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another era, one as vivid as the reality she’d left.
    Which is exactly what happened to her now.
    She opened her eyes. She knew immediately that she was a different person: her perspective was higher, farther from the ground, and her physical form felt heavier. She knew she was an adult. She stood outside, beneath a heavy sky of surging gray clouds, but it wasn’t cold. It was the opposite: heavy, humid, and with the tension of thunder in the air. And she was not alone.
    She stood on a flat mountain top: Emania Knob, a place she recognized. No one outside Cloud County knew why trees failed to grow here, leaving only uneven grass; the Tufa knew it was the very spot where, back when the mountain itself was jagged and new, they had arrived to begin their exile, thanks to their leader’s hubris and failure. He’d been thrown across the sea by the Queen, and his impact flattened the mountain.
    If she looked hard enough into the clouds, Mandalay could see the transitory images of faces, vaguely human but with just enough distortion to make her wish she hadn’t seen them at all. Wind moved through the tops of the trees visible below the bare mountaintop, although the air on the peak itself was utterly still.
    Mandalay wondered which ancestor’s body she now shared. It could have been Radella, who’d come over with the original Tufa and helped them settle this new world. It might have been Scathac Scaith, a warrior woman who essentially divided the Tufa for all time following the Third Battle of Mag Tuired and drove the dark Tufa into the cave they still used as their meeting place. Or maybe it was even Layla Mae Hemlock, the Singing Siren, whose voice could bring angry men to tears and who sang away the threats during the Civil War.
    It didn’t matter. Whoever she was, Mandalay saw through her eyes now, and what she saw was far more important than whoever was seeing it.
    All the Tufa, hundreds of them, from both groups, were there on that mountaintop. They formed a ring around two people at the center. Their clothes were of another era, but Mandalay couldn’t say whether it was twenty years earlier, or two hundred; her sense of the passage of time, when she was in this vision state, was nonexistent. Everything happened in the present, and she felt it all as if it were life and death. In this case, that didn’t seem to be an exaggeration.
    The two in the middle, a young man and woman, clutched at each other as if they expected to be attacked. The man was tall and handsome, clad in jeans and a leather bomber jacket that zipped diagonally across his chest. The woman wore a tight blouse and capri pants. They had the Tufa coloring of dark hair, dusky skin, and white, perfect teeth. But the woman’s hair was made up of long, wavy curls that fell around her face and danced in the wind. They behaved like two animals herded into a corral, and now being slowly cornered to be harnessed, bridled, and broken.
    Or slaughtered.
    Rockhouse Hicks stepped into the open. His hair was gray, not the white of his current incarnation nor the black of his youth. And he looked truly worried and afraid, emotions that seldom crossed his typically arrogant, sarcastic countenance.
    â€œBo-Kate Wisby and Jefferson Powell,” he said loud enough for all to hear. “This is where it stops, you two. Enough people have died. Enough property’s been destroyed. Enough shit has been spread around.” He turned to look straight at Mandalay. “Right?”
    Mandalay heard the voice of the head she was inhabiting. “We agree. This all has to end. We don’t begrudge you your love, but your actions have left us no choice.”
    Bo-Kate said, “You go to hell! All of you! You all tried to keep us apart, but we fucking showed you, didn’t we? And now you want to destroy us!”
    â€œWe want to keep you from destroyin’ us, you malignant little harpy,” Rockhouse said.
    â€œIf you