Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  But to what end? she wondered, panting as the exertion of the day, the week, began to catch up with her at last. La Llorona’s swipes were getting closer and closer. They had covered every inch of the cave’s floor twice at least.

  Pao was only stalling now, delaying the inevitable.

  “Bruto!” Pao called, but nothing stirred in the cave. She was alone. And the prism’s terrible cold was reaching for her….

  The next time the woman grabbed for her, Pao seized her hand and wrenched it backward. Her pursuer stopped short, screaming in shock and pain. Pao hadn’t been sure La Llorona was human enough to feel pain. She filed away the results of that experiment for later use.

  Unfortunately, the injury had only created a little distance between them, and it was quickly closed by La Llorona.

  Pao was tired. Spent. She slipped once, her knee hitting the rock floor with a crunch. She landed a hard kick at La Llorona’s ankle but stumbled afterward, twisting her own.

  There was nowhere left to go. The specter was close, and she was furious, green light pulsing in the hollows where her eyes should be. Pao had backed herself into a wall, her knee throbbed, and her ankle was protesting any weight on it.

  It was the end of the line.

  Tears sprang to her eyes when she realized what would happen. Not just to her, but also to Dante and Emma. To Franco and the Niños. To her mom and Señora Mata.

  “Now you’ll see what your little tricks are worth in the face of absolute power,” La Llorona said, reaching toward Pao, who pressed herself futilely against the rock wall, closing her eyes, praying to every ancestor her mom had ever called on and every white protection candle she’d ever lit for Pao’s safety.

  The scent of Florida Water wafted by, overcoming La Llorona’s river mildew-and-death stench for just long enough to make Pao feel warm inside. But when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t a long-lost ancestor she saw behind the ghost woman.

  It was Ondina.

  “Enough, Mother,” came her voice, a little shaky, but resolute. “Let her go.”

  La Llorona’s huge hand was only a few inches from Pao’s throat when the sound of her daughter’s voice stopped her cold.

  “You’re not supposed to be here yet,” La Llorona said crossly. “I didn’t send for you.”

  “I found my own way,” Ondina said, her chin in the air.

  Pao’s heart beat wildly. She hadn’t dared to hope.

  Something rustled behind Ondina, and out from the shadows came Bruto, limping slightly, but his tail wagging.

  “This is none of your concern,” La Llorona snarled, half her attention on Pao, half on Ondina. “I made the preparations—everything is set. There’s no turning back.”

  “It is my concern,” said Ondina, stepping forward. “It’s my life. And I don’t want to live it this way. If I say we turn back, we turn back.”

  La Llorona whirled to face her defiant daughter, and Pao sagged against the wall, boneless with relief. In seconds, Bruto was by Pao’s side, jumping on her, licking every part of her he could reach.

  “Good boy,” Pao murmured, but her eyes were on the scene unfolding in front of her.

  “Let them go,” Ondina said, sweeping her arm imperiously at Franco, Emma, and Dante. “Let them all go.”

  “You think this is just about you? You selfish brat. This is what we’ve been working toward for decades. This is what your brother died for.”

  “Luis died for your mistake,” Ondina said, her voice every bit as cool as her mother’s. “Twice. And Beto—”

  “Don’t say his name to me,” La Llorona snarled. “That ungrateful—”

  “He wasn’t ungrateful, Mamá,” Ondina said, her face softening just a fraction. “He was good. He didn’t want to live if someone else had to die for it, and neither do I. Haven’t we done enough?”

  “It will never be enough,” La Llorona said, growing taller and more terrifying in her anger. “Not until I’ve recovered everything I lost.”

  “Everything you threw away,” Ondina spat, looking more like her mother than Pao had ever seen. “How long are we supposed to keep pretending you didn’t do this to us? To yourself? How long is the world going to keep paying for your terrible choices?”

  “The world owes us this!” she shouted, advancing on her daughter. “The world wouldn’t let me have a family. I was branded a sinner for loving. For daring to have joy without penitence and fear. And your father—”

  “My father was a closed-minded fool who couldn’t handle small-town gossip,” Ondina said, sadness tingeing her every word. “He walked away. You’re the one who turned it into a tragedy. I’m the last Hija de Lágrimas, Mother, and I’m telling you, it ends here.”

  For a moment, Pao thought that would be the end of it. La Llorona’s silence stretched on and on as Pao held Bruto against her shins and waited.

  But she should have known better.

  “It’s too late,” the ghoul said, straightening up, her voice as cold and impenetrable as frost-covered glass. “I’m your mother, and you are my child, and I will take whatever I need from the world to right this wrong.” And La Llorona reached out for her daughter’s throat.

  She had momentarily forgotten about Pao.

  Before the demoness could get ahold of Ondina, Pao did the only thing she could think of. She ran up and shoved La Llorona from behind, feeling like she was taking down the schoolyard bully for stealing lunch money.

  The horrible, twisted woman stumbled forward, giving Ondina just enough time to dart out from under her arms.

  “No need to thank me,” Pao said, smirking at Ondina, who rolled her eyes and tossed something to her without warning.

  Luckily, Pao caught it by the handle. It was her knife; she must have lost it in the field outside the palace.

  “A heads-up would have been nice!” Pao shouted as Ondina raced across the cave.

  “I was hoping it would cut off your hand!”

  Pao shook her head, but she laughed. She hadn’t been wrong about Ondina. Yes, they shared some darkness, but they also shared some light, and Pao was no longer alone in this battle.

  “We’re almost out of time!” Ondina said from the base of the pillar.

  “Yes, you are.”

  La Llorona had righted herself, and Pao knew her knife wouldn’t be of much use against this monster who was more magic than flesh. Even so, Pao felt better with it in her hand.

  The ghost woman stalked toward Pao, who ducked her first swing and ran in the opposite direction. Pao’s knee and ankle still hurt, but she was reenergized by her assailant’s scattered focus, one eye always on her rebellious daughter, who was edging along the cave wall.

  Pao caught Ondina’s attention after a quick double-back to dodge another swipe of those giant hands. Ondina tipped her head toward the towering column that held the orb.

  Nodding in acknowledgment, Pao assessed the layout of the cave. Ondina was going to climb the pillar to the orb. If it was really the power source, she would know what to do when she got there. Ondina could end all this, as long as Pao could keep La Llorona busy in the meantime.

  The chase became a dance, Pao drawing the woman to corners of the cave where Ondina and the orb would be out of her line of sight. And it worked.

  Until it didn’t.

  “No!” La Llorona shrieked when she looked over her shoulder and caught sight of Ondina. By then the girl was almost to the top of the pedestal, clawing her way up. La Llorona forgot Pao instantly. Her mutinous daughter was the much greater threat.

  Pao placed herself between the desperate mother and the column, knowing it wouldn’t mean much, hoping a few seconds of distraction would be enough to suit Ondina’s purpose.

  La Llorona swiped at Pao as she passed, much stronger since absorbing the extra energy from the orb. Pao flew into the cave wall like she’d been lifted up and tossed, her shoulder crunching against the stone, the pain making her dizzy.

  She hadn’t even bought Ondina those few second
s. Pao was nothing next to the might of this legendary ghost woman on her chosen path.

  La Llorona was too fast, and Pao watched, pain warping her vision, as mother and daughter reached the top of the pillar at the same time and squared off on the small platform, the glowing orb between them. In the face of her mother’s shining, unnatural strength, Ondina looked small and pale, a waif clinging to the boundary between life and death, threatening to let go.

  But there was something in Ondina’s eyes, Pao thought, pushing herself up to sit against the wall, her shoulder screaming. Something that made Pao certain this would be a tougher fight than La Llorona was expecting.

  “Are you going to push me off, Mother?” Ondina asked, steel in her spine, ice in her tone. “It wouldn’t be the first time you killed me to get what you wanted. Just remember, this body is barely hanging on. I don’t think it would survive the fall.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Ondina,” said La Llorona, inching closer. “I only want to help you. To give you the life you’ve always deserved.”

  “The life you took from me, you mean,” Ondina said, more resigned than angry. “Some things can’t be undone.”

  A moment of silence stretched between them, hundreds of years of history crackling like static electricity in the air before a storm. Pao finally made her painful way to standing, feeling helpless from so far away. All she could do was watch as both women held their ground, the orb throbbing between them with its poison power, waiting….

  And then it happened.

  They both lunged at the same moment, their movements eerily similar despite the unnatural size and pallor of La Llorona’s form. But Ondina was more nimble, and Pao gasped as her hands closed around the orb with a sound like lightning splitting a tree.

  The cave went dark, like a flame had been doused. Only Ondina and her mother were visible, lit by the green glow of the orb, La Llorona’s concentrated fury a contrast to the mania that had overtaken her daughter’s features.

  Her eyes were unnaturally wide as the power of the orb danced in them, the crackling green cords snaking their way around her fingers, moving too fast.

  “Ondina!” Pao shouted instinctively, and Bruto barked once, short and sharp.

  Whether it was her voice or the puppy’s yip that snapped her out of it, Pao would never know, but Ondina’s eyes went dark again, and her expression changed to one of pain as the cords stopped climbing her wrists.

  As if she sensed her daughter’s indecision, La Llorona leaned over and reached for the orb, a terrible hunger in her eyes.

  “No!” Pao screamed, and Ondina’s eyes snapped to hers. An understanding passed between them like an electric current.

  Despite the fire in her shoulder, Pao pushed off the cave wall and sprinted with the last of her strength as Ondina raised her arms and tossed the coveted prize over the platform’s edge.

  Pao watched it fall as if in slow motion, sure she wouldn’t be able to get into position in time, and all would be lost. But the moment she was in range, it was like she became a magnet. The orb zapped into her hands as if it had been made to fit them, and the green energy snakes wrapped around her wrists and hands, holding them in place.

  Pao braced herself for a shock. For pain. She wasn’t the least bit ready for what happened instead.

  The cave walls around her disappeared, replaced by a web of glittering white light strands. She felt a pulsing from the orb, which Pao could now see was a massive ancient freshwater pearl. The vibration passed through her skin and into her bloodstream, filling her veins with something fizzy—like the rose lemonade her mom made with soda water.

  Pao’s mind was sharper than it had ever been, suddenly able to stretch in any direction, to sense and hear and feel everything. There inside the web she could see La Llorona’s life force—a deformed thing bound up with the green snakes of energy, trying to feed off the pearl. Ondina’s was there, too—a lighter green, flickering and fading.

  Pao could even sense her own, as well as the moment it disappeared into the white-hot power of the pearl, fusing with it until she couldn’t tell them apart anymore.

  A heat spread from her palms to her forearms, the fizzing intensifying as it did. Around her, she could feel the river and the glowing nodes of every life-form that was supported by it.

  Time slowed, running like warm honey. Pao saw how her lifetime had barely been a blink in the endless timeline that stretched behind her, and ahead of her. She was everything and nothing. She was pure power, pure light.

  When she looked down at her hands and arms, she noticed as if from a distance that the green snakes had wound up to her elbows.

  Moving effortlessly through the web of glittering strands, Pao’s mind focused on La Llorona, on the history that had twisted to become her tragic legend. The lover who had suddenly turned on her, shaming her for the children she’d borne him. The stares and jeers and insults of their neighbors. Despite it all, her passion for him, the ferocity of it.

  And then his abandonment, and her inconsolable grief, pushing her to the edge of madness. Beneath it all, the fear for her children, brown-skinned, born out of wedlock, and now fatherless, too. She had worried endlessly over them, loved them with all her heart.

  Until, eventually, the intensity of her love twined so closely with her fear that it drove her to commit an unspeakable act. One that broke her mind and body. It sent her wailing along the riverbanks in search of a way to get back the lives she’d taken.

  Pao saw Franco through La Llorona’s eyes on a summer solstice a hundred years ago. The way she’d clutched at him with filthy, desperate hands, and he’d stabbed her with the very knife Marisa had used on Pao in the cactus field.

  Pao, a living human, had only lost consciousness. The knife was meant to be used against phantoms, and La Llorona had felt it when it tore into her, banishing her to the rift, where she should have let go of her form and become part of the magical fabric of the void.

  But the ghost woman had been more than her form. She had stubbornly clung to all the love and madness that had driven her to take the lives of her children. And then, nearly spent, she had encountered the pearl….

  Franco assumed he had rid the world of her, but instead, he had sent her to the fire to be forged. La Llorona had entered the void a wasted, defeated phantasm and used its power to become a formidable demon.

  The rest was only flashes. The resurrection of the ruined palace. The experiment that had cost her her youngest boy for a second time. A flash of another boy—older, nearly a man.

  His face… Pao thought, before he turned his back on his mother, leaving her wailing in this very cave. It was so familiar…. But how could that be?

  Once La Llorona’s story was complete, any sense of the woman’s future grew cloudy. Pao began to see her own instead. La Llorona had used the void’s magic for selfish gain, corrupting it in the process. But Pao was different. She could do so much good with the power that was now radiating in her elbows, crawling up her biceps, reaching for her shoulders. She could create alternate fuel sources, restore ecosystems. Bring peace and prosperity to the residents of Silver Springs and beyond.

  She saw herself in a white lab coat, a flight suit, her intellect boundless, her life never ending. She saw adoring crowds cheering for her, books and papers with her name on them.

  Paola Santiago…

  Pao knew it then, that she could own this power. She could control the void. It was offering itself to her here and now, the green winding up her neck and across her chest.

  Once it reached her heart, her brilliant new senses told her, there would be no turning back. If there was a choice to be made, it was now. And how could she refuse it? All this…it was everything she had ever wanted.

  Her greedy heart showed her a porthole and the epic vastness of space beyond it.

  Everything she had ever dreamed of…

  But underneath the shining good deeds, the rewards, and the dreams, Pao saw the human imperfections in herself. Her s
elf-doubts and petty jealousies, the quick temper that had bonded her to Ondina and set this whole thing in motion. Those flaws would feed on the power and pervert it, she knew.

  She envisioned herself as the girl from her dream again, white-haired and green-eyed. Terrible, beautiful, all-powerful.

  “Pao!” A voice penetrated the glowing cage. “Pao!”

  The sound came from far away, bringing with it the scents of Florida Water and too many burning candles, the taste of Coke and orange Popsicles, the feeling of home….

  It took everything in Pao to reject those images of her super-bright future, the power she craved but couldn’t trust herself to wield. But she did. She focused all her energy into repelling the green snakes, and she felt them resist, twisting around her arms and holding on for dear life.

  She blasted the pearl with thoughts of home. Of Emma and her comics and her purple nails. Of Dante and the way he’d kissed her cheek.

  Of her mom, and cold pizza, and tarot cards, and more love than Pao could possibly receive.

  The kind of power that didn’t hurt. Didn’t destroy.

  The memories gave Pao the strength she needed to say good-bye to the void’s promises. She shut her mind against the pearl and immediately saw the energy snakes shrivel and draw back.

  When the last of the warmth that wasn’t her own left her body, Pao found herself back in the cave. It was like no time had passed, even though she’d seen hundreds of years, lived and lost a lifetime.

  “Pao!” That voice again. Fingers squeezing her arms. Fingers with sparkly purple nails.

  “Emma…” Her own voice seemed to be coming from a long tunnel, but it worked, and Emma smiled. “You’re…Are you…”

  “Pao, for now I really just need you to let go of that thing….”

  The scene around them snapped into focus. Emma standing in front of her, as vital as ever. Franco on his hands and knees, coughing, and Dante, his club shining as he faced down a growling La Llorona, who was trying desperately to get to Pao. Ondina, teetering on top of the pedestal, looking weaker than ever now that the pearl had been unplugged from the palace.