Free Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips

was the second time in her two weeks at the canyon that she’d driven off the ranch to the asphalt highway, watching her phone screen until she picked up reception. She’d answered e-mails, pulled off on the side of the road, windows rolled down to catch a breeze. As soon as she closed her phone, the whole conversation—her whole life on the other end of the phone—caught the wind and floated away.
    She’d been pestering Silas to take them up canyon to a previously excavated site called Apex, and he’d finally agreed. A jagged hill rose out of the flat ground, with edges of rock obvious along the outline of the hill. Ren could see the rocks were walls embedded along the peak. She could count room blocks, but they were packed in tightly, a prehistoric tenement apartment building. The families had built right on top of each other, all the way up the rock face. It was clearly Northern Puebloan.
    â€œWe’ve got six-foot walls, collapsed architecture, rooms—as you can see—all the way up that slope,” Silas said. “Obviously these guys were worried when they built here. You can see for miles and miles here, all across the canyon, so no one can sneak up on you. The other side of this hill is a sheer drop—absolutely no way to approach from that side.”
    â€œThink they were afraid of the neighbors?” asked Ren.
    He shrugged. “I think they were afraid of everyone. These guys got here around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The world was a dangerous place.”
    Ren cocked her head and squinted against the sunlight. After the fall of Chaco, the city’s residents had spread into surrounding valleys, uprooted and unsure. The population had fallen into valley-to-valley warfare. Chaos and violence. In the Gallina Highlands, outside of Albuquerque, studies of human remains had suggested that sixty percent of adults and nearly forty percent of children had died violent deaths in those years after Chaco fell. Beheadings and dismemberments with dull flint knives; quick, brutal deaths during hand-to-hand fighting over land and food and survival.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with the name Anasazi?” asked Paul.
    Ren and Silas turned. Paul looked slightly surprised they had heard him.
    â€œI mean, the northern groups, the ones with Chaco, they were the Anasazi, right?” he said. “From all the movies and books? You say Northern Puebloan, but it’s the same thing. Why don’t we call them Anasazi anymore?”
    They were walking around to the back of the cliff, watching the cliff swallows darting through its shadows. The back was unassailable, as Silas had said, a vertical wall of rock where nothing but birds and bugs could find footholds.
    â€œIt’s offensive to some people,” said Ren. “
Anasazi
is a Navajo term, meaning ancient enemies. It’s a little, oh, negative. Some of the tribal groups prefer ‘Ancestral Puebloans,’ but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. ‘Northern Puebloan’ works.”
    â€œCities of gold, weren’t there?” pressed Paul. “Treasure? Mass human sacrifice? Some of it has to be true.”
    â€œNot so much,” Ren said.
    â€œA little,” Silas said.
    She rolled her eyes.
    â€œNo cities of gold,” said Ed. “But it’s hard to believe Chaco controlled hundreds of miles just with charm and good looks.”
    â€œSo maybe it was just the possibility of withholding food surpluses,” said Silas. “If you don’t do what we say, you won’t get food. But judging by what we’ve seen of their plazas and where there’ve been traces of human blood and remains, it was more than that. If you bucked the system, you got taken there and beaten in public. Humiliated.” He pointed a dusty finger at Ren. “Then, possibly, you were cooked. And eaten.”
    She frowned. “They haven’t found that many boiled human bones. We