day and dusk to begin what looked like a challenging program.
“You’re murderers,” she said. “All of you. What punishment do you deserve?”
Terez lowered her head, silky blonde hair covering her face. Karena poked a finger into the dirt, her painted nail carving small holes through dead leaves. Fiore bared her teeth in a grin. Nobody spoke, but she could hear the hiss and spark of their answer.
Death, they did not say.
Jaguar chuckled. “Death would be too easy.”
Terez and Karena swayed and moaned, rolled back on their haunches and covered their heads with their hands.
Jaguar’s hand shot out and slapped Karena in the face. The moaning ceased.
She cast her gaze around the eco-site, with its high pines, birch saplings that stretched toward light, and floor padded with soft, wet leaves. “We’re going to make a sweat lodge,” she said. “Start gathering wood.”
The women stared at her blankly, and Jaguar shook her head. They were suburban women, all some flavor of Christian, used to the polite smiles and good clothes of Sunday church services. Spiritual ceremonies conducted naked on the damp earth were totally foreign to them. They had no idea what a sweat lodge was.
“Just do what I tell you,” Jaguar said, and set them to their tasks.
She took on the job of cutting saplings and bending them to the curves that would be the dome frame of a sweat lodge, which they would cover in the skins they’d carried into the woods from her vehicle. Fiore chopped wood into kindling for the fire they’d build. Terez gathered stones that would be heated in the fire. Karena dug a pit for the center of the lodge, where the heated stones would go once the ceremony began.
Their three bodies moved like patches of moonlight through the trees. They worked without speaking to her or each other, only occasionally asking for her attention nonverbally, to make sure they were doing their jobs correctly. Jaguar worked and listened to the language of their gestures as they performed their various tasks.
Terez, young and blonde and lovely, carried stones tentatively, one at a time, stumbling frequently over tree roots. She would place a stone near the circle where the fire was to be built, then stop and stare at Jaguar. When Jaguar smiled at her, she jerked her head away and went back to work.
Until a few weeks ago, she’d been a mathematics professor at a University, studying infinity, enjoying a perfect life with a perfect house and marriage. Then she killed her husband with a meat cleaver while preparing a vegetable stir-fry. Her crime was discovered when a colleague of her husband showed up at the house to see why he hadn’t come to work, and found a blood-spattered Terez sitting at the table, staring at a plate full of cold human parts mixed in artful arrangement with miniature corn and straw mushrooms. All she would say at the trial was that she was tired of being a vegetarian.
Since her sentencing to Planetoid Prison Three, she’d said nothing else, and it was Jaguar’s job to find out what lay under her continued silence.
Karena worked awkwardly, shoveling dirt slowly, stopping to brush the dirt off her rings, clean out a nail. She would pat at her head, as if to keep her close-cropped, carefully groomed curly dark hair in its place. She didn’t seem aware of Jaguar’s watchful eye. All her concern focused on somehow staying clean as she worked the earth.
In contrast, Fiore’s muscled back bent to her task with ease, and she didn’t stop to wipe the sweat off her face as she worked. Periodically, though, she would straighten her spine, press her hand against her lower back and lift her eyes to the moon, breathing deeply as if light and air were equally necessary for her lungs.
Jaguar watched, and listened to the spark and hiss of their unspoken fears. They wanted her to kill them, she knew. It would be easier than facing the tangle of power, desire and fear they were caught in.
The women worked together to pile the stones and cover them with wood and brush. The air, heavy and humid, defied the fire at first, and the three women struggled with matches as kindling caught and spit and refused to burn. Fiore stood over Karena and Terez impatiently, her dark skin shiny with sweat, and the silver streak in her black hair accenting the high color of her face and eyes.
She was 44 when she discovered she was pregnant for the first time, after being told she’d never bear children. The pregnancy proceeded without trouble until she began having labor pains in her sixth month. She was home by herself at the time, but she didn’t call a midwife. Instead she gave birth alone and easily, and her husband came home to find her licking at the remains of the tiny head.
Fiore pushed the other two women aside and grabbed the matches from them. She knelt in front of the fire and struck three against the box. She walked the circle of piled wood, directing the fire to the four quarters as Jaguar showed her. In her hand the blaze caught, her breath spreading the flames around the circle and toward the wood at the center, casting sharp points of shadow and light across the faces of the women.
Jaguar watched, letting the moon pour light into her, chanting the song her grandfather taught her to invite the play of spirit in.
Two hours passed as the rocks heated and Jaguar chanted and the moon ran in her course through the sky. The women began chanting with her, waiting for what they supposed was their punishment. They showed no signs of fatigue. The energy that coursed through them from the Artemis compound wouldn’t let them rest. Jaguar could feel the pull of it as the ritual space unfolded around them.
When the fire began to die down, Jaguar let Fiore kick the logs out of the way to reveal the glowing stones, and instructed her how to pick them up with the pitchfork, welcome them into the lodge with sage and water, slide them into the pit at the center. Then, she led the women inside the lodge.
As she knelt and pulled back the deerskin that covered the opening to the dome, she looked down and saw that blood stained the inside of her thigh, a warm trickle of red sliding from her body onto the earth. Fiore, looking at her from inside the dome, laughed as if she knew. The other women took up her laughter. They were all menstruating, sweat and blood mingling in a space much darker than any night.
The heat rose to a palpable mass as she pulled the deerskin down to cover the entrance to the sweat lodge. Once inside, she fed the fiery stones with sage, then poured water onto them. They sang as steam swarmed them. Even in the first round, where they honored the spirits of the East, it was a hot sweat. By the second round the other women had lowered themselves to the baseline of the lodge where they sucked in cool earth and moaned out responses to her chanting. She could feel the breathy openness of empathic space in them and around them. None had tested positive for psi capacities, but the sweat lodge sometimes opened regions long closed. And there was no telling what effect the Artemis compounds would have on any latent skills. No one had ever studied that. She’d find out more in the third round, when she’d make her first empathic contact with them.
She could hear Alex cautioning her against this, especially in the round of the West, called the House of No Words in Jaguar’s tradition. This was the place of death, the place of the ancestors and the black jaguar. Here you ceased being fully human or fully alive. You spoke only in the howls that came from the bottom of your belly and the scream that lived inside your throat. If she contacted them here she’d be touching primal energy, and that was risky. But it was also effective.
When she closed the door after the second round and poured more water on the stones, an inescapable fury of heat blanketed their skin. Jaguar tilted her head back and howled, and the other women followed suit, moaning and keening, barking and yipping and
