But You said nothing. So all I had was my imagination.
I imagined many things.
What if Simone was not real?
What if Solado was a mistake?
What if las poemas were a cruel trick, meant to tempt me and torment me and drive me far from home, from my duty?
Or maybe the zopilotes would follow me on the path to Solado, would descend upon my body to feast upon it—but while I was still alive, still breathing.
Or I would return to Empalme, and the gate would be locked. My entrance denied. They had found another cuentista, and I was no longer needed. No home, no purpose anymore.
We were so alone, Solís. We had discarded our previous lives to find something else, somewhere else, and here we were, placed in the hands of someone we barely knew, who had lost her sense of where we were supposed to go, a sense that You had previously given her. We were without help, without a means of salvation if something went horribly wrong.
It already had.
Each of us a desert, each of us a curse.
We could all die, and no one would ever find us.
So we walked to our fate, and I stopped praying to you that night. You couldn’t help us anymore.
No.
You wouldn’t help us anymore.
Las estrellas settled in the sky, and because of them, I could see the distant outline of yet more sierras in the north, and it tired me, Solís. I did not want to climb again; I did not want to push my body further than I had ever pushed it. I wanted more than anything to cease, to give myself over to the inevitability of it all.
But I didn’t.
I kept going.
The world came alive around us, and I began to scope out areas that seemed safe enough to set up for the night. Creatures skittered in the underbrush. Felipe nearly stepped on a snake, golden stripes on its vibrant scales, and we all watched as it slithered into the shadows.
We did not know what caused most of the noise; the creatures darted off when they heard us. I occasionally caught a flash of light in the irises of some bestia, some terrible thing that might have been stalking us. Were we the rare prey that had wandered into the hunting grounds of untold monsters? Las estrellas sparkled, enough for us to have suitable visibility, but without you, it was still a land of shadows.
Each of us a desert. Each of us alone.
Especially me.
I was the first to notice it: a crumbling structure that blended in with the rolling hills behind it. I held out a hand to tell the others to stop, and I focused on the structure, trying to discern more details, and I realized it was much bigger than I had first thought.
“What is that?” Emilia asked.
I kept my hand raised.
It was a wall.
Much like la ciudad we had passed through, the wall was a mess, a pathetic echo of what it had once been. A ghostly image. The gray bricks and stones seemed to have crumpled long ago and lay in chaotic piles on the ground.
“Not a very good wall,” said Felipe. “You can walk through it.”
A whisper.
Faint.
Impossible.
“Stop talking,” I said.
“Why? It’s not like—”
“Stop. Talking.” I hissed at Felipe, and I knew I was being harsh, but I had heard it again.
Felipe shrank away from me and into the arms of Rosalinda, who scowled my way.
What was out here? What had we stumbled into?
“Emilia,” I said softly, my eyes locked on the remains of the wall, scanning it for any sign of life. “Did you come across this place on your travels?”
“No,” she said. “I know we traveled far to the west before we headed south. I think we missed it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can feel it again. Solís guiding me, that is.”
I faced her. “You’re going to have to explain that.”
“We came from that direction,” she said, pointing ahead of us, toward las montañas in the north. “But I remember descending in the morning and—” She thought for a moment, then turned her body to the west and pointed. “—we definitely went that way, then headed south.”
I had no time to react to that. As soon as she stopped talking, I heard something new: the scrape of stone on stone.
We stilled.
A head poked out from behind a pile of rubble. All I could make out in the starlight was that the figure was small, with black hair and dark skin. “Eduardo?”
What?!
“No,” I said. “I’m Xochitl. Who are you?”
The person stepped out from behind the stones, and Rosalinda cried out. The piece of the wall behind them was at least three times their height.
It was a child.
They came from behind the wall and rushed up to me, but stopped an arm’s length away. They were indeed young—perhaps much younger than Raúl, who was twelve—and then they scowled at me. “Why are you here? What do you want with us?”
“Us?” Emilia said.
I couldn’t help the sound I made, the cry that erupted from my mouth. They appeared from all over, tiny heads and faces from behind the ruins, from inside the piles of stones and brick, and they swarmed up to us. Some held stones, and others held weapons crafted from the ruins, from wood, and I saw one girl with a rotted arm of a saguaro jammed over a wooden stick, the needles jutting out threateningly.
“There are more of us than you,” the boy said. “What do you want?”
Rosalinda dropped down to her knees. “Ay, Solís, this is all too much,” she said, her head craned back, her prayer spitting up into the sky. “Please, help us, Solís.”
“What did you need help with?”
This came from a girl, whose face was stained with some sort of reddish ink in a rough pattern. She held a stone in her right hand, and I completely believed that she
