Ayana watched beside him.

“You could have kept it,” she said.

“No.”

“Why?”

Gideon looked at the flames.

“Because remembering isn’t the same as carrying.”

Ayana considered that.

Then touched the Seventh tattoo above his heart.

“And this?”

He smiled faintly.

“Harder to burn.”

She traced the old ink.

“Good.”

Gideon looked surprised.

“Good?”

Ayana nodded.

“Scars should not always disappear.”

He understood.

Some scars warned.

Some testified.

Some reminded you who you had been.

And sometimes they proved that a person could become something else.

Gideon looked toward the mountains.

“So.”

“So?”

“You announced to several hundred people that I was your man.”

Ayana kept a perfectly straight face.

“I was under pressure.”

“Ah.”

“Bullets were flying.”

“Understandable.”

“I may have spoken too quickly.”

Gideon nodded solemnly.

“I suppose I should leave.”

He took one step.

Ayana caught his belt and pulled him back.

Gideon laughed.

It was the first time she had heard him laugh without sadness beneath it.

She placed both hands against his face.

“Gideon Thorne.”

“Yes?”

“My father saved your father.”

“He did.”

“You saved me.”

“Yes.”

“I saved you.”

“Repeatedly.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“Do not ruin this.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

Ayana looked toward the valley.

Ka was riding along the creek.

Abram sat outside the cabin repairing a saddle.

Farther north, smoke rose peacefully from her people’s camp.

The world had not become safe.

Perhaps it never would.

But it had become something Ayana had once believed impossible.

Open.

She turned back to Gideon.

“When I first saw your tattoo, I thought it told me everything about you.”

He said nothing.

“I was wrong.”

“So was I.”

“About what?”

“The night I found you.”

Ayana smiled faintly.

“You thought I was going to die?”

“No.”

His gray eyes softened.

“I thought I was saving you.”

Ayana waited.

Gideon glanced toward Ka.

Toward Abram.

Toward the peaceful valley where enemies had become witnesses, where the dead had finally been given names, and where two families once divided by blood now sat beneath the same evening sky.

Then he looked at Ayana.

“Turns out you were saving me.”

She kissed him.

Above them, the moon rose over the Chuska Mountains.

Not red this time.

Silver.

Clear.

Whole.

And Ayana understood at last why her father had carried a wounded enemy through the smoke of Black Mesa.

He had known something neither armies nor vengeance had ever understood:

The bravest thing a person could do was not die for hatred.

It was live long enough to end it.