Chapter Three
By the afternoon of his third day in Albuquerque, Qadim had cleared nearly a half-mile radius around the hotel he had designated as his new home. He could see the contours of the land better now, where it rolled and where it was flat. The soil was terribly depleted from years of human interference, however, and so he brought in new topsoil and seeded it with native grasses and plants and trees, sending them the nutrients they needed to grow. He would have preferred a landscape of green, rich grass, so different from the barren surroundings he’d left behind in the otherworld, but he knew it would never survive here in this high desert environment, and he would not do what humans had always been far too eager to do — plant according to their own aesthetics, and not based on wh
