst of her people.

  He didn’t beat around the bush.

  “We’re taking the offer. With that much money, we can buy other land, build a new Cultural Center, and put all of our kids through college, to boot. We’d be fools to refuse.”

  “If we even could,” someone in the crowd murmured, but it was quiet enough that the words carried.

  Redbird nodded.

  “Exactly. Now go back to your homes. We’ll call the Mahk-Ra in the morning and sign the deal tomorrow afternoon. In the meantime, start figuring out what college colors your kids look best in. I’m kind of partial to burnt orange, myself.” The crowd laughed as he made the “Hook ’em, Horns” symbol for the University of Texas, and then began to disperse as he’d asked, the air full of excited, hopeful conversation instead of the complaints and arguments Kim had been expecting.

  Redbird was really good at what he did, she realized.

  Even when what he was doing was selling out his own people.

  THE COUNCIL wanted a check, but the Mahk-Ra wanted a ceremony. The aliens invited the media, and some of their journalists showed up, mostly from the Texas press. They carried sat-cams that could transmit the images back to their respective news organizations, even from such a remote location. Decades after the goal of “universal broadband access” had been declared met, it remained obvious that Native American communities didn’t count as being part of said universe.

  It appeared that the national and international outlets would ignore the story, as they did most news related to Native American issues. Unless some calamity occurred, they were content to do a story once every half-decade or so, reporting the not-so-astonishing findings that many Indian communities still suffered from poverty, crime, fetal alcohol syndrome, and the other sad consequences of a people hunted nearly to extinction and then occupied.

  Kim had expected protesters outside, even if just a handful—and she was firmly convinced that Daniel would be part of the group. She hadn’t seen or spoken with him since he had vanished into the crowd the night before. But no protest materialized; a few tribal members had come to see the Mahk-Ra but they were largely supportive of the deal. Even those who opposed it did so quietly, because to do otherwise would risk the wrath of the tribe as a whole. Besides, anyone who didn’t like the deal was still going to benefit from it. Still, there was a small law enforcement presence, just in case: tribal police, sheriff’s officers from the county, and uniformed Mahk-Ra officers, towering over the rest.

  Charley Winterhawk wore his best white shirt and bolo tie under his new vest. The shirt had been patched many times, some of the patches sewn on with colorful thread, and it was frayed at the cuffs, but he dug it out anytime there was an occasion to dress up. Johnny Redbird’s clothing was old, powdered with dust, but Kim noticed that his black hat was brand new. As she sometimes did when working at the center, Kim was wearing a traditional dress of tanned deer hide decorated with elk teeth. It closed at the neck and dropped almost to the moccasins on her feet. Modern clothing was far more comfortable, but there was value, sh
e believed, in reminding visitors to the center how the Taovaya had dressed before the coming of the Europeans. She wondered how long it would take for people who lived as far out in the boonies as they did to adopt Mahk-Ra styles of dress, mannerisms, perhaps evolve to look like them through interbreeding, further diluting Native bloodlines. Assimilation seemed inevitable, however hard some tried to fight it.

  Seven Mahk-Ra had come, not counting the reporters, and they filed one by one through the center’s doors to a smattering of applause from the onlookers. The council members were already inside, as were the members of the press. The ceremony would be brief—a few words from Redbird, a few from the head of the Mahk-Ra delegation, the application of thumbs to a touchscreen that would record the prints to affirm the deal, much as signatures on paper treaties with Washington had done back in the old days. She wasn’t sure whether the aliens’ thumbprints were as individual and unique as human ones, but if the agreement wasn’t any more enduring than those earlier treaties had been, she supposed it didn’t much matter.

  When everyone was in place in an inner chamber usually used for educational presentations and sometimes crafting sessions for young people—Taovayan council members standing in a semicircle on one side of the buffalo skin-draped table that held the touchscreen, Mahk-Ra on the other side in similar formation, with the glass case containing the Red River Stone behind them, where it would be visible in any news footage—the speechifying began.

  This was when Kim was supposed to make her exit—she wasn’t part of the council, after all, and had only come to open the Center and get it set up for the ceremony—but when she made to leave, one of the Mahk-Ra held out his hand in a forestalling motion, shaking his head. She glanced at Johnny Redbird, who’d exercised the privilege of age, and been chosen to speak for the tribe. He stood nearest the table on the Taovaya side, and when he saw her looking, he gave a quick nod. Kim moved over near him and crossed her arms while he took a half step forward, the cue for the other participants to pay attention.