She didn’t belong here. She hadn’t earned her place the hard way. A rift monster had spared her, and Pao still felt guilty for it. Also a little afraid.
Pao had always been angry. She had a quick temper and she distrusted people. She’d thought these were just hallmarks of a great scientist growing up in an increasingly scary world. But if Marisa was right, Pao had grown up two miles from a source of malevolent magic.
What if Pao wasn’t just a little too realistic for her age?
What if her anger was being piped into her by an external source?
Pao felt the worry settle on her chest like a rock as she lay back on her bedroll. Finding Emma was her first priority, of course, but that wasn’t the only reason Pao had put off Marisa. This deep-seated fear had been plaguing her ever since Marisa had mentioned the rift.
Pao had been haunted by nightmares for most of her life. And in her dreams, she saw things she had always assumed were just part of her repressed imagination. But now they’d all come to pass.
The glowing green light that had filled the apartment.
Ondina, whom Marisa had banished for being a monster.
Even a disembodied hand dragging her away.
When Pao dreamed, she walked with ahogados and ghost girls and monsters. Was that what being the Dreamer meant, that Pao was a monster, too?
The questions and suspicions continued to loop until Pao could imagine herself with glowing green eyes and white hair, patrolling the riverbank, attacking the Niños. Her thoughts turned to visions before she could tell waking from sleep, and her mouth tasted metallic as she chased a boy who ran from her in terror.
Though she was familiar enough with nightmares, this one was the most visceral Pao had ever experienced. She could feel the air whipping back her white hair, and she could hear the boy’s panicked heartbeat. But there was something else beneath her senses: an otherworldly pull, like there was a fishing hook in her chest, the line growing more tight and painful as she ran.
Pao caught up to the boy easily. He was unarmed, and when she tackled him to the ground, he screamed.
His voice was familiar.
Too familiar.
Turning him over, the pulling sensation in her chest worse than ever, Pao realized it was Dante.
Unable to stop herself, as if some dream puppeteer were holding the strings, she grabbed him, ignoring his cries, and started to drag his body toward the river. The closer to the water she got, the more the tugging on her eased. She moved faster, oblivious to his kicking and shouting, her name leaving his lips again and again as the glowing green current came into view….
The scene dissolved then, Dante fading away, a victim of the corruption she didn’t know how to eradicate from her bones.
When the vision was gone, Pao was alone, back in her usual body, dark-haired, and moving at human speed. But the dream wasn’t over. The sky was the same ominous, empty black it had been in her previous nightmares. Pao wanted to scream and run, but she knew that wouldn’t do her any good.
She would see what she was supposed to see. Resistance was futile.
The landscape looked the same as always, the glowing green water and bone-white sand beneath the oppressive sky. Pao walked along the riverbank, taking some comfort from the fact that she was back to being herself. That the taste of blood, and the boy she’d taken it from, were gone.
Like an old-timey movie reel, the bonfire from the Niños camp flickered to life in front of her, where before there had been only sand. Beside it was an altar made of stacked milk crates, topped with bunches of marigolds and bowls of fruit arranged around a newspaper obituary with a photo of a smiling, dark-haired teen.
Pao’s stomach lurched. Somehow, she was sure the young man in the photo was the pixelated face she’d seen on the news. The same boy who had wielded green light and laughed in her dream the night Emma had disappeared.
The kidnapper.
And in script below his photo was a name:
Franco
Before she could find out more, another figure stepped up to the altar.
It was Marisa, her strawberry-blond hair wavy and loose, freed from the severe braids Pao had almost gotten used to. Her face looked younger, too, and somehow Pao understood that this was the Marisa she had known in school. The clever, cruel girl she hadn’t been able to find in the face of the Niños’ leader.
Marisa covered her mouth with her hand, choking back a sob. “Oh, Franco,” she said, her voice low. “I’m so sorry.”
Franco couldn’t answer, of course, but as Pao observed Marisa mourn the person who was almost certainly responsible for Emma’s disappearance, Pao felt an icy hatred forming in her chest.
She should have known she couldn’t trust Marisa. Not for a second.
The bonfire was just as Pao had seen it when she was awake, with the white stones surrounding it, at least ten feet in diameter. But before, the flames had been reaching for the sky, and now it was burning low.
When it was down to a single glowing ember, Marisa climbed up the white rocks, tears streaming down her face. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.
But she dropped his picture in the fire, and then there was no one left to apologize to.
Pao watched as Marisa stepped, barefoot, into the ashes, and dug into them for the last cinder. “Don’t!” Pao shouted instinctively when Marisa lifted it with her bare hands.
But Marisa didn’t flinch, not from the heat, and not from Pao’s warning.
It was like Pao wasn’t there at all.
Pao moved closer, secure in her invisibility, and gasped as the crying girl put the glowing coal to her lips.
“Mi corazón es la llama,” Marisa whispered, kissing it. “La llama es mi corazón.”
The ember had left white marks on Marisa’s mouth, burns that had to be agonizing. But the girl seemed immune to any pain.
“Mi corazón es la llama; la llama es mi corazón,” she said, a little louder now as her eyes blazed with determination. “Mi corazón es la llama; la llama es mi corazón.” This one was the loudest yet, and the sound rang eerily against the empty sky of the dream river.
The moment the words left her, Marisa closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and put the ember on her tongue. Pao’s stomach turned. She imagined she could hear Marisa’s tongue sizzling behind her closed lips.
Once the deed was done, Marisa stepped out of the firepit and sank to her knees, her hands clamped over her mouth, every muscle in her body convulsing, trying to reject the pain even as she forced herself to accept it. Even as she swallowed it whole.
It took a long time, but Marisa finally screamed. Over and over, the sound high and keening and desperate, like a dying animal. The screams gave way to sobs, racking and terrible, and then, at last, Marisa lay down with her eyes closed and was still.
In the dream, Pao lowered herself to the ground on shaky legs, running the Spanish words over and over in her mind. If only Pao had tried harder to learn the language when she’d had the chance. She’d always thought there would be time enough later on, and besides, Spanish seemed tied to her mom and the spiritual stuff Pao hated. But in this moment, she had never wished so much that she’d studied it.
If I ever get out of this vision, she vowed, I will.
She sat like that, with unconscious Marisa nearby, until the white sky went dark.
When Pao opened her eyes for the third time, she was back on her bedroll by the fire. The relief came so fast and hard, she almost cried. The nightmare had finally ended.
But where was everyone? Where were the other Niños? And the fire…
The flames were green.
So the bad dream wasn’t over after all.
“I wanted you to see for yourself,” said a voice, and a pale figure came into view, washed in the green firelight. She wore the same black dress, its lace back to its pristine condition after her tumble with Marisa. Her curls were glossy. “She calls us ahogados, and monsters, but what is she? She should be dead, too, Paola.
She’s no better. You don’t belong with her.”
Ondina stood beside the sleeping bag, her ankle boots planted firmly on the ground this time, her wide eyes glowing eerily, curls tossing in a wind Pao couldn’t feel.
“What do you want from me?” Pao asked, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice, but in a blink, Ondina had disappeared. Pao got to her feet, her knees still shaking, still seeing bloodless Dante and hearing Marisa’s shrieks of pain. “What do you want from me?” Pao screamed at the sky, which was now glaringly bright.
“It’s a touch melodramatic, don’t you think? The whole screaming-at-the-sky thing?”
Ondina was back, on the other side of the fire this time, her long eyelashes casting spidery shadows on her face.
“Do you do that just to creep me out?” Pao asked, her nerves jangling, her temper flaring in her chest. “Can I request a new dream ghost or whatever?”
Ondina affected a little shudder. “Trust me, if you knew your options, you’d be happy to see me. I mean, unless you like putrid pig demons or talking birds of prey with intestines hanging from their beaks.”
“Marisa says she banished you,” Pao said, ignoring the grotesque images. The glow from the river and the intensity of the sky forced her to squint down at the white sand. Her feet were bare in this dream world. She didn’t remember being barefoot before. “Is that why you’re here instead of in the cactus field?”
“The Banisher lies,” Ondina hissed. “That’s what I’m trying to show you! You can’t trust her. You can’t trust any of them. Promise me, Paola.”
“Oh, but I can trust you?”
“Well, for one thing, I know my way around a bathtub,” Ondina said, turning up her nose. “Have you smelled those miscreants? They have untrustworthy written all over them. In grime.”
“Can you be serious for three seconds? Do you even know what you just put me through?”
Ondina yawned exaggeratedly, lifting a pale hand to her mouth. “I get one mortal to talk to in…well, in a long time…and she has to be literal and boring. Just my luck.”
“Are you really what she said you are?” Pao asked. “An ahogada or whatever? She said you would try to lure me into the water. And when the Manos had me by the throat, I thought I heard you—”
“We don’t have time for this,” Ondina said, waving a hand impatiently. “It doesn’t matter. The solstice approaches, the third quarter has almost passed—”
“I know, I know,” Pao said, like this spooky, mystical moon stuff was old news. “They told us that after the Mano attack.”
“Oh, really?” Ondina asked, arching a perfect eyebrow, her expression saying she knew it was flawless. “Did she try to recruit you to fight an endless horde of monsters? Or did she tell you that the solstice is your only chance to get through the rift?”
As if on cue, a shape began to move toward them through the water. Pao didn’t have to look to know what it was: Emma’s hand, wearing the ruby ring.
“They said it’s too dangerous to go into the rift,” Pao said, turning to face Ondina, who was examining her nail polish, looking bored.
“But they also didn’t bother to mention they were mourning thieves and murderers. Am I right?”
Pao hated how right she was, how her own diamond-hard anger got sharper whenever Ondina spoke.
“You don’t belong with them,” Ondina said. “You’re meant for so much more.”
“Then tell me what it is!” Pao shouted.
“Do you think we’re here for my health, Paola?” Ondina asked, rolling her eyes with the precision of an expensive scientific instrument. “Do you think I like this toxic beach and the severed hand with its tacky jewelry? I’m obviously trying to show you something! You need to pay attention!”
“Why does everyone talk in riddles?!” Pao asked, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Can’t you just tell me what to do?”
Ondina smiled, revealing strangely pointed incisors. “Well, that wouldn’t be any fun for me, now, would it?”
Pao wanted to strangle her, or at least pull one of those annoyingly bouncy curls, but before she could so much as take a step in Ondina’s direction, the ahogada was gone.
Emma’s hand had almost reached Pao by now, crawling toward her on the sand, the severed bone protruding from the wrist, the ring sitting too heavy on her fourth finger.
“Where are you, Emma?” Pao whispered to the hand, but it didn’t answer. It just latched onto her ankle, and for the third time, tried to drag her into the glowing green water.
For a change, Pao didn’t bother to struggle.
But just then, when the darkness was closing in, at the point she usually woke up swallowing a scream, Pao saw her. Hair floating around her like a cloud of gold, blue eyes open, lips faintly smiling.
Emma.
“I’m here, Pao,” she said, reaching out, moving toward the surface as Pao was dragged into the fathomless depths. “Don’t give up on me.”
Pao awoke gasping in her bedroll with no idea of how long she’d been asleep.
“Emma!” she cried, reaching out before she realized the river was gone and the dream had ended at last.
Dawn was breaking in the cactus field, leaving the horrors of the night in the past.
Pao rolled over, stretching her stiff muscles, getting ready to wince her way to her feet. Then she froze. Sometime while she’d been dreaming about killing him, Dante had placed his sleeping bag right next to hers.
He could be infuriating. He cared too much about what other people thought. He valued things that Pao couldn’t even understand. But he was also trusting. Loyal. Not afraid to be exactly who he was. Dante loved with his whole self, and he protected what he loved, and Pao wouldn’t let anyone put him in danger for it. She knew what she had to do.
“Who’s Franco?”
Marisa hadn’t been hard to find. She was on her “throne” in front of the mess tent, just staring into the cooking fire like she was remembering something that had happened a million years ago.
Spread out on the ground in front of her was a handkerchief, and whatever was on top of it sparkled in the dancing flames.
“Excuse me?” Marisa asked.
“Franco,” Pao repeated, letting her anger infuse every word. “Do your little lackeys know about him? Do they know he’s a kidnapper and a thief? That he stole kids from their families and they were never seen again?”
For the first time since they’d come face-to-face—or knife-to-ribs, anyway—Marisa looked almost afraid. “How on earth…?”
“It doesn’t matter how I know,” Pao said, trying to sound spooky and ominous. “But I do. And I want you to give me one good reason why I should trust you, because…”
Pao trailed off. She had just gotten close enough to see what was laid out on the handkerchief. One half of a friendship locket. A bracelet with a star charm. A ring like Emma’s, with a sapphire star instead of a ruby heart.
“You were working with him,” Pao said, her body cold despite the warmth of the fire. “You knew what he was doing, and you helped him.”
Marisa pinched the bridge of her nose like Pao had seen her mom do a million times. It was typically when Pao was asking a lot of impossible questions, come to think of it. Pao’s usual instinct was to fill the silence, but in this instance she waited. It was Marisa’s call which way this was going to go.
“Sit down,” Marisa said at last.
“Why would I sit down with a kidnapper?”
Marisa actually chuckled. “Because I’m not one. And neither was Franco. Let me explain.”
Pao didn’t intend to believe a word she said, but she obeyed her order and sat. Marisa just had that effect on people.
“Franco was the leader of Los Niños,” she said when Pao was settled. “He was…my friend. He recruited me when I was wandering lost in the cactus field. He gave me a new home.”
Pao waited, even though she had a thousand more questions.
“We grew close quickly, and
then Naomi came, and the three of us were inseparable. Franco had been here for generations, fighting the ahogados, protecting the town. But he thought there was more to the job than that….”
“Wait,” Pao said. “Generations?” The boy in the video footage hadn’t looked any older than eighteen.
“Our leaders become immortal when they take the flame,” Marisa said, like it was a throwaway fact.
“You mean eat the flame, right?”
Again, Marisa looked shocked at how much Pao knew.
Pao motioned for her to keep going.
“Uh, right,” said Marisa. “It’s how we remember.”
“But you don’t remember your family?” Pao asked. “Is that the price? Forgetting them?”
Marisa smiled wanly, shaking her head. “I haven’t forgotten my family, as much as I would like to. But when I took the flame, I inherited the memories of every leader before me. And since the fire was lit a hundred years ago, it makes the mind a little crowded. Some things naturally fall by the wayside.”
For a minute, Pao forgot the reason she was there. “So…you remember me?”
“Remember what?” Marisa looked genuinely curious, and Pao wondered how much to tell her, whether it would change things.
“I…knew you,” she said. “In Silver Springs. We went to the same school. Paola Santiago?” She waved.
Marisa’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second, and then they returned to their timeless stare.
“You…We didn’t like each other very much,” said Pao.
Marisa laughed a little at that. “I’m sorry,” she said. “From what I remember, I wasn’t always pleasant. But I had my reasons. I had…” She paused, her face twisting in pain. “It’s over now. This is my home.”
“So why are you stealing kids and keeping them here? You and Franco…”
“Franco risked his life,” Marisa said, an edge to her voice. “He never harmed anyone. He was searching for an important artifact, one that would give him access to the rift. He believed we could stop the monster attacks if we could get inside, but…”
“But what?” Pao asked when Marisa was quiet for too long.
Paola Santiago and the River of Tears Page 15
