You simply had to scrub hard enough.
31: Two Good Hands
Cold moved fast in the south. Simon had sweated through the afternoon when the sun had cut neatly through the haze and set the hardpan to sizzling, but mere moments after it set the ground grew frigid, and a chill wind descended from the mountaintops.
He inched closer to the fire, fingers flirting with the orange flames. Heat licked his hands, its friendly tongue belying the set of burning teeth that would close upon him if he lowered his arms a few more inches.
Fire had always made Simon nervous, even as it fascinated him. There was strength and madness in its endless flickering dance, a power temporarily harnessed but never truly tamed. He preferred the cold obedience of electricity. It could be deadly too, but its reprisals invariably had a cause. Electricity punished incompetence; fire could strike at anybody.
Simon heard the puttering of the vehicle’s engine before he could see it. His ears had grown accustomed to its pitch. Emily had made the run twice a week, give or take, hauling ears of corn and jugs of water in the vehicle’s bulging sidesaddles. This schedule meant she was traveling nearly all the time, but she seemed not to mind the pace—indeed, she treated the machine the way one might a well-loved horse, her fingers caressing its chassis in quiet moments. Simon was grateful for the deliveries, and while he insisted she needn’t trouble herself on his part, he couldn’t really say no—without them, he wasn’t sure how he’d manage to eat and drink.
The vehicle rounded a bend and came into view. Simon immediately sensed something off, but he couldn’t say what until the figure crested the hill. The rider’s features grew clearer in the waxing moonlight, their dimensions much too large and boxy to be Emily. Simon retreated behind a chevron of concrete that was once part of the building’s foundation and watched the figure approach. Had Emily been waylaid on her latest trip back? He imagined a thin wire stretched taut between one of the narrow passes, its deadly length calibrated to neck height. A well-aimed carbine roaring from a distant mesa, its payload buried in the small of Emily’s back. A pack of feral man-beasts descending on her camp, fingernails sharpened to deadly points.
He reached for his gun and realized he’d left it in the bunker with his other belongings. Not that it had any bullets, but at least he could’ve given the impression of being less than completely helpless.
The rider slowed, drifting along the narrow pass. The vehicle’s wheels crunched over the cracked asphalt, rendered by time and temperature into hunks of blackish gravel. Its front wheel wobbled unsteadily—clearly, the rider was unpracticed and lacked Emily’s innate grace with the machine.
Simon ducked lower behind the concrete protrusion. The rider pulled up twenty feet past it and cut the engine, the whirr of its dynamo more evident in its absence than it had been when running. He—it was definitely a he; at this distance, Simon could tell that much—brought his foot down and struggled to step free of the vehicle.
“Simon!” the man called. “Hey, Simon!”
It took Simon a moment to place the man’s voice. When he did, he wasn’t sure if it made him feel better or worse. He stepped from his hiding spot and waved.
“I’m right here!”
Otis returned the wave. He crunched his way along the road to the broken foundation where Simon stood. His face looked drawn with lack of sleep, its creases deeper than Simon remembered.
“Is everything okay?” Simon asked.
“It’s fine,” Otis replied. “Emily told me what you and her’ve been up to.”
“Oh.” Simon swallowed. He scuffed his shoe through the dirt.
“I’m not here to cause trouble with you about it. She knew how I felt and she made the decision she thought was best. I just came to say, I’d like to help you if I can.”
“You would?”
Otis nodded. He pointed to the wedge of shiny tissue splitting his right cheek. “You know how I got this scar?”
Simon shook his head. In answer, Otis drew a hunting knife from his belt. It was a serious weapon, nine inches of steel tapering to a vicious point. He pressed the flat of the blade gently against his face. Its tip dimpled the loose skin of his lower eyelid. Simon winced. Otis laughed, a sound too dry to hold any real humor.
“Seems a fool thing to do to your face, huh? Can’t say I much like how it looks, but I liked what was there before even less. A green star. Meant I was a field hand in the plantations of Jefe Thorin, he of the triumvirate—or the lone honcho now, Emily tells me. A marcado. Like your sister.”
Otis sheathed his knife. He sat down on the concrete outcrop and looked up at the moon.
“I’d like to say I’m with you because it’s the right thing to do. But I’m a father first, and fathers can’t afford too much nobility.” He scratched his chin. “Emily didn’t know exactly what your plans were, but she said that you and your sister were headed somewhere in particular. Somewhere you could lay down roots. I’d like us to come with you, if we could.”
Simon sat down next to him. “I could use all the help I can get, but I gotta tell you that there’s no guarantee what’s waiting for us. We’re not way out here because we’re chasing a better life. We’re just finishing what our parents started. Right now, you’ve got the farm and your canyon. Is it really worth giving up?”
“I don’t see as we’ve got a lot of choice. This has been a long time coming. Truth be told, I shoulda moved on years ago, but the roads around here are dangerous, ‘specially for a runaway marcado. Staying put seemed the best bet, but it can’t last. The irrigator goin’ bust proved that. You saved this year’s harvest, and I’m grateful for that. But what about next year? Or the year after that? Eventually, some other bit of machinery is gonna fail, or the water’s gonna run out, or the soil’s gonna dry up. I’ve got myself a leaky bucket, and I’m tryin’ to bail out the tide. It ain’t gonna keep working forever.”
A fresh gale rolled down the mountain face and swept through the cleft where the town once stood, carrying with it a dusting of fine white snow. It settled over the stones and bricks and rubble, coloring the world a crystalline white. Otis brushed a few flecks from his pants and stood up.
“Could be we should take a look at what you’ve got so far. I’m no great shakes with gears and engines, but I’ve got two good hands and can follow instructions. Tell me what you need doing, I’ll see it gets done.”
Simon smiled. He appreciated the offer and the spirit with which it was given. But what he needed doing was more than any man could promise him.
In fact, he was starting to worry that it couldn’t be done at all.
32: The Stones That Shifted Their Burden
The air in the tunnel smelled of death. The odor was distinct from the abattoir stench of blood and viscera and lacked the pungent reek of decomposition. In fact, there was nothing outwardly unpleasant about the smell at all—a faint dustiness, perhaps, and an earthy odor that recalled a decommissioned root cellar where winter preserves were once but no longer stored. Yet it was unquestionably death that Selena smelled, a distillation of its purest and most abstract properties.
Selena and Mary descended a dozen stone steps and entered a long narrow chamber with a bare dirt floor. Twin rows of pillars ran the length of the room, each of them capped with a candle burning feebly against the gloom. At the far end of the room, a skeletal figure perched on an antique throne, its body draped in robes of red and black. Its left hand rested on a scythe balanced across its thighs, while its right hand clutched a pewter globe. A corona of candles flickered around its feet, snagging glints of yellowish light from the coins and bones and bits of jewelry piled on its pedestal.
A crowd of worshippers knelt before the shrine, clutching their hands or pressing their foreheads to the ground in gestures of supplication. A few of them muttered catechisms, but most were silent.
As she proceeded toward the altar, Selena was conscious of the hollow slap of her feet, which seemed amplifi
ed by the very silence it broke. She expected the penitents to round on her or shoot her annoyed glances, but none of them seemed at all concerned by—or even aware of—her presence.
Mary, more familiar with the setting, moved with greater confidence. She stepped nimbly over the prostrate bodies and tapped a kneeling figure on the shoulder. Grace raised her head and regarded Mary with studied indifference. Mary whispered something to her in Mejise. Grace mouthed a reply and dropped her head, resuming her prayer. Mary tiptoed back to Selena.
“What’d she say?” Selena asked.
“She’ll talk. She just has a few more things to say to La Santa first.” Mary frowned at this last point, her disapproval apparent.
They moved away from the penitents and waited closer to the stairs. A haze of sunlight permeated the first few feet of the subterranean hall, allowing Selena to see deeper into the gloom that hung like inky drapery over the walls. Bones ran the length of the room, stacked in geometric patterns and dotted with blankly staring skulls. Selena wondered how many bodies were needed to furnish such a display. Hundreds, surely. Where had they all come from? The ones she could see bore the brittle yellow cast of relics. Perhaps they comprised the victims of the Last War or the plagues and famines that followed. Fresh bones were plentiful then—them and little else.
Grace rose from her ministrations and left the altar. She passed over the penitents with a light-limbed stride befitting her name. Her eyes flicked expectantly from Selena to Mary. For a moment Selena felt at a total loss for words. She looked to Mary for guidance, who seemed ready to translate but offered no suggestion of what to say. Her plan, held together at best by gossamer threads of intuition, seemed to unravel before her. She held the strands as tightly as she could and forced herself to meet Grace’s eyes.
“Maybe we should go somewhere more private,” she said.
Mary dutifully translated—or so Selena assumed, for Grace nodded and led them from the temple.
They emerged in the wan half-light of Juarez’s tangled alleys. Selena had been reluctant to enter them after her encounter with Krell, but there was no other way to reach Santa Muerte’s temple.
Grace strode through the winding paths to a blind alley, its arched doorway curtailed by a wall of large clay bricks. She pressed tight against the wall and shimmied to the left, disappearing into a narrow crevice invisible from the alley’s mouth. Selena followed.
Darkness consumed her for a moment and spit her out into a tiny courtyard. Tufts of scrub grass burst from the hardpan. The courtyard’s walls met at strange angles where competing buildings had grown into one another, leaving an angular scrap of negative space. A statuette of a skeletal figure stood in the corner, her tiny shoulders draped in a flowing red robe. The remnants of a few candles rested at her feet, their colored lengths burned down to almost nothing. Grace genuflected to the figure before turning to Selena and speaking a few words of Mejise.
“She asks you to state your piece,” explained Mary.
Selena looked from Grace to the tiny altar squatting in the dirt. The spirit of this strange ugly city stared from the empty sockets of its skull. It was a wild, creeping spirit, a frothing mist that would brook no containment would inevitably spill from whatever vessel attempted hopelessly to hold it.
Selena had been raised in a state religion, but not of it—A Seraphim and hence of the upper class, she studied the Gospels of the Final Testament as all New Canaanites did. She learned of its reverence for submission to higher authority, of the parable of the stones that shifted their burden and were thusly crushed beneath the mountain, of God’s abhorrence of the sin of defiance above all things, but the unspoken assumption laid down by her teachers was that these rules didn’t really apply to her kind. That the Salters bore the burden while the Seraphim stood at the pinnacle, with the middling Shepherds there to ensure the lowly Salters didn’t spoil the view.
The truth of the gospels was never openly questioned in her house—for even in the quietest corners it was suicide to deny the brief return of the savior during the Last War and his establishment of the new Canaanite Order as a bulwark against the encroaching chaos, with the Archbishop serving as his earthly mouthpiece—but nor were its teachings revered or even referenced. There seemed no fervency of belief among Seraphim or Salter, but simply an acceptance of the Testament’s rules as an extension of natural laws, as immutable as gravity. Religion was the state, and the state was religion. Knowing the cult of Santa Meurte could exist not just outside of the state, but in open defiance of it, fascinated Selena. More than that, it formed the crux of her plan.
“I’m leaving Juarez in two weeks,” she said. Mary echoed her words in Mejise. The two found an easy rhythm and soon Selena ceased to notice the translation at all. “I’ve been told how rare it is to escape. I’ve seen what happens to those who try. I don’t care. There’s something expected of me, and I intend to do it or die in the attempt.
“I don’t know much about you, other than that your brother was killed and your birthright was taken away from you. Maybe you don’t want it back. Maybe you’ve made peace with your situation or decided that there’s no changing it. But if you do want it back and are willing to try to take it, with all the risk that comes with that, I see a way how we might be able to help each other.
“You’re a marcada, like me. But you’re also a Delgado. This isn’t my town, but from what I’ve heard that name carries some weight. And from my own experience, being a marcada doesn’t stop people respecting you. But respect for a fighter isn’t respect for a leader. So my question is this: if Thorin looks like he might topple, will your brother’s former men support you? Can a woman and a marcada be a Jefe in Juarez?”
Grace knelt down before the shrine of Santa Meurte. She scratched a scab of dirt from one of the nubs of candle, lit a match, and touched its flame to the wick. She held it there a moment as the fire performed its embryotic doubling, then shook out the match and tossed it aside. Smoke rose from the candle, filling the tiny courtyard with the scent of lavender. Grace stood and gave Selena her answer. It required no translation:
“Si.”
33: Flickering Orange Semaphore
Marcus could feel the sickhouse breathing on him. Wet air lapped at the back of his neck, dampened his palms with its relentless condensation. That his own sweat was the actual cause of this moisture made no difference to him. He adjusted his serape to hide the wedge of exposed skin between hair and collar and wiped his hands on the front of his pants.
He had always hated sickhouses, hated them with the bone-deep loathing that can only gestate in fear. It was not the sight of injury that frightened him—Marcus had seen the insides of too many men to fear the exposure of such anatomy, and had performed dozens of feats of ad hoc surgery in conditions far from sterile. Nor did the promise of death, mixed into the very mortar of every enfermeria and hospicio ever built, give him pause.
It was simply that sickhouses reminded him of his father. His presence filled every bed, rode every gurney, dribbled from every corner. To cross their threshold was to shed inches and years, husking away his defenses until only a trembling kernel of boyhood remained.
He recalled those final visits with absolute clarity as some unknown malady—nameless but for the nebulous and shifting phrases that fumbled to catch and classify his symptoms: la viruela, la palidez gris, el demonio sudoroso—prodded his father mercilessly along on his slow march toward death. He remembered the way his father’s eyes sank deeper and deeper into their sockets, leaving him to peer through cranial tunnels at the world receding around him. The funk of his sickness, sour at first and by the very end strangely sweet. The moan, weak but constant, a reedy pathetic timbre so unlike his real voice, as if from a lost and frightened child weeping in the caverns of his throat. The slow implosion of his body as the germs dissolved his flesh and chipped away his muscle, leaving behind a sagging tent of skin and bone.
The twitch of his mother’s finger bru
shed the recollection from his mind. He patted her hand and waited as her eyes fluttered open, their brown irises growing wan and cloudy behind a skein of milky tissue. A Grey Sister appeared at her side, bony fingers proffering a tin cup of cool water. She brought the cup to his mother’s puckered lips and held it steady as she drank. The muscles in her neck twitched and shuddered with the effort of swallowing. She broke off with a contented sigh. The Grey Sister disappeared as quickly as she’d come, her legs mere hypotheses beneath the whicker of her floor-length dress.
“Are you awake, madré?” he asked. “It’s Marcus.”
His mother’s eyes fluttered open.
“Marcito. It’s—” Her words dissolved into a cough. It folded her inward, wasted muscle showing in tight cords beneath her tissue paper skin.
“Please, mother. Don’t strain.” He smoothed out her blanket and hiked it up to cover her shoulders. “I need to speak with you about something. It is no easy thing, but I promise to heed your words, whatever they may be.”
His mother closed her eyes. Her breath resumed a gentle rise and fall that could signal sleep, or perhaps simply rest. She nodded, once, a barely perceptible jostle of her head.
“I’m afraid, mother. Afraid that I may do something terrible, something that will hurt our family. I’m afraid because so far, I’ve chosen not to do this thing, but that choice becomes harder every day. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.
“I’ve hurt so many people already. I’m very good at hurting people. I used to take pride in that, and to me, that’s the most shameful thing of all. I didn’t realize that if you cause enough pain, it starts to stick to you. And soon it stains everything you touch.
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