Ana didn't run. She closed her eyes and pushed her palms flat against the warming stone. If the earth was going to rise, she wouldn't be the dust cast aside. She would be the one to whisper it back to sleep, or the first to see what lay on the other side of the awakening.

Legend said that the earth was a sleeping giant, and Las Espaldas was where its shoulder blades met. If you pressed your ear to the red dust at just the right moment, you could hear the heavy, tectonic thrum of its heart. But lately, the heart had been racing.

The earth did not just have a face of soil and stone; it had a spine, and Ana knew exactly where the vertebrae cracked.

"Patience," she whispered into the dirt. "The stars aren't ready for you yet."

"It's waking up," her grandfather had whispered before the fever took his voice. "And when it stands, we are the dust it shakes off its coat."