Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  Pao and Ondina had more in common than the princess even knew.

  “But Ondina…” Pao said, her fear thawing. “Ondina needs you. She needs you to let go.”

  “No,” sobbed the woman, the water rising to their chests now. “¡No puedo!”

  “She needs to be set free,” Pao said. “You killed them, and you’re sorry, but killing more children isn’t going to save them.”

  “It will…. It will!”

  The light in La Llorona’s eyes was dazzling again, and the black water turned red.

  “No, don’t!” Pao said, her panic back in full force. The water was climbing to her neck, and she knew what was coming next.

  “Lo siento,” said the woman, the black tears still falling, dropping like ink into the red water around them. “No puedo seguir sola. I can’t….”

  Pao was out of options. She didn’t know if this was real or a dream or some illusion in the wall, but when La Llorona took Pao’s head in her hands, her grip was terrible and sure.

  She tried to think of her own mother…of Emma, Dante, all the people she had ever loved….

  But when the water took Pao, it took them, too.

  Pao woke, as she had so often before, coughing and sputtering, drowning on dry land.

  Only this time, she was on the stone floor of what appeared to be a cave, and everything around her was bathed in green light. It reflected off the wet rocks, turning her skin a sickly color, her white hair into a witch’s wig.

  Pao had drowned in blood. And La Llorona…she had won. What did that mean? Had it even been real?

  “Oh, please. You didn’t think that was it, did you?”

  Pao used what little strength she had to turn her head toward the voice, immediately recognizable even without the ghostly echo that had carried it through the palace’s glass walls.

  “That was just a memory.” The voice was coming from a shadowy corner of the cave. Pao squinted, but she couldn’t see anyone there. “Just a story. I was so weak back then, prowling the riverbanks, unable to see what was right in front of me—bound to a single frail phantom body.”

  She was describing the pathetic ghost Franco had discounted a century ago, Pao thought as she struggled to sit up. A wraith who had not yet become shrouded in legend.

  “When that upstart boy attacked me,” she continued, as if she could read Pao’s thoughts, “I was still half-broken, mourning the loss of an unworthy man, bound to my earthly concerns. The boy thought he’d won when his banishing knife sent me here, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Why?” Pao asked, wanting to buy herself time, but also shamefully fascinated by La Llorona’s transformation. From a wailing pauper barely worthy of local gossip to the scourge of the rift and beyond….

  “This is where I found my true calling,” La Llorona said, her disembodied voice still floating to Pao through the darkness. “Where I discovered that a true warrior can never be destroyed. Not when there’s power to be had. Not when her desire is strong enough to survive anything.”

  As she spoke, Pao pushed herself up to standing, her legs shaky underneath her. She cast around for a sharp rock, a shell, anything that could be used as a weapon. But there was nothing.

  “We’re always underestimated, aren’t we?” The voice turned seductive, and Pao wished she could cover her ears. “But is there anything more determined than a mother parted from her children?”

  The words were eerily similar to the ones Pao had thought when she’d realized who the general was, and what part Ondina had played in this sad, horrible story. Pao didn’t want to hear any more, didn’t want to know what other ideas she shared with the monster who had ruined so many lives.

  “Where’s Emma?” Pao asked, steadier on her feet now, squinting into the darkness. “Dante. Where are my friends?”

  From reminiscing and boastful, La Llorona’s tone turned speculative. “Your stubborn little loyal streak,” said the voice, footsteps accompanying it now. “It could have been the end of us all.”

  The voice was like a snake, or a leech. As it slithered and probed, it felt like something crawling over Pao’s skin.

  “My little girl—she’s brilliant, beautiful, and cunning. She’s relentless. But she’s a survivor. She won’t be held back by ties to others.” The voice was coming closer, and Pao strained even harder to peer into the darkness. “We’ll have to break you of that before the end, Paola Santiago.”

  As she said Pao’s name, La Llorona stepped out from the cloak of shadow.

  It was true—there was no comparing this woman to the white-dressed ghost sobbing on the riverbank. Her body was now corporeal, though her skin was pale and waxy. She was easily six feet tall, draped in a gown of kelp and river stones, her long black hair lustrous, shining in the green light. She was magnificent. Strong. The void’s magic had turned her grief into something shimmering and deadly.

  Her face, though, was truly horrifying. Her mouth was stretched open in a perpetual scream, her eye sockets wide and empty. She moved like a living person, but her voice was projected from inside her somewhere, her features frozen in eternal grief.

  “My daughter,” said the unearthly woman, “wants to survive. And by the time I’m through with you, that’s all you’ll want, too.”

  “You underestimate her,” Pao said loudly, despite the way her knees trembled and every cell in her body quavered in fear. “Ondina is loyal, too. And what she wants is to be free.”

  It would be really cool, Pao thought, if Ondina showed up right now. Like a punctuation mark to Pao’s defiance. It would give Pao the incentive to keep fighting when her fear was rapidly overtaking her bravery.

  But Ondina was nowhere to be seen.

  Probably off teaching Bruto to bark sarcastically, Pao thought bitterly.

  “She will be free,” said La Llorona as she came closer to Pao, trailing the smell of mildew and rot. “Free to leave this place and return to it as she pleases. Free to spread what we’ve created here beyond this sad corner of the world. Thanks to you.”

  La Llorona reached out and, before Pao could stop it, took her by the throat with one hand. The phantom lifted her to eye level, Pao’s feet dangling three feet off the ground as she choked and scrabbled at the monstrous woman’s pasty skin with her fingernails.

  “We’ve waited a long time,” the ghost breathed, and from her tortured mask came the faint screams of hundreds of children, dragged from their homes and playgrounds to feed this woman’s guilt. Her vengeance.

  As she held the struggling Pao in one hand, she waved the other through the air, and a circle in the floor began to rise in the center of the cave. Behind La Llorona, four glass prisms descended from the ceiling. She waited until all was still to let go of Pao, who fell into a twisted heap on the stone.

  Immediately, Pao pushed herself up, ignoring the way her knees stung from the impact and her palms were bleeding freely again. The stone didn’t take her blood—it displayed it like a warning.

  “This is the last phase, Paola. Consider yourself lucky to be witnessing it. You are by nature a curious girl, are you not? Like me, unwilling to merely accept without question—”

  “I’m nothing like you,” Pao interrupted, and she would have said more, but when she looked closer at the changes to the cave’s landscape, all other thoughts fled her mind.

  In three of the four glass enclosures now standing at the room’s west end, a person was suspended in water but somehow still breathing, eyes closed as if asleep.

  Two of the faces were familiar; the third Pao could identify without recognizing it.

  In the first prism was a tall boy, sixteen or so, dark hair waving around his face.

  Franco, Pao thought, remembering the way Marisa had mourned him.

  Beside him, her dirty blond pigtails floating on either side of her pale cheeks, was Emma, looking too small, too helpless. Pao choked back a sob.

  In the third, Dante had his chin on his chest, his arms crossed i
n front of him like a shield. If she didn’t know any better, Pao would have said he was snoring.

  Hopelessness dragged at her like cement, threatening to pull her under.

  They’re alive, she reminded herself, ordering her legs not to collapse, her tears not to fall. They’re alive. It’s not too late.

  The fourth prism stood empty, and Pao knew instinctively that it was waiting for her. She too would be placed in suspended animation as the final step in restoring Ondina’s wasted life.

  “She doesn’t want this,” Pao said, not taking her eyes off Dante and Emma. “Ondina doesn’t want it. Giving her back her life won’t fix what you did.”

  “She’s a child,” said La Llorona, walking close to Franco, tracing a line in the glass in front of his face. “It’s up to me to know what’s best for her, not cater to her silly whims.”

  “It’s not a silly whim to want to prevent suffering,” Pao said. “It’s heroic. If you were ever a true healer, you would know that.”

  “Heroic.” La Llorona laughed, examining the other prisms before turning to Pao, who didn’t back down. “We aren’t heroes here,” she continued. “We’re survivors. We make the best of what we’re given.”

  “So what was killing your children, then?” Pao asked, trying not to flinch as she stared into the woman’s ghastly face. “Was that you doing your best?”

  La Llorona snarled, “You pathetic little girl. You know nothing about what I’ve sacrificed, nothing about how people treated me in that terrible place. You have no idea what those children’s lives would have been like with an unmarried mother.” She seemed to pull herself together before saying, “You may think me a monster, but I did them a kindness. And now I can do Ondina an even greater one.”

  “Only Ondina?” Pao asked, remembering the three pitiful ghosts she had seen in the passageway. “What about your two boys? What happened to them?” She was grasping at straws, already feeling suffocated by the prospect of La Llorona forcing her into a water coffin of her own.

  It was impossible to read emotion on a face frozen by centuries of grief, but Pao thought something in La Llorona’s manner stiffened.

  “My sons were not as strong as my daughter,” she said, her tone flat within her twisted mask. “One I lost in my first attempt at restoration. The other…”

  Pao waited, her breath trapped in her throat.

  “Men are ungrateful fools.” La Llorona grunted with a sound like a door slamming shut. “My daughter will be my masterpiece. She will never leave me.”

  “Daughters leave all the time,” Pao said, thinking of her own grandmother, who had crossed the border alone at twelve years old to live with relatives she’d never met. And herself, leaving home to enter another world entirely. If her mom wasn’t in grave danger herself, she’d be worried sick by now….

  “Enough!” La Llorona cried, and she turned to the dais in the middle of the room.

  Pao had almost forgotten the platform in the shock of seeing her friends again, but it was hard to ignore it now, with La Llorona’s pale form sweeping toward it, trailing strings of rocks and what looked like eel skins behind her.

  The ghost woman peeled off its black surface like a magician pulling a tablecloth, and suddenly the green light bathing the room intensified a hundred times. Pao threw up an arm to shield her face.

  When her eyes had adjusted, Pao squinted at La Llorona, who was standing in front of a glowing green globe. The illumination threw her face into harsh relief, making it look triumphant even though its expression remained fixed in screaming terror.

  The sight chilled Pao to the bone.

  “It’s time…” La Llorona said, more to the glowing sphere than to Pao. “The solstice has weakened the barrier.” She drew a small glass container from her cloak and shook a ring of white crystals around the base of the pedestal. Salt, Pao knew from her mother’s rituals.

  As La Llorona prepared the space, Pao examined the globe at its center. It wasn’t simply a ball of green light as she’d originally thought. The sphere was surrounded by separate particles, like the bodies of a hundred illuminated snakes twisting in a cluster. Pao could see through the cracks between them to the pure light underneath.

  Pao thought back to what Marisa had said—Franco’s theory about the rift itself being neutral, and something corrupting its magic.

  What if it was this globe, and not La Llorona, that was the source of the void’s power? What if the green coursing like venom through the palace—absorbing the negative emotions of anyone who walked its halls, lighting up the eyes of the beasts and the ahogados—was the corruption?

  La Llorona, now muttering with her eyes closed, didn’t notice when Pao crept over to the glass prisms and pressed her palms to the ones that held Dante and Emma. They didn’t react—not that she’d expected them to. When she was doubly sure they were still breathing, Pao’s eyes darted to the fourth enclosure—the one waiting for her—and her mouth went dry.

  She felt the urgency of the moment, as if it were up to her to prevent a nuclear core meltdown before it exploded and took everything with it. Her life. The lives of her friends. Ondina’s freedom. The Niños’ safety…

  Pao took advantage of La Llorona’s distraction to think harder than she ever had in her life.

  The power source was obviously part of the ritual. In her vision in the passageway, Pao had seen La Llorona from the days before she had absorbed strength from the void: a ghost woman doomed to wander the riverbank wailing for her lost children. She’d been haunting—scary, even. But Franco had been right on one count: That pitiful specter could never have been the general.

  With the power of the void in her hands, however, she was deadly. Unstoppable.

  Turning her back on Dante and Emma wasn’t easy, but Pao found herself walking toward the orb before she could decide against it, transfixed by the color of the pulsing light, the way the cords of energy seemed alive as they moved.

  She would have to destroy it, Pao knew, but that seemed impossible. How did one obliterate pure energy? You could divert it, maybe. Use it up. But could you just…stop it?

  Pao had always been told she was smart for her age. But now she was up against the vengefulness of a ghost turned god, who’d had hundreds of years to plan and experiment. How could she overcome that?

  The horrible truth dawned on her as she stared into the light.

  She couldn’t.

  Not alone.

  The cave began to vibrate, small rocks dislodging from the walls and ceiling and clattering to the ground. Beneath the orb, another platform was rising, lifting the power source higher, where Pao couldn’t have reached it even if she’d known what to do.

  “Wait!” Pao blurted out.

  La Llorona laughed. “It’s too late,” she said. “It’s beginning.”

  And she was right. The orb was inaccessible, La Llorona was moving toward her, and the empty glass prism was yawning, waiting to take everything inside Pao and turn it into green light.

  Waiting to bring Ondina back to life.

  La Llorona raised a hand, and a tiny cord of the orb’s power wrapped around her wrist like a vine. She grabbed it and flicked it at Pao. A line extended like rope and lassoed Pao around the waist.

  Pao began to slide inexorably toward the prism. Toward the end.

  “No!” she screamed, struggling against the cord, but La Llorona just stared at her with those empty eyes, reeling her in until Pao could feel the glass coffin pulling at her.

  Cold air wormed its way under her skin, freezing the blood in her veins and the thoughts in her brain.

  And then, inexplicably, the pressure ceased, the rope of energy falling from her waist. Pao looked up slowly as her body and mind gradually thawed.

  “Get off me, you beast!” La Llorona was shouting, and there, ripping the ends of her trailing river robe, was Bruto.

  How did he get in here? Pao wondered. She looked around for Ondina, but there was no sign of her. Pao and Bruto were on their o
wn. It would have to be enough for now.

  Now that she was free from the unbearable pressure and La Llorona was distracted by the puppy, Pao did the only thing she could. Even though the cave was barely the size of the middle school gym, and there were no doors, windows, or other escape routes, she ran.

  There was a yelp and a crunch, and then La Llorona laughed, a horrible, grating sound like nails on a chalkboard.

  Please let him be okay, Pao prayed. Please let him be okay.

  “Tricks won’t protect you,” La Llorona said, stalking Pao, snapping three more cords of energy into her own hands. “This time, I’ll put you in there myself.”

  Pao dodged one cord, and then another. The third caught her around the ankle, but she stepped out of it before it could tighten. She kept moving, remembering the time in sixth-grade gym when Mrs. Roberts had told her she had “good footwork” during a basketball unit.

  La Llorona didn’t seem as impressed. As Pao darted in and out of the shadows, the specter screamed in frustration, summoning four more cords, her eyes pulsing with power.

  But she didn’t send the cords after Pao. She stood stock-still in the center of the room as they suctioned themselves to her bone-white arms, glowing green as they pumped her full of the void’s power as though she were taking steroids.

  Before Pao’s eyes, La Llorona grew taller and more fearsome than ever. The cords fell away and she lunged for Pao, her reach much longer now.

  Pao baseball-slid to get away, like she’d learned from Naomi back what seemed like a hundred years ago. Then she scrambled to her feet.

  “You can’t escape me,” the woman screeched as Pao evaded her grip by a hair. The ugly sound echoed off the walls as the orb rose higher and higher, taking with it Pao’s last hope of ending all this misery.

  Pao’s world shrank to the muscles in her legs, the pounding in her chest, and the sound of La Llorona behind her. Sure, the wailing woman had gotten bigger, but that just made it more difficult for her to move in the small space, and by dodging, zigzagging, and sticking to the shadows, Pao managed to avoid capture.