Excerpt: Desert Rose

The desert is an honest place. It wears its bones on its skin, lets you see its inner workings. It is an emaciated old woman of a place, with so little to risk that she can be completely honest. The jungle, with its inexhaustible wealth of life and the desert, barren and poor can alone be honest.
It was the honesty of the desert that Rose most prized as a child. The sleek unconcern. The very brutality of the place appealed to her. She approved of its lack of pretense. Almost everything else covered itself, concealed the truth with ever more translucent layers. Even her father.
Especially her father.
Had he ever even seen a rose? She doubted it. She almost doubted that there had ever been such a thing as roses. The pictures remained, sure, but then there were pictures of unicorns and dragons and sphinxes, too, and those were no more real. And from what she'd seen of the, they were useless things. Great water sucks. Of course, back when there had been roses there had been water. And food. And cars. And electricity. And…well. Things had been different.

Rose lay on her stomach in the gravelly sand, staring at the battle in front of her nose. A wasp was locked in combat with one of the long-legged tarantulas. It was something she had seen before fifty, sixty times. Perhaps a hundred. But it never failed to entrance her. The frantic interplay of flying and crawling, the large and the small. Also the desires involved. The tarantula wanting nothing more than to survive (and wasn't that the universal desire?) and the wasp…the wasp wanted nothing more than to give her children a chance at survival. But wasn't that a level removed? Shouldn't her desire be less than the tarantula's for that? Why, then, did she keep winning? It was a problem that niggled at her. Such a layer of separation should weaken the resolve of the wasp. Not strengthen it. And yet it would seem that it did.
Perhaps she would understand better had she had any experience with mothers.
Her father's voice broke her reverie. "Rosie! Get your ass in here or I'll eat your dinner myself."
She jumped up, not even bothering to brush the dirt and gravel from her shirtfront, and ran towards the distant house. His threat was not idle. He was a hardworking man and the food they were rationed was barely enough to keep them both just the right side of starving. She had a narrow window to take what was hers before it wasn't anymore.
Their house was part of a small collective, maybe six--depended on if you counted the two deserted ones, abandoned and already filled, on the inside, with that fine dust that turned everything into beige velvet. She would sometimes walk among them, letting her hands stroke the dust away from the hard-backed kitchen chairs, revealing the once-red plastic beneath. They were tomblike. Monuments to those already dead and those that were slowly dying.
Their own house was a very different kind of monument. Her father had never talked to her about her mother. She had asked once, just once, when the lady with the burro and cart who came to try and force letters and numbers through her ears had come and demanded to know where her mother was. Rose didn't know. She'd never knowns. She taken the lady to Papa and Papa had shot the lady in the foot. Then, after she'd left, trailing both curses and blood, he'd whipped Rose until she, too, bled. She'd limped out into the desert and hidden in a wadi, feeding the sparse plants with her blood until her wounds had crusted over and she was so thirsty her head had throbbed with a constant, steady ache and her tongue rasped against the roof of her mouth. Her father had said nothing when she returned and took a glass of water from the blue jug they kept on their counter. He had stopped her from taking a second glass. She'd never mentioned her mother since.
She had, though, thought about her. There were no pictures of her mother, about their house, but there were thousands upon thousands of pictures of roses. Not, her father would grumble, pictures as they used to be. Not vibrant, not still heavy with the expectation of life. But beautiful, still, in their preserved perfection. She'd never seen a rose. She'd never seen any flower that didn't bloom among the sharp thorns of the desert plants. She'd never seen anything softer than the heavy abdomens and soft struggling wings of them moths she caught by moonlight after the brief rains. She held them in her cupped hands until they beat their wings to tatters against her arched fingers. Then she let them drop to the ground to flutter among tiny gravel pieces until they were eaten by birds or spiders or bigger insects. Or, once, a bat that swooped beneath her opening hands and neatly caught her prey. Roses, though…she knew the inner and outer life of her desert as fully and deeply as she knew the length of her skinny arms and scar-crossed legs. As sure as she knew the sharp angles of her face, honed by hunger and cruelty. Flowers were not a part of that desert, were not a part of her life, were not something she hungered for.
Her father did, though. He was a man of appetites. Consumed by them, almost. The first was his love of fire. That was obvious. Their community was a small one, and a silent one, but it was alive with the love of fire and the thick scent of it. They were burners and burners children. Lonely and wreathed by the smoke of their toil. And her father, her father was the greatest of them. He had blacksmith's arms and hands, stronger than steel and ingrained so deeply with soot that, even if they had had water to wash with, he would never had managed to scrub away the reminder of fire and its possession of him. He would never have freed himself. It had him too strongly.
As for what they burned…Well. They burned what was sent them. They burned what the great, smoke-belching trucks brought them from the train station. Load after load after load of refuse. There was a pile of ash as tall as a mesa at the burn sight, a mere ten miles from the houses. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, there was a constant steady drift of ash. Perhaps that was the softest thing. The ash that was the snow of her childhood.
The smell of it, though, was far from soft. On some days it was so retchingly bad she could not open her mouth to speak without gagging. On others, and perhaps this was worse, it smelled of the rare treat of meat, made her mouth water and every mouthful of taken or foraged food a mockery of her desire. She would dare not look her father in the eyes on the days he came home, bringing the meat smell with him. He was at his most dangerous then. His most violent. His most unpredictable. He was never a safe man, but on those nights she doubted even his humanity. She ran to the desert and hid in a small cave she had found and lined with blankets and cushions taken from the abandoned houses, huddling into herself against the cold. She forwent her dinner. She didn't care. Anything was better than that.
Tonight he smelled only of refuse. She slapped the door closed behind her--not that it could keep anything out, but her insisted on it being closed. He glowered over his shoulder at her for a moment and jerked his chin at the Formica table. Bread, again, that hard flat stuff the trucks brought with their loads. And, this a rare treat, a bit of oil spread on it. It was less then her share, she knew, but she didn't protest. It was still more calories than she'd foraged all day. She'd found a Calabazilla in seed and eaten what she could, but it was still not enough. It was never enough. Rose poked her belly meditatively, feeling the bread resting in it like a rock. One day, perhaps, hunger would not be her greatest fear. She couldn't imagine it, but she knew it was possible.
Leaning back and kicking her heels against the legs of her chair, she rested her glass of water on her belly and slowly nursed it. Her father turned around at the noise, brow lowered. She stopped suddenly, like a jackrabbit scenting danger.
But something changed in his eyes. Like a light switch going off. He was no longer angry. She knew that. She didn't know that he might not be even more dangerous in this new mood. Her heart rate began to climb. She clenched her fingers around her glass of water. If he came at her, she'd buy herself a couple seconds by tossing it in his face, and be out the door more quickly than a rattlesnake slithering off of its sunning rock.
It wasn't needed, though. He grunted and turned back to the window again, eyes searching the road to the train station.
"Gettin' big."
She said nothing.
"You watch out."
She stayed silent. She wasn't sure what he was warning her of. Himself? But that was far too indirect of her father. He was as incapable of hiding his feelings as she was of spending a day indoors. They were both simple people. He as simple as a hammer. She as simple as a scorpion. He lived to destroy--it was plain across his face. She, she lived only to live. But that didn't mean she was a simple victim. The last time he'd truly beaten her, she'd put coffeeberry bark in their weekly water. He'd had the runs for far more than a week. She had too, of course, but it had been worth the pain on his face.
She drank the last of the water and pushed away, the table and chair both scraping across the dust-streaked floor. As she opened the screen door to go out, he turned to her. "Where?"
She shrugged, jerked her chin at the desert, at the rippled landscape that beckoned to her.
"No. Stay here."
She looked at him closely for a minute. The desert was right there, tantalizing. He wasn't angry. Yet. But there was a tightness around his eyes that promised turbulence to come if she disobeyed. She let the door clap shut and shrugged, turned and walked to her room.

It was a sad place. Confined and stinking of other people's dreams. Her mother's probably. Her father was not the type of man to dream of anything other than the next day and the one before. Stale things already played out like kite strings, kinked and twisted in on themselves.
She kicked back on her bed, ignoring the red streaks of dust her shoes made on the counterpane, next to a thousand others. She stared at the ceiling. The drooping, faded, torn pictures of roses stared back. Thousands of them papered the ceiling and walls of her room. The rest of the house had always had a few here and there, but her room was the worst. They covered the place like flies on a rotting carcass. The wind, which was strong enough that even her father had trouble walking against it in the evenings, sneaked into her room as she slept, sometimes, and rustled through them. The sound was eerie. Like the sibilant whispers of old women, she sometimes thought, those ones that played with your life like string that the teacher woman had once told her about. It scared her. Sometimes. A little. There was something unsettling about the pictures, no matter how familiar they had become. They smacked of a mania not yet completely dead. Like an old coyote stalking a jackrabbit, one too young and fresh for it to ever catch, the ghosts swirled and tittered though their time was past. Rose didn't move--she couldn't let them taste her fear.
She let her breath still, forcing her heart to beat ever slower and slower. It was a trick she'd learned, sleeping in the desert. If she was small and still and not too warm, fewer night creatures would crawl in with her. She usually picked a few lizards or snakes out of the folds of her clothes when she woke, but that was it. And they were small creatures, not unkind and, often, not frightened of her. She had become (had she ever not been?) a part of the desert landscape for them. A warm rock or a Joshua to be experienced. But not a threat. Even as a small child, coyotes had given her no more than a cursory look as they trotted past, tails twitching and tongues lolling as they went about their own business. The other child--she had a name, but even after spend their lives together, Rose didn't remember it. She hardly remembered her own, at times. She might have spoken, occasionally, once. She must have. But she didn't remember it. She didn't remember much. Life was made of two things: the interior of the house, electric with the presence of the long-gone, and the desert. The desert was pure. It was as it had always been, and as it would always be.
Slowly, slowly, her consciousness drifted out, softly, into the desert, across the wonderful swells and ripples of the land and the soft brushing of scrub that covered it. She dispersed herself across it like the stars that stared down, a thin cloud of self between the sky and ground.

Time was a fluid thing for Rose. There was the weekly deliveries of water and food and…other things. There were the seasons, the temperamental winter and scorching summer. There was the shifting politics of ferocity of the desert. There was the sun and moon and the wheeling stars and the occasional clouds scuttling across the sky. There were sudden rains and sudden frosts. They were the smells of the burning--plastic, wood, fiber, human--in all their varied complexity and terribleness.
But that was it. There was no "year", no "month", no "week" beyond those markers. Even the gentle elongation of her own limbs went unnoticed except for the necessity to find and occupy a new night cave. This one was farther away from the house. Perhaps five miles, as the others reckoned distance. For her, it was over six swells, across two stream beds, and around a scree at the edge of the truly dead desert, a wind-carved canyon she avoided if possible. The echoes there were…almost unnatural. The animals, too, did not go there. Staying at the edge of it meant she lost her nighttime visitors, but as her courses started she found she didn't mind. The clean, unanimalistic simplicity of the place appealed to her. As did its seclusion.
She found herself needing to spend more and more time there. Her father was…strange. And getting stranger. There was nothing blatant about it, but she smelt the lunacy on him. Like the rabid fox that she'd once come upon. He had the same look of senseless hunger in his eyes when he looked at her. For the first time, she decided to follow him to work.

She was on her stomach on a butte, overlooking the burn site. It had been a hard scrabble up the side, one which had scraped even her callused knees and hands. Her sweat had dried almost instantly in the desert air, wicked away. She scarcely noticed, her attention almost completely grabbed by the scene below her.
There were three men at the burn site. Had there once been four? And only two empty houses? She didn't remember. It wasn't a part of her desert and therefore of no import. The others were like oil on the surface of a glass of water. There but without interaction. Without reaction. She hardly considered them worth her notice.
Now, though. Now there was danger coming off of them. She felt it. And it scared her. So she watched them through narrowed eyes, lifting and hauling and burning, burning, burning.
Today was a day when the wind smelled of meat.
She'd always wondered why the animals never came near this place. Never ate the remnants. It couldn't have been the presence of men. They did not fear men, particularly not the coyotes. Or, at least, they didn't fear her. They treated her with a wary respect, leaving the area she marked as her own alone while she was there, but not fearing to nip the quick rabbit or ground squirrel while she wasn't. She didn't mind. They were predators, not monsters. And she only ate the occasional rabbit, anyway. The snares she made were from her own hair, and it didn't grow quickly enough to make them often.
Now, though, she thought she knew why it was avoided. There was a subtler stink than carrion in the air. The men below her tossed another limp corpse onto the already head-high pile. The heat must have been almost unbearable. Even from her vantage point, she could feel the steady pressure of the energy the flames released. And it made her sniff the wind like a wary animal.
This place was human to the very rock. Filled with their intangible otherness. A sort of miasma hung about the place. It was thickest around her father. Not quite visible, but still glittering with a dangerous intensity From this height she could only see his tick black hair and huge arms. They gleamed like glass under their thin layer of sweat. It was not a scene of fragility, though. This was glass waiting to shatter. Waiting to cut and maim. Her heart beat against her ribs like a trapped bird. She slithered backwards, out of sight even if they had thought to look up. Flopping onto her back, she stared up at the crystalline blueness of the sky. It soothed her, but not enough. Terror had risen in her like bile, and she was unable to swallow it down. It was choking her.
If she could only find a water source. If there were some place she could drink, without having to crawl back to the rose-haunted house. She would leave without a look back if she could find one. But there was only one spring she'd found in her wanderings. A tiny poison water thing that she'd recoiled away from as soon as she'd taken a sniff. And there was no way to make that drinkable. She'd asked her father and he'd tilted an eyebrow at her and told her no. The survey team who'd found the place had specifically looked for somewhere with no groundwater to infect. She'd find no liquid solace in the desert.
But that meant returning to the house. The house where the walls were ever closer and closer, the ghosts ever louder and more insistent, the fear within her greater and greater with each passing day. It was terrifying. But it was unavoidable. She'd considered stealing from the water trucks. But they were heavily guarded. The men who drove them were as harsh as her father, with the jaws and eyes of men trained to kill. They were predators with no need to kill but ever more and more desire to. She wanted to give them no excuse.
So. She could not stay forever chained to their small supply of water. But she could not leave. She knew just how quickly thirst could kill. And unlike the rats and insects, she required more water than she consumed in her food.
Sitting up, she wrapped her arms, arms almost the same brown as the rock around her, around her knees. Something had to change. And yet, nothing could.

She held the door behind her, carefully cradling it so it made no sound as it hit the frame. Her makeshift canteen, which she had sewn together from jackrabbit skins, hung loose and empty around her neck. She kept it there, safe, when she walked. If she walked always away from the sun, too, the shade of her body protected it from evaporation. Since the burn site was to the west of the houses that suited her admirably.
Rose unlaced the top and tiptoed over to the water jug, turning the little white plastic spigot as silently as she could.
A scant handful of water flowed out. And then nothing. Frowning, she tilted the container. She could tell from its weight, though, that is was no use trying. There wasn't any left.
She swallowed, looking down at the mouthful of water in her water pouch. It would be enough for, perhaps, a morning. Any longer and she would be risking far more than she dared. The desert was her place, as close to her as her own skin. But that didn't mean it wouldn't kill her. If anything, she knew it better than to expect that it wouldn’t.
There was a soft noise behind her. Gentle, but too loud to be the ghosts. Rose turned.
Her father stood in the doorway behind her, glass of water in his hand. He was grinning. His hands were shaking, the water slopping dangerously close to the sides of the glass. Rose tensed, every instinct telling her to flee. But there was the water. She wouldn't make ten miles on the small amount she had.
So she stayed, though the fetid breath of his presence wreathed her like smoke. She swallowed, and forced herself to relax. She couldn't let him see her fear.
"So. Rosie. You thinking 'bout running off? Eh? Thinking 'bout leaving your old man?"
She shook her head, more in denial of his knowledge than from any hope of convincing him she wasn't.
"No?" He shifted his weight, menacing, like a wolf testing the reaction times of his pray. Rose didn't move. Her eyes, though, almost unconsciously, flicked to the glass of water in his hands.
His smile widened.
"Yeah. Thought this'd get your attention. Want it?"
Rose bobbed her head, once. Yes.
"Then why don't you ask for it like a human?" he growled.
Rose opened her mouth, but it was if there was a hand around her throat, trapping the words before they could even slip into her mouth. All that came out was a dry hiss, the warning of a trapped bobcat.
Her father's fingertips whitened against the glass, even beneath their patina of soot. One of the tiny muscles beside his mouth leaped into sudden definition. He took a step forward, between Rose and the door.
Immediately, instincts honed by years of wary interactions with the desert community began to scream. She felt both hot and cold, the sudden mixture of fear and, yes, a hint of disbelief filling her. Why disbelief? She didn't know. It didn't matter. But it was there. And it paralyzed her.
"You're just like your mother," her father said. The water slopped against the sides of the glass as he shook. Fury radiated off of him like heat off of one of his fires. "Always one eye on the door and the other on yourself. Just like her. There's no one else in your little world, is there?" He growled. "Never let me in. She'd never let me in. Like I was some kind of idiot. A child. Didn't know better than to…to…" He pressed his lips together.
Rose was barely listening. There was a window behind her, above the sink. If she could get up on the counter before he stopped her, she could dive out and run for it. Wait at the train station for the delivery to arrive. They were coming tomorrow. Surely she could hide from him for that long. The night would be brutal. But she could deal with that.
Her father laughed. She blinked, pulled from her plans. "You're not even listening, are you?" he asked softly. "You're not… even… listening." His face, too, was pale under the marks of fire. He shook his head, once, almost a spasm. Then, with a cruel deliberation, he dropped the glass of water.
Rose started forwards, but the glass hit the floor before her foot even hit the ground.
"Do I have your attention now, Rose?" her father roared, bellowed like a peccary.
She stared at him. Again the disbelief. Again the paralysis. Again her breath shallow and fast.
He closed in two quick steps and grabbed a fistful of her hair, ripping it out of her scalp with a twisting wrench. It blazed with pain like a scorpion's sting. She gasped and started backwards. The top of the counter hit her in the small of her back. She caught her breath, gulping back a scream again. Her father's scent was oily and harsh, his presence even more so. His eyes were wild and mad.
"Just. Like. Your. Mother. But, oh, she left, didn't she? She ran off, didn't she? Better to die in the desert then spend a day with me, right? And you? Rather die of thirst than tolerate me? Eh? Am I that bad? I'm a monster, right? Some sort of beast?"
Rose shook her head. Monsters she didn't know. Beasts she did. And he was no beast. A beast would never be so unnaturally… strange. That was the disbelief, she decided. The unnaturalness.
Her father's voice dropped suddenly. "Well maybe that's because I am one. Maybe I should start acting like you think I should. Hm?"
He grabbed her shoulders and flung her to the ground. She was wiry and honed by the desert and her constant exploration but he was bulging with muscle and hate and all she had was fear and endurance.
He knelt over her, knee firmly in the middle of her chest. His breath was harsh and acrid. It stank of desperation and violence.
All at once, her paralysis left her. Her disbelief melted. This was happening to her. She didn't know what he was planning on doing, but she knew she didn't want it.
Growling, she tried to twist away from him. His bulk was too much for her to shift. He looked down at her with a sudden triumph.
"Not so quick to run away now, are you? Not gonna run to wherever it is you get off to?"
Her hands were still free. With a screech, she scratched for his face, fingers clawed. He leaned back out of reach with a small smile. She hissed and writhed harder. Rose pecked at his delicate stomach with her bunched fingers, hard and fast as a roadrunner hunting a snake. He grunted and wheezed. Then he hit her across the face so hard it was all she could do, for a moment, to breath. She was almost numb with the pain. As she drew in her next breath, though, that quickly passed. The pain pushed her to new desperation. She wriggled and twisted. Whined like a trapped coyote. Beat on her father's chest with futile fists.
He merely looked gloatingly down at her as his weight crushed the air from her. Even his grunts quickly subsided.
Rose's muscles were red hot with the effort and she could already feel the sweat gathering between her skin and the loose shirt she wore. Her scant mouthful of water was just a wet patch on her chest.
Without realizing it, she had begun to sob.
"You're not going anywhere," her father crooned. "No, you're not. Not like your mother. You're staying right here. With me. Forever. I'm going to tie to down, if that's what it takes. Lock you up. Keep you safe. That's what I'm going to do."
His voice was the fractured whining of a sick coyote. She couldn't bare it. The smell of him, his weight, his very presence. The humanity of him.
As she writhed, she felt a pressure within her. A non-physical thing. Like the ghosts whispered rose-dreams to her as she slept. Like the air, the leeching poison that surrounded the burn site. But somehow purer. It resonated with the heat of the air. The arch of the sky over the human-burrows. The beat of her heart and the steady pulse of the stars and sun and seasons. She thrummed with it, felt it grow stronger and stronger within her. It was rising in her like a flood, and there was no holding it back.
She was hardly even aware of her father now. He had been the trigger. The subtle shift that caused a rockslide. He was no longer important. Her body was no longer important.
Somewhere, she was screaming. Somewhere, she was in inelastic and unrelenting pain. Not here. Not in the cool, reverberating stillness that she was submerged in.
And the vibrations were growing stronger. She was shaking with them. They were snaking down into the very bedrock of the desert itself. She was channeling more energy than she had even suspected existed. It was like drinking lightening.
And then it passed from her. Like rain from the desert. And, with its passing, it took everything from her. Even the light of her consciousness.

She was herself again. She was cold. Cold. It must be night. With a muffled groan, she sat up, a hand to her head. It felt as if it had been beaten into a pulp, like the prickly pear guts she used to sooth her scratches.
A gentle hand pushed her back down.
"There's a dear," a voice whispered. "You're safe now. Just lay yourself down and keep still. Don't want to have to reset that leg, now do we?"
Rose opened her eyes, then immediately closed them. There was something…wrong. It was too light to be night, but too cold to be the day. And the room was moving. Swaying. She could almost hear it. A steady insect-like clacking.
She slowly opened her eyes again, just a slit. Lights. Electric lights. She caught her breath. The sudden movement made pain crack through her ribs.
"Hush now. You're lucky to be alive, you know."
Rose squinted up at the speaker. A woman. She was little more than a white blur hovering above her. Almost too white. Nothing stayed clean that long in the desert expect bones.
She tried to speak. Her words-- she wanted to ask where she was-- stuck in her throat. All that came out was a dry hissing, like the evening wind through the canyon that housed her night-cave.
"You're safe now, though." The woman's voice was quiet and soothing. Rose found herself relaxing despite herself. It was almost impossible not to. "You're on a train. I'm taking you to a place where you'll be able to recover. And, perhaps, learn some things you might find useful. You're a very special girl, Rose. A very special girl." The woman paused, sighed and leaned back, cloth rustling. "It's a pity I wasn't able to get a chance to speak to your father. Rose… you should know. Your father is. Well. He didn't survive the earthquake. Nor did any of your neighbors."
Rose frowned. Earthquake? There hadn't been any earthquake.
"As far as we can tell, he died trying to protect you. He died almost instantly when your house collapsed, but his body shielded you from the worst of the damage. You were very lucky the train came the next day, Rose. It's as if something were looking out for you."
The woman paused, as if she expected Rose to say something. Rose remained silent.
"Well. I think I'll leave you to your rest, Rose. You need it. And try not to move too much. You're on a lot of medication right now, and I don't want you reinjuring yourself. Do you understand?" Rose nodded. "Good. See in you in a couple hours. Just give a shout if you need me."
She left in a rustle of cloth and a small cloud of scent Rose didn't recognize. Something soft.
Slowly, she let her eyes close again. She felt as if she were floating. Gently released from her bonds.

She was back in the desert. It was not until that moment that she realized that she had left. Relief trickled down through her like the first glass of water after a thirsty afternoon. Home. She'd never thought of it in terms of place, before. As something it would be possible to leave. Now that she had… The thought of not being there was terrifying. She didn't know anything outside of the desert. Not even the desert, though, because to conceptualize desert you need to know something more lush. And there was no blankness about the desert, as the teacher woman had tried to tell her years ago. There was, instead, a deep and varied richness. Endless variety. Unbelievable ingenuity of life. She could no more think of the desert as a dead and single-faceted place than she could think of her skin as an unvaried covering for her bones and muscles. It simply wasn’t.
There was still something wrong, though. Still something amiss.
She looked out over the desert, the wind snatching at her hair. It was sunset. The temperature would soon begin to drop. She'd need to find shelter soon.
And yet there was a different urgency driving her. Something out of place. Something haunting her.
She look out over the scene. The shadows of the sagebrush stretched long across the swales and swoops of the desert, distorting the landscape. It was the time of day when her eyes were the least reliable, though the desert was beautiful.
Something…something was wrong. She took a deep breath and looked around her. It smelled fine. Nothing out of the ordinary. And the wind on her face was cool and crisp. It was the perfect desert evening.
Expect for the sound. It was silent. Silent as it never was outside. The sage swayed but did not rustle. Her breath she could hear. It was loud in the silence. Almost defining. This was the desert. Her desert. She'd know it with her eyes closed. But the silence…
"I prefer it this way," a deep voice said. "Silent. There's been to much noise in my life. Particularly of late."
The speaker was behind her. Male? Female? It was hard to tell. Rose felt no fear, though. The presence was… utterly familiar. It felt of smooth stone and silence. The hiss of wind over rock. The breath of the desert. The heat of the sun. The complete stillness of place she had only ever felt in one place before. The little canyon of the unnatural echoes. She had ventured into it a few times. But never too deeply. It felt almost as if she were intruding.
On what, though? The question had never occurred to her before. Now she wondered why it hadn't.
"Turn around. I want to see you face to face."
Rose turned. The creature behind her tilted its head. Its face, too, was sexless.
"Hm." It twitched its tale neatly around its paws. "Interesting. You don't look much at all like your namesake."
Rose frowned, tilted her head.
"A rose, dear. Flower. Genus rosa. Generally, at least at the time of your birth, Rosa chinensisor some hybrid thereof. Ornamental flowers cultivated for their color and scent. Surely you know them?"
Rose nodded, hesitantly.
"Ah, but you'll never have seen a real one. Too young for that, I suppose." It sighed. "So much changes. Your people. They're the ones responsible, you know. They started this rockslide. We, my dear, have just been caught under it." The creature peered at her. "You understand?"
She nodded.
"Good." It settled down into a crouch, head erect. "Then I think you'll enjoy this. They're taking you away, you know. Out of the desert. I won't be able to reach you there. And nor for much longer. So listen. This is important.
"They are going to train you. The express purpose of your training will be in killing me. They believe, mistakenly I might add, that whoever kills me will gain my powers. They are fools. You will take what they teach you and learn it. It will come in useful for you later on. But do not share anything with them. Tell them nothing of what you dream or feel. In fact, it would probably be best if you told them nothing at all.
"When the time comes, they will bring you back here. For their own ends, or so they will imagine.
"When that time comes, I will tell you what to do. If you follow my directions exactly I will grant the greatest boon I can give to any mortal. A boon many would give their lives for. Do you understand?"
Rose nodded, slowly. She understood. But that didn’t mean she'd comply. With either of them. She'd take what they offered, sure, and decide for herself.
"Ah, Rose." The creature smiled gently. "We are two of a kind, you and I. Born of the desert, yes? Alive with it. With full knowledge of its power and beauty and slow, ticking complexity. Aren't we? And, of course, its secrets. I dare say I know a few more than you, but then, I've been around longer. They? Those blind ones don’t see the rattle snake until they've already stepped on it. And we, my dear, will be rattle snakes." The creature looked up suddenly, twitching an ear. "Hm. I must let you go back. You're getting too far away. Remember Rose. Don't tell them anything. If they can't see it, then they shouldn't. I'll see you soon."

She woke, again, to the insect clattering. The shifting was greater now. And she was at an angle. And cold. Very cold. And dark.
Shivering, Rose sat up gently. Her ribs didn't hurt. Nothing did. It felt as if she'd been swaddled in cotton wool. She let her breath out slowly and it formed smoke in the air in front of her.