Chapter 1: Here Lies the Queen

The summer Kai turned twelve, the reservation felt like the edge of the world.

He crouched behind a cluster of sage brush, watching his cousin Shadi creep toward the mouth of Brave Woman's Grave. Even from fifty yards away, he could see her hands trembling as she clutched the smooth river stone they'd chosen for the dare. The cave opening yawned before her like a wound in the mountainside, dark and utterly still.

"She's actually going to do it," whispered Taza, dropping down beside him. At fourteen, Taza was the eldest of their trio, tall and serious with eyes that seemed older than his years. "We should stop her."

Kai shook his head, though his stomach churned with unease. "She'd never forgive us. You know how she gets."

They both knew. Shadi, at ten years old, was the fiercest of them all. She had a chipped front tooth from climbing too high in the cottonwoods and a scar on her knee from racing Kai's bike down Cemetery Hill. Fear wasn't in her vocabulary—or if it was, she'd long since decided it was a word for other people.

The dare had started innocently enough, the way these things always did. They'd been swimming in the creek below the old mining road when Tommy Crow Feather had shown up with his older brother's friends, all swagger and cruel laughter. Tommy had always resented that the cousins were inseparable, that they had something he could never break into.

"Heard your grandma's been telling you babies more stories about the Little People," Tommy had sneered, his voice carrying the particular venom that only thirteen-year-old boys could muster. "Maybe if you weren't such city boys"—this directed at Kai, who'd spent two summers with relatives in Phoenix—"you'd know they're just made-up bullshit to scare little kids."

That's when Shadi had stood up in the shallow water, her dark hair streaming down her back, and fixed Tommy with a stare that could have melted steel.

"Prove it," she'd said simply.

The challenge had escalated from there, as challenges do. First it was just about going to the cave. Then it was about going inside. Then Tommy, sensing weakness in their hesitation, had made it about reaching the deepest chamber—the place their grandmother called the Grave itself.

"Race you," Shadi had said, and that had settled it.

Now, crouched in the dying light of afternoon, Kai wondered how it had come to this. The cave had been forbidden for as long as he could remember. Not just by their family, but by everyone on the reservation. Even the tribal police avoided the area after dark, though they'd never admit it publicly.

His grandmother's words echoed in his mind: The Nimerigar walk there, grandson. The Little People. They take children who wander too far from home, children who don't listen to their elders.

But that was just folklore, wasn't it? Stories to keep kids from getting lost in dangerous caves. Kai had learned about geology in Phoenix, about how underground chambers could fill with toxic gases, how limestone formations created unstable passages. There were logical reasons to avoid Brave Woman's Grave.

The rational part of his mind clung to these explanations even as something deeper, something ancestral, whispered warnings in a language older than words.

"On three," Shadi called out, her voice echoing strangely off the cave mouth. She'd positioned herself at the entrance, bouncing slightly on her toes like a sprinter. The dying sunlight caught the silver bracelet on her wrist—the one their grandmother had given her for her last birthday, etched with protective symbols that now seemed pathetically small against the cave's hungry darkness.

Kai and Taza exchanged a look. There was still time to call it off, still time to grab Shadi and drag her away from whatever waited in that mountain's belly. But pride was a powerful thing, especially when you were twelve and desperate to prove you weren't afraid.

"Three!" Shadi's voice was bright with excitement and determination.

Kai pushed through the sage brush and took his position beside her. Up close, the cave mouth seemed even more ominous. The air that drifted out was wrong somehow—too cold for summer, carrying scents of wet earth and something else, something organic and ancient that made his skin crawl.

"Two!"

Taza joined them reluctantly, his face grim. "This is a mistake," he muttered, but he crouched into a running stance anyway.

"One!"

They burst forward together, feet pounding against the rocky ground. Shadi shot ahead immediately—she'd always been the fastest—but Kai had longer legs and determination born of pure stubbornness. He caught up to her just as they plunged into the cave's mouth, the sudden darkness swallowing them like a living thing.

Their footsteps echoed weirdly in the enclosed space, multiplying until it sounded like an army was running through the tunnels. Kai's eyes struggled to adjust, and he stumbled over loose rocks, nearly falling. Behind them, he could hear Taza cursing in their grandmother's language.

The passage sloped downward, twisting and branching in ways that seemed to defy the mountain's external shape. How could there be so many tunnels? How could they run so deep?

Shadi's laughter bubbled up from somewhere ahead, wild and echoing. "Can't catch me!" she called, and her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

Kai pushed harder, his lungs burning. The air grew thicker the deeper they went, heavy with moisture and that strange, organic smell. His hands, stretched out to feel for walls in the darkness, came away damp and strangely warm.

The tunnel opened suddenly into a vast chamber, and what little light filtered down from the entrance above revealed something that stopped all three children in their tracks.

The room was perfectly circular, carved with an precision that seemed impossible for natural formation. The walls were smooth as glass, covered in symbols that hurt to look at directly—not because they were unclear, but because they seemed to shift and writhe when observed. And in the center of the chamber stood a massive stone slab, rectangular and flat-topped like an altar.

Or like a grave marker.

"Jesus," Taza whispered, and his voice shook.

But Shadi was already running again, her small form darting toward the stone slab with renewed energy. "I'm going to win!" she called over her shoulder, her grin visible even in the dim light.

Kai's competitive instincts overrode his growing sense of wrongness. He sprinted after her, his feet slapping against stone that felt too smooth, too warm. Behind him, Taza shouted something that was lost in the chamber's strange acoustics.

Shadi reached the slab first, slapping her hand against its surface with a sound like thunder. But Kai was only a heartbeat behind, and as his palm struck the stone beside hers, the words tumbled out of him—words he'd heard in his grandmother's stories, words that felt ancient on his tongue:

"Here lies the Queen of Bones!"

The phrase echoed through the chamber, multiplying and layering until it became a chant, a declaration, a coronation. The symbols on the walls pulsed with a sickly light, and for just a moment, Kai could have sworn he saw something move in the shadows beyond the altar—small figures with too-long fingers and eyes like black stars.

Then everything went silent.

The sudden quiet was more terrifying than any sound. Even their breathing seemed muffled, absorbed by the chamber itself. Shadi looked around with wide eyes, her earlier bravado finally cracking.

"We should go," she whispered. "We should go right now."

They ran then, all three of them, scrambling through passages that seemed different somehow—longer, more twisted, with branches and offshoots that definitely hadn't been there before. Kai's logical mind tried to rationalize it: they were panicked, taking wrong turns, getting confused in the darkness. But deep down, he knew better.

The cave was changing around them.

They burst out of the entrance gasping and stumbling, the late afternoon sun seeming impossibly bright after the crushing darkness below. Kai collapsed onto his hands and knees, retching from exertion and terror. Beside him, Taza sat heavily on a boulder, his face pale as bone.

"Where's Shadi?" Taza asked after a moment.

Kai looked around, still catching his breath. The entrance to Brave Woman's Grave yawned behind them, exactly as they'd left it. The sage brush rustled in the evening breeze. But Shadi was nowhere to be seen.

"She was right behind us," Kai said, though even as he spoke, he wasn't sure that was true. When had he last heard her voice? When had he last seen that flash of silver bracelet in the darkness?

They called her name, voices growing increasingly desperate as they echoed off the mountainside. They searched the immediate area, then widened their search to include the creek and the old mining road. As the sun touched the horizon, painting the sky the color of blood, they finally accepted what their hearts had known since they'd emerged from the cave.

Shadi was gone.

The only trace of her they found was a single sneaker—the left one, still tied tight—sitting just inside the cave mouth as if she'd simply stepped out of it and walked deeper into the mountain's belly.

But that was impossible. They'd all run out together. Hadn't they?

Standing there in the gathering darkness, holding his cousin's abandoned shoe, Kai felt something fundamental shift inside him. The rational world he'd been building in his mind—the world of geology and logic and reasonable explanations—cracked like an eggshell.

And through that crack, something ancient and hungry began to whisper.

The search parties would come tomorrow. The tribal police, the volunteers, the dogs with their keen noses and trained instincts. They would find nothing. Brave Woman's Grave would swallow their lights and their hopes just as it had swallowed Shadi, leaving only questions and grief in its wake.

But Kai would carry more than grief. He would carry the weight of those words he'd spoken in the darkness, the title he'd unknowingly bestowed in a moment of childish competition.

Here lies the Queen of Bones.

He didn't know it yet, but those words had changed everything. In the deepest chamber of the mountain, on a throne he couldn't yet imagine, something that had once been his beloved cousin had heard her coronation.

And she was waiting.