Current Work-in-Progress, so far...

Writing adventure for boys

My current work-in-progress is a book for middle school boys. It’s set in rural Utah and features some Graham Hancock-style ancient civilization stuff, along with fictional Indian tribes and pseudomagical mecha. I’m having a hell of a time with it. I just finished the fifth chapter.

I’m allowing paid subscribers to access it in case they want to kill a few minutes and see what they think. To those precious few of you who subscribe at that level, many thanks. My aim is to get this book to around 50k words by the end of January, then send it out to beta readers. I’m hoping to submit it to the publisher no later than March.

Just a heads-up: when I copy and paste to Substack, it doesn’t preserve the scene-breaks, and they’re not all formatted in. So if there’s a sudden, jarring jump from one perspective to the next, safely assume that it’s marked as a scene-jump in the Word doc.

Chapter 1: What Randy Left in the Barn

Patrick dropped into the old wicker chair and sighed as a cloud of dust kicked up around him. It had probably been a million years since anyone sat in that chair and he was pretty sure he’d have dusty stripes all over his back when he got up. He didn’t care. He could sleep for a month, even in this heat. The last box was finally out of the moving van, and it was over.

August in southeast Utah was terrible, worse than anything he’d ever felt, except maybe that one time they had to drive to Las Vegas in July. Mom wasn’t joking: Profunda, the little town where she’d grown up, was way hotter than Salt Lake in the summer. Way more desert, but weirdly it had more water, too. She told him he’d get to swim in the river a lot. Told him there’d be trails to hike and things to see. She told him and his brother and sister a lot of things to try to make the move sound better, but they all knew why they had to come here.

He was only twelve—almost thirteen—and he was starting to hate it when grown-ups acted like he didn’t get what was going on. Your mom and dad weren’t supposed to move back in with their mom and dad when they were older, not unless something went wrong. Maybe your grandparents got sick or something. That had happened to Patrick’s best friend Aiden, only Aiden’s grandma had moved into Aiden’s brother’s room after his brother went to college. That was different.

Mom and Dad had run out of money. Things got bad. So bad they had to sell their house and move here, and if Patrick’s brother Lincoln was telling the truth, they still didn’t have any money. So they moved six hours away to Profunda, past Moab, on the other side of Canyonlands National Park, into Grandpa’s house. Grandpa, who Patrick had only ever met three times before this, was a quiet man, and while he was nice, he was kind of tough to talk to. Like he was distracted all the time, always thinking of a hundred other things. Mom said it came with being a rancher and living in the Same place for his whole life. There was always something to do.

Sitting in the chair in this old barn, Patrick could kind of see why. There was enough junk in here to come from several lifetimes, and this was one of two barns Grandpa had on the property—more of a big storage place now, which was why they’d unloaded the moving truck in there. Boxes, chests of who-knew-what, tools that were so rusty they must have been from the Pioneer days, a couple of big blocky things on wheels that looked like trailers for farm work, and a truck that sat in the corner under a tarp with a bunch of holes in it. Patrick didn’t know anything about cars and trucks but it looked old because parts of it were curved and round, and the paint color was different shades of rust.

There was a loft and an upstairs part, though. That was cool. Kind of looked like that one Superman TV show that Mom and Dad liked, where Superman was just a teenager and he had a cool place to hang out. Patrick hadn’t gone up there yet. Too tired. Too sweaty.

But it looked cool. He wanted it to be cool. He wanted it to be better than their house in Salt Lake, or maybe at least as good as that place. He didn’t want to end up hating this place like Link did, even if Link kind of had a good reason: a few months ago, Mom and Dad had sold Link’s gaming computer and monitors to try to pay some of the debts from Dad’s accident. Link was—had been—a streamer. His channel was doing, well, just okay. But he was close to getting it monetized and he swore he’d be able to pay all Dad’s bills and pay the house off if they didn’t sell the computer…they didn’t listen to him.

Patrick had tried to tell Link it was going to be okay, but he was only twelve and Link was seventeen, he said Patrick didn’t know anything and that everything sucked now and that Profunda was a crappy town with nobody in it, and his life was over. Link gave Mom and Dad nothing but trouble since then. Sandy, their sister, wasn’t as bad, but she’d complained during the whole move too. Not wanting to make it worse, Patrick focused on trying to help, even if he ended up tired and sweaty in a dusty barn for it. Link and Sandy could have at least been a little more understanding of Dad’s problems…

“Pat? You in here?”

Patrick sat up in the chair. “Be right there, Dad.” He climbed to his feet—a struggle because the chair was lower than it looked—then hurried across the dirt floor before Dad had to wheel himself too far in there.

Dad came into view, strapped into his wheelchair, his legs positioned at a slightly weird angle, looking thinner than they used to. His arms looked bigger. So did his stomach. Dad used to be healthy before he got paralyzed. Partially paralyzed, Patrick corrected himself. The doctors said he could get better. Patrick believed he would get better, it would just take time.

“Hey bud, make sure you stay hydrated in this heat, okay? You worked hard today. I wanted to say thanks.” Dad reached into a bag on his lap and pulled out a green sports drink. It dripped like it was sweating, and Patrick realized he had a drop of sweat rolling down into his face.

“Welcome,” Patrick said, uncapping the bottle and taking a swig.

“Not just for unloading, kiddo. You’ve been a big help to Mom and me this whole time. I haven’t had a chance to say anything about it yet, but…yeah.”

“Yeah,” said Patrick, not knowing what else to say.

“This whole mess…” Dad trailed off, getting that look in his eyes that Patrick never thought he’d see, that look like he was trying not to feel hopeless. It scared him. It wasn’t normal. Maybe that was why Patrick tried to keep things normal, like it wasn’t a big deal that they had to do all this…

Dad didn’t used to get all serious. It seemed like the accident kind of broke all the funny he had in him.

“Where’s, uh, Link?” Patrick asked, grasping for something to say.

“Mom’s got him vacuuming the bedrooms. Sandy’s off with one of Grandpa’s helpers, shoeing a horse. Want to see? It’s pretty cool, you’d never catch that in the city,” Dad said.

Patrick shook his head. “I don’t want to go back in the sun yet. This is really good.” He took another drink.

“Okay. Well…this place is pretty cool too,” Dad went on, looking around at the barn. “Mom says your Uncle Randy used to play out here all the time. Says most of his stuff is upstairs in the loft. You know he collected comics, right?”

Patrick shook his head. “Didn’t know that. I kind of don’t remember him, but I didn’t want to say that to Mom.”

Dad nodded. “Probably for the better. Someday, buddy.”

“Yeah.”

Uncle Randy had been in the Army. He died over in the Middle East—Iraq, or Afghanistan, Patrick couldn’t remember which. One of those places where people buried bombs in the road that could blow up Army trucks. Randy got a closed casket for his funeral. Link told Patrick that it was because there wasn’t enough left of Randy to see. Mom could never talk about Randy much without breaking down in tears, and that was before Dad got hurt.

When Patrick was ten, Dad had been on his way home from working at the mine in West Jordan when he got hit by a drunk driver. Not only did the driver have no insurance, he didn’t even speak English. Apparently that got you out of paying for someone when you hurt them. The courts couldn’t do much to set it right. The car was destroyed and even worse, so was Dad’s spine.

Patrick didn’t know all the details, only that it cost a lot of money to fix Dad’s back and it wasn’t even fixed yet, and without his legs he couldn’t do his job at the mine, and “insurance” this and “deductible” that, and it all seemed boring and scary at the Same time, especially when at the end of the day it meant selling the house to pay off the growing stack of bills, and now here they were, moving in with Grandpa.

New town. No friends. Lots of new chores. Understanding that Mom was trying to stay positive, and Dad was trying to be tough through it all, trying to get back on his feet, trying to find computer work in the meantime. Link was always mad about it, Sandy was always whining about it, so Patrick didn’t want to do either of those things.

“Why don’t you take a break? Mom and Grandpa are taking the truck back into town, I’ll keep Link on task. That’ll get us to dinner. Grandpa’s making Indian tacos,” Dad said.

“That’d be cool,” Patrick said. “I can still help if you want, though.”

Dad was already turning his chair around. “Pat, don’t burn yourself out. You’ve got the rest of your life for that. Be a kid for a while longer, okay? Go see if you can rustle up some of Randy’s comics. He used to go on for hours about that stuff. You could use a distraction.”

Patrick smiled. “Okay. Thanks Dad.”

He climbed the stairs to the loft. Uncle Randy had a nasty old couch up there that looked even dirtier than the wicker chair downstairs, and there were cobwebs all around the base, so Patrick didn’t sit on it. There were two bookcases full of paperbacks in different sizes, the color worn from their spines after being stored in the barn for so long. They looked old, and had titles that were either sci-fi or cowboy-related, or both. The rest looked like history books and conspiracy theories. Randy must have had some imagination.

There was an honest-to-goodness CD player plugged into a square outlet in the wall, and while it worked, most of the CDs were country music, which Patrick didn’t like. Randy must have been listening to some guy named Toby Keith because that disc was in the player. Shrugging, Patrick turned it on and let it play while he looked around. It sounded okay, and felt like it fit the room.

There was a map on the wall opposite the bookcases. It was huge, pieced together from other big sheets and tacked into a large sheet of plywood. From the look of it, Uncle Randy had drawn the map himself, making all the squiggly lines and stuff to make it look real, like in a textbook.

“Whoa,” Patrick breathed, scanning it from top to bottom. It was a blown-up map of southeast Utah, showing Profunda and the surrounding area in really good detail. Canyonlands National Park was on the west side, with Moab up north and Monticello down south. Right along the northern edge of Profunda, wrapping around the east, was the border of the Indian reservation marked “Alapiute/Terrano,” which Patrick had heard of but didn’t know what the words meant.

South of the reservation there was a range of oil fields, and west of those there was a big copper mine, though not as big as the one where Dad had worked. There were other symbols on the mine too—Patrick was pretty sure they were metals. ‘Ag’ meant silver, and ‘Au’ was gold, but ‘U’…that had to be uranium. Elsewhere on the map, way to the south, there was an even bigger ‘U’ near Blanding, Utah, and Patrick remembered Dad saying they were careful about radiation there.

Nothing held his attention as much as a cluster of markings right between the reservation and the oil fields, though; these were small, crisp, and deliberate, all laid out in a long line, and Patrick had to get right up close to see what they were: dinosaurs. Two legs, four legs, even a few with wings, the shapes were clustered together in a messy line like the path of a river. They weren’t all drawn in the Same color ink, leading Patrick to guess that Randy had added them over time.

“Cool,” he whispered. He counted them all, left-to-right, and came up with sixty-eight of them. Did people dig up fossils out there? He was suddenly very curious. Patrick had always liked dinosaurs, but only the real kind, not the weird ones that ended up in movies. Any real paleontologist knew that dinosaurs didn’t look like that. Randy might have drawn them wrong but that was okay. Patrick really wanted to get out there and see if Profunda had fossils to dig up. Maybe moving here would have its upsides.

He studied the map for a while longer, than started rummaging through some of Randy’s comic boxes on the bottom of a nearby shelf. To his disappointment, almost none of them were characters Patrick recognized, and hardly any of them were even superheroes. Some of them were historical comic books and others were in French—Mom had said that Randy spoke French, so that made sense. Patrick went from box to box, looking for something interesting, fearing that he might not find anything else as cool as the map Randy drew, until he pulled out the last box on the bottom of the shelf, and immediately noticed something different.

So far, all the boxes had been neatly organized, with the comics standing upright, packed front to back, in little plastic sleeves. This box rattled like its contents were loose, and there were comics lying flat on top of something inside. Frowning, Patrick pulled the comic off the top—something with dinosaurs on it called Neozoic—and beneath it was…a helmet?

Setting the comic aside, he reached in with both hands and pulled out the round object, made of what seemed like clay, all smooth and shiny like it had been fired in a kiln. He’d made a clay pot for art class back in elementary school and gave it to Mom, who set it out every Christmas with candy in it, and it never stayed full for more than a day. This glazing was smoother though; cleaner, better. It gave the helmet a shiny black finish. The face wasn’t really a face, just kind of stylized with sleek lines that made it look cool. He wondered how it looked, deciding that it might be hard to see because the eye holes had super dark lenses in them, so dark that they almost looked like they were glazed too.

“Nice,” Patrick said. He turned it over, peeked inside for spider webs, and then carefully slipped it on over his head; it fit him a little big, but not too bad. In fact, after a few seconds, he could barely feel it move, even if he turned his head fast.

To his surprise, the dark lenses didn’t impede his vision at all. If anything they made it better; the interior of the barn suddenly looked sharper, brighter, more detailed. Smiling wide, Patrick walked around with the helmet on, just looking at things, taking it all in, and generally enjoying the novelty of it, until the world around him started to…change.

The light dimmed. It faded gradually, then all at once. Patrick frowned and was just reaching up to take the helmet off when his sight came back, only this time he didn’t see the loft all around him. He was in a dark space, wide and open, and though he still felt the loft, he smelled and heard and saw a completely different setting.

He immediately thought of a cave. There was some light, not much, and he couldn’t tell where from. There were voices. Hard to make out, not hostile, but unclear. Then there were shadows moving in the darkness, shadows shaped like very tall, very muscular people, their silhouettes outlined by whatever that odd light source was.

“Oh, sorry, I…I’m not sure what happened,” Patrick began.

“Sweet! It’s talking!” one of the shadows said.

“No way! The fourth one works? Hey, what’s your name?” asked another shadow.

“Dude! Where are you?”

Out of habit Patrick almost said his name along with ‘Utah,’ before remembering a million lectures from Mom and Dad about strangers on the Internet. This helmet might not be a computer—and the wi-fi in Profunda was bad anyway—but he got a strong feeling he should treat it like that. He was hearing voices from people he couldn’t see and didn’t know.

“Uh-oh,” said the first shadow. There was a sharp clicking sound. Fingers snapping, he realized. “We’re losing him. Hey, bro! Where are you? We can help!”

“Unless he’s the cops,” said the second shadow. “You better not be the cops.”

A chill ran up Patrick’s back. He immediately reached for the helmet.

“No wait, that was a joke!”

“Great, he’s pulling back! You scared him—”

Patrick didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. The second he had the helmet off, the sound cut out and he could only see the barn around him. Turning the helmet over in his hands, he took another look inside, but there was nothing—no sound, no images on the lenses. For a second he was tempted to put it back on. Before that temptation could lead to anything, he shoved the helmet back in the box and hid it under the dinosaur comic, then hurried out of the loft, taking one final glance at Uncle Randy’s map of Profunda.

***

He didn’t notice a curious arrangement of symbols in the center of the Indian reservation, made up of a perfect circle with four vaguely person-shaped drawings inside it, and several smaller figures standing outside it. Back on the shelf, in the box, under the comic, one of those symbols started to appear on the forehead of the helmet, glowing warmly. Elsewhere, in three hidden locations across Profunda, three other helmets—identical to the one in the Pulsipher barn—lit up with their own symbols.

It had begun.

Chapter 2: Meet The Guys

“Why can’t I drive?” Link insisted. “I’ll take Sandy and Patrick, you can stay here and keep unpacking.”

Patrick suddenly took a great deal of interest in the eggs and hash browns on his plate, not looking at Link on his right or Sandy on his left. Mom stood at the stove, frying up more eggs for Dad. Grandpa had been awake since five and was already out doing chores.

“I need the van, Lincoln. Your dad has his first meeting with the new therapist today. There’s a bus coming by at six forty-five and you’ll be on it,” Mom said.

“So take Dad in Grandpa’s truck and I’ll take the van.”

“Ha,” Mom said, fake-laughing.

“Or I’ll take Grandpa’s truck.”

Mom turned and pointed at him with the spatula. “Link, don’t even joke about that. He’s doing us a huge favor by letting us live here. If you touch his truck or anything else he doesn’t want you to, you’ll be in crap ten feet over your head.”

“I won’t need legs to kick your butt if you do that, Link,” Dad said from the next room. Patrick held his breath to choke down a laugh, stealing a glance at Sandy, who shook like she was being tickled.

“Mom I am seventeen,” Link said, with all the severity of an innocent man on death row. “I shouldn’t have to ride the bus!”

“Then walk,” said Grandpa as he came in through the kitchen door. “Or stay here and muck stalls all morning. Quit buggin’ your mom about dumb stuff.”

Link may have gotten comfortable picking a fight with his parents, but Grandpa just had that aura about him. Patrick was now as focused on his breakfast as a brain surgeon. Link quieted down and shoveled a forkful of eggs into his mouth.

“All good?” Grandpa pressed.

“Yes, Grandpa,” Link managed.

Grandpa nodded. “You want a set of wheels so bad, you can always fix up that Power Wagon in the barn. Just needs a couple of things.”

Link perked up again. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Engine, trans, rear diff…”

Link slumped back in the chair. “Real funny.”

“I thought so. Look, life’s been a kick to the teeth for everyone and we all got caught without a mouthguard, most of all Kent,” Grandpa said, meaning Patrick’s dad. “You’re used to a lotta things that you’re just not gonna get around here. Gotta embrace that, Lincoln. Ain’t getting better just ‘cause you fussed about it. It don’t work, so don’t do it. You wanna go back to Salt Lake, your best bet is to get your old man back on his feet and back to mining.”

“What’s my second-best bet?” Link muttered.

“Smile, go to school, turn eighteen, then go take on the world like your uncle did. Well. Don’t do it like he did; join the Navy.”

“Or a trade school,” Mom interjected. She handed Grandpa a plate of food and he joined the kids at the table, planting a quick kiss on Mom’s forehead.

“I was gonna be a streamer,” Link said. “Still can.”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever that is. Until then, you’re gonna help me in the barn in the evenings. I’ve got some lumber we can work with and you’re gonna be a great hand.”

“Oh, uh…no thank you,” Link said.

Grandpa paused, his fork halfway to his mouth, and locked eyes on Patrick’s brother. “Weren’t no request, boy.”

Patrick knew Link well enough to expect backtalk if it were Mom or Dad, but one did not simply give Grandpa lip, especially not at his own table. Link nodded, defeated, and finished his breakfast. Mom quietly carried a plate to Dad in the living room. The silence filled the dining space with the kind of tension Patrick couldn’t stand, so he swallowed a mouthful of potatoes and cleared his throat.

“Grandpa, do you know what time my bus comes?”

“An hour after theirs,” said Grandpa, pointing to Sandy and Link. “You’re big enough to ride Randy’s old bike if you want. Probably needs fixin’, but yeah. Middle school is a lot closer than the high school. You can make it a little faster ‘an the bus if you cut across my land. Couple other kids ride that way. Should even make some friends.”

For Patrick’s first day, he took the bus. Grandpa was right about Randy’s bike—it had two flat tires and a broken chain, and he figured Mom and Dad wouldn’t spare the money to fix it just yet. Dad had found some computer work to do but it didn’t pay much, and Patrick was used to hearing ‘no’ if he asked for things. So it looked like the bus was his future.

There weren’t any kids his age, just a few sixth-graders who sat up front, and a seventh-grade girl with her nose stuck in a book. Patrick sat at the back and tried not to think about being the new kid in a small town. The bus ride took less than ten minutes. Mom had given him an envelope full of papers to take to the front desk, and Patrick was headed that way when some kid he didn’t know came running over to him from the bike rack.

“Pulsipher! Hey, Pulsipher! You’re him, right?”

Patrick frowned. This kid had short brown hair and freckles, and a very toothy smile. He wore a faded BYU shirt, and Patrick fought the instinct to inform him that his family were Ute fans. Better not make enemies on day one.

“I’m Patrick,” he said, a little confused.

“Oh yeah, but you moved in at Pulsipher’s ranch, didn’t you? I’m Tyler.” The kid held up his knuckles for a fist-bump, and Patrick obliged him.

“He’s my grandpa. Mom’s dad. I’m Patrick Keller.”

“Cool. I’m Tyler.”

“You said that.”

“Yeah but you probably forgot already.”

Patrick didn’t want to tell him that he was right. Chill out, he thought to himself.

“Hey, sorry about your uncle, by the way. My mom said he died in Syria or something.”

“Uh…yeah. Something. That was a few years ago. Are you…”

“Here to show you around! Yeah. My mom said she knew your mom back when they were kids. Come on, office is this way!” Tyler gestured for Patrick to follow, like they already knew each other.

“Weird,” Patrick said quietly to himself. But he needed friends, and he’d been worried about how to make one, so hey…

Tyler wasn’t shy about being helpful. If anything he was a little too eager, meeting Patrick between classes to show him to his next one. At lunch, Patrick and Tyler got a table to themselves, and by then Patrick was kind of hoping that Tyler had other friends.

“Do you normally eat alone?” he asked.

Tyler unwrapped his sandwich and lanced a straw through his juice box. “Depends. Sometimes I’ve got extra reading to do so I use the time.”

“The teachers make you read at lunch?”

Tyler took a huge bite and shook his head. “Fwen,” he mumbled.

“Your friend makes you read?”

“Sorta. My two best friends don’t go to this school but we’re working on a project together.”

Patrick took a bite of his own sandwich to avoid saying what he thought, that Tyler didn’t have any friends and was expecting Patrick to pick up the slack.

“And I know what you’re thinking: Profunda is too small and there’s only one middle school. But! You’re forgetting about the Rez. My buddy Steve lives out there, and my other friend Howie is home-schooled. They’re coming by the shop later today, I’ll introduce you,” Tyler said.

“The shop?” Patrick imagined Tyler’s family running some kind of general store, where they lived in the back and made horseshoes and cowboy hats.

“Yeah! My parents own Bailey’s Bikes, we hang out there all the time.”

Patrick relaxed a little. A bike shop. Now that was useful. “Hey, what does it cost to replace a chain? And tires, I guess.”

“Not a ton. You got a beater lying around at home? Dad lets me take any parts that he can’t resell, long as they’re safe. Bring your bike and we can figure it out.”

“That’d be fire. But, uh, isn’t it too hot to ride bikes?” Patrick asked.

Tyler stared at Patrick like he had extra eyeballs on his forehead. “Bro. You sound like you’re from the city when you ask that stuff.”

“So? I am from the city.”

Tyler waved him off. “I’m just busting your chops. Don’t worry about it. You’re gonna like Steve and Howie. I swear Howie has read like five hundred books, and Steve knows all the neat hideouts on the Rez. Plus…well, we’ve got cool stuff to show you. We’ll get you set up.”

“Cool. Thanks, man.”

***

Tyler was good for his word. He rode his bike over to the ranch that afternoon with a backpack full of tools and parts, enough to put new tubes in the tires and pin the chain back together, explaining it step-by-step to Patrick, who watched in surprise as someone his age did something so expertly.

“Where’d you learn to do all this?”

Tyler shrugged. “Guess it’s in my blood. My grandpa was a Bailey, he started the store back in the day and bikes were just one thing he sold. Now it’s mostly bikes. So I’m the bike guy, and Howie is the book guy, and Steve is the Terrano expert. Out here, that’s valuable.”

Patrick had no idea what a Terrano was, although it sounded familiar. His mind raced as he thought of something he was that good at, and when he realized there was nothing, he vowed to become the best at anything he could by the end of the week. It didn’t do any good to make new friends if he was the dead-weight-guy.

Mom and Dad were out at an appointment and Grandpa was off doing farmwork on the land somewhere, so Patrick left a note before riding off with Tyler to the bike shop, where they could do “a real service” on Randy’s old cycle. It was here that Patrick met Steve and Howie.

“Guys, Pat, Pat, guys,” Tyler said as he hoisted Uncle Randy’s bike up onto a service stand.

“Hi Steve,” Patrick said. “Hi, Howie.”

Both boys exchanged the customary fist-bump and nod. Steve had dark hair, dark eyes, and deep tan skin, and it clicked for Patrick why Steve went to school on the reservation: he was Indian, from the local Terrano tribe. Howie had spiky blond hair and thin reading glasses. He looked like he spent most of his time indoors, he was so pale. Their bikes were just as new and nice as Tyler’s, but neither had anything bad to say about Uncle Randy’s old set of wheels.

“You moved into the Pulsipher place?” Howie asked.

“Yeah. He’s my grandpa,” Patrick explained.

“Bet he’s got a lot of cool stuff in that barn,” said Steve. “I heard he’s hiding a UFO.”

“I heard it was Bigfoot,” said Tyler.

“You dummy,” said Howie. “Bigfoot doesn’t live in the desert.”

“Yeah, no Bigfoot—” Patrick began.

“It’d be a skinwalker,” Howie finished.

“You’re the dummy. We don’t let skinwalkers off the Rez,” Steve scoffed.

“Skinwalkers are just Scout Camp stories,” Patrick said.

“Oh hey, look, we got an expert on Rez life,” said Steve.

“Wait…that’s not what I meant…” Patrick protested, but Steve was smiling like a proud troll, and he decided not to push it.

“Settle the argument for us, Pat,” Tyler pleaded, now dripping oil on the chain as he cranked the pedals. “Aliens, cryptids, or Indian monsters?”

“Wait…in the barn? Far as I know it’s only dust and like, a hundred spiders in my uncle’s couch. If Grandpa had a working UFO, I’d take that to school,” said Patrick.

“It would weigh less than this bike,” Tyler said, testing the rear brakes. “We’ll have to put together a Frankencycle for you at some point, this frame is too cheap. Feels like straight up iron.”

“Isn’t cheap metal lighter?”

“Not always. Racing bikes are made out of aluminum and that stuff is crazy expensive. Take a look at that Shimano on the wall,” Tyler said, pointing to a whole bunch of bike frames across the shop. Patrick had no way of knowing which was the ‘Shimano.’ “The price tag on that thing would give you a heart attack.”

“That’s not hard,” Patrick said, then immediately wished he hadn’t.

The boys must have noticed the look on his face. Tyler was quiet for a second, like he was thinking what to say, and Steve beat him to it.

“Hey, no judgment. Nobody moves to Profunda because they hit the lottery.”

“Yeah dude, my dad’s always saying that half the town grew up in trailers,” Howie chimed in. “My house is two trailers put together.”

“My dad only ordered the Shimano in case a tourist wanted a custom bike. He’s sold two in the last year. You’d be amazed what guys from San Francisco will pay, but…” Tyler lowered his voice, “I’m not supposed to say that.” He put a finger to his lips and smiled, and Patrick felt a little easier.

“What do you guys do for fun? Got any video games?”

They all shook their heads at the Same time.

“I like being outside,” said Tyler.

“I like reading,” said Howie.

“Internet sucks out here,” said Steve.

“I’ve heard that,” Patrick said, nodding. “Oh! I just remembered: are there dinosaur fossils we can look at?”

He knew he had landed on an important subject because Steve and Howie suddenly became very interested in random items around the store, and Tyler was quiet for more than five seconds.

“Definitely, definitely. There’s a huge deposit of fossils out on the Rez, close to seventy or so. The schools take a field trip every September, that’s kind of the only time that you can see them without getting in trouble,” Howie said.

Patrick hesitated before asking another question. “In trouble?”

“With the tribal police,” Steve said.

“You’re not allowed to just…visit?”

Howie shook his head. “Dinosaur bones are too valuable. They don’t want anyone stealing them, or trying to. The Profunda Wash Site is the second-biggest in the country, after Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, only that one is run by the Park Service. The Terranos found the PWS after the reservation was set up.”

“It’s part of our tribal pride,” Steve went on. “Lots of collectors have tried to buy different bones from us but we don’t sell things like that. My uncles all work security at the Wash Site. They’ve got some cool stories.”

Terranos are the local Indians, Patrick realized, and filed that away, pretending he’d always known. Now he remembered seeing that word on Uncle Randy’s map.

“Stories about what? Arresting people?”

“They don’t bother arresting them.” Steve smiled, smug as a lion in the jungle.

“Whoa,” Patrick whispered, his imagination suddenly running with the idea of Steve’s uncles bombing around the desert in pickup trucks, chasing down fossil thieves and beating them to a pulp, then disappearing into the night.

“Very cool stories,” Tyler agreed. “The Wash Site is cool. We can’t go there on our own but the field trip is always the first Friday of school. Still, people have found random fossils here and there, even off the Rez. This whole area used to be underwater like a billion years ago.”

“Less than that. Way less than a billion,” said Howie.

“Nerd.” Tyler waved him off.

Without thinking about it, Patrick relaxed. The guys had such a casual and comfortable way with each other, the way Mom and Dad always wanted Patrick and Sandy and Link to act, only it seemed like siblings just couldn’t do that. It was different with friends when they were your age, and all boys. These three had the advantage of growing up together, and maybe it would be a while before Patrick could feel like one of the group, but for the first time since his parents had told him they were moving to Profunda, he started to hope. Give it time, and he could fit in here.

“Anyway, mostly we just ride bikes,” said Steve.

“Or read,” Howie added.

“Nerd,” Tyler repeated.

“There’s lots of stuff to explore. Caves, washes, canyons, that sort of thing,” Steve went on.

“I guess I’ve never really been the outdoors type, but if there’s cool stuff to see…” Patrick trailed off. “Hey, wait a second: you said caves?”

“Sure. Nothing crazy, some of them might have been old Alapiute sites but if we ever find hieroglyphs, we can’t touch them and we have to tell the tribe,” said Steve.

“Alapiutes and Terranos are the same thing,” Howie said, noticing Patrick’s confusion. “Like the Dinae and the Navajos.”

But Patrick wasn’t confused about that—he was thinking of that brief moment when he’d worn the helmet, and the oddly-shaped room he’d seen. “What about a cave that’s the size of…oh I don’t know, I guess this store? Maybe a little smaller? And round-shaped. Like being inside a dome.”

“Kinda specific,” Tyler said, and his tone was just a little different.

“Where would you have seen a cave like that?” asked Howie.

“Oh, uh, my uncle left some stuff at Grandpa’s place. Pictures, and a map, and whatever. I thought the cave looked cool. Do you know which one?” Patrick asked. He hated the lie, but what was he supposed to say? I put on this weird helmet and started hallucinating, suddenly it looked like I was in a cave with three giant dudes in armor.

“He had a picture of it?” Tyler’s shifty fingers stopped moving.

Patrick got the impression that was bad. He chose his words carefully. “A drawing. A good one. He wrote ‘cave’ on it. There were other pictures, real pictures of caves in, like Montana and stuff. Anyway, I just assumed it was something here. If he was looking for it, and you knew where it was, then…” he trailed off and shrugged.

“This is the uncle that died in Iraq?” Steve asked.

“Yeah, my Uncle Randy. And it was Afghanistan.”

“Well, we can show you the caves we know. Maybe we’ll find it out there,” said Tyler. He finished tinkering with the bike and unclamped it from the stand, grunting as he lowered it to the ground. “For now, that’s an A+ service. If you’re gonna ride to school, I can meet you on the south side of your grandpa’s barn. Maybe we can take a look at that map your uncle had, it sounds cool.”

“Yeah, maybe. Thanks for the help. This will be nicer than riding the bus.”

“For a couple more weeks, anyway. I know it’s the desert but it snows here. We’ll start taking the bus in November. You heading home?” Tyler asked.

“Yes, we’re still unpacking and I have a lot to do. Do you guys hang out here every day?”

“Most days,” said Howie. “If you’ve got any cool books, bring one tomorrow and we’ll swap!”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Patrick, who only read stuff if his teachers made him. “It was cool to meet you guys. Thanks again. See you tomorrow.”

One by one, Patrick bumped fists with the guys, and carefully turned Randy’s bike around, then headed home to Grandpa’s, hoping he remembered the way.

***

As soon as the door closed, Tyler whirled on Steve and Howie, his face split by a huge smile. “A half-dome cave? It’s gotta be him!”

“Maybe he was telling the truth, maybe his uncle just drew a picture of it,” Steve said.

“No, he was lying about that part. He got all nervous. He tried on that helmet last Saturday, I just know it. He put it on while we were all synced up. This is so cool! The fourth sentinel! We’re ready to train in the open!”

Howie glanced around even though the shop was empty. “Chill, Ty. If it was him and he saw the meeting room, that’s just the first step. Now we’ve got to tell him what he has. Maybe even show him.”

“You’re skipping like ten other things,” said Steve. “Remember what my dad said? We have to be sure that we can trust him first.”

“Oh, he’s a goody two-shoes,” said Tyler. “The helmet wouldn’t even activate unless he was ‘pure of heart’ or whatever. We saw the fourth one wake up. That’s the biggest hurdle. I bet he was fooling around in Pulsipher’s barn and he found his helmet and while we were training. Come on, you’ve gotta be psyched about this!” He punched Steve’s arm.

Steve punched him back. “I am psyched, I’m just thinking about what Dad will say. The sentinels are good judges of character but we still have to do our part. Back me up, Howie.”

“You’re both right,” said Howie. Steve and Tyler booed him in unison. “No, I mean it. It’s definitely him, and we definitely have to be careful. Don’t just sit him down and lay it all on him. He put on the helmet once, he’s gonna get curious and do it again. We should wait for that. We’ll be there when it happens and we can talk him through it.”

“And as long as his parents are broke, he’s not going anywhere. We’ve got the whole team! Tell me your dad won’t be madly hyped about that!” Tyler said to Steve.

“Let’s just be sure, okay? We all got tested. He’ll be tested too. Worst thing would be if he messes around and loses his shot, then we’re stuck waiting for someone else who can operate it,” said Steve. “Plus, all this proves is that he has the helmet. Doesn’t mean he’s got the key, or the armor.”

“You’re a buzzkill,” said Tyler. “Both of you guys. How can you not be revved up right now? I’m telling you, this is gonna be the coolest thing that ever happened in Profunda. Just watch.”

Chapter 3: Just Passing Through

Elsewhere in Profunda—it was not a large town, but it was spread out—a box truck pulled into the parking lot of one of the few motels. The driver stepped out onto the cracked pavement. He was tall, mid-twenties, with his short hair pinned down by a ball cap. His back and knees hurt; he was still getting used to walking around up here. Pushing down a yawn, he walked to the back of the truck, checked the lock on the latch, and then went to the front desk.

“Evenin’,” said the clerk, a man in his fifties with gray hair and a round gut.

“Evening,” the driver said. “One room, two nights.”

“That’ll be one-forty-two seventy-five. I’ll need an ID and a card.”

The driver made a show of looking bored as he fished the items out of his wallet and handed them over. The clerk looked back and forth between his computer and the cards as he kept the small talk going.

“What brings you to Profunda?”

“Just passing through. Special courier. Too many night routes lately, gotta switch back to days. Need to sleep.”

“I hear ya. Oh, and I’ll need your plate information. You got that Isuzu out there?”

The driver nodded as he copied down the information. “Call me if anyone tries to mess with it. Even if I’m sleeping. Nothing dangerous in there, I’ve just been robbed before. Out-of-towner, and all that.”

“Sure thing. Shouldn’t be any worry, things are quiet around here. If you want, my cousin has a gated yard up the road, for the mining trucks and such. Even safer,” the clerk said.

The driver shook his head as he took the key from the clerk. “That’s my only set of wheels and I need regular access to it. Thanks for the room.”

“Of course, and enjoy your stay Mister..” The clerk looked at his computer screen. “…Jones.”

Adam Jones was one of his rotating aliases. He always matched common first and last names, except for “John” and “Smith.” If a name was too generic it could also stand out. Up here, people had computers with lists of every name in every town, and if you had a memorable name, they could find you with the computer. The driver didn’t want to be found.

Names like Robert Brown, or David Fields, or Alan Grant, those were his bedrock names, although he got rid of Alan Grant—that was apparently the name of a man in a dinosaur movie and the driver didn’t want anyone thinking of him and dinosaurs at the Same time. He only used that one twice before someone pointed that out.

So today he was Adam. He found his room down the hall, checked it carefully, decided it was safe from prying eyes, and pulled a notebook out of his travel bag. One by one, he spread sheets of handwritten notes and hand-drawn maps across the small table in the corner. Montana had been a bust, and so had Colorado. Wyoming was a little better, he’d found a few good things in the place they called Yellowstone Park. Now he was on the Utah leg of his expedition, and even though there were sites all over the state, nothing sounded more promising than the Profunda Wash.

Adam opened a bottle of water and sipped it slowly, thoughtfully. In order to check out the fossils at the Wash Site, he would need a ticket from the front office. This place, this country called ‘America,’ had hundreds of different governments all piled on top of each other, and it still tired him out to try to understand it. You had the federals at the top, and then the state, and then the county, and then the city, but some places had “reservations” that didn’t have to follow all the rules of the other governments, like little countries inside of a larger one.

The Wash Site was one of these. The Alapiutes were in charge of that and even though they were Americans like the…like the who? The Utahns, or the Profundians? Was there a word for them? The Alapiutes were one group of people that mostly had the same ancestry, while everyone else also had similar ancestry—Adam had looked this up and found out they were from far-away countries in a place called Europe, but that was a long time ago, and now they were here and they were called something else…

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. These people were so confusing and he was overthinking it. Yes, he had to understand his enemy. There was also such a thing as getting distracted by details. The Alapiutes, or Terranos, or Indians, or whatever their name was, they were different from the other Profunda residents for ethnic and cultural reasons. Because of their history, the Alapiutes had different laws from the other Americans, and the Wash Site was on their land, and they didn’t want people just walking through it.

Yet if there was any group of people who might sniff out who and what he really was, it would be the Alapiutes, whose ancestors had been on this continent for thousands of years. Adam stroked his chin, thinking it over, and unfolded a topographical map of the Mountain West.

Most of the boundary around the Alapiute land was just a line on the paper. In real life there were gates on the roads, and some spots had fences with the spiked wires on them, but those were easy to get over. The Wash Site was isolated by natural rock formations, low between two long hills that created a shallow canyon. He didn’t like to do it this way but hiking in was probably his best option. He’d be here for a few nights and that wouldn’t be enough time to search the Wash for everything he needed.

He was close, though. He knew that much. If he had to leave and come back a few times over the next few weeks, then so be it. As long as nobody here knew who he was and nobody from home knew where he was, he had time. Tonight was what they called a “new moon,” a concept completely foreign to Adam, but it gave him an advantage: out here, after dark, he’d be cloaked in shadow. He could easily open the box truck, get inside his armor, and explore the Alapiute Nation. He had a strong feeling that the helmets were in the Wash Site. It felt obvious.

Adam undid the top two buttons of his shirt and reached inside for his key. This was a special key, not like the ones these people used; it was the key to his armor. The helmet controlled it, steered it, operated its integrated abilities, but the key was its connection, the direct link between tool and operator. Aside from that, its main value was in finding its ilk.

Out here, Adam got a lot of mixed signals from his key, directing him in vague, general directions instead of giving him a specific destination. He had to rely on hunches, or disputed lore, or logical deductions of where the other armors were. He could have sworn that Devil’s Tower in Wyoming would have given him what he wanted but that had been a waste of a trip.

Ever since Yellowstone, though…oh, how Yellowstone changed things. West and south, the key had said. When he learned of the Profunda Wash, well, then it had all made sense. Utah had a couple of fossil graveyards like that, more powerful than anything Adam’s people had ever harnessed, more powerful than nuclear minerals. Unlike the other fossil sites, Profunda was firmly in the control of a different government: the Terranos. The “Deep-Earth” Indians. That could not be a coincidence.

Adam kept his key in a leather pouch. He plucked it out and held it flat on his palm. It looked like a large, thick coin, maybe an inch in diameter and weighty. As he held it, he concentrated on his research, focusing hard on the Profunda Wash.

“So close,” he whispered.

Soon. This would be over soon.

***

“You fixed that bike?” Grandpa asked.

Patrick walked the bike into the barn, sweating and tired, his legs feeling like rubber. He’d gotten lost on the way home and rode around for an hour longer than he thought he would. Sweat soaked his shirt, and he almost couldn’t make words, his mouth was so dry.

“My friend, Tyler, he did it. So I can ride to school with him.”

Grandpa sat on a tall stool at his workbench, hunched over something Patrick couldn’t see, pencil in hand. He paused and glanced over, a serious look on his face.

“Tyler Griffin?”

“Uh, I think so.”

“Todd Griffin’s kid. Todd’s father-in-law was a Bailey, now he owns the bike shop.”

“Must be him, then.”

“He was here?” Grandpa scanned the barn’s messy contents, like he was counting everything.

“Well, he came here first, to fix the tires, and then we rode to the shop and he fixed everything else. He didn’t say I owed him,” Patrick said, sensing he’d done something wrong.

“Not money, anyway,” Grandpa said. “He’s not allowed in this barn, and he oughtta know that. When he tries to get in here and snoop around, you remind him, y’understand?”

“Oh…did something happen?”

“You probably didn’t have to deal with this in Salt Lake, but we’ve got rules out here: folk oughtta mind their business and keep out of yours.”

“Did he do something wrong?”

“Yup. About a year back, Tyler kept trying to get permission to come over and mess around in the loft. Said he wanted to help tidy it up or some such. I never said yes and that should have been it, until one day I caught him rifling through the cab of that old truck.” Grandpa thrust his chin in the direction of the curvy old rust bucket that he called a ‘Power Wagon.’ “If he was family I’d have busted my boots on his backside. Just about made his old man’s ears bleed with the chewing-out I gave him. He ain’t allowed back. I don’t like that he came by without me knowing.”

Patrick decided against telling Grandpa that Tyler thought there was a UFO in the barn. “Sorry Grandpa, I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t. I figure this whole arrangement will take some getting used to. Much as it’ll be nice to have you kids around, I expect you will eventually move back north once Kent gets back on his feet,” Grandpa said.

Plopping down in the same dusty chair that he’d used on Saturday, Patrick wiped sweat off his brow and tried to ignore the twinge of worry in his head—worry about his dad, about doing something to upset Grandpa, and about Tyler being potentially dishonest with him. “Grandpa, are we…are we making things hard for you? By staying here?”

At this, Grandpa put the pencil down and looked Patrick right in the eye. “No, kiddo. I’ve had the place to myself for a while. I got used to that quicker than I thought. Now I’ve gotta switch gears again. I lost your grandma and your uncle about two years apart and I’m still figuring that out. In the end this’ll be good for all of us.” He went back to his writing.

“I wish Dad didn’t get hurt. But I’m glad we get to see you and the ranch and stuff.”

“Me too.”

“What are you writing?”

“Come see.”

On a large sheet of paper, Grandpa had drawn up some carpentry plans with numbers and inch-markings all over the place. What exactly it was supposed to be, Patrick couldn’t tell. “It looks like train tracks, kinda.”

“Boy, I gotta teach you how to read a blueprint,” Grandpa chuckled. “This is for Kent. One of my neighbors busted his back in the same place several years ago. He to learn to walk all over again. Me and the guys built him something like this right here in this barn. Kept it up for, I dunno, ten months, maybe a year. Made him walk laps for weeks until he was good enough to start going up and down the stairs.”

Patrick considered the stairs leading up to the loft. “Whoa…that’s cool. Dad said he wanted to try more walking after New Year’s.”

“He’ll try it now. He can move his legs and stand, so he’s ready. Nerve damage ain’t a death sentence but atrophy is hard to reverse.”

Atrophy. Patrick knew that word. It was what happened to muscles when you never used them. They just sort of shriveled up. It was why Dad’s legs were so thin now. “His doctor said…”

“His doctor wants you to keep paying for visits. As many as possible. Everybody’s got bills to pay, Pat. Ain’t evil, it’s just the way it is. Healthy patients are bad for business. I told you, I’ve seen a case just like his before. Best thing for him now is to eat beef and move his feet.”

Patrick didn’t want to argue with Grandpa, yet this was about Dad. This was one of the few very serious things in life and he couldn’t hold back. “Mom won’t like it. She’s really careful about Dad. Did you tell her about this?”

“Yup. She wasn’t thrilled. Kent’s on board, though.”

“Was Mom mad?”

“I’ll tell you a secret, buddy: your mom loves me, but she don’t like me. For now it means I got nothin’ to lose on that front. It’s why she married a miner and moved to Salt Lake. A dozen perfectly good farmboys came sniffin’ around here like flies to honey when she turned sixteen, but she wanted out. She might not want me coaching your pops but if he doesn’t get better, she’s stuck here longer, and she’ll go nuts on me,” Grandpa said. “You’ll understand when you’re older. In a way I’m doing her a kindness.”

In spite of himself, Patrick giggled. “Okay. Just be careful, I guess. We all want Dad walking again.”

“Yes, sir. One hundred percent careful, certified. Good talk. Hey, when you go shower, tell your lazy brother to get out here. He’s gonna help me make all this.” Grandpa gestured to the blueprints.

“Okay,” Patrick said as he made for the house. “While you guys are doing that, is it cool if I read some of Uncle Randy’s comics?”

Grandpa hesitated before answering. “Anything you touch up there, you put it back exactly how you found it. First time you have trouble with that will be the last time, you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Patrick said, and he meant it, though he was unsure where the ‘sir’ came from. It just felt right when Grandpa used that tone.

“And no friends up there, not Tyler, not anyone. Family only. That’s Randy’s space.”

“Got it. I’ll go find Link.”

Patrick headed off, thinking all the while about the helmet in the box, and Tyler and his other new friends, and the odd sense of mystery that surrounded the barn in general. He’d expected to be bored in a small town like Profunda with no Internet, but he had to admit: the place was growing on him.

Chapter 4: Heavenly Wind

As soon as the sun was down, Adam Jones sneaked out through the motel’s back door and got in the truck. He pinned a sheet of paper to the dashboard and started driving down the road, glancing at his little map every few seconds and reading street signs whenever he saw them.

The paper map had been a reliable instrument to these people for centuries; only recently had they all switched to electronic devices, but these presented Adam with several problems: expense, upkeep, and lost privacy. He wasn’t interested in any of those. It was hard enough to maintain all his fake IDs with the governments up here, he wouldn’t make it any more complicated if he could help it.

It took him forty minutes to reach the sign on the highway that indicated the reservation boundary. There was a rest stop up the road with some truck parking; he backed into a spot, putting the rear of the truck between two shadowy trees, just in case the building had cameras. Then Adam got out and climbed into the back.

He stripped down to his underclothes, made of skintight material that moved easily within the armor. Then he removed the key from the pouch around his neck and slipped it into the gauntlet on his armor’s right hand. The armor, which he always arranged into a sitting position when he traveled, woke up and rose to its feet. The gigantic masked face looked down at him expectantly, as if to say hello, and await orders.

“We’re making progress,” Adam said as if it could hear him. “The others are close. We will have them soon.” He opened a crate on the floor and pulled out a perfectly fitted helmet, slipped it on over his head, and waited a few seconds for the connection between armor and operator. A minute later he had the armor on, fully awake, fully integrated.

By the locals’ standard, Adam was a tall man. In the armor, he was even taller, close to nine feet, and almost indestructible. Stronger. Faster. Built for a purpose. Grinning to himself, Adam walked into the darkness, letting the built-in eyes of the sentinel scan the landscape, seeing it as though the sun was low in the sky.

No paper maps here. It would distract him, having to hold it in his hand. With the armor and the key, he had only to sense the massive fossil deposit in the Wash, and run that way. It took another fifteen minutes to cross the unknown terrain and traverse the dangerous rocky ledges that led down into the canyon, where an ancient flood had carried the bodies of some five or six dozen dinosaurs.

No, Adam realized, studying the ground. He stopped and held out his hand, feeling the energy radiate up from the depths; there was far more here than even the locals knew, with their ground-scans and technology. The ancient flood had killed thousands of ancient animals and buried them here, changing them through the slow burn of time and the workings of the earth.

He almost laughed aloud.

Yes. Yes. This was the place. Even if the other armors weren’t in Profunda, he’d find them and bring them back here. He’d find his allies and train them. With this much power, they’d be unstoppable. Liberation was closer than ever. Adam’s whole body quaked with excitement. He had to bite the inside of his cheek to force himself to focus. He’d come too far to make an emotional mistake now.

He scanned the nearest clusters of fossilized bones. They were mismatched, as they almost always were; nature tended to destroy dead animals, often violently, leaving pieces all over the place. Complete or near-complete skeletons were a total rarity. More often there would be a deposit of a mixture of fossils, and he’d have to scan each one to know its origins, and what powers it might give him.

Adam studiously examined dozens of individual pieces as he crept along the uneven ground, the lenses in his helmet filtering out everything except the X-ray waves that showed him where the bones were. There was a huge femur belonging to an adolescent therapod—good for an energy boost, but not much else. He pointed his key at it and concentrated, absorbing the energy into his power supply. The fossil ceased to register on his sensors after that. He moved on.

Next there was an adult Allosaur skull, and where there was one, there would be others. He could craft something especially potent with the Allosaur energy, and he always needed weapons. He absorbed that energy as well.

He could afford to be picky for the next thirty minutes or more, not wanting to overdo it. Finally he came across a sample he’d seen elsewhere, something that wasn’t technically a dinosaur but from the same period and had gone through the same fossilization process, giving the bones their value. Adam almost leapt with excitement when he saw that they were wing bones.

The scan identified them from genus that the locals had only collected a couple of times, called Caelestiventus. These were so rare that the individual species didn’t even have a name. The type was just a word in an old language that meant “heavenly wind.” For Adam, that meant flight.

He’d been looking for flight for a while.

Eagerly Adam absorbed the pattern from the Caelestiventus and integrated it into his armor. This wasn’t why he had come to Profunda but he couldn’t have been happier with the result.

He spent another hour walking down the Wash—a disciplined hour, scanning and tagging different specimens without absorbing them into his armor. When he reached the footpath at the bottom, he noticed something that brought him to a dead halt.

Just under the surface—in fact, half of this sample had been excavated and preserved for visitors to see—there was a Ceratopsian skull. One of the horns was broken, the other was still underground. It definitely was a fossil, the genuine article—he’d stopped at museums that had plaster models on display—but it had already been scanned and absorbed by a sentinel.

Someone like him had already been here.

There weren’t supposed to be active sentinels anywhere on the surface.

He checked and double-checked to be certain. This skull, belonging to a Torosaurus, was real and depleted. Heart pounding against his ribs, Adam went about scanning other samples farther down the trail. Twelve, no, thirteen different fossils—all at the surface, all visible to the naked eye—had been robbed of their innate energy. The helmet’s eyes didn’t lie.

Immediately a feeling of exposure lanced through him. How long ago had this happened? Who had the armor? Was there more than one sentinel? He thrust his hand into the sky and pointed it in every direction, searching, scanning, trying to feel out a similar presence coming toward him. Nothing. He relaxed, but only just. This…this changed his mission. Now he had to be extra careful. The hunter could become the hunted in seconds. Even walking around in the armor, he could be sensed at a distance and he wasn’t ready to face off against another operator. Not yet.

Farther down the beaten path, the soft roar of gasoline engines echoed off the canyon walls, getting closer. In the distance Adam saw the amber glow of vehicle headlights. Someone was coming, but not in fossil armor. It had to be the tribal security. Time to leave. He had come here looking for leads on the other suits, and now he had them, just not in the good way.

Closing his eyes, Adam concentrated on the flying fossil he had just absorbed, then flooded it with power from the therapod bone. In an explosive rush he was suddenly thrown skyward, into the dark night of a new moon, just as the tribal security trucks rounded the canyon corner.

***

Patrick woke up before the sun had cleared the eastern mountains, turning the sky orange at the edge, and he got an idea. He and Link shared one of the second-floor bedrooms, so Patrick had to be quiet as he changed into his school clothes and headed for the stairs. Link was as still as a stone, and snoring like a chainsaw. Grandpa had worked him hard in the barn last night, carrying two-by-fours and cutting them in different ways, usually to the wrong length, because Link didn’t want to read the blueprints at first. After a few tongue-lashings from Grandpa he had gotten with the program, building a long walking path with wooden guardrails that Dad could use to hold himself up while his legs got stronger. Patrick had listened to them work while he read Uncle Randy’s comics in the loft, but really he was waiting for a chance to look at that weird helmet again.

He couldn’t be sure why, but the idea of pulling it out when Grandpa might see it made him nervous. There was nothing wrong about it, beyond the simple fact that Patrick didn’t know what it was for, and the one time he’d tried it on, he saw something that made no sense. Fear gave way to curiosity and now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

But when Grandpa had decided to call it a night, and told Link to pack up all the tools, he’d also called Patrick inside, and Patrick didn’t want to get on Grandpa’s bad side, so he left the helmet alone. Now, in the warmth of predawn, he quietly let himself out front and slipped his shoes on, running across the grass to the barn some distance away.

The helmet was right where he’d left it on the bottom shelf, in a box under a dinosaur comic. Sliding his fingers under it, Patrick pulled it out and set it on the ground, then sat down cross-legged and stared into the eyes.

Was it watching him now? Did it have batteries? Was it broadcasting somehow? Did he dare try it on again? Frowning, Patrick mulled it over, then glanced back at the box, and noticed something else at the bottom. He plucked it out and studied it: a small leather book with faded pages, about half of which were filled with notes in what had to be Uncle Randy’s handwriting.

Opening to a random page, Patrick tried to read, but Randy had really bad penmanship, or else this was cursive, something Patrick didn’t prefer to read because it usually made his eyes tired. Still, he could pick out obvious words like “Profunda” and “Terrano,” and “helmet.” One thing in particular that caught his eye was a drawing of four symbols with strange words beside them. Patrick glanced up at Randy’s map of Profunda and saw the same four symbols inside a circle over the Terrano Reservation. What did that mean?

Patrick tried to sound out the words. “Talak. Naki. Tago. Digo.”

Something flashed in the lenses on the helmet. In the smooth, lacquered finish on the front, a golden symbol lit up, matching the intricate marking in the book for Digo.

“Oh, crap,” Patrick whispered. “Uh…turn off? Anti-Digo. Reverse-Digo. Um, Digo backwards. Crap, why did I do that?”

No change. The helmet stayed, well, on. Biting his lip, Patrick went back to the journal and followed the scribbly lines but couldn’t find anything about shutting the helmet off. Heart thudding in his chest, he couldn’t think of anything else to do so he closed the journal, replaced it and the helmet in the box, and hurried back to the house for breakfast.

***

That whole day, Patrick worried if he’d done something he shouldn’t have. When Tyler showed up to ride to school, he asked jokingly if Patrick had found the UFO yet.

“No, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you what’s in the barn. Grandpa said he caught you in there once and had to talk to your dad or something,” Patrick said as they pedaled down the dirt path.

“Oh jeez, he’s still mad about that? Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that. I got a little too curious for my own good I guess. So that’s a ‘no’ on the UFO, then.”

“And no Bigfoot either,” Patrick said, relieved. He’d been worried that Tyler might argue the point, and he’d find himself fighting with the only friend he had at school so far.

“But there is something,” Tyler said, grinning wide.

“Stop, I mean it,” Patrick said.

Tyler held up his hands as if to demonstrate that he was backing off, then pedaled with no hands for the next several seconds. “Sorry Patrick, it’s just a game that I play with Steve and Howie. We ride around Profunda and make up stories. Well, that is, Howie and I make up stories, and Steve just tells us Indian legends and you’ll never convince him they aren’t real. It’s fun. I bet you’ll be good at it after a while.”

The next few days went by in a slow blur. Tyler didn’t press the issue about the barn, and Patrick’s fears about the helmet drifted to the back of his mind. On Thursday he brought a permission slip home for Mom to sign so that he could go to the Profunda Wash on the Friday field trip. Leaving Randy’s bike in the barn, Patrick grabbed a glass of water in the kitchen and went waking around Grandpa’s property, looking for his parents.

He found Sandy under the shade of a big tree next to Grandpa’s reservoir, a deep, square pond filled with dark blue but unmoving water. Sandy sat texting on her phone with one of her hundred friends back home. Patrick wondered if he’d ever stop thinking of Salt Lake that way.

“Do you know where Mom is?”

Sandy didn’t glance up. “Doctor, with Dad. Why?”

“Permission slip,” Patrick said.

“Dinosaur place? All the schools are going. Link and I left ours on the counter, she’ll find it.”

“Okay. Hey, think Grandpa will let us swim in this?” He jerked a thumb at the reservoir. Sandy actually did look up this time, wrinkling her nose.

“Yuck. Even if it wasn’t gross, he said not to mess with it. I asked him if the horse drinks from there and he said no, so I don’t know what it’s for, but not swimming.”

“Maybe crops?” Patrick suggested.

Sandy looked at him funny. “This is a ranch, not a farm.”

Patrick shrugged. “What’s the difference?”

“You goober. Hey, speaking of the horse, I’m gonna ride him later, want to watch?”

“Sounds boring.”

“You’re boring.”

“See you later.” Patrick left the permission slip in the kitchen, then went up to the barn. He tensed up, then sighed in relief when he checked and saw that the symbol had gone from the helmet. Maybe it “turned off” after a while, like a phone. He might try putting it on again later but for now he wanted to flip through Randy’s journal some more.

He’d spent more time with Tyler and the guys in the afternoons, and it only made him more determined to become really good—even expert—at something whenever they got together. Tyler did bikes, Howie read books, and Steve had all kinds of stories about his ancestors, going back before the cowboy days, even back to when the western United States belonged to Mexico. For the first time in his life, Patrick had started to worry just a little bit that he didn’t have something he was really good at.

He liked riding bikes but he couldn’t fix one like Tyler. He didn’t care for reading even though Howie was always going off about something cool he learned from a book. And as for family history, Mom knew a lot about theirs but she always managed to make it so boring that Patrick could never get into it, and besides, that was Steve’s thing anyway. All of those belonged to the other boys. What was Patrick’s thing?

The first idea that came to mind was Randy’s journal, even though it was Randy’s, and not Patrick’s. Even so, Patrick hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since he’d first laid eyes on it. Granted, a lot of that was because he worried about breaking the helmet or something, but still.

As he puzzled this out, his eyes once again fell on Randy’s map, as they often did, and he especially focused on the dinosaur logos along the Profunda Wash.

“Gotcha,” he said to himself. He could memorize the dinosaurs Randy had marked there! It might take him a few hours but he had time. Tomorrow he would go to the Wash Site and he’d know what every fossil was before any of the guys could tell him, and Patrick would begin his career as the Dinosaur Expert.

Maybe that would require him to do some more reading. So be it. Grinning to himself, Patrick went over to the map and started reading off the names of the fossils, only to frown when he got seven or eight fossils deep.

One of them, a Stegosaurus silhouette, had a symbol drawn on its flank. It was small, but sharp and very clear. If Patrick wasn’t mistaken, it was the symbol for Digo, a word he didn’t dare say aloud, in case the helmet heard him again. Patrick quickly flipped open the journal to confirm. In his excitement he went too far and turned almost to the back of the book, where a very precise hole had been cut through a chunk of the pages.

Pressed tightly inside that hole was a coin, bigger than a silver dollar, and thicker than one too. Come to think of it, it looked like a challenge coin that Uncle Randy had shown him once. Military guys and policeman got them as awards for things. Curious, Patrick slid a finger under the pages and popped the coin out, holding it up to the light for a better look.

The surface was incredibly smooth and shiny, like polished gold. At the right angle he could even see his own reflection. As he studied it, he thought he could make out tiny markings, not etched into the surface but embedded in it, like a slightly different color of metal had been pressed into the gold.

The longer he watched, the clearer the symbols became, until the markings darkened and the symbol was unmistakable: it was Digo again, like on the helmet, and on the map, and the stegosaurus marking. Patrick almost said the word aloud but he wasn’t sure what would happen if he did, and he stopped himself before the sound could escape his throat.

His nerves buzzed with excitement. A journal! Full of writing! Whatever this coin was, and the helmet, and all of it, whatever Randy knew, it had to be in here. It might look weird if he played with the helmet, but the journal? He could read that anytime.

Well, not anytime; he wouldn’t take it to school. He felt a little weird at the idea of taking it out of the barn, even. The safest place for it, other than here, was the house, although if he stayed up to read it in his room he might eventually have to share it with Link, and he didn’t want to explain to anyone what this was. Not until he knew for himself.

“Expert,” Patrick whispered.

This was it.

Grinning like an idiot in the coin’s reflection, Patrick pressed it back into the hole in the journal and plopped down onto Randy’s nasty old couch, immediately choking in a cloud of dust. Coughing and hacking, he got up and set the journal back on the shelf, then ran downstairs to find Grandpa’s shop-vac. If he was going to spend more time up here, he’d need to be able to breathe.

And he was definitely going to spend more time up here.

Chapter 5: What’s In a Name?

Friday came, and once again Patrick was on the bus. This time was different, though: he and Tyler had ridden their bikes to school, giddy about the coming field trip, and now they were crowded into their seats with all the other eighth-graders, bouncing down the highway toward the Terrano Reservation.

“I wish they did this once a month instead of once a year,” Tyler said, watching the red desert sand rush past the window. “They usually do a huge cookout next to the visitor’s center and we’ll see a movie inside, and then there are the fossils. There’s an entire Torosaurus skull buried in the wash, and almost half of it is exposed and sticking out in the air.”

“Isn’t that bad?” Patrick asked. “I thought they break apart if they do that.”

“They preserve it with ceramics and resin. Not just the skull but the ground, too. The way it’s covered, any time it rains the water just washes away from the skull and doesn’t collect in the ground there. Howie says it can still break apart but I think they watch it close enough that they’ll catch any problems before they get too big. Steve’s not joking, they take real good care of this place.”

As the bus rounded a turn on the highway, Patrick counted four police trucks on either side of the gated entrance to the Rez. His eyes widened and he let out a whispered “whoa.”

“That’s unusual,” Tyler murmured. “The last couple of years there might be one officer, tops. And sometimes it’s just a guy from Profunda. These are all Tribal police.”

The closer they got, the easier it was to read the words painted on the doors of their trucks: Alapiute Nation Tribal Law Enforcement. All four trucks had red-and-blue lights on their roofs, flashing idly as the police gestured for incoming vehicles to slow down. The bus came to a stop in a line of cars and vans, and one of the Terrano cops slowly walked alongside then, looking under the vehicles with a mirror mounted on a long stick. Tyler giggled at the officer’s bulletproof vest, which had A.N.T.L.E. stitched across the chest.

“I wish they’d change their name just a little! Add ‘reserves’ or something to the end so their vests say ‘antler’ on them.”

Patrick laughed unexpectedly. “That’d be hilarious. Except there aren’t any deer around here, are there?”

“Who cares? It’s still funny. I’m trying to make a portmanteau for ‘Tyler’ but it’s hard to find words that start with Y.”

“You…do you mean an acronym? A word made up of the letters in your name?”

“Portmanteau, acronym, what’s the difference?”

“The difference is they don’t mean the same thing, like, at all. Portmanteau is a French word and Uncle Randy served his mission in France. He told me it’s when you stick pieces of words together to make a new word. Like a ‘tribal cop’ would be a ‘trop,’” Patrick explained.

Tyler looked like he was thinking hard. “Or maybe ‘tribal police’ could be the ‘trol-lice,’ like their whole job is just to go around trolling people. Maybe they’re only pretending to look for bombs on the bus, so we’re late and don’t get burgers. Boo!” Leaping up from the bench, Tyler fiddled with the window latch and slid it down, sticking his head outside. “BOO!”

Eyes wide, Patrick grabbed his friend and pulled him back in. “Dude! You’re gonna get us in trouble!”

Tyler cackled. “I’m just playing! I wanna get there!”

“Griffin, sit down!” shouted the bus driver, eyeing them both in the mirror. “You too, new kid!”

“Now we’re in trouble!” Patrick whispered, suddenly conscious of the dozen other kids now watching them.

“Relax, Pat! It’s Friday. This is practically a bonus day of summer even though we’re at school. You’re gonna love this place. I bet Steve and Howie are already here.”

Patrick and Tyler found their other friends at the visitor’s center entrance, where it seemed the entire childhood population of Profunda and the Rez alike were running around, shrieking excitedly as teachers and parents tried to wrangle them inside.

“Ty! Pat!” Howie stood up on his tiptoes, waving over the heads of several sixth-graders to get their attention. Steve looked almost bored, and Patrick figured that for him the Tribal museum must have been a pretty normal thing, not worth getting worked up about.

“Sup guys?” Tyler asked, bumping fists with everyone, including Patrick.

“We rode here together,” Patrick said, perplexed.

“Did you bring the camera?” Howie asked Tyler. Tyler patted his backpack straps.

“Definitely. Gonna get some really great shots this year. I hope we go far enough up the Wash to see that ankylosaur.” Tyler crossed his fingers.

Patrick’s mind raced through the lineup of fossils on Randy’s map. If they took a tour up the Wash, they would have to get to…the twenty-third fossil to find an ankylosaur. He counted them off in his head to be sure. It was a third of the way up the Wash, would they go that far on this hike? He forgot to memorize the key on the map and now he wondered…

“How long is the Wash? Like, in miles?”

“Not bad. The trail is about a quarter of a mile with a lot of climbing and zig-zagging,” Steve said. “Today might be short though.”

“What? Why?” Tyler sounded worried.

“Did you see all the cops? Someone was out here last night. Jonny Begay saw him walking around off the trail and called for backup, and by the time they arrived the intruder was gone,” Steve said. “I heard Mom talking to my neighbor about it this morning.”

“Bone raiders,” Howie whispered, mouth agape.

Steve shrugged. “He didn’t take anything, but my uncle found fresh footprints all over the ground. And Jonny never lies.”

For the first time all morning, Tyler’s overflowing energy evaporated. “Man, that’s so weird. Why would someone come out here the night before us? Why not just try to sneak in with the field trip?”

“Think about it,” Howie said. “Whoever it was, he didn’t want to be seen. Maybe he didn’t know about the trip. And besides, there are gonna be teachers everywhere in the Wash—anyone who steps off the path gets in trouble.”

“I thought you were kidding about people trying to steal bones,” Patrick said. “Or at least, that it’s super rare.”

“It is,” said Steve. “That’s why they’re all on edge. Jonny didn’t see him until he was already in the Wash. The means he entered at the top.”

“He walked that far in the dark?” Howie asked, staring off into the desert, at nothing in particular.

“Yup. And with no light. Jonny would have seen him way sooner if he had.”

“Who is Jonny Begay?” asked Patrick.

“The oldest hatali on the Rez. A medicine man. Nobody really knows how old he is. He doesn’t have a birth certificate, but my great-grandpa is eighty-six and he was ten when Jonny went off to join the Army. Can’t remember what war that was, but it was a long time ago. He lives the old way, in caves, and he sleeps during the day so he can move around at night. I’ve only met him twice, and he’s…well, let’s just say when Jonny talks, you listen, and that’s it,” said Steve.

“Whoa,” said Patrick.

“Um…okay. Well, uh, looks like the tour is starting,” Tyler said, swallowing hard. “Guess we’d better be careful on the trail.”

The schools took turns pushing through the visitor’s center. Link and Sandy were already ahead of Patrick and his friends, since high school started sooner. Patrick wondered what they had thought of the different displays explaining the Alapiute story of the creation of the world, and how their farthest ancestors had sprung up out of the ground in Utah.

They had maintained their cave-dwelling ways for thousands of years, building more elaborate cities into the deep mountains than anyone had ever seen. When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, they called the Alapiutes “Terranos,” meaning “earth-people.”

“The Spanish renamed several western tribes this way,” the attendant explained. She was a nice lady, about Patrick’s mother’s age, wearing normal work clothes like a Polo shirt, but also sporting different colored beads in her hair and on her earrings. “The Dinae, a tribe similar to our own, also have a Spanish name: Navajo. They live to the south of us in Arizona and New Mexico.”

Patrick moved next to Steve and whispered, “Did that happen to the Pueblo Indians? I’ve heard of them. I thought pueblo was a Spanish word.”

Steve nodded. “Sort of. Pueblo just means ‘people.’ Pretty much all the tribal names mean ‘people’ in some way or another, but the Pueblos are a lot of different groups. Anasazi, Hopi, Aztecs…it’s complicated. I don’t know all of it. Mom says once you mix people together and change their names it’s almost impossible to sort them out again[GB1] . They do their best.”

The attendant finished her presentation and the teachers told them all to look at the exhibits until it was their turn to hike the Wash. Howie eagerly rubbed his hands together.

“Okay guys, come check this out. I want to show you something.”

“Here we go,” Tyler muttered.

“What’s wrong?” Patrick asked as they followed Howie to another exhibit.

“Howie must have read another book. Now we’re gonna hear about it.”

“I told you to look at that chapter in A.J. Handler’s last book, Ty,” said Howie. “I think he was on to something here. Ah, yes, this one.”

The four boys stopped in front of a glass display case with some kind of leather sheet inside, illuminated under soft lighting to preserve its faded markings. There were symbols like writing, and shapes that meant…something, but Patrick couldn’t make sense of it. Howie shook off his backpack, opened it, and pulled out a book as thick as a lunchbox.

“A.J. Handler? Isn’t he that guy from the history show about aliens?” asked Patrick.

“That’s Graham Hancock. And he’s got some really cool ideas too, but no, Handler has studied a lot of the southwest tribes and their lore. Steve, you know what this says, right?” Howie gestured to the drawings on the skin.

Steve shrugged. “I’ve heard about it.”

Howie flipped through the book until he came to a page with the same drawing. “Handler says that the Alapiute are unique among Great Basin tribes because their creation myth has a story about deep cities under the earth, where old medicine men live forever in an unchanged state, and have for ten thousand years. When they lived on the surface, they got their power from rocks, and then they moved fifty miles below ground where the rock was always moving. As long as the rock moved forever, so would they.”

Tyler glanced at Patrick, quick and furtive, then back to Howie. Patrick noticed but said nothing, not sure what it meant. “Okay…why does that matter?”

Steve raised a hand to point at the skin. “Alapiutes use math that the other tribes didn’t, because they didn’t dig as deep as we do. Our unit is different but yeah, a hundred and sixty-eight akeets is fifty miles.”

“You speak another language?” Patrick asked.

“Barely,” said Steve. “I heard this story a hundred times though.”

“That’s the interesting part!” said Howie. “In all his research, Handler says only the Alapiutes had that kind of measurement, as well as a story about people living deep enough in the ground that the rock was always moving. The earth’s crust is around fifty miles thick at the deepest part. Even with modern engineering, the deepest manmade hole on earth is only seven miles. Did the Alapiutes dig fifty miles down by hand? Probably not. But they’re very specific about that number. It’s right here.”

“Cool,” Patrick said, imagining having to dig ten feet down with a steel shovel, let alone a mile—or fifty—with anything else.

“Except the only moving rock is lava. That’s the earth’s mantle. You can’t build anything inside it, you’d burn to a crisp,” said Tyler. He pointed to a cutaway diagram of the planet in Howie’s own book.

“You could if you were a super-advanced ancient civilization. Look, and—”

“Digo!” Patrick said, suddenly snapping his fingers and pointing at the skin.

The other three boys froze. So did Patrick. And then he felt the color drain from his face as he realized what he had said. He couldn’t help it; he’d been eyeing the symbols on the skin when at the bottom he was able to make out the four symbols on Randy’s map and in his journal. The four names escaped him, but he recognized Digo.

His mind raced, desperate to explain. Perhaps by accident, Steve came to his rescue.

“You speak Alapiute now?”

“No, sorry, I’ve just seen that word. I think Randy was learning Alapiute. He left out some old homework or something on his desk and I was reading it the other night,” Patrick offered lamely. “What does it mean?”

“Just a number.” Steve counted off on his hand, starting with his thumb. “Talak, Naki, Tago, Digo.” He stopped at his ring finger. “Your uncle was learning to count. Preschool stuff.”

“Four,” Patrick said. “Huh.”

“Anyway, I just thought that was cool. Next time we go out exploring caves, we should look for diagrams like this. It’d be awesome if we could find proof of deep cities,” said Howie, replacing the huge book in his backpack.

“Huh,” said Tyler, still glancing at Patrick when he thought he wasn’t looking. “Well, looks like it’s our turn for the Wash. Let’s go!”

Compared to the skin in the visitor’s center, the Wash held surprisingly little interest for Patrick. Various fossils protruded from the ground, or were highlighted on permanent displays, but after seeing a dozen or so they all seemed similar in his mind, and he trudged along up the path behind Steve and Howie.

Digo. Four. What did it mean? And why had he said it? He’d given such a lame excuse for knowing the word. Maybe the guys thought he was weird now. He’d have to be casual from now on, and he definitely needed to know more from Randy’s journal. ‘Four’ had to matter for something.

They stopped every so often for Tyler to take a picture of something with his camera, something he took very seriously, judging by how hard he focused and held still while shooting. In total he took five shots, which Patrick only knew because it was more than four. Digo.

The sun was now high as the late morning approached, and the desert heated up fast. The teachers led the students quickly back down the path to the shaded pavilion, where several of the visitor’s center staff were grilling burgers and setting out lunch. The boys found a table and sat down to eat.

“I got that ankylosaur,” Tyler said, grinning from ear to ear. He somehow said this to Howie and Steve, and Patrick sensed that he was outside of the topic.

“Can I see it?” he asked, without thinking.

“Oh, uh…I’ll have to email it to you. The display doesn’t work.” Tyler held up the camera and toggled the power switch. The flat black screen stayed dark.

“That’s cool. What do you do with the pictures?”

“Art project. I’ll show you when it’s done.”

There was a note of deception in Tyler’s tone that Patrick couldn’t be sure about. It felt weird. Kind of like the whole trip. He wondered if he would ever have a normal day in Profunda, or if they were always like this.