Las estrellas.
She awoke in the back of a wooden cart, one that rumbled and bounced along a dirt trail, and the sun was just beginning to rise. She lifted herself up, and the sight of the desert made her gasp. The hills unfolded around them, the landscape stretched out in every direction, and panic filled her. She had lived her entire life trapped, enclosed, with ceilings and walls she could reach and touch at all times. There was a thickness in the air from Your heat, and she ran fingers over her arms, her face, down her legs, felt the moisture along them, the way sweat beaded on her skin, and she sucked the air deep into her lungs. It did not poison her. She did not collapse, she did not plunge to the ground and clutch her chest, she did not die.
She was still alive. What else had she been lied to about?
Emilia saw her father ahead of her on a light brown horse, but he seemed uninterested in her. They journeyed in silence, and she did not know what direction they traveled. South, as Julio had declared? West? East? How far had they gone to escape the land of ash?
By the time You were firmly in the sky, she had prayed to You. Asked You to tell her what was happening. But You said nothing. Julio and his men—she counted nine of them—instead spoke of what awaited them in each new aldea. Riches. Glory. Power. They spoke of a time long ago, centuries before La Quema, when there was a dignity in control, a respect gained from taking what you wanted. “That is what our masters taught us,” Julio said, riding alongside the cart. “We are done pleasing Solís, mija, so you can stop praying. We are done living by all these rules, in all this guilt, and we are done waiting for a god to speak to us. We will speak to Them.”
She wanted Luz back, Solís. She didn’t care if Julio left them both to do whatever he wanted. She just wanted to see Luz’s soft face and her brown eyes.
She wanted to see her mami, too, but she knew that was impossible.
They traveled all day, and Emilia experienced the true intensity of Your burning. There were no shadows, no caverns to duck back into when You became too hot. It drained her, and her skin was tender and red the next morning. But still they pressed on, and by mediodía on the next day, they arrived en la aldea of La Palmita, and that was the first time Emilia saw death. Julio led them to the center of La Palmita and slaughtered a woman who was stretching out hides to dry in the sun. She watched as Julio’s saber was lifted in the air, the way it swiftly dropped down, the spray of red, the scream cut short as the act repeated. When the woman’s son tried to stop Emilia’s father, one of Julio’s men stuck him with a long blade, then laughed as he squirmed and shook on the ground.
La Palmita was theirs now.
But this display was not enough. Emilia watched in horror as Papi called out to the man curled up over the bodies of the woman and the boy that he had killed. He ordered the man, whose long, scraggly hair was coated in the sweat of terror, to kneel before him. Then Julio placed his hand on his head, and with no hesitation, the man was telling the truth: admitting his crimes. His misdeeds. His betrayals.
And then he told Julio where he could find the food stores for La Palmita.
“I am now your cuentista,” Julio announced. “And you will not defy me.”
Emilia couldn’t remember how long they stayed there, how many people Julio and his men killed in that first aldea. Time passed without any meaning or sense, and the days bled together like the pile of corpses left in the plaza of La Palmita.
You said and did nothing, Solís. So they continued.
As soon as they got bored, after they had stolen everything they could, after la gente de La Palmita resorted to hiding in their homes to avoid any contact with Julio and his men, the terror finally ended. Julio gathered what he could—all the more richer, all the more certain that he was on a divine path—and led his men to their next conquest.
Emilia went with them. She could not see any other options.
They would travel again, farther and farther each time, and then they would descend on a new aldea like a swarm, using their violence and Julio’s power to take everything. Emilia became numb to death, and she prayed to You to give her a way out of this. She wondered whether she had done something wrong, if she had kept some horrible secret from You, and this was how You forced her to pay the price. Her pesadilla had manifested as Julio, her immorality born as this journey of violence.
You did not answer her.
She moved from aldea to aldea, drifted from one display of horror to another, and she had no means of stopping the monster her papi had become. She soon lost track of how long it had been since she left Solado. A month? Two? They never traveled long before they found a new aldea, a new comunidad to terrorize.
And then she came to Empalme.
Julio did not tire of death, but she realized that he was spending longer and longer in each aldea, treating them as if they were a game to be played. She watched as they quietly moved into Empalme; she watched Julio plan what to take control of;
