“I have to,” I said. “I don’t have a choice.”
She laughed, a throaty sound that cut through the silence of the night. “You always have a choice,” she said. “We often don’t like what one of the choices is, so we ignore it, pretend it is not there.”
She blew more smoke out. “Why must you leave, Xochitl? Why are you not asking your parents for help?”
“You don’t know?” I said. “Were you not here?”
She squinted at me. “I know everything.”
“So you saw what Julio just did?”
The ember flickered in front of me, and seconds later, she blew smoke up into the air. “Did what?”
“Manolito is dead.”
The cigarillo stopped moving. “Dead?” More smoke. “Don’t joke with me, Xochitl. I don’t find that funny.”
“I’m telling the truth,” I said, and then a pang of guilt hit me. Maybe about this I am, I thought. “Julio killed Manolito for stealing from him. He’s a cuentista, and he took Lito’s story right out of his body.” I paused. Swallowed. “And then he had him torn apart by this creature that could track him. With his blood. He called it ‘un sabueso.’”
The effect was instant. Her cigarillo hung in the air, and it burned down as she stared at me. Her dark eyes were wide, so intently focused that a chill rushed over me. “Marisol? What is it?”
“Esa palabra,” she said. “Otra vez.”
“Sabueso,” I repeated. “Julio brought it out and—”
The cigarillo plummeted, tumbled over the ground, and Marisol swore. “I have to leave,” she said. “Now.”
She reached out and grabbed my hand, and a piercing pain shot up my arm. “Let me go!” I shouted, and I tried to yank my hand back, but she only held on tighter.
“Xochitl, you need to take my story,” she said. “You can’t let them get me.”
“What are you talking about?”
She dropped down to her knees, nearly pulling me down with her. She had both my hands in hers, and they were slick with sweat.
I had never seen her like this. Marisol, La Reina del Chisme, now looked more frightened than even Raúl had earlier that night.
“Marisol…,” I began.
“Take it,” she said. “Then you’ll know.”
I took a step back. Marisol had never sought me out in all the years I had been a cuentista. She said she had her own that she used, somewhere in Obregán. Why now? Why did she have to ask me now?
“I can’t!” I screamed. “You don’t understand—”
“It won’t matter,” she said. “I have seen los sabuesos before, and they only bring devastation.”
I breathed in deep, and when I said, “Tell me,” her terror burst up through me, up my arms and into my body. It was one of the quickest connections I had ever made with someone during the ritual, and her desperation to tell me the truth flooded my body and—
Let me tell You a story, Solís.
Marisol never wanted to leave her home. She had been born underground, had lived her life in the complex tunnels and chambers of Solado, the tradition she was taught to survive Your rage. It was a land far, far to the north.
Her fathers, Josué and Ricardo, had let her run the tunnels, and she spent her days getting to know the other people who lived underground with her. She would come home late in the afternoons, and she would tell her parents about all the stories she had been told that day. Josué in particular loved hearing them, and he would sit with Marisol in his lap, asking all the right questions, always interested, always loving. Even Ricardo, who worked overnight to help collect food for his aldea, soon became enamored with how much information Marisol was able to get in only one day.
They were the most knowledgeable family in Solado, and Marisol thrived most when she sat quietly, listening to the words and stories of those around her.
She stayed there for years, and it became her responsibility to teach the other children: about how to farm underground, when best to harvest vegetables, which aldeas nearby were best to travel to for supplies. She told stories, of a sort, to explain to others what it was like to live in Solado.
She never thought they were perfect, that they had no problems. Solado had to depend on Carmilo to the north for meat and cotton. While it was not forbidden to go above-ground, it was highly discouraged, and Marisol could recall only a handful of times that she stood on the earth itself, gazing up into the sky, at Solís and Their light. She had seen las estrellas at night even less, as angry bestias roamed the land above when darkness fell. Sometimes, if you crept close to the entrance, you could hear the creatures above them, snarling and growling outside.
But Marisol loved la comunidad. She loved the ways they survived in a universe that seemed so hostile and frightening. She loved her place in Solado, and by the time she was twenty, she was trusted. Believed. It was told that Marisol could get anyone to open up to her in her presence.
And it was around that time when they had ruined everything, stole it all from her.
They came in the night. She had her own home by then, carved out of a tunnel on the end, and she heard the shouts. The echoes. The snarls. Marisol sat upright in her bed, her heart beating in her throat.
A shadow passed by the entry. It was impossible. They wore masks with elongated snouts so no one could see their faces. Long white cloaks flowed behind them, stretching their shadows into frightening shapes. Every bit of their skin was covered. They seemed to be from some other time, some terrible place.
At first, she believed she was dreaming, and then she heard the screams, heard the tearing of flesh, and then she
