As Carol, Daryl, and Rick were hiked through the forest, two gunshots rang out in the far distance. Daryl assumed it was one of their own hunters, probably Rosita or Father Nicholas, since Dixon was with the kids at the temporary camp, and all of the other hunters relied on bow or spear.

Wohali turned in the direction of the gunfire. "For a small camp, you sure have a lot of hunters in our woods." He turned forward again. "Not to worry. I've sent my best scouts to rut them out."

Wohali rode easy in Thunder's saddle, as though he were an experienced horseman. He must be about sixty-five, Daryl thought. He wondered if the man was actually a Native American or a King Ezekiel type, playing a role and building a fantasy to give his people a sense of community and a hope of survival. Most of these men did look like they might be of Native American heritage, except for a single black man, who could have, like Patrick, been adopted into the tribe. Or kidnapped into it.

That was a possibility that sat heavy in Daryl's stomach. A young girl, thirteen, on the cusp of sexual maturity, taken as a potential future wife for one of Wohali's grandsons, or worse yet, one of his forty-something sons, or…Daryl shuddered to think of it…for him.

But if Patrick had been kidnapped into the tribe eight years ago, he'd acclimated to his captors in time and earned their trust, because he had clearly been given responsibility and freedom to roam the forest alone. Daryl wanted to ask questions of this seeming chieftain, but he was afraid he'd put his foot in his mouth, so he was glad when Rick made the attempt.

The ex-cop walked quickly to catch up with the horse Wohali's rode and asked, "Who's Deyani?"

"My daughter."

"And why will you know the truth when you have taken us to her? Is she a soothsayer?"

Wohali chuckled, but he did not reply.

Rick let the silence ride for a moment and then ventured, "I didn't realize there were any federally recognized tribes in West Virginia."

"Do you think we require the white man's recognition?" Wohali replied coolly.

Maybe Wohali was a little of both, Daryl thought, a little bit the real deal, and a little bit playacting. Maybe he'd taken a kernel of his own identity and exploded it into something bigger in the end times.

"No, of course not," Rick hastened, "it's just…I wondered how you came to be here, in West Virginia. Did your people have a reservation before all this?"

"We had our lands," Wohali replied. "Which we owned. A land trust, not a reservation. We could buy, sell, and own. And we had our township, which we built. We maintained it when the earth groaned, but fourteen months ago, it was destroyed by fire and flood and the wendigo, and so we moved north."

"You're from the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina then?" Rick asked. "Eastern Band of Cherokee?"

Wohali looked at him with surprise. "Yes. When our lands were destroyed, we became nomads for a winter, but now we have settled these new lands. We have begun to rebuild."

The Qualla Boundary. Daryl hadn't checked there. All the state and federal and local parks he'd swung by in his repeat journey from Virginia to Georgia and back, and he hadn't checked there. The path to Richmond from Fun Kingdom ran east, and Qualla Boundary was slightly west. But what if they had gone northwest with the intention of eventually swinging east toward Shirewilt? Or what if they had simply been caught up by scouts from the tribe while in North Carolina and then taken west to the Qualla Boundary?

Fuck it! Why hadn't he thought to check that reservation?

"Do you farm?" Rick asked.

"Soon we will harvest the three sisters."

"The three sisters?" Carol asked from beside Daryl.

Wohali glanced back at her. "Selu, tuya, and iya."

"Corn, beans, and squash," Rick explained.

"Were you a high school history teacher?" Wohali asked him. "Before the earth groaned?"

"Small town cop," Rick replied. "But I used to quiz Carl for his fifth-grade American history tests."

Daryl watched Wohali's reaction when Rick said Carl—a name the ex-cop had intentionally dropped and emphasized. Wohali's mouth twitched, almost as if in a grimace of pain, and then straightened again, but his face otherwise betrayed no expression. He spurred his horse forward, just enough that Rick couldn't keep up by walking.

They arrived at the tribe's camp about forty minutes later. Wohali strolled Thunder to a stop in the midst of the camp and dismounted. The men split off from them and went about their business, leaving only Wohali. Daryl watched a man walk away with crossbow and made note of the cabin into which he disappeared.

Wohali hadn't been kidding about rebuilding. At least thirty bark-roofed windowless log cabins littered the open field in this valley in the shadow of the mountain, while another appeared to be under construction. Each cabin had a single door and a smoke hole in the roof. Women, some wearing tear dresses and some canvas work pants, tilled fields of corn and tended vegetable gardens. An old man sat outside an open door sharpening arrow heads. Beside him an old lady ground cornmeal with a mortar and pestle. Two boys played some kind of game that involved heaving spears into the distance and seeing who could reclaim them first. A Cherokee man was hanging a deer hide to tan. A portly white man sat on a tree stump where he seemed to be carving a flute. Chickens clucked in a large, wire-fenced coop where a Black woman was busy gathering eggs. A slingshot hung from her back pocket.

A woman, who looked more Japanese than Native American, and who wore a bow and quiver on her shoulders, approached the group. She seemed to have been patrolling the perimeter of the camp.

"Yumiko, are Kelly and Magana back with the other search party?" Wohali asked.

The woman shook her head. "Not yet. But you've found Concotocko! Is he badly hurt?"

"He's been temporarily treated but needs to be brought to consciousness. He requires hydration and may need stitches his rescuers were unable to provide."

"Are these his rescuers?" Yumiko nodded toward Carol, Rick, and Daryl.

"Yes."

"Then why are they bound?"

"It's a precaution until I receive confirmation."

"Confirmation of what?"

Wohali ignored her question, and now that Daryl studied his eyes, he did read expression there, but not the emotions he would have anticipated. He read fear. And sorrow. But Wohali's voice betrayed none of that when he ordered, "Bring Concotocko to the medicine woman. When he's conscious, send for me."

Yumiko nodded and took the horse by its reins with Patrick slung across its saddle.

"Luke!" Wohali called to the man who had been busy carving a flute. "Bring this other horse to the stables."

The man nodded, set down his flute, and walked over to take Thunder's reins. As he was leaving, Wohali called after him, "Where is Deyani?"

"In her cabin."

Wohali turned and looked at his captives. "Follow me."

As Rick walked alongside the elder, he asked, "Why don't Luke and Yumiko and this Kelly and Magna person have Cherokee names?"

"Because they just joined our tribe seven months ago," Wohali replied. "They're all adults, and a new name would not stick easily. That and we're running out of worthy names."

Wohali strolled quickly toward the open door of one of the cabins, his three captives struggling to keep up with their hands bound behind their backs. He called "Deyani?" as he approached the door.

A woman came hurrying out of the opening at the sound of his voice. "Concotocko?" she cried. "Did you find him, agidoda?"

"He is safe," Wohali assured her with a comforting hand to her shoulder. "He is well. A wound, but it will heal. He's with the medicine woman."

Deyani let out a great sigh of relief. "And Tala?"

"Still with the scouts, investigating those gunshots. He'll be pleased you asked after him."

By now, the captives had caught up and stood on the earth a few feet from the cabin. Wohali, who had been blocking Daryl's view of Deyani, turned sideways to reveal her.

Daryl looked over the woman Wohali had previously called his daughter. She wore a red-and-white tear dress and moccasin boots. Now twenty-one, she had blossomed into a beautiful woman. She was three or four inches taller than she had been at thirteen. Her strawberry blonde hair had darkened to brown with tints of red and had grown down to below her waist, where it fell in two thick braids. Her freckles had faded to a much lighter smattering across her face. Her transformation overawed him, and before Daryl could open his mouth, Carol had already cried, "Sophia!"

Sophia gasped. She ran to embrace her long lost mother but pulled back abruptly. "Why are they bound, agidoda? Cut them loose this instant! All of them!"

Wohali drew his knife and slid it between Rick's wrists to cut the ropes. Next he freed Daryl and then Carol, who threw her freed arms around her daughter and wept. She eventually pulled free to give Daryl a turn. As he clung to Sophia, his throat felt almost too dry to swallow. "I searched for you, Soph," he murmured. "I searched and searched. From Virginia to Georgia and back. Again and again. I swear to God I did. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But I searched, trip after trip, month after month, until I lost hope."

Sophia pulled away, and her light brown eyes were shimmering with tears. "I thought you were dead! I thought you all were dead! After we escaped Fun Kingdom on the horses, we lost Freckles. Then we must have wandered for a month, just trying to get north. We were famished and near dead when the tribe rescued us and took us to Qualla. They nursed us back to health. Once we were strong again, I begged Wohali," she nodded to the elder, "to take us to look for you. I thought maybe you would have gone to Shirewilt, to Noah's neighborhood."

"Smart girl," Daryl said. "Knew you'd think it!"

"Didn't you see my notes?" Carol cried.

Sophia nodded. "Go to the following address: My birth month followed by your birthday on a street with the same name as the last name of your 4th grade teacher. So we did."

"And you didn't find Zach?" Carol asked. "At the botanical gardens?"

"What botanical gardens?" Sophia returned. "At 1018 Washington Street, there was a historic estate. The whole place had been burned to the ground. Nothing was left but the charred, unrecognizable bodies of whoever had once camped there. We thought what had happened at Fun Kingdom had happened again. We thought you were all dead. After that..." Sophia shook her head. "We returned and settled in Qualla, until it was destroyed a little over a year ago. And then we found this valley to settle."

"But your fourth grade teacher, Sophia," Carol said, "she was named Mrs. Wallace."

Sophia blinked. "I thought her name was Washington?"

Carol sobbed.

"It's okay, it's okay," Sophia assured her, hugging her again. "It's okay, Mama. I'm alive. You're alive!" She pulled back and wiped a tear from Carol's cheek. "What about the others? Did anyone else escape the fire? And what about your group that was up north at the time, are they all still alive?"

Carol swiped at the tears beneath her eyes with the back of her hand. She couldn't speak, so Daryl answered for her, "Noah died a few years back. He had a kid, though, 'fore he did, with this girl named Tina. That kid still lives. Mika, Luke, and Judith are still alive. So are Dixon, Beth, Maggie, Glenn, Rosita, T-Dog, Andrea, Michonne, Eliza, Louis," Sophia's smile grew with each familiar name, "Zach, Tara, Duane, Rosita-they all made it out. A few more of the kids." He couldn't remember their names anymore, not after eight years, not after they'd settled at Oceanside and he'd never known them well to begin with. "And Rick, of course," he nodded to Rick, who had been waiting tensely through all this.

Sophia stepped tentatively forward and hugged him. "You look so different with the beard," she said as she drew back.

"And the graying hair?" he quipped. Then he swallowed hard and asked the question that had no doubt been on his mind this entire time. "Carl?"

Wohali's nostrils flared and he looked at the ground. Sophia gritted her teeth and blinked repeatedly but couldn't hold back the tears that started to pool in her eyes. She opened her mouth but then closed it again. All she could manage to say, after repeated attempts to speak, was, "I'm so sorry."

It was Wohali who had to explain. "We called him Junaluska, which means one who tried and failed, because when we found the kids, sick and weak as he was, he tried to fight us, to defend his friends against us. He couldn't of course, and he soon learned we meant him no harm, but oh how valiantly he tried. And he was like that ever since. Brave, headstrong, always rushing against the impossible." Wohali exhaled shakily. "When fire and flood assaulted our homeland, and the wendigo threatened to overtake us all, he fought. He fought so valiantly, and it was because of him that Deyani and so many others escaped with their lives. But it is with great sorrow I must tell you," he looked at Rick with watery, dark eyes, "he did not. Junaluska died a warrior, giving his life for his people."

Rick groaned out a long nooooo! and fell to his knees on the earth. Sophia got down on hers and hugged him, but she pulled away when a baby began crying from within the cabin behind her. The plaintiff wail drifted through the doorway, and the sound of it caused Rick's sobs to taper off. "You have a baby?" he asked in awe.

"Come," Wohali told him, extending his hand to Rick. "Though you cannot see your son, you can still see his reflection."

Rick swiped at his eyes. He clasped Wohali's outstretched hand and asked, "His reflection? What does that mean?"

Wohali pulled Rick to his feet and turned toward the cabin. "It shines in your grandson."