Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World Book 1)

by Rebecca Roanhorse

But I’m no hero. I’m more of a last resort, a scorched-earth policy. I’m the person you hire when the heroes have already come home in body bags.

“Honágháahnii, born for K’aahanáanii.” Only my first two clans, but that’s enough.

The Wall. The Tribal Council approved it back when the Energy Wars first started. Most Diné supported the Wall. We all grew up with the stories that taught us that our place was on our ancestral land, the land within the embrace of the Four Sacred Mountains. Others call the Wall absurd, saying it’s some paranoid attempt at border control that’s destined to fail, just like the wall the doomed American government tried to build along its southern border a few years before the Big Water.

But I had forgotten that the Diné had already suffered their apocalypse over a century before. This wasn’t our end. This was our rebirth.

Safe from the outside world, at least. But sometimes the worst monsters are the ones within.

“Seems anywhere there’s a natural resource, there’s someone willing to hoard it for themselves to make more money than they can spend.”

“Words matter,” he says. “The name you give things, it forms them when you speak. You must always be careful with your words.”

“The sad truth you do not wish to face, Magdalena, is that sometimes the ones we call our heroes are the greatest monsters of all.”

“Everything you’ve done, your past, it’s all just a story you tell yourself. Some of it is true, but some of it is lies.”

“You know people who love you don’t hurt you like that,” he says, eyes steady on me. “Love’s not supposed to try to kill you.”