Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  “Yeah, fine,” Pao said, feeling an anger rise in her—an anger much older than this terrible week. “Go ahead—bail. That’s what you’re good at now, right? Hey, maybe if me and Emma both die, you’ll finally be free to leave us behind! You can go be a cool kid without your dweeby elementary school friends holding you back.”

  Dante’s jaw dropped, but he didn’t deny it.

  She didn’t wait for him to come up with a response. “I’m going to find Emma,” Pao said. “I care what happens to my friends.”

  It was hard to walk away, like moving through molasses instead of air, but she did it anyway, pointing herself toward the middle of the cactus field.

  Dante would either go home or he would follow. He called out for her to stop once, twice, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. If she stopped, she might lose her nerve. She might go home, too, and Emma would never be found, and it would be all her fault.

  She had to find Marisa Martínez and ask her why she wasn’t at the bottom of the river. She had to find out what the third quarter was. She had to keep going.

  The light was dim in the cactus field, and she couldn’t tell what time of day it was. The sky was gray and sunless, and the plants cast no shadows. Pao walked straight ahead to keep herself from getting turned around. She hoped it would work.

  Eventually, she told herself, she’d either find someone or reach the end of the field.

  But the cacti just grew denser as she pushed on, blocking her view. Dante’s calls had long since faded behind her.

  Or maybe he’d just stopped calling.

  Maybe he really had gone home.

  The farther in Pao traveled, the faster her pulse began to pound. With her heart in her throat, she started to run, needing to feel like she was making progress, any progress, instead of just walking on a treadmill.

  She’d felt so brave when she set out, but now she was alone, with no real plan, and she’d just yelled at her best friend, and it was so quiet in here. So hauntingly, horribly quiet.

  Pao ran faster, tripping as the ground became uneven. She couldn’t hear the river over the sound of her own accelerated heartbeat. Had she strayed too far from the Gila?

  At last, the cacti started to thin out, and Pao’s breath came easier despite her exertion. Maybe Marisa would be just around the next corner. Maybe Emma…

  But when familiar terrain came into view, it wasn’t the edge of the cactus field. It was a small clearing, and there was an impression in the sand where just a few minutes ago—or had it been hours?—she had lain unconscious on the ground.

  Dante was on his knees, brushing sand off the bottle of Florida Water, and Pao felt the sobs in her throat before she heard herself make a sound.

  “No!” she said. “No, no, no! I went straight. I was going straight the whole time.”

  “Pao?” Dante said, standing up and taking a step toward her. “Where are you going?” he asked, as if she’d never been gone at all.

  “No,” she said, holding out an arm. “No.” She started off in the opposite direction, a terrible hypothesis forming in her head. She took care never to turn, to point her sneakers forward no matter what.

  But this time, it took less than a minute before she was deposited back in front of Dante.

  She tried again, despite his protestations, but no matter which way she set out, she always found herself right back where she started.

  Pao’s hands started to shake. Her breath came in gasps. There was no way out. She was stuck in this field, the cacti holding her hostage. Pao sank to the ground, wrapped her arms around her legs, and pressed her eyes into her kneecaps.

  “It doesn’t make any sense…” Pao whispered. “It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Pao, stop,” Dante said, kneeling next to her.

  But Pao couldn’t contain it. Sobs came from somewhere deep in her chest, her back heaving with the weight of them. “This…doesn’t…make…sense….”

  Dante scooted closer and tried to put an arm around her, but Pao recoiled, jumping to her feet, feeling like every breath was being dragged from a throat full of broken glass.

  “Emma is gone!” she said. “And I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or awake!” Another sob broke free. Her hands were still trembling. “I can’t fix this, Dante! I can’t develop theories or test them! Everything I know is useless if nothing’s going to make sense and this cactus field won’t let us go….” Another gasp. “What if none of this is real? What if I’m going crazy?”

  Pao couldn’t breathe. Her throat felt like it was getting smaller and smaller, the shards of glass overlapping until there was no space left for air. She clutched at her neck, thinking of all the things that had happened, of Emma, and of home—so close and so far away.

  Whenever things got to be too much, Pao had always turned to science for reassurance. The science of the river. The science of the subconscious and dreams. The science of panic and adrenaline. Up until now, there hadn’t been anything she couldn’t explain or justify.

  But here, her best tools were useless. Here, there was no logic for her to rely on.

  Mom would know what to do, Pao thought, possibly for the first time in all her twelve years. Her mother would have known how to solve the riddle of the cactus field. She would have understood what Ondina was and why Marisa didn’t seem to be dead and what the third quarter was and why no one would shut up about it.

  And if only Pao had listened to her, had just believed that the world might be bigger and stranger than she thought, maybe she wouldn’t be stuck here with all her useless science knowledge and no way out.

  Dante tried to meet her eyes, no doubt on the verge of attempting to comfort her again, but she turned away, stumbling to the nearest cactus and kicking something hard that went spinning off into the strange early dusk. She doubled over, trying to draw in a breath that would satisfy her, and failing. Always failing.

  If this wasn’t a dream…if she couldn’t wake up…

  “Mama,” she heard herself say, the tears spilling over. “Help me….”

  “Pao,” said Dante, and something in his voice made her look at him. Had she managed to summon her mother here? Stranger things had happened today….

  But when she straightened up, they were still alone, and Dante was staring at the ground with an expression that told Pao this was all about to get even weirder.

  If that were at all possible.

  Pao walked toward him, still hiccupping around her sobs, not entirely sure she wasn’t going to start yelling again.

  “What is it?” she asked, her voice wobbling in a totally undignified way.

  “Look,” he said, pointing down. “The flashlight.”

  It was up against the base of a particularly ancient, half-petrified saguaro. Pao had kicked it when she stumbled away to cry, and the impact had caused it to switch on.

  But that wasn’t the strange part.

  The strange part was that the flashlight was pointed at Pao, but its beam was shining to her left. Bending in the air like there weren’t laws of nature that definitely prevented that kind of thing.

  Dante nudged the flashlight with his toe, turning it toward himself, and as Pao watched in disbelief, the light bent at an even more extreme angle, continuing to point to what Pao thought might have been east, if directions even mattered in here.

  No matter where Dante aimed the case, the beam stubbornly shone in an easterly direction.

  Maybe it was the sheer absurdity of what was happening, or maybe she was just tired of crying, or maybe her mind had really and truly snapped. Whatever the reason, Pao felt a giggle bubbling in her throat like sparkling cider, and before she knew it, she was doubled over, laughing so hard her stomach hurt, until tears leaked out of her eyes.

  Dante looked at her in alarm.

  “I’m sorry,” Pao said, still howling. “But come on! Even physics?! Like, PHYSICS isn’t real? It’s just…” And then she was lost to the laughter again, and this time Dante was
guffawing along with her.

  “This shoe!” he said, shaking the chancla at her. “This shoe can change into other shoes!”

  Pao slapped her knee—literally slapped it. She’d never known that was a thing people actually did.

  “We can’t get out of here!” she shrieked, causing them to laugh even harder.

  “My grandma is, like, some kind of witch?” Dante offered, sinking to the ground, clutching his knees, his eyes streaming now, too.

  “MY MOM WAS RIGHT!” Pao said, lowering herself down beside him, banging the ground with her open palm.

  It took a while for the hilarity to fully subside, and when it did, it left a numb feeling in its wake, like the novocaine the dentist used so the drilling didn’t hurt.

  “I care, you know,” Dante said when they were finally quiet. “I care a lot, okay? You’re still my best friends. Both of you.”

  Pao nodded, taking it in, not sure if she wanted to laugh again or cry.

  “I don’t know what to do next,” she admitted, and there was something freeing about it. She was a girl who always knew. She knew which bill was due next, and to put it at the top of the pile so her mom wouldn’t forget. She knew as much math and science as some high school kids. She knew how things worked, and how to fix them if they stopped working. Admitting she didn’t know wasn’t just difficult for Pao—it was unprecedented.

  “Come on,” Dante said. “I bet you’re dying to check out that flashlight.”

  Pao had to admit she was. Even if the laws of physics were useless in the cactus field, there had to be a reason the light was behaving like that, sticking to its current track like it was glued there. Not that light particles could be glued…but anyway…

  “It is kind of interesting,” Pao said, trying to be nonchalant. “None of the normal rules seem to apply, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules…. It’s just that we don’t know what they are yet.”

  Dante smiled.

  Pao tried to scowl, but excitement was starting to crackle to life in her veins.

  “I’m not promising anything,” she said.

  “I believe in you,” said Dante. He picked up the flashlight and handed it to her, the beam still bending unnaturally, like Matthew Promise’s broken arm when he’d fallen off the jungle gym in third grade.

  Pao wanted to be skeptical. She wanted to cling to the disbelief she had worn like armor against her mother for as long as she could remember. But this wasn’t just a story. This was a new discovery.

  “Okay,” Pao said to the flashlight. “Let’s see what you can do.”

  It turned out the flashlight didn’t do much—if you didn’t count that whole defying-the-laws-of-physics thing.

  While Pao flicked it on and off, Dante held the chancla, turning it over and over in his hands, narrowing his eyes at it like it was failing some kind of test.

  “If I at least had my stupid Boy Scouts compass, we could use it to get out of here,” he grumbled, chucking the slipper to the ground, where it kicked up a little cloud of desert sand.

  “Yeah…” Pao said, but her brain was already taking his words and running with them. A compass. That’s what the flashlight was acting like!

  Pao thought fast. A compass was a magnet that interacted with the earth’s own magnetic field. But there was nothing magnetic about a flashlight, was there? How could the beam of light be reacting to the earth?

  “I think we have to follow it,” Pao said, knowing how crazy she sounded. She couldn’t explain why the flashlight was acting like a compass, but she’d never been so in need of a true north.

  “Huh?”

  “The light…it’s holding its direction, like some kind of freaky compass. Maybe if we follow it…”

  “It’ll lead us out!” Dante said, cramming the slipper into his back pocket again and coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with Pao.

  Even though she normally despised being interrupted—especially when she was on the verge of a scientific breakthrough—Pao let him have this one. It was the first thing that had felt like progress in a long time. In…wait, how long had they been in here, anyway? The sky hadn’t changed at all. It was still a uniform gray, even though it had to be approaching dusk, and they had left the apartment complex at dawn.

  You have five days, Señora Mata had said. Five days until what?

  A chill crept up Pao’s spine, and she flicked the flashlight on again, the beam faint but definitely visible. They needed to get out of here, and soon. And if this flashlight could help them, Pao decided she wouldn’t hold its fundamental disagreement with the laws of science against it.

  “Let’s go,” she said, keeping her new sense of urgency to herself.

  Dante nodded, and together they rotated until the beam of light was pointing straight ahead. Pao drew an X in the dirt with her sneaker toe to mark their starting place.

  “So we’ll know if we’re backtracking,” she explained, and Dante nodded again, his face anxious and a little pale in the strange light.

  They had only been following the beam for a half a minute or so when it abruptly changed direction. The hair on Pao’s arms stood up.

  “Whoa,” Dante said under his breath.

  “It’s sending us back the way we came,” Pao said, feeling defeated. “We can’t go that way. Let’s just keep going straight for a little longer.”

  “But I thought the whole point was to…” Dante began, then trailed off when he saw Pao’s expression. “This way it is,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender.

  Pao turned off the flashlight and focused on a cactus a few yards ahead that she was sure had been in the path of the beam before. She kept her eyes locked on it as they walked, but like the flashlight beam, the daylight itself seemed to bend and shimmer, and in less time than it had taken them to get this far, they were back at the X again.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Pao said again, but with notably less hysteria. She remembered a Thomas Edison quote from a poster in the science room at school: “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that will not work.” She glanced at Dante, who was pinching his lips closed. “Don’t gloat,” she said.

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  This time, they left the flashlight on. When it changed direction, so did they. Relinquishing control was not Pao’s favorite thing to do, but she tried not to keep track of where they’d been, or think about which way they were headed. She just followed it, and Dante followed her, and after thirty minutes or so of zigzagging and backtracking and what felt like walking in circles, they still hadn’t returned to the X on the ground.

  Pao didn’t understand. But so what? Whatever was happening, it was working. They’d be out of here before they knew it.

  When the terrain changed, Pao could have cried from relief—if she hadn’t already done too much crying for one day. The gray of the sky began to deepen and change, taking on the purples and reds of an Arizona sunset. Had they really been out here for twelve hours?

  The cacti grew thicker—saguaros giving way to shorter, scrubbier versions Pao didn’t recognize, even after her many units on the local flora and fauna in school. The plants were round and pale, and they almost glowed. Pao thought they looked a little like jellyfish.

  “Any minute now,” she said, her throat parched from a long day without water, her empty belly grumbling. Any minute now, they’d emerge from the field, and then they could figure out where they were and what to do next.

  Right?

  “PAO, LOOK OUT!”

  She reacted instinctively, before she even knew what she was supposed to be looking out for. Grasping the flashlight tightly, she spun out of the way as a dark shape came running straight toward her.

  “What the—” she began, but there was no time to finish the thought. There was another shape, moving too fast to make out, and another. Pao’s heart was in her throat as she ran in the opposite direction, the crocheted bag flopping against her stinging back wound, her hand clammy around the f
lashlight’s case.

  “Dante!” she called out behind her, but there was no answer. “DANTE!”

  Out of breath, she stopped for just a minute, clutching at a stitch in her side, her eyes wide open in case there were more of…whatever those were. That’s when she saw it, a few yards away, standing perfectly still. She froze, too, afraid that if she moved, it would set the thing off.

  The scientist in Pao couldn’t help but try to categorize it, even as the rest of her was panicking and seeking escape.

  It wasn’t a dog—it was way too big and terrifying for that. Plus, between clumps of matted fur, it had scaly patches that looked like lizard skin covering at least half of its body. Its eyes glowed the same green as her dream river, the same green that Señora Mata’s candle flames had turned before she and Dante were forcibly ejected from the apartment.

  But the really bizarre part was the spines running from the top of its head to the tip of its tail. Long green things that almost looked like tentacles, waving in a nonexistent breeze.

  There were large, fearsome dogs. Pao had always avoided those breeds during her research, but she conjured up images of them now: the Doberman pinscher, the rottweiler, the German shepherd…. This was nothing like any of those.

  The thing snarled, one scaly lizard lip curling up to reveal a crowded row of what appeared to be very sharp teeth. Fangs, really, thought the awestruck part of Pao’s brain as the rest of it tensed her muscles to flee. Or fight. To do anything but stand here like bait.

  Only she never got the chance.

  Before Pao could move an inch, before the beast could release its coiled stance and launch for her throat, something collided with it at an alarming speed.

  So much for not standing here like bait, she thought, paralyzed with horror and fascination as a human-shaped blur with dark skin and silver-white curls battled with the monster.

  There were grunts, and thuds, and the occasional doglike whimper, but mostly there was the pounding of blood in Pao’s ears. What could she do? All she had were a shopping bag, a flashlight, and…