“Sh/ft.”
A modern-day scifi short featured in The Granville Gazette.
When sixteen-year-old Winnow discovers she’s not the only Hopi who can teleport, she’s thrust into a world of government ops, cosmic myth, and viral fame—but what shakes her most is the fear of losing the one thing she’s never had before: being seen. In a future shaped by ancestral magic and modern exploitation, Sh/ft is a blisteringly sharp coming-of-age story about power, identity, and the price of belonging.
The following short story first appeared in Baen Books’s The Granville Gazette, Volume 82, Universe Annex in March 2019.
“One of the finest stories we have ever published. ‘Sh/ft,’ by JD Jordan is a terrific exploration of Hopi myth, Hopi reality, and a young woman trapped between the two. It is a sure nominee for Best of the Gazette 2019 next year, and if enough people like it, a worthy nominee for the Nebulas, Hugos, and Dragon awards.”
— Walt Boyes, editor, The Grantville Gazette
The first time I saw David Cummings, he was doing laps in the shortie pool at the Flagstaff Days Inn. Armed guards were pressed against the breakfast room glass, watching as he shifted from one end of the pool to the other, appearing just for a second in two places at once as he swam an infinite lap. They were all pointing and jabbering and trying to sneak video on their phones. But me, standing alone at the side of the pool? I was just mad impressed. He never broke stroke, there was no splash of water where the waves didn’t line-up perfectly. He didn’t even bump his feet against the side from shifting too close.
Eventually, he swam over toward me.
“So, you’re the Indian girl,” he said. Because of course he did.
“And you’re an old white guy,” I told him, my voice shaking. I mean, WTF else was I supposed to say? “Hold on while I get my feather!”
He chuckled the littlest bit and drifted backward, crouching in the shallow hotel pool so only his head was above the water.
“Show me.”
Not for the first time, I thought about just shifting out of there. I didn’t need this guy. I was only sixteen but I’d been shifting for five years without anyone’s help. And, hell, he didn’t even bother to put on a shirt to meet me. But the good old White Father had found me once—they’d find me again. White guys had a way of doing that.
So, Instead, I looked around the indoor pool, all nerves. It would’ve been just like me to screw it all up and shift myself right into the deep end. Or the wall. Well, like me back then. Nowadays I’m kind of a badass.
I closed my eyes and whispered to myself: “Nahongvita.” That’s Hopi for “Get your shit together.”
I stepped onto the “5ft” tile and, without much thinking, shifted myself over to the matching tile on the far side. And since the tiles faced each other, I turned around too and had that weird moment of seeing myself both here and there at the same time. And, OMG, I looked small.
David turned to see where I’d shifted and just nodded, acting not at all impressed at seeing the only other person in the whole damn world who could do what we could do.
He just said, “Let me finish and we’ll get started,” before swimming right toward me and, just before hitting the wall, shifting back into his endless lap.
He made it look so easy. It wasn’t like that for me.
The first time I shifted was a total accident. Charlie Chaca had fired a fastball right at me, all pissed off because I’d easily banged his last pitch off the edge of the mesa. But confident as I was with a bat in hand, I was still eleven, back then, and staring down an angry pitcher twice my size. So when I saw that ball leave his hand, aimed right at me, I straight freaked. I dropped my bat and curled up to protect my head. But I also felt this electricity in the air around me—and in the red dust at my feet. And I felt it, too, in the midfield. Like I was there, right inside the tire we were using for second base. Like I was in both places at once.
Next I knew, instead of hitting me, that fastball brained Charlie from behind. The asshole dropped like a rag doll. And my cousin, Jennifer, on first, started telling anyone who’d listen about how I’d been in two places at once. How I’d made a sipapu—a portal from the old stories—and was probably a powakum. A witch, Jennifer!?
And maybe no one would’ve believed her if home plate hadn’t been half-buried under second.
Let me dispel some myths about us shifters right away. The tribe and Indian Affairs and NASA and the Department of Defense like to talk about how we can do all these epic things like walk into a mockup of the space station in Alabama and, seconds later, float from module to module on the real thing. They love to tell the story about how David used to shift whole submarines from one part of the ocean to another or how he would shift special ops teams across the globe in a heartbeat. And that picture of David taking his first step on Mars—down off a plastic Walmart stool half-embedded in rock—is one of the most reproduced images in history.
But here’s how we really do shit: My boyfriend lived in K-town and I lived in Sichomovi—atop two different mesas, is the point—so I used to shift from my bedroom to his after Mom passed out. One time, I even shifted from bed to bed—though I was careful to shift about a foot over his bed so I didn’t end up with his sheets fused into me. And he wasn’t at all unhappy when I fell on him. :-) And once, at a party, I kept grabbing empties and shifting that bitch Elyse Tanakeyowma’s beer from her can to mine. I’d pass them out to my crew while she kept fishing in the cooler, feeling cans for weight and opening them only to find them drained. Hell, I used to bogart whole plates of Mexican from tourists at restaurants in Page. They’d just be chatting and—whoosh—their steaming enchiladas were gone while I left full, having never ordered a thing.
And that’s probably as fancy as my shifting would’ve been except for the night Mom got pulled over by some Navajo cop on the wrong reservation outside Tuba City. She was all lit and we couldn’t afford for her to go to jail, again, so I waited for the cop to step out of his Bronco and then shifted us all the way back to my high school, just below First Mesa. That was the farthest and biggest shift I’d ever done, back then, and I accidentally sank our tires a few inches into the pavement. But that tribal cop didn’t come after us. How could he?
No. Was the feds who showed up the next day.
No one knew about David or shifting back then. No one except for the DoD and whoever else the government shopped him out to. But once they found me—another shifter!—they were beside themselves. And by the end of the year, they’d found six more. All Hopi, like me, except for that one Zuni kid with the lisp. And David. Because, of course, the first one was a fucking white guy. And military, at that.
But when I stood by the pool watching David swim, I didn’t know there’d be anyone else like us. For all I knew, it was just the two of us in the whole world who could do what we did.
And that day? Goodnight! I mean, when I’d shifted Mom and me back to the school, I was so drained I almost couldn’t huff it home afterwards. But the way David did it made it look so crazy easy. It’s like exercising a muscle, he said. The stronger you get, the more you can lift and the farther you can go.
So he showed me. After his swim—and OMG some clothes—we went out into the parking lot—to the flattest spot he could find, and he asked if he could take my hand. Creepy. But his hand felt so strange. Most boys clutched at me like I might get away. And damn straight, I could if I wanted to. But here was this old white guy, all silver on top but cut like a damn soldier, holding my hand as tender as you might hold a child’s. It was weird hating and liking him at the same time.
He stood by my side, holding my hand, and I felt an electricity in the air like I’d never felt before. Wasn’t all static like when I shifted. Was more like a hum you felt under your skin—made me warm. And then, without a sound or a flash or anything, we were standing on this plaza overlooking the Eiffel Tower, all lit up red by the fading sun. The shift was just crazy smooth—the alignment of that pavement in Flagstaff and pavers in Paris so perfect we didn’t drop even a fraction of an inch from ground to ground. And before I could say a word, we shifted again. Suddenly we were standing under the lights and in the hot breezes of Tiananmen Square. And after barely a break to take it all in, one more shift—something so unexpected I about died. For reals.
Tiananmen vanished and this red desert stretched out ahead of me. Behind glass, of course. And a blue sunset cast long shadows over everything.
A blue sunset. WTF!
That son of a bitch shifted us to Mars.
And it was there, in this little Mars outpost no one on Earth knew about, that David laid it all out for me. And where I bought in quick as shit. I mean, lots of us talk about getting off the rez but this was off the rez! I mean, Paris would’ve been enough for most girls.
“I want to train you,” he said.
“I am not cutting my hair or changing my name,” I told him. And he didn’t get it but I told him I was down to train, anyway.
So here are a few other myths about shifters I can knock out: I know those alt-right news nutters like to talk about how we’re assassins and government stooges and whatnot. When they’re not saying we’re fake or whatever. And the truth is, yes, we’re government dogs. Which totally sucks, BTW. But I can’t say we have much choice in that matter. I suppose we could go AWOL or work for some criminal organization or for the highest bidder but I don’t really think they’d let that happen. Besides, the government pays us bank and the benefits are kind of ridiculous. And if I can pat myself on the back a little, we’re big goddamn heroes and stuff. And not just because we do all this national security biz and go to outer space all the time. I mean, me and the other Hopi shifters are heroes. Native heroes. Because now the government that pushed us into some tiny corner of the desert, that left us there all poor AF to fight with the Navajo, that took us off to schools and cut our hair and killed our gods and our language—they need us. They need us so hard the DoD is now the biggest employer on the rez but they’re answerable to the Tribal Council. NASA built their new interplanetary transit station just north of First Mesa and the average income among the Hopi now exceeds those of white folks in Flagstaff. And I know not everyone on the rez loves having the government as their neighbor, but even the traditionalists can’t argue that shifting hasn’t elevated us from a little-known tribe to the goddamn X-Men, mansions and all. #DropsMic
So I guess I’m saying, it’s been a positive.
I can also tell you that if it weren’t for that mess in Saudi Arabia, the world might still not know about us and all that good might not’ve played out.
There were five of us then—David and four of us Hopi shifters—when those Wahhabi rebels stormed the embassy. State didn’t want a repeat of Benghazi and we hadn’t trained in remote spec ops support, yet, so they had David and Tuvi and me go in to rescue the embassy staff—the twins, Iris and Emory, were jealous as hell but they were far too green. And, like nine, so no.
Me? I was sixteen and had been training with David for eight months. I was the old lady of the crew.
David shifted in a whole Delta Force team from Andrews onto the chancery roof while Tuvi and I went into the residence to grab the staff. Even from the other side of the world, floor-to-floor shifting isn’t that hard, you’ve just got to know what’s on the other side and hope the builders used a decent level. So State showed us photos and blueprints of the complex to help us orient ourselves. And we were pretty lucky no one was in the bathroom when we got there.
See, that’s the scariest part of shifting: you have to know where you’re going and give yourself enough time to feel the space, to line up the here and the there, else the shift won’t take. Or, worse, you might line it up wrong and lose a foot into a misaligned floor or shift halfway inside another person. But however it goes, for a moment, you’re in two places at once and you have just a second to decide where you’ll end up. And on that shift to Riyadh, I remember there was one of those yellow “wet floor” tents right where I was shifting in—right where my leg would go—and I just barely had time to step back before shifting in and kicking it to the floor.
The embassy staff was all holed up behind security doors and were plenty surprised to see two Indian kids show up out of nowhere—Tuvi, all tall and skinny and his hair white as snow with those scary red albino eyes, me on the short side but sporting this pony-tail that reached almost to my waist when it wasn’t lashing about like a whip. We burst out from the bathroom and started ordering everyone into groups of five. And when Tuvi shifted the first group away, the rest of them freaked. But we managed to get forty people out—and David, another dozen from the chancery—before the Wahhabis broke through the security door.
This is where history caught up with us. Where secrecy shifted right to hell.
During my first month training with David, as he taught me how to build up my stamina so I could shift farther and farther, with more and more often. He also taught me how to use my shifting in other ways. For instance, while we’re always at the center of the shift, we can sometimes send and receive without shifting ourselves. Like how I’d done with the baseball or Elyse’s beer, except over greater distances and out of line of sight. For instance, he was fond of shifting ocean breezes into his bedroom at night. Or cooler air from up north into the hot, un-air-conditioned buildings on the rez. He showed me a picture of some Alaskan lake I’ve never been to and coached me how to navigate my mind there so I could line it up with an empty wash below the mesas. And damn if I didn’t make an ice-cold river flow through the Arizona summer.
But he also showed me how to use shifting as a weapon. Which is what I did when those Wahhabis burst in.
There were still seven staffers in the room. And Tuvi about to shift some of them back to Andrews. But when the security door came off its hinges and those rebels burst in—like out of some Vice video, all red headscarves and AKs and yelling and smelling like ass—what I’d thought was a hot mess went full shit show. People started screaming and running past me, for the back of the room, and right away one of those bearded assholes shot the Air Force attaché. Looked like they were about to spray the whole room. And I’ll admit it, I wasn’t really thinking. I’m not a soldier, like David. But I’m not stupid. Staring at those AKs was like when Charlie fired that baseball at me. Straight terror. So I reacted. I put my wrists together and pointed my open palms at the doorway—at those rebels—like David showed me. And I shifted the smallest space I could from that little room in Riyadh to a spot far overhead. Far, far overhead.
I shifted that little spot to the surface of the sun.
“You see the sun every day,” David told me one bright afternoon when we were training in the desert not far from Second Mesa.
“You know where it is. You can find it quick. Distance doesn’t mean anything. Shifting isn’t limited by lines of sight or walls or the void in between or even the speed of light. You just have to know where to find both the here and the there.”
And with that maddening ease of his, he stretched out one hand toward a nearby boulder and this tiny pin-point of light burst to life a few feet from his hand. It was crazy bright—way too bright to look at—but that boulder turned black right away. And it started to burn! A rock! Burning! For reals! And before David was done, the stone slouched into crumbles and magma, smoke and heat driving me back. But David just stood there, like Superman sweating through his too-tight USN tee shirt.
“Hell, yes,” I told him.
I grew up in the desert. Running and playing under it’s terrible heat, waiting for Mom in hot cars, listening to the elders and their stories of Tawa, the sun spitit. I knew the sun as well as I knew the dust under my kicks.
So, that night in Riyadh, I shifted the sun. And I let it pour through. Just the tiniest bit of the corona. 10,000-degree plasma streamed out of that little space between me and those Wahhabis and shot right at them. It vaporized the rebels, their guns, the doorway, the hallway beyond, the concrete and steel wall at the far end, and the better part of the apartment building across the street. The tiny bit of magnetic field that slipped through fried every computer and phone for miles. And three of the staffers behind me went blind—one, it seems, forever.
When we got back to Andrews, folks were going crazy: asking me what I’d done, bitching about international incidents and rules of engagement and all sorts of stuff that I still don’t care one bit about. But not that Air Force attaché. He was still bleeding from the shoulder when he came over to shake my hand and thank me. A soldier twice my size thanking me for saving his life.
David never questioned what I’d done, either. He walked across the hangar and straight hugged me. Told me he was glad I was ok.
Told me, “I’m so proud of you.”
That.
That, right there.
No one ever told me that, before. Not when I hit a ball off the mesa or when I’d fought off those three creeps in Tuba or all those times I brought Mom home from God-knows where, to young to drive. I mean, Mom told me she loved me, sure. When she was able to talk at all. But here was David, this guy who—legit!—had saved the world more than once, telling me he was proud of me.
Me. Some little nobody from the reservation.
The press likes to talk up the relationship between us kids and David. Mine, in particular. Like he’s some kind of white daddy to all us native babies. Pisses me off every time. But if there’s one myth about us shifters I’ll give any weight to, it’s that David has done a lot for us. For me. And what he did that day, having my back and saying what he did? Well, it felt all right.
And, turns out, it was the first in a long line of that sort of praise.
That Energy Department staffer who went blind at the embassy? Guess she decided me saving her fat white ass wasn’t good enough so she sued the government. And went on Fox News, telling all the world about these two mutants who came in and grabbed everybody. She even had the balls to complain about the “little Mexican girl” who blinded her, too. I mean, so much WTF!
Everyone thinks it was the President’s call to out the program. And, yeah, I guess it did land on her desk, eventually. But let me set the record straight on this one, because it’s important. No one—literally, no one at any level—wanted to out the program. Even I was skittish. I’d killed a bunch of folks, after all. And while I don’t feel bad about it—the nutters were trying to shoot me!—it doesn’t mean I wanted every Wahhabi ass-clown in the Middle East knowing who took out an apartment block of religious radicals.
Well, almost no one. Our bosses at the DoD were trying to figure out how to deal with the crazy blind chick, when David just sort of announced, like it just occurred to him—which is total BS, he never did anything without a plan—that he thought we should go public. He laid out this vision of us shifters as both the ultimate deterrent but also as this huge boost to public morale. How the operation could expand and do more good if the public was aware of us. And as much as I might take credit for my role in expanding the shifter program and bringing DoD and NASA operations and all those awesome jobs and money to the rez, it was David who spelled it all out in that meeting. And when General Head-Up-His-Ass who sent us to Riyadh balked, David just nodded like a good soldier, took Tuvi’s and my hands, and shifted right over his head.
Figuratively speaking. Der.
See, this is another story they never get right. How we shifted right into the White House. Because we can do that. Because we’re ballers.
The Secret Service straight freaked! But we were nice and all. I mean, we could’ve shifted right into the residence but instead we waited in the Oval for the President. Caught her after dinner and it was weird to see her in jeans and a UGA tee. But not so weird, I guess, as her seeing a middle-aged guy with two native teenagers waiting in her office, all unexpected and all still covered in Saudi dust and blood. Hell, my jumpsuit was singed. By the sun!
Because. Ballin’.
We were announced to the press the next day, in the Rose Garden of all places. Just the three of us, to start. The President’s staff wanted Tuvi and me to wear all this traditional stuff—they even wanted me to put my hair up in squash blossoms like some Star Wars princess—but I told them where they could shift that dumbass idea. I mean, I’m all for representing the tribe, and all, but I wasn’t about to be outed as a superhero and to facilitate cultural appropriation in the same press conference. So they put us in these weird flight suits we’d never worn before, with some official-looking program patch on the shoulder we’d never seen before, and when she cued us, the three of us shifted to the other three corners of the Mall, where reporters had been told something would happen. David shifted to the Capitol Rotunda, Tuvi to the Jefferson, and I shifted right into Lincoln’s lap.
I wasn’t supposed to. I was supposed to shift onto the stairs, like where MLK stood back in the day, but I was totally full of myself. Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it was all the attention. Looking back on it, I’m actually kind of shocked how much I really loved the attention we got from that day on. That I got. I mean, how often has a native girl been given this kind of stage? I wasn’t a soldier. I wasn’t even a grown up. And blah blah blah. The thing is, they needed me more than I needed them. And that was awesome.
I’d never really had much of a voice before. So I called out to those reporters on the steps—the ones who hadn’t seen me shift in—and showed them who I was. I zipped open the top and my jumpsuit and slipped out of the arms—tying them around my waist to keep from dropping trou—and revealed my pink “Made in NativeAmerica” tee.
And what started with me taunting reporters from Lincoln’s lap ended the week with me on the cover of just about every magazine in America. My favorite was the Time cover. I was sporting these long tight pigtails, a traditional Hopi necklace worth bank, and bright cherry red lips—closed over my braces, thank God!—with the words, “The girl who touched the sun” written across my neck.
That’s some epic level shit, right there.
A Native American girl on the cover of every major magazine in the country. And not some old black and white pic of a girl wrapped in a blanket with big-ass squash blossoms on her head, either. David had his covers, of course. The week after, with the Mars reveal, was when he got most of them. Tuvi even got a cover or two—he has an edgy look, after all. But that first week, most covers were of me. And some of it was because I was the one who blew up the rebels and some because I was the one named in the lawsuit brought by the very-much-alive fat blind woman. But some was also because I was a girl. And girls sell magazines.
We did this crazy press junket where we would shift from show to show—Good Morning America to Fox and Friends to Today, that kind of thing. I was on Kimmel and Colbert on the same night—and so glad Mom made me speak English at home so I could keep upm with the banter! We even made a big splash of taking the whole White House press corps from DC to the rez for the groundbreaking of NASA’s Big Mountain facility. And back again if they were real nice.
Some people in the tribe were initially less than thrilled with our fame, though. Because nothing’s a big deal unless someone else is shitting on it. I heard all about how Tuvi should’ve been the one in charge because he’s a boy and two whole years older than me—never mind he’d only been training for a month! There was briefly some debate among the more traditional types about whether I was powakum or duhikyam—basically, whether I used my ability for good or evil, because I guess being a hero didn’t make that clear. I even heard this one elder from Polacca tell a reporter that I should’ve been a boy—cause, you know, that was a choice I had in my mom’s belly—and that girls, super powered or not, had no business working off rez.
Deep breath. Nahongvita.
Once the press was gone, there was this big winter solstice ceremony in Walpi—not in Old Oraibi, because they’re kind of dicks about photos and the tribal council wanted their money shots—where we all went down into this thousand-year-old old kiva and there were katsina dancers and we ate piki and everything was Hopi AF. Except for David. The council decided to break with tradition and let an outsider crash an otherwise tribe-only underground spirit party. And he took it all in as best a tourist could be expected, I guess. Given that he didn’t speak one bit of Hopi, I figure the details of how our ancestors travelled to Earth—the Fourth World—through a magical portal that emptied into the Grand Canyon—the sipapu—was a bit lost on him. But I didn’t worry about him. Since it wasn’t clear yet how things were going to go, I was busy stressing about the rift I’d caused in the tribe. Watching the dancers, I don’t know if I worried more about the half of my people who saw me as some kind of Soyoko—a monster who was going to take away their children by bringing in the white government and everything that came with them—or that the other half might see me as an Ahola—a spirit of growth from whom so much was expected. I was only sixteen. No way I was ready for any of that pressure.
But the tribe’s fortunes did change for the better. Just not overnight, like most folks think. Sure, there were tons of construction jobs once NASA broke ground and once the DoD began building our campus out by Keams Canyon. And it was amazing to see all the paved roads and infrastructure come in those first few months. And all the new houses and trucks in the months afterwards.
For the first eight months, I was working with David, things had been so secret I couldn’t even tell my mom what I was up to. Just that it paid alright and that I could afford to get her things we never had before. But now I was a star on the rez. Tuvi and the twins, too. There were parades and more traditional ceremonies in our honor and ribbon cuttings and they renamed Hopi Junior Senior High School, “Winnow Loloma Junior Senior High.” They even put a marker where I sunk those tires in the asphalt almost a year before. #GoWinHigh!
But the thing most folks off the rez don’t know about is the insane shifter mania that took hold of the tribe. It was crazy! See, when we finally introduced the twins to the world, it didn’t take any time at all for people to put two and two together and figure out four of the world’s total population of five shifters came from the same small reservation in northern Arizona. And pretty soon everyone with a drop of Hopi blood in them—even those dicks who bitched about girl shifters—were harassing David and Tuvi and me everywhere we went, wanting to see if they could do what we could. Like maybe they could shift but just never noticed for some dumbass reason. So we had to launch this recruiting tour. A total waste of time. It was like American Idol except without anyone doing anything. There wasn’t any genetic marker that we knew of and there wasn’t any way to teach someone to do it if they didn’t already have the skill. So it was a lot of talking to people who had lots of hope—even desperation—but no shifting.
Except for Neil and Dextra. They had the goods. But that was basically the only good thing about them.
I was ready to quit it. We’d seen maybe 600 people in our first week of screenings and I was just done. 600 people who claimed they could go from here to there unless, apparently, we were watching. Total shit show.
So I was ready to walk. And my old boyfriend and some of my old crew had been texting me all morning and I was just fine with making some old mistakes. I was already starting outside to shift dirt-to-dirt across the rez when David shifted into the room behind me.
“Win, Tuvi!” he called out.
And if I’d just shifted out right then, my day would’ve been all make outs and beer and much less bullshit. But I didn’t. Because when David called for us, it meant we were needed. That something was going down.
I sighed. I kicked the dust. I swore ten or twenty times. And I stomped back to the trailer door and barked, “What!?”
But here’s the thing: David wasn’t all keyed like he’d been before we shifted over to Riyadh. Or even like he’d been when we’d done all those press appearances. He was all smiles. Smiles like I hadn’t seen since we found the twins shifting themselves all over their elementary school.
“Two,” he said. “There are two more!”
He shifted Tuvi and me back to his trailer across the rez and showed us this father-daughter duo, Neil and Dextra. He was near on David’s age, I think, and she was in her twenties, at least. And sort of cute, if you like sluts. And David was so damn excited. Seems every time he found one of us, he lit up even more. Like he was collecting Pokémon. Except each of us was a little less rare and a little less precious with each new find.
But they were legit shifters and brought our number to seven. Turns out they’d been using their shifting to pull small-time hustles and recently ran afoul of some nasties in a Navajo casino down in Gallup. They tried to go big, Neil said, but he’d screwed up a shift at a blackjack table and Dextra got caught shifting on camera while robbing a hotel room. Neil also let drop that he’d read about the lack of native leadership un our “little group” and he figured he could help out. Cause he has a penis and everything and that should make him pretty valuable.
So, basically, they came to us looking for protection. Because they suck.
And a few weeks later, this little Zuni kid with a lisp—Byrd—shifted right into my trailer. He was thirteen and said he’d had a crush on me ever since seeing my Time cover. Apparently, it’s pinned over his bed and I don’t want to know anything more about that. But while he’s a little creepy—and never mind how the word “shift” sounds when he cocks it up—he was also the only member of our little clan I’d recruited. He was my Pikachu, dammit, and David couldn’t claim him.
David and his Pokémon…
Let me tell you a few things about David Cummings. His official bio outs him as forty years my elder but leaves out the part about him being a thousand years old. The guys been to Mars but he carries a flip phone. And he still listens to Garth Brooks. On CD. Where do you even start into that? But lame as he might be, he was the only shifter in the world for most of his life. And he’s the best of the lot of us—no doubt about it. I can’t begin to tell you everything I’ve learned from him. He even mastered this technique where he lines up a handle—just a little damn handle—and can go anywhere an identical handle has been installed. He uses that little number to shift onto satellites and across dangerous borders and into submarines so cramped and cluttered I’m straight terrified just thinking about all the limbs I’d lose on the shift.
But what the bios often skip over—leaving me and the twins to fill out the imagination, if they bring it up at all—is that he doesn’t have a family. He’s married to the Navy or Jesus or Uncle Sam or some BS. When he and I first discovered how Tuvi was able to commute from the rez to Tucson every day for college, David actually told me that his job was his life. That where other folks had kids, he had shifting. And us. And ‘Merica. And damn if that isn’t the whitest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.
David is amazingly talented. He was doing shift ops against countries that don’t exist anymore back when Mom wasn’t even a glimmer in my kwa’a’s ding dong. But he’s painfully dense. His is a world of mission objectives and success metrics and he didn’t see adding two crooks to our number as anything but a good because. Because shifting was the ultimate deterrent. Because we are all stronger the more of us there are. And because he gets his rocks off being the granddaddy of a tribe of brown teleporters.
And that day in the trailer, I wasn’t down for that.
David was starting to tell Neil and Dextra all about how our little team worked and I cut in, “Can we talk about this, first?”
“What’s there to talk about?” he asked.
But before I could say anything, my mom showed up.
OMG. You should see the old ladies drip all over David. Even the Hopi ones. My Mom had taken to crashing the trailers during those recruiting weeks just in the hope she could get some bit of him in her hands for two minutes. And, respect him as I do, it’s so gross. Mom was raped by some white guys when she was my age but even that doesn’t keep her from being all hands and puppy-dog eyes when David Cummings comes around.
So she just breezed into the trailer and did her typical BS, barely saying “hi” to me as she swooped in on David for a little Manifest Destiny. She even started prattling on about this idea she’d had that we should all quit our save-the-world government jobs and go to work for UPS or Amazon. Because every superhero secretly hopes to be a delivery girl.
David was a gentleman, or something, and rose to greet her while I just sat there, fuming. I mean, it wasn’t like I was in the middle of saying anything. Neil and Dextra and Tuvi were all looking around like they’d suddenly ended up at the wrong party. But Mom was oblivious, begging David to shift her back to her house—for a drink or to shift in a few trees or some lie so she could try to get him wasted. She kept saying, in this gross voice she never used around me, that she just wondered what shifting felt like. Like she didn’t remember all the times I shifted her home—because she’s a pathetic drunk and couldn’t.
I called him over and, like a good soldier—or seaman, whatever—he patted Mom on the arm and came over to me, stiff as a board.
“That’s my mother,” I told him.
He just nodded.
I stood and took a deep breath. I was shaking a little. “I need you to back off.”
He crossed his arms, which only made him seem two full feet taller than me instead of just one-and-a-half. “Win—”
“No,” I started. I was never good confronting him on real issues. For all my You Tube-taught sarcasm, he could talk circles around me. He’s intimidating as hell even when he’s on your side.
David just looked at me. He knew I was trying to say something and powerful as he was, knew he had to wait for it.
“I need you to back off. Everything. My mom, the recruiting, all of it.”
Mom started to say something about my behavior and Neil tried to inject himself into the conversation and Dextra made some passive-aggressive, dumb-bitch joke about me being a little girl and David just smiled this absolutely maddening, condescending smile at me as he started to turn back to my mom.
And I just had it.
I grabbed David by the wrist and shifted us right the hell out of there, to this spot I’ve always loved on the border of the rez. Instead of a dim trailer, we were surrounded by huge boulders and cliffs of red earth crisscrossed and hatched with white stripes like Tawa, himself, had taken to writing on the world. And, wow, the look on David’s face. I wonder if anyone had ever shifted him, before.
It was actually kind of priceless, not that I appreciated it at the time.
“What’s gotten into you,” he muttered. And in that instant, I felt so worthless. Like some little annoyance he’d grown weary of.
And without a sound, he was gone.
But I wasn’t done.
I shifted back to the trailer and caught him mansplaining my actions to the room. But I didn’t hesitate. I just grabbed him, again, and shifted us right back out to that canyon. I did it real sloppy, too, and dropped us both almost a foot when we got there. Got some of that red and white sand all over his too-tight tee.
“What are you doing!” he yelled, climbing back to his feet.
“We’re not a bunch of kachina dolls!” I barked at him.
He looked so bewildered, like I was speaking some alien language—which, given that he couldn’t speak Hopi or Spanish, wasn’t impossible. But I just kept going.
“What are you thinking with those two?” I asked him, my voice high and shaking. “Are you really so hot for more shifters that you’ll take a pair of criminals?”
“I took you,” he said.
It was the middle of the day in that desert canyon. And so colorful, with all the reds and whites of that part of Arizona, the wide blue sky overhead. But that was some shade, right there.
I clenched my fists to keep from shifting him off a mountain somewhere. Someplace where there was no handle to save him. But he’d trained me better than that so I took and deep breath and took my turn shaking my head at him.
“What are you doing?”
He started to say something but I cut him off.
“Sorry, that wasn’t a question.”
He looked so lost. But he didn’t shift away.
“I know you were the only one for a long time, but you’ve got to slow down. There aren’t that many Hopi in the world but, still, you’ve got to have some standards. Neil and Dextra—”
“Demonstrate some pretty advanced techniques,” he interrupted.
I took a deep breath, again.
“Neil and Dextra are bad people.”
“So we should let them go work for the highest bidder? Kill them?” David asked.
“I don’t know what we should do with them!” I yelled. This wasn’t going at all like I’d… FML. I hadn’t planned any of this. And it sucked.
He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me from so very high up.
“That’s why it’s not your call.”
He gripped my shoulders in a way that I suspect he thought was reassuring but which really just hurt. And he looked at me for a long while before we both spoke at the same time.
“I need you to listen to me,” I said.
“Take all the time you need,” he said.
And he was gone.
I just…
I mean, what do you do with that?
You don’t talk to an asshole for a long time, is what you do.
I mean, clearly there wasn’t anything to talk about. He’d made it very clear he didn’t care what I had to say. And I was straight up pissed off. I sat in briefings and training classes thinking about little ways to get revenge. Like shifting the lid off his coffee right as he took a sip. Or shifting his chair a foot to the side so he’d get a wooden arm up his ass. Or, my favorite—which I totally did…shhh!—when I hid one of his shoes while he did his laps in the pool. Just one shoe. And, man, he got so crazy aggravated looking for it! But he’ll never find it. On the Moon.
Neither of us even tried to break the tension, either. We’d pass each other in the halls at Big Mountain and we’d never even look at each other. I even got myself reassigned off the Enceladus space probe over to the Venus-Mars transfer group so I wouldn’t have any NASA team ops with him. And no one else tried to bring it up, either. I think the kids—Tuvi, the twins, and Byrd—were waiting to see how things would shake out. They kind of looked up to me and were intimidated by David, so I get that. Neil and Dextra, on the other hand, saw a chance to be big dogs for the first time in their shitty lives and put their claws as deep in David and the program leadership as they could get away with.
And that’s how a few weeks went by. David was training those con artists while I started getting Byrd up to speed and we all worked our own gigs. The only time we really had to interact with each other was on this joint task force. Seems the big brass asses at the DoD didn’t want to risk one of us getting all shot up like almost happened in Riyadh so we started training with these Seal-types on remote shifting. The idea was, we’d shift a team in camo to some far corner of the globe and then monitor them via cameras and drones and stuff while using our shifting to pluck baddies out of the fire zone or tactically move the squad around to evade enemy defenses. I also used the chance to repeatedly shift David’s drone behind a wall. It really was some next-level badassery.
But when Tuvi came to find me—all in a panic—I was doing Venus-Mars transfer training with the twins. See, these guys at NASA had the crazy notion we could shift the atmosphere of Venus over to Mars and bulk up the red planet’s cold, thin sky. We even had a prototype built, using quarter-scale models of these flagpoles NASA wanted to drop on each planet. Except ours were here at Big Mountain and on top of Denali—or as David kept calling it, Mount McKinley. But the idea was the same. So we tested shifting the poles together and letting the high-air pressure at the compound pour into the low air pressure above Alaska.
Iris and I were up on Denali and I was coaching her through holding the shift together as long as possible. I was trying to build up her endurance—like David had taught me—so she could keep the warm air flowing before handing the shift off. Ideally, we’d be able to keep the air flowing without interruption, but it was hard. When two or more of us were involved with a shift, we could all sense it, affect it. But controlling it? That was hard to hand off. And Iris was only nine with all the patience you’d expect of a nine-year-old.
She was bawling about how she couldn’t do it and I was trying to keep her from hyperventilating in the thin air. We’d been up there too long, already. That’s when Tuvi got on the radio and told me to get back to the compound. Right away.
We shifted back and I wasn’t even out of my frozen coat when Tuvi burst in talking about how David was gone and no one knew where he was and how he might be dead already and WTF! He dragged me through the compound to the Enceladus control room where twenty people started talking to me at once.
Ever wonder why NASA space probes have such a better success record than, like, anyone else’s. Here’s the skinny: NASA spent a bajillion dollars sending the Space Shuttle to fix the Hubble back in the 90s and they didn’t ever want to do that again, what with them having way too little money and way to much universe. So they started attaching David’s handles to basically everything they fired into space. So anytime some Martian Rover didn’t unfold or some deep-space probe needed a camera update, David would do that handle-to-handle shift of his and pop out to this planet or that and go all super DIY. Rumor has it—and it’s maddening, no one will tell me if this is BS or not—they even rigged a custom handle so David could shift out to Voyager 2 with a little plaque and a selfie stick proving an American was the first person in interstellar space.
Anyway, these NASA guys have it in their head Enceladus is the best place in the solar system to look for life so they shot off a probe toward Saturn a few years back and wanted David to do something to it. He’d been training for a few weeks and just that AM, while I was getting Iris and Emory in their parkas, he grabbed one of his handles and shifted 700 million miles. No bigs.
Except he never called in. They gave it a little while, for sure. The probe is over an hour away by radio, so they didn’t expect him to text when he got there. Or, more to the point, they did, but they expected some lag. Either way, David never called in. And that was four hours ago.
So here’s one of the big problems in our little super hero program. David has thirty years’ experience on the rest of us. Even counting all our shifting before we were in the program. So, usually, David is the one doing the bailing out. When Tuvi panicked and got stuck in North Korea? David. When the twins shifted their bedroom door with a wall and trapped themselves in their room? David. And a sledgehammer—that didn’t require shifting to fix.
When I was sent to fix the Rosetta comet lander and got stuck? David. With one of his handles.
But what do you do when Superman is the one in trouble?
There’s the problem: The next most veteran shifter is this petite sixteen-year-old who’s barely been in the program for a year and who’s not talking to him.
Honestly, they pitched it to me as a recovery mission more than a rescue. By the time they didn’t get the arrival message, odds were he was already dead. Or adrift and unable to get a signal back to Earth through the probe’s transmitter. But he went out there with eight hours of air—just in case—so there was a chance he might just be hurt or unconscious or… I didn’t want to think about anything worse.
I also didn’t want to think about how I was going to have to shift out there on a handle. I’d never done that before. Never done deep space, either. I’d been to Mars a few times, to Comet Russianname-Russianname, the ISS, and to the Moon—there’s a sneaker on the Moon!—but never out so far as Saturn.
But this was David. Pissed off or not—terrified or not!—of course I was going to drop everything and try to go get him. And, to the brass assess’ credit, they never considered anyone else for the rescue. So Neil and Dextra can eat a dick.
It took forever—really, maybe forty-five minutes—to get me into a space suit. The first one was comically large and then there was some mad scrambling to find the tiny one I used now and again for Mars and ISS trips. Tuvi apparently shifted all over the base until he found it. Then they got me all fitted and rushed me into the vacuum chamber we used for the space shifts.
I’d used the chamber before. But when I’d shifted to the comet, that had been a regular floor-to-floor shift, just like any other. This time, though, there was this handle in the middle of the floor. A big aluminum door handle with magnets on the ends of the U so I could position it on the floor, the wall, the ceiling—wherever I needed.
One of the mission team gave me the skinny on what the probe looked like, where I should expect metal arms and antennae and David to be when I shifted out there. And one of the techs slipped my carabiner around the handle before they sealed the door behind me. This is really when my heart started to race. Like, for reals. I was panicking. The hiss of air being sucked out of the chamber, the noise of my breathing echoing in the helmet, that stupid AF handle staring up at me from the floor…
Right where David left it.
I crouched over the handle and tried to remember where they said David was when he shifted out. I tried to visualize where the pieces of the probe were, where he might’ve drifted if he was unconscious. Or worse.
I was scared shitless.
The mission team were talking to me through the helmet but I wasn’t paying any attention. I just took hold of the handle, the carabiner locked around my thumb so I could move it as I shifted. And I tried to psych myself up. “Nahongvita,” I told myself. Dig deep and get your shit together.
I was a professional.
I was a superhero.
So I took a deep damn breath and I shifted.
Every shift has its hard part. Most ground-to-ground shifts are pretty easy, as long as the ground is kind of flat and you don’t mind dropping yourself a half-inch on the other side to avoid fusing your shoes with the floor. Especially with uneven ground, like when I’d shifted David our to Blue Canyon. Object-to-object, like with beer cans and restaurant plates, is actually even easier once you get used to working with small targets. Yes, you still have to be right at one end of the shift—like, holding the receiving can or flagpole—but you’ve got something solid to focus on and you’re bringing something small and manageable to you. Liquid-to-liquid is hard AF, though. No doubt. David makes it look easy but I still can’t do it. Air-to-air—which is basically what that little Sun move is all about—is much easier. If you misalign a little air it doesn’t affect the shift at all. Maybe gives you a little gas.
Handle-to-handle is more like the beer cans and the plates than anything. So it shouldn’t be too hard. What makes it so damn complicated is that instead of shifting something else to you, you’re shifting yourself without much reference. Nothing around the handle on the other side is paralleled—or even known, sometimes. And in that instant when you’re in both places, there’s so much to take in. Nevermind the vacuum of space all around. The void is unshiftable. You drift off out there, there’s no shifting back.
So, for a second I was both in the vacuum chamber, bent over that handle on the floor, and gripping a handle on the side of a gold and stainless steel box the size of a minivan, hurling through the outer solar system. The handle was intact—the probe, too—and my limbs were clear. Even the carabiner was hooked okay around that same bend in the U. And almost a foot away, another carabiner floated around the opposite bend.
I shifted. The sudden dark was so dim I couldn’t see anything for several seconds. But what I’d only felt, before, slowly came into view. The handle, the space probe, and OMG! Saturn was above me—big as shit—with these rings right out of a movie. Enceladus was nowhere to be seen, but silhouetted against Saturn’s stripes in the sky, I saw David floating out at the end of his tether.
I yelled for him—realizing, for the first time, I never checked with the mission team if I’d even be able to talk with him over the radio—and immediately reached out for his tether.
Space is all wonky, though, so I ended up spinning myself around and twisting the hell out of my own wrist just trying to keep from floating away. I was sweating like a slut in that helmet before I got myself turned back around and was able to start pulling him in.
He drifted up on me and I caught him by the chest. He seemed limp, at first, but something was off. His sun visor was down, despite the dark, and he seemed to tense a bit before bumping into the side of the probe. I took his arm in my hand and tried to shake him, really shaking myself, instead, because I’m tiny and space sucks. And then he blew my mind. Without saying anything, David reached out, took my shoulder in one hand, took the handle in the other, and—
We were someplace else.
Someplace with gravity.
I fell on my ass and straight panicked. I don’t mind admitting it.
“What the goddamn!” I yelled so loud the echo in my helmet hurt the hell out of my ears.
David was standing beside me, his helmet already half off his head.
“Win,” he said, a big dumb smile on his face. “I was beginning to worry you weren’t coming.”
He reached down and helped me up. You know, like this was just some regular Tuesday, bouncing around the universe and shit. And you can believe I leaned back and made him work for it. But by the time I got to my feet, I wasn’t looking at David anymore. I was looking around at where we were. And if anything could blow Saturn away—OMG—it was this.
A dozen suns hung in the sky—all smaller and dimmer than ours, but still—and as many moons dangled between them, all casting this lovely purple twilight over everything. And the landscape, below, reflected all these warm tones. Rock and desert scrub were close around us and just beyond, cliffs stretched out on either side down a long canyon. Water reflected up from below and everywhere thousands and thousands of glowing windows and doorways peeked out from the rocks. Some above us, some below. But everywhere I looked, it was like Mesa Verde on crack. Towering cliff dwelling blended seamlessly with the canyon walls, ladders reaching upward and downward in a labyrinth that made no sense. And us, in the middle of it all, hidden about halfway up the intersection of two cliff walls.
“Where the—” I started, not really thinking about the fact David couldn’t hear me outside the helmet. So I reached up to my collar and cracked the suit open, lifting the helmet over my big cinnamon bun hair. The air was warm and wet but fragrant. Like the desert back home after a wash or a bloom. And I could hear music and singing far off. Laughter, too. I mean, I’ve seen some shit. For reals. But this?
Nothing like this.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said that day in the desert,” David said, his eyes never on me but always on the scene around us.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so distant,” he said. “I love you, Win. I love all of you. You’re my tribe. And I want to be your Pahama—your lost white brother.”
Was that an eyeroll? Yas.
I sighed, wherever we were, this wasn’t the time for all that sappy crap.
“David. Where are we?”
“You said, there are only so many Hopi. And you’re right. Pretty soon we’re either going to run out of candidates or we’re going to have to start considering people who don’t meet our standards.”
“David?”
He smiled at me. It was the most grandpa look he ever gave me.
“After we talked, I went back to that kiva in Walpi where we had the ceremony,” he started. “I know I didn’t understand much of it, but I’ve been trying to learn. And I caught a few things. Especially the story about how, once upon a time, the Hopi travelled from world to world.”
“Jesus. That story says we were lizard people two climbed up a bamboo shoot into the Grand Canyon. It’s myth, David. Like King Arthur or the Garden of Eden.”
He clapped his hands together and took me by the arm, leading me closer to the edge of the ledge we stood on.
“See, this is why I need you, Win. I’m not Hopi. I never will be. I know that. But whatever makes your tribe so special, I’m connected to that, too. Somehow.” He pointed at the canyon around us. “So, I shifted back to Walpi and really communed with the place. Where those ancient people lived in their pueblos. Where they vanished, too, a thousand years ago.”
“You mean where they live, right now?” I cut him off. “Please don’t start with some Anasazi crap. We’ve talked about this. That ‘ancient enemy’ shit is Navajo BS. The Hisatsinom were peaceful. The climate changed. People moved. And the Navajo and your ancestors conquered what was left. They didn’t go anywhere.”
“But just look around you, Win,” he told me. “They did.”
He stood back.
I looked down into the valley beneath us, mindful to stay close to the scrub bushes so I couldn’t be seen. There were people everywhere. People who looked just like me. Some of the women had their hair up in traditional squash blossoms, some wore it long and straight like I did. They laughed and hugged and ran through the twilight scenery. Men and boys played by a stream pouring out of the rocks below us, fathers lifting up their sons and throwing them out into the deeper water, their cackles echoing 10-fold up the walls toward us. And then I saw something. A girl—with jet-black hair, like mine—slipping away from her mother and shifting right out of sight. And a boy, not far from his father, looking around and shifting away, too. And after some searching, I found them again. Within earshot of their families, their faces locked in this crazy hot kiss. Then a frantic look around and they both shifted back to where they’d come from.
I looked back at the fathers throwing their kids into the stream and noticed the kids shifting themselves a little higher in their arcs, midflight. I noticed mothers braiding their daughters’ hair, shifting away and back again with new ties and blankets. Another boy called out from a high apartment. Then, a second later, he shifted down to the side of the stream, mid-stride running with his friends.
“All of them?” I asked.
“All of them.” David said.
He put his hand on my shoulder—gently, this time. “I went to that sacred kiva and I felt those rocks and that tiny hole in the floor that stands in for the portal, and I let my mind wander. I let it wander father than I’d ever let it go before. I didn’t worry about shifting to anyplace I knew. I just tried to think like those ancients did. I let my imagination reach out. And with my hand on the floor of that old meeting room, I felt another world. And I let it bring me here.”
“I’ve come back a few times,” he continued. “I brought a handle to make it a little easier,” he told me, pointing to a stainless-steel U on the ground behind us. “And so far, I don’t think anyone has seen me.”
I really had no idea what to say to all of this. Could these really be ancient pueblo peoples transported to some other world? The ancestors of the Keresans and the Tanoans and the Zuni and the Hopi? And all of them shifters? What if the myths were true and those old stories of portals were half-remembered tales of shifting? If Earth really was the Fourth World, could this really be the Fifth?
I scanned the cliff dwellings on both sides of the canyon. There must be as many people here as on the whole rez, back home. And I don’t know why, but just the thought of that made my chest tight and my stomach sink. All these shifters who didn’t have to work for the government or deal with the bureaucratic bullshit of the tribe and Indian Affairs and the DoD. All these shifters who didn’t have to cozy up to con artists and kids to find people like them. All these shifters who grew up together, learning from each other, and didn’t need some special superpower to matter.
“I need you to talk to them for me, Win. I need you to help me connect with them.”
All these shifters who left us behind.
“Are you kidding me?”
David looked confused.
“If these are really Hisatsinom—my ancestors—then I can no more talk to them than you can talk to an ancient Roman. Have you not noticed, our language isn’t the same from mesa to mesa. Bet it’s much less, world to world. So unless they speak English and Spanish, we’re SOL.”
David shook his head, “Well, you can try—”
“And even if I could,” I went on, “I’d tell them to run. I’d give them the Wikipedia version of white conquest and make sure they knew just how far they could shift your ass back to Arizona.”
“Win!”
“No, fuck that,” I kept on, looking down at the families below us by the stream. “I’d tell them, fuck you! Fuck you for leaving the rest of us behind. Fuck you because you didn’t take us with you.” I watched those dads and those sons playing in the stream. And I remembered the stories I grew up with. How—like Noah—the Spider Grandmother would usher the worthy from one world to the next, leaving behind or destroying the rest.
“You left us!” I said, definitely too loud for someone sneaking. “You didn’t even come back to check on those of us you left behind.”
David pulled me back from the edge.
“Win, stop it.”
“You think any of these shifters will pledge allegiance to the USA once I tell them what the government did to us? Should I give them a tour of the rez? Maybe sell them some pottery or an arrowhead? What if they don’t have turquoise here!?”
There was commotion in the valley beneath us but, so far, no one was investigating our ledge.
“Win, I need you to take a deep breath.”
I shook my head. “I need you to be ok if there are only a few of us.”
David squinted at me.
“We have to be enough, David.”
“Is that what this is about?” he asked. “You feel threatened?” And then, in his most condescending tone, “You feel less special if there are a lot of you?”
I sank a bit and looked away.
“Of course, I do,” I told him. “With each one of us, we’re all a little less special.”
I pointed back at the canyon and the raised voices echoing up from below. “And these aren’t even our people, David. They left a long time ago. And they make all of us less special.”
He just looked at me, clearly surprised by my reaction and not quite sure what to do next. He kept starting to say something but stopped himself each time.
“Take us home,” I told him. “Don’t come back here.”
“Win—”
“Promise me.” I said. “Never.”
He looked out across the valley. “They could teach us so much.”
“I won’t allow it,” I told him, surprising even myself with my tone.
He laughed—the balls on me, right?—but didn’t say anything.
“You ever come back, I quit. I don’t care how cherry the deal or how clear the threat.”
He didn’t say anything. The noises from the valley were quieting some.
“You want us to be a tribe? A family? Then you’ve got start listening to the rest of us.”
“But, Win—” he started.
“What’s important to us—to me—has to be just as important to you.” He was looking all around the canyon, desperate, but I only had eyes for him, now.
“And this is important.”
Then he looked at me for a long time, his chin tucked in the wide metal collar of his space suit.
“Okay.”
I looked back across the canyon walls at all the windows and ladders and ropes and doors and people. And for a moment I let myself wonder what it might be like to stay. To be part of a people without oppression or conquest or poverty. To say hi, at least. If this really was the Fifth World, they’d already shifted across the universe. What else could they do?
But instead: “Take us home.”
David looked lost but he pulled his helmet on all the same. I took a long deep breath of that warm fragrant air before I resealed my helmet. And we knelt over the handle, making sure our tethers were carabineered on. He put his hand on my back and I felt David start to shift us back to the probe. There was a hesitancy to the electricity. A reservation. Like even his superpower regretted bringing me along to put the kibosh on his Manifest Recruiting.
So I reached out, too. Not to the Enceladus probe but a few million miles past it. And it was one of the most Hopi feelings I’d ever had. Because I reached out for Tawa, the sun spirit, the creator. I reached out to the corona of the sun, just like David showed me one of those first afternoons in the Arizona desert. Like I’d used to blow up those rebels in Riyadh. And I shifted—within David’s shift—just the tiniest piece of that solar heat all the way from our sun to that twilight pueblo world. Just enough to reduce the handle David left there to a metal puddle.
We were suddenly floating over Saturn, again, and he looked at me with this dumb shock. Like he couldn’t believe what just happened. Like no one ever dared, before. Cause, you know, no one had. But he’d get used to it.
He was at a loss for words, so I helped him out. I found the radio controls on my arm and told him, “I know you’ll be tempted to go back. So I helped you. Like you’ve helped me.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“That’s ok,” I told him. “I’ll train you up.”
Then I laughed. “Otherwise, I’ll have to kick you into deep space. And that would suck for me. Going back not the hero and everything.”
He hung there on his tether, like a constellation all his own. Guess I must’ve been the same in his eye.
“It’s that important?” he asked.
“It is to me,” I said.
And then he was quiet for a bit—a bit long, if you ask me—before saying, “Ok.”
He drifted in close and we took hold of each other. Nothing sweet about it, at all. Just practical floating around in space kind of stuff. But his hand was firm on mine—and mine right back. Might be generations and cultures and his terrible taste in music between us, but we’d never been closer to an understanding than right then. Really changed how everything went, going forward.
We got our story straight and shifted home. We even fixed the probe, too, cause shifters are ballers and always get the job done. #DontWorryBeHopi
David played dumb on his transmitter not working—even going all old-man foolish when it worked fine for the techs. And I got props for a risky damn shift and bringing back the boss in one piece. Lots of back-patting and high-fives in Big Mountain, that day. And not too few lost glances between David and me.
That evening, David asked me to shift out to Walpi with him. To that ancient town that lit him up so bad he wandered halfway across the universe looking for Fifth World recruits who would’ve never passed the background checks. I begged off, though, and convinced him to join me at this dive in Page I used to shift food from. And damn if he didn’t come with. And if we weren’t such big damn heroes, we might’ve been able to steal some dinner.