The four of us stared at one another. Rosalinda and Felipe must have known that this was a bad omen, for they both looked terrified.
I had to know.
“Protect you from what?”
Now the children stilled, as we had done earlier. They looked to one another, then to Gabriela and Pablo. She nodded, and they scattered, disappearing into piles of rubble or beneath the wall. It was sudden, almost as if it had been planned. The first of them returned, hair shorn unevenly, face gaunt and desperate, and held it out for me—and I fell off the stone I sat on.
A skull.
A skull like the one I’d found before, when I was alone.
Long. Horned. Impossible.
Yet here it was.
Rosalinda started praying to you as Felipe whimpered. Emilia reached out to it, ran her fingers over the clean bone of the horns.
“Un sabueso,” she said.
“They started attacking us,” the girl said. “The guardians protected us, but they came to us not too long ago, said that they knew where they were coming from.” The rest of the children went quiet, and the girl continued. “Carlito insisted on going. That was when we last saw him.”
“But why are all of you here?” Rosalinda said, her voice loud, echoing off the ruins. “No adults, no parents … where are they?”
Gabriela beamed. “Oh, they’re up north! In Solado. Eduardo took them there.”
“¿What?” Emilia yanked her hand away from the skull.
“Our parents couldn’t take us with them, so we stayed here.”
Pablo rejoined us and with him came many of the others, some of them carrying skulls of these horrible bestias, but most carried random objects.
Una cobija.
Un rebozo.
Serapes.
Little items, things that someone could leave behind.
Things that reminded the children of who had continued on.
Without them.
“Eduardo promised that as soon as he could, he would come take us back to them,” explained Pablo. He opened his hand to me. A small stone, a brilliant green, shone there in the starlight. “This is his promise,” he said. “That he would come back for me.”
“But why?” Emilia asked. “Why would they go there?”
“For work,” said Gabriela. “To build us a new life, and then invite us there when things are ready.”
Emilia had her hands on her temples, and panic flooded her. “Xochitl,” she said, “they can’t go there. I barely escaped from it.”
“You’re from Solado?” The one who had brought us the first skull lit up. “Can you bring back our parents?”
Emilia’s eyes went glassy.
She turned and ran off, past the wall and into the darkness.
“Go,” said Rosalinda. “I’ll talk with the others. She needs you.”
I followed after her, my eyes still adjusting to the surreality around me. I hopped over a section of crumbled wall, hoping she had not gone far. Even with the starlight above, I was in an unfamiliar place. The shadows taunted me with untold horrors lurking just out of sight.
“Emilia?” I called out softly. “Please talk to me.”
I saw her outline, a dim shape not far from me. I came up behind her and I fought the urge to smother her in an embrace, to kiss the back of her neck, to tell her that everything would be fine.
I did not know her like that.
I probably never would.
So instead, I stood next to her, and we stared out across that vast expanse, that empty desert that stretched so far in front of us, out toward the towering montañas we would have to cross the next morning. I existed in that silence there, wondering so many things. What awaited us in Solado? Had los pálidos maintained their hold over la aldea? How were we ever going to find Simone?
And what if Simone wouldn’t help me?
I swallowed down my anxiety, unsure once more if it was my own or if it belonged to one of the stories in my belly.
“We have to go back,” she said, her voice soft but certain. “Not just for Luz. Not just for Simone. But for them, too.”
I laced my fingers with hers.
“For all of them,” I said.
And I meant it.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but we can’t let this go on.” She squeezed my hand.
I squeezed back.
“I am not sure what we’ll find in Solado, Xo. And I can’t promise it’ll be easy.”
“I never thought this was going to be easy,” I countered, smiling.
“But … los pálidos,” she said. “I know where they live, and I know how to get into Solado, but … it’s going to be really hard.”
“It’s worth it,” I said.
And I meant that, too. Maybe not in the way she did, but I did. It could not be easy to be around me, but she still was. That had to mean something, right?
“Let’s head back,” I suggested. “Get some sleep. We’ll figure things out in the morning.”
“Yes,” she said. “In the morning.”
She guided me back.
The whole time, she held my hand.
The children suggested that we sleep outdoors. They had not done so in a long time, but they felt safer with us around. Rosalinda was concerned it would be too dangerous. “What of the attacks?” she asked. But they said that there’d be some of them on patrol. We’d be fine.
The idea was too strange to me, but they wouldn’t accept any arguments. “We know what we’re doing,” Gabriela assured me, and she lifted her chin up when she said it.
To refuse her would disrespect her, so we accepted.
I spread out my sleeping roll not far from the underground entrance, then found a spot nearby to relieve myself. I covered up my waste, then ran water over my hands to clean them. When I turned back, Emilia was sitting on her own sleeping roll next to me.
“Eat something else,” she told me, and she held out some dried cabra for me. “Even if you aren’t hungry.”
I begrudgingly took the food and bit off a piece. Then I collapsed onto my sleeping roll, chewing.
“We should make it to Solado tomorrow,” said Emilia.
Tomorrow.
Only another sunrise before I found the person I was looking for.
Another
