“Please,” she begged, and the coldness was gone. What was that in its place? Fear? “Give me this one thing, at least. Then you’ll understand.” She lifted herself up, rested on her elbows, and her piercing eyes bore right through me. “This isn’t a trick. I promise you.”
I shook my head. No, I thought. She’s with Julio. It’s a trap. I focused on the spot where the trail met the southern edge of the vista, hoping that I could see someone coming.
“You think he’s coming, don’t you?”
I looked down at her. “Who?”
“Julio,” she explained. “You think I’m here for you, don’t you?”
I wrinkled my brow up in response.
“You keep looking behind me. Like you’re expecting someone.”
I sighed. “Can you blame me? After what he did?”
“But I did something, too, and I can’t go to Julio. Not anymore. I have to clear my conscience before I continue on. And you could help me.”
“Why would I do that?” I stood up then and I walked away from her, taking the goatskin bag with me. This was foolish, and despite how exhausted I was, I had to leave. There was no way this was anything other than a ploy to keep me distracted. Julio was bound for us, and I was not going to let him catch me. I would lose myself in Obregán, and I would leave this entire nightmare behind.
“I can help you.”
I scoffed at her. “No, you can’t. Not with what I need.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, her voice in a high, pleading tone. “What my father did to him. But that’s not what I meant.”
I packed up my sleeping roll but kept la pala close.
“I can help you with something else.”
Don’t listen to her, I told myself.
“I know someone en mi aldea who can take your power away.”
I stilled.
My breath was caught in my throat.
“She offered it to my papi before he chose his path. Before he became corrupted.”
“You’re lying,” I said, and I couldn’t control how shaky I sounded. The idea was offensive. “There’s no way that’s true. You can’t give this up! No one can.”
“I know it can happen,” she insisted, and she stood and came toward me, her hands up. “My friend Ivan used to be a cuentista. He is the one who gave the power to Julio.”
“No!” I threw my hands up in the air. “And he did so without dying?”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Ivan fell in love with someone, someone who needed him, someone who understood him. So he sought out our curandera—Simone—and she did it for him. She said it could never be reversed. And Papi volunteered to take it on. He…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. Her gaze dropped down, and her bottom lip quivered.
“He what?” I moved closer. “Emilia, what did he do?”
“I have to tell you my story,” she said.
“But I don’t know if I can!” I said, my face twisting in frustration. “You heard the truth back there.” I pointed to the south, toward Empalme. “Those stories … they’re all still inside me.”
“Please,” she pleaded once more, wiping at her tear-streaked face.
She was manipulating me. She had to be. If a pesadilla threatened her, then maybe I should leave her be, let it claim her for all the times she never bothered to stop the brutality of her father.
But it was so hard. This was what I had been told to do. It was all I did. And kneeling there, in front of someone who seemed so desperate, I didn’t know how to say no.
No matter how far I had run from Empalme, I was a cuentista. I knew nothing else.
“That is all I will do for you,” I said, and my voice was flat, threatening. “After I am done, you will tell me where to find Si- mone, and then I’m leaving.”
She nodded quickly. “It’s not a trap,” she said, and maybe if she hadn’t always been so cold, I would have felt pity for her. She sat up, her hair now tied in one long braid down her back, and she still trembled when she held her hands out. A panic threaded through my veins, and I told myself that if this was a trap, I was probably surrounded already.
Was I wrong to be curious? Was I wrong to want to know why she had followed me so very far, without any supplies that I could see?
I reached out. Put my palms faceup. Emilia put her hands in mine—they were wet with sweat, and now I could see that her arms were covered in a dark substance, dust and dirt caked on to it. Blood.
Whose blood?
“Are you ready?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Tell me, Emilia. Why are you here?”
Let me tell You a story, Solís.
Emilia was born far, far to the north, in a place she was too young to remember, and then she was taken to a land of devastation when she was still an infant.
She grew up in Solado.
Julio never forgave himself for what had happened. They came at night, dressed in strange pale outfits with monstrous masks on their faces, and then, when Emilia’s family awoke, they were underground, in a new home, one that was forced upon them. Her family learned the hard way that this was how they took you: under the cover of night, while you slept, when you were most vulnerable.
They had a name, one given to them by the original inhabitants of Solado, those who had survived the initial attack:
Los pálidos.
The ones who wore the pale vestiments.
Emilia’s mother, Alegría, told her stories of where they had lived before: among los árboles, the cover of the leaves shielding them from the heat of Solís. Whenever she spoke of this place, her eyes sparkled. Emilia could tell she missed it.
It was nothing like the tiny room they inhabited in Solado.
All their homes were carved out of the underground passageways. They were cool and dark, which Emilia loved. It was all she
