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everything else. Her mother had not been the prior leader: that was the semi-legendary Ruby Montana, who had lived high in the mountains and held court on Saturday nights at the barn dance. On rare occasions she would visit the Pair-A-Dice roadhouse, neutral ground where both sides of the Tufa could come together and play. It was said her voice had been so pure, it could melt icicles and summon fish from the bottom of lakes; she also played the autoharp so well, she could produce notes no one, human or Tufa, had ever heard before.
    Ruby Montana had been dead for ten years prior to Mandalay’s birth, although given the Tufa’s rather malleable relationship with time, she’d managed to make sure there was no gap in leadership. Before her death, she’d told the First Daughters who would give birth to her successor, when and where it would happen, and even what to name the girl. But she hadn’t warned them that Mandalay’s mother would die. There had been no omens, no signs, so no one was prepared for it, least of all her father. Raising a newborn daughter alone was bad enough, but he had no idea how to help her sort through the generations of knowledge lurking in her mind. His extended family had pitched in, as had the entire Tufa community, but none of them had the slightest clue what she was going through when her eyes glazed over, or when the words that others heard as mere whispers on the night wind spoke to her with total clarity.
    She was halfway down the aisle when Mr. Dalton stopped the bus in front of her house and opened the door. He said, “Careful on the ice, there, darlin’.”
    â€œThanks,” she said. As she walked away, the radio voice said, “A revolution is coming, people, and it won’t be pretty. People won’t take this forever!” The door closed, cutting off the anger and resentment.
    Mandalay lived in a single-wide house trailer with her father and stepmother, Leshell. Her swing set, now half-buried in snow and crusted with ice, sat beside the driveway. No one was yet home, so she got the key from the mailbox and let herself in.
    She hung up her coat, put down her books, and went to the stove. Aluminum foil covered a plate of brownies, along with a note from Leshell that said, Hope you had a good day. Stay warm. Love you.
    Mandalay took one and chewed on it absently as she went to her room. She took down the tiple Bliss Overbay gave her from its place on her wall. She was big enough now for a full-size guitar, but when she needed to find a little peace, she always returned to this.
    She sat on the edge of the bed and began to play a song she’d found on YouTube, called “Paranoid.” It wasn’t the old Ozzy Osborne song; this one, by a Nashville singer-songwriter named Alice Peacock, instead captured in its words and music something that Mandalay thought no one else in the world could understand:
    You’re making me nervous
    You’re making me sweat
    Confessing to crimes
    I didn’t commit
    I’m looking behind me
    And under the bed
    You know where to find me
    Get out of my head
    The song may have been written for a lover, but for an avatar like her, who carried millennia of history and was constantly being whispered to by the night wind, it applied just as fittingly.
    As she sang, she closed her eyes. A slowly building noise in her head drowned out first the tiple, then her voice, and finally her very thoughts. The night winds blew over her, into her, through her. At once she was in the air, of the air.
    Time travel—there was no other word for it, really—was such a basic part of Tufa existence that few even commented on it anymore. It often took place in dreams, or waking visions, moments that gave glimpses through the eyes of someone who lived through the events. Occasionally the night wind took people as they were and let them observe. But for Mandalay, it was a literal experience of being uprooted and dropped into