Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  “Ondina!” Pao shouted, and with the remnants of the void’s power left in her, she projected a thought to her. Her solution to the puzzle. The way to finally end this.

  She knew it had reached Ondina’s mind when, from the top of the pedestal, the ghost girl smiled serenely. She nodded once.

  Pao felt a tug in her chest, but Franco was struggling to stand, and Dante was barely holding off La Llorona. It was time.

  “Stay with me?” Pao asked Emma, and her friend squeezed her arm again.

  With the last bit of the strength the pearl had left behind, Pao raised her hands high. La Llorona saw her and, swiping Dante to the side, lunged across the space between them.

  But she was too late. Pao threw the pearl as hard as she could at the stone floor. It flew at a hundred times the speed it should have, shattering right at the warped woman’s feet like the devotional candle Pao had smashed in her kitchen.

  “No!” La Llorona gasped, and the cave—so full of frantic activity only moments earlier—suddenly went eerily still. The phantasm grabbed at her own throat, the green light in her eyes extinguishing in a way that seemed final.

  Pao, however, only had eyes for her friends.

  “Quick!” she shouted, linking her arm with Emma’s, ignoring the terrible cold that had begun to spread through her the moment the pearl left her hands. “We have to stay together!”

  Dante found his way to Pao and took her other arm. Franco stumbled over, bleeding from a cut on his forehead.

  “You too,” Pao said as Ondina’s feet touched the ground. “You’re a hero. You’re one of us now.”

  “Ew,” Ondina said, but she stepped closer anyway.

  “Bruto!” Pao called, suddenly panicked, but the little chupacabra limped over from a pile of fallen rocks. They were all together. Together and safe.

  Just as Pao thought the words, the ground began to shake.

  “The palace is going to fall,” Ondina said, her voice faint.

  “I know,” said Pao, and somehow she did. Was it the power of the pearl? “And when it does, there will be a way out of here.”

  What she couldn’t see was whether the palace’s collapse would kill them all first. She would just have to hope this wasn’t going to be the end of her future. The version she’d chosen.

  La Llorona had crumpled to the ground, her hands gripping the stone floor like she was holding on for dear life.

  “The power won’t let go until she does,” Ondina said with a note of wonder in her voice. “She’s been its master for too long.”

  “Isn’t there something you can do?” Dante asked.

  Ondina left Pao’s side and walked toward her mother as the others clung to one another in shock and confusion.

  They watched as Ondina knelt down beside the woman who had held her as a baby. She stroked her mother’s grotesque face tenderly. “It’s okay, Mamá,” she said. “We can go home now.”

  “No…” sobbed La Llorona, but even as she did, her appearance began to change. Her masklike features relaxed as her massive, terrible form shrank. Soon her visage had transformed back into her human one. “I wanted to save you….”

  “This is how you save me,” Ondina said, her face radiant. Pao could swear the ghost girl was beginning to glow from inside—but not green. Not this time. “Forgive me, Mamá. I forgive you. Set us free.”

  “My daughter,” La Llorona moaned, taking Ondina in her arms. “Lo siento, mi hija. Fue solo porque te amo….”

  “What did she say?” Pao hissed to Dante, but it was Franco who answered.

  “It was only because I love you.”

  Pao knew that would stay with her for the rest of her life, this last image of the two of them. Mother and daughter. Shining. Peaceful.

  Free.

  And when they had faded completely, the walls came tumbling down.

  Pao, Dante, Emma, and Franco stayed in the center of the cave as the rock walls disintegrated and water began to pour in from all sides.

  “Trust me,” said Pao. “This is how we get out.”

  If I’m wrong and this is the end, Pao thought, taking a deep breath just before the water closed over her head, at least we did what we came to do.

  The surge of water carried them upward, and Pao did her best to keep her eyes open so she could watch what happened to the void. The dome was gone. She saw green light flicker and die across the ruined landscape below. Faint white clouds drifted alongside them like jellyfish.

  Those were the ahogados, Pao realized, their peaceful faces turned toward the light that was just becoming visible above. And not only them. Pao also saw chupacabras, Lechuzas, even Manos Pachonas floating up, their spirits freed from the malevolence that had been holding them prisoner for so long.

  Pao gripped Emma’s arm, and Dante’s, and at last, she closed her eyes, focusing on holding her breath for one more second. Just one more…

  When their heads finally broke the surface of the Gila, they swam for the nearest bank, and Pao didn’t think about ankle-snagging branches or cold pockets or the dangers of invisible currents. She only thought of home.

  Emma was struggling, and Pao tried to pull her along, but in the end, it was Franco who heaved her onto the riverbank, while Dante—already standing in the shallows—took Pao’s arm as they sank into the gritty sand, coughing and sputtering. Alive.

  There was a screeching sound, and then a clunk, like a heavy steel door slamming shut. Pao peered into the river just in time to see a massive dark mouth close just beneath the water’s surface.

  The solstice was over. The pearl had been destroyed. The rift was sealed.

  Pao felt a tug in her chest, a phantom of the pain she’d experienced when the key had drained her. But when the portal could no longer be seen, she felt a weightlessness, too. A sense of relief.

  Sitting up, Pao looked at her exhausted friends spread out along the bank, its familiar white sand and dripping black moss seeming positively ordinary compared to the horrors they’d seen. She felt close to her comrades, but also separate somehow.

  When she’d held the pearl, she’d seen the potential of what she could be, and she’d given it up. She was in mourning, while everyone else was waking from a nightmare.

  Pao felt a little lonely as her eyes roved over them, but she tried to shake it off. To find joy in the sensation of solid ground beneath her. To remember why she belonged with them.

  That was when she realized Bruto was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where are we?” Emma asked.

  Pao blinked back the tears in her eyes. There was no way to explain Bruto to her, any more than she could explain her sense of loss at the closing of the void.

  “The rift opening wasn’t too far from the Niños’ camp,” Pao said, though her journey between the two had seemed endless. “I think this is the same place I went in.”

  Franco nodded, getting to his feet.

  “Wait, the what now?” Emma asked, looking a little dazed, and Pao suddenly felt overwhelmed by how long they’d been apart. How much had happened to both of them in the interim.

  “It’s a long story,” Pao said, trying to smile.

  “I have a couple of those myself,” Emma replied.

  “But you’re okay?” Pao asked. “Everyone’s okay?”

  Dante stepped up between them and put an arm around each of their shoulders. “We’re together,” he said. “It’s a start.”

  Pao smiled for real this time, basking in the feeling of being a trio again. It helped fill the hole where her shining future had been.

  “So…which way do we go to get back to camp?” Dante asked her.

  “There’s no more key,” Pao said, shrugging. Dante and Emma looked confused, but Franco’s eyes snapped to hers.

  “You found it?” They were the first words he had spoken.

  Pao nodded. In some ways, she’d had it all along. “It was destroyed when I went through the rift.”

  Something settled in Franco’s expression, and for
a moment, Pao could see the hundreds of years he’d lived, even though his face still looked sixteen.

  “It’s all right,” he said at last. “I know the way.”

  As they headed toward the Niños’ camp, Pao couldn’t help but crane her neck and look at the sky, wondering where Ondina and her mother were now. Where Bruto was. What would happen to them next? Even the pearl in all its infinite power and wisdom hadn’t been able to tell her that.

  Maybe it’s for the best, she thought. She’d already seen enough impossible things for one summer. Probably for a whole lifetime.

  Compared to the route Pao had taken, following the flashlight beam with all its twists and turns, Franco’s sure steps were almost anticlimactic.

  Pao and Emma walked behind the boys, shoulder to shoulder, taking comfort in each other’s presence. Dante seemed to understand, and besides, Pao could plainly see how much he wanted to emulate Franco.

  It makes sense, Pao thought. Franco is basically the soccer captain of the cactus field.

  She would keep the joke to herself for now, though. Surviving the ghost-and-monster-filled underworld deserved at least an hour of cease-fire.

  Beside her, Emma’s brow was furrowed, her lips drawn in a frown. There was so much Pao wanted to ask her, about the details of her disappearance, about Franco, La Llorona, and Ondina, and about how Emma had ended up in the glass palace. For once, though, she decided to let her curiosity rest.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, simply, and Emma’s face relaxed.

  “I am now,” she said. “For a while I thought…” Emma swallowed hard, her gaze on the horizon. “I thought I was never going to get out of there.”

  “I never would have stopped until we found you,” Pao said, and it was true. As terrible as the ordeal had been, she would have gone through worse for Emma. She would have done anything.

  “That’s what I kept telling the ghost lady,” Emma said. “I think she put me under glass because she was sick of hearing about you.” Her tone was teasing, but her eyes were still haunted.

  Pao flashed back to Emma in the prism, unconscious, helpless. Pao had been so close to letting her down. To letting them all down.

  “Hey,” Emma said, bumping her shoulder into Pao’s. “It’s over. We’re okay. Thanks to you.”

  Pao smiled gratefully. She’d missed this. The way best friends knew just what to say.

  The noises of camp drifted toward them, and Pao was suddenly apprehensive. She had escaped from the Niños, who had left her tied to a bed. What kind of welcome would she receive now?

  “Franco?”

  Three boys emerged from a knot of cacti—friends of Sal’s, Pao remembered—looking like they’d been in a scuffle. But whatever had caused the ripped T-shirts and dirt-smudged cheeks was forgotten when Franco took a step toward them.

  “Is it really you?” one of the boys asked.

  When Franco grinned, Pao got a glimpse of what all the fuss was about. He had a kind of magnetism, a rakish, irreverent joy that was peeking through the layers of fatigue and stress.

  “That depends,” he said. “Who won the fight? I only reveal my resurrected form to winners, you know.”

  The boys ran at him then, whooping joyfully, tackling him and almost taking him down.

  Franco was exhausted, but he grappled with them anyway, laughing and tousling their hair as they peppered him with questions.

  It was like this, with ecstatic boys hanging from his arms and shoulders, that the presumed-dead former leader of Los Niños de la Luz made his entrance.

  Pao realized quickly, arriving in his wake, that she’d been silly to worry about her own reception. In the tail of Franco’s blazing comet, she was nothing but a chunk of dull space rock. He was a true hero, and Pao had never been so happy to be nobody special.

  With his famous weapon and reputation as the boy who’d gone down fighting for Naomi, Dante was getting his share of adoration, too. He stood slightly apart from Franco by the massive firepit, looking sheepish but pleased with himself.

  For once, Pao wasn’t jealous. He deserved this moment.

  She and Emma—whom no one here knew—stayed at the fringes, shoulders still touching, watching it all from a distance.

  “Pao?” Emma asked after a few minutes had passed.

  “Yeah?”

  “It was my fault.”

  “What was?” Pao turned to face her friend, who was worrying her lower lip with her teeth, a telltale sign that something was bothering her.

  “Everything that happened to us. I wasn’t…just taken. I went with her, the ghost girl—your friend. I went with her.”

  “Ondina?” Pao asked, nonplussed. “What do you mean?”

  Emma took a deep breath. “It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her. But I thought she was just a girl from Mesa on a family trip. She and I made plans to meet before I was supposed to join you guys. I was going to show her the river, but when I got there, things got…weird.”

  Pao, processing the words, didn’t answer right away. But Emma could never let a silence stretch very long, and she spoke into it too quickly.

  “She started talking about souls, and I thought she was just a weird hippie, but then he showed up.” Emma pointed at Franco, now slinging his arm around a thunderstruck Marisa. “He told me not to trust her and started asking questions about my ring, and by then I just wanted to get out of there, but all these ghost zombies or whatever showed up and dragged me into the river and—”

  “I don’t understand,” Pao said, feeling dizzy. “Why would you arrange to meet a girl from Mesa who was on a family trip?”

  Emma’s cheeks went pink. “Oh. I don’t know, she was at the club after tennis practice, and she said she wanted to see the Gila. I told her I knew a place….”

  “And you didn’t tell me?” This seemed like the least of their worries right now, but for some reason, it was the thing that stung Pao the most. Emma had been making other friends without her?

  That the friend in question turned out to be the ghost of a drowned girl looking for a matching soul was beside the point.

  “Pao, I’m so sorry. I should have. I just…I’m sorry.”

  Pao felt her temper start to rise…but then she thought about her river dreams, and the strange boy-girl whatever that had been going between her and Dante lately. There were things she hadn’t told Emma, either.

  She exhaled slowly. “It’s okay. Ondina would have done anything to come back to life,” Pao said. “And Franco was looking for a key to get him into the rift. It wasn’t your fault. Just an epically bad wrong-place, wrong-time situation.”

  “So, you’re not mad at me?”

  Pao shook her head, and she meant it. “Just…no more secrets, okay? From now on, we tell each other everything.”

  “Deal,” Emma said, sticking out her hand. They used the special handshake they’d made up in drama class last year, ending with a double pinkie swear.

  “I have about six million questions to ask you, though,” Pao said when they’d finished.

  “You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t,” Emma said, shaking her head and linking her arm with Pao’s.

  At last, the knot around Franco and Dante began to loosen, and the Niños noticed Pao.

  Sal approached her first, and she found that despite everything she had gone through, despite the emptiness still lingering in her chest, her smile came easily. Maybe that’s how healing worked—a little at a time.

  “You kept your promise,” he said, and Pao felt her smile grow bigger.

  “I did my best.”

  Sal put his chubby hand in hers and squeezed before smiling shyly at Emma.

  “I remember your bike,” he said to her. “Purple, right?”

  “Purple,” Emma agreed, smiling back.

  Naomi took Sal’s place when he scampered off to examine Dante’s club. Her expression was unreadable as she sized up the two girls, giving Emma a nod that almost passed for friendly before turning to Pao.

/>   “Guess I underestimated you,” Naomi said after a long moment.

  “Sorry I ran off.”

  “Sorry I tied you to a cot.”

  “Yeah, that was kind of rude.”

  They both laughed—the soft laugh of two kids who had seen too much.

  Together, Naomi, Pao, and Emma looked toward the fire, at Marisa. She had tucked herself under Franco’s arm, her hair loose and wavy, her smile positively radiant.

  “We all thought he was dead,” Naomi said, her voice hushed and almost reverent. “Seeing him now…it’s…”

  “A miracle,” Pao said, reaching over to squeeze Emma’s hand.

  “Complicated,” Naomi offered, shaking her head. “What was he doing down there, anyway?”

  Emma turned to her. “She wanted to use us. Our souls. To bring her daughter back. Franco could have escaped. He was captured trying to save me….” Her eyes were more solemn than Pao had ever seen them. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s not your fault,” Naomi said, no trace of thorniness in her tone. “We’ve been fighting the rift for a long time. It’s insidious, and Franco knew what he was up against better than anyone. Believe me, he didn’t do anything he didn’t decide to do.”

  “He didn’t know La Llorona was still a threat,” added Pao.

  “La Llorona…” Naomi echoed, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it was her the whole time.”

  “Never underestimate a mother with a grudge,” Pao said darkly, looking at Franco. Did he feel bad for his mistake? For his role in creating the monster La Llorona became? How much would he tell the Niños about that?

  Naomi smirked, then asked in all seriousness, “What’s next for you?”

  “Home,” Emma blurted out. “And soon. My parents must be going crazy with worry.” She nudged Pao’s shoulder with hers. “I’m gonna go see if Dante’s almost ready, okay?”

  Pao nodded and stayed with Naomi, who was considering her with a different kind of expression…. Could it be respect?

  “You know,” Naomi said, “you wouldn’t be the first kid to walk into the cactus field and never come out. We could use someone like you.”

  “But La Llorona is gone—” Pao started.