by Mark Oshiro
Silence.
“Who thinks we should let them stay?”
Hands shot up in the air.
“Then we are in agreement?”
In unison: “¡Sí!”
Pablo stepped forward and brushed the hair out of his face. “Bienvenidos a La Reina Nueva,” he said. “Our home.”
The reaction was instantaneous. The children did not care that we were such a horrible mess. The girl with her face painted marched up to me and extended her hand. “I’m Gabriela,” she said. Her eyes were dark like Emilia’s, like Papá’s, and she was so thin, as though she hadn’t eaten in a long time. “We protect La Reina Nueva, so we had to do that.”
“What do you mean?” I said, my mouth agape, but she didn’t explain further. She dragged me forward, and I looked back to the others, but they were swarmed by children, too. “What does that mean? Who is ‘la Reina Nueva’?”
“I didn’t name it,” said Gabriela. “Supposed to be about some ‘reina’ who ruled here long ago. Would you like something?”
What were they doing here?
“Are you hungry? Thirsty?” Gabriela asked me, and I let her lead me without any resistance. I was too tired, too confused. “Marcos found some prickly pear fruit today, and we were saving them for whenever Eduardo arrived.”
I struggled to keep up. “Who is Eduardo?” I asked, then tried to find Emilia or any of the others. That name. Eduardo. Where had I heard it?
I couldn’t find the others; there were too many children, and they climbed over the ruins, surrounded my compadres, and I called out to Emilia. Rosalinda. Felipe.
“How do you not know Eduardo?” she said, as if the statement were obvious, something I should have known. She brought me to a portion of the wall that was still intact. “You’ve been walking in the sun all day. Eat! Drink! We always take care of the people Eduardo brings.”
Who is this girl? I thought.
“But what about you?” I asked. “How are you—where do you—?” I threw my hands up in defeat. “I don’t understand this place. How are you all not dead?”
“We stay underground during the day,” Gabriela said. She pointed, and I looked to the hollow space there in the ground at the base of the wall.
“You all really live here?”
Behind me, a gasp echoed out, and I faced Rosalinda; the children of La Reina Nueva had gathered Emilia and Felipe as well.
“I don’t understand,” said Emilia. “Where did you all come from? And who is this Eduardo you keep talking about?”
“El coyote,” I said, and I watched the epiphany hit Emilia.
“Soledad wanted to send us to him,” she said, nodding her head.
Large stones were hauled to us. We were told to sit. No one answered our questions, and then more children arrived—Were they different ones from those we’d seen before?—carrying baskets woven from sticks and reeds, and I could smell the prickly pear fruit. A basket was thrust in front of me.
“Eat,” Gabriela said, thrusting the basket nearer toward me. “They’re pretty fresh.”
Skinned prickly pear fruit glistened in a pile in the basket. I’d had it only a couple of times in my life, and I didn’t hesitate. I picked up a piece of the deep red fruit, its flesh sticky against my own, and I shoved it into my mouth greedily, the juices flowing down my chin.
What was this place? How could it exist?
“This is delicious,” said Felipe as he devoured a handful of fruit. “But … this is really happening, right? I’m not imagining it?”
“Solís help us,” muttered Rosalinda, who was now sitting next to Felipe as a group of children swarmed her, offering them both fruit and water, asking her if she was staying.
One voice out of that group cut through the noise.
“Have you seen mi mami? Is she coming back soon?”
Rosalinda whipped her head in the direction of the one who had spoken. She was also terribly thin, smaller than she should have been, and it looked as if a layer of dirt covered the clothing she wore, its edges frayed and tattered.
How long had these children been here?
I thought of Raúl, of his bushy hair, and was tormented by guilt. I had not thought of mi hermanito in days. Was he that meaningless to me?
No, I told myself. I love him.
I tried to imagine him here, among these jovencitos, all alone in the desert without anyone to take care of him. Nausea pushed up into my throat, and I gagged, coughing repeatedly until Emilia was at my side, handing me her canteen. I drank the cool water down, then leaned my head back, my eyes focused on all those stars around us.
“What is this place, Mami?” Felipe asked.
Rosalinda didn’t know what to say. I saw her mouth open, then shut, and she looked to me. I had nothing for her. No explanation, no reason.
How was this real?
The child named Pablo approached me. “Sorry about that,” he said. “We have to be careful now that Carlito is gone.”
I shook my head. “Carlito? Eduardo? Who are these people?”
As I ate, Pablo sat in front of me to explain. “Carlito was our leader,” he said. “He was the first person Eduardo brought here.”
“Brought?” I nearly choked on the prickly pear. “He left you here on purpose?”
Pablo nodded, and he curled his feet under him, sat up straight. “Me and Gabriela, we took over after Carlito went missing.”
“Ay, what do you mean by that?” Rosalinda groaned.
There. It flashed across Pablo’s face.
Fear.
In the light of las estrellas, he was a child.
Then, it was gone, and he addressed Rosalinda as if they were both adults, both ruled by responsibility and duty. “We haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks. He went with the guardians to help protect La Reina Nueva, and none of them ever came back.”
The four of us stared at one another. Rosalinda and Felipe must have known that this was a bad omen, for they both looked terrified.
I had to know.
“Protect you from what?”
Now the children stilled, as we had done earlier. They looked to one another, then to Gabriela and Pablo. She nodded, and they scattered, disappearing into piles of rubble or beneath the wall. It was sudden, almost as if it had been planned. The first of them returned, hair shorn unevenly, face gaunt and desperate, and held it out for me—and I fell off the stone I sat on.
A skull.
A skull like the one I’d found before, when I was alone.
Long. Horned. Impossible.
Yet here it was.
Rosalinda started praying to you as Felipe whimpered. Emilia reached out to it, ran her fingers over the clean bone of the horns.
“Un sabueso,” she said.
“They started attacking us,” the girl said. “The guardians protected us, but they came to us not too long ago, said that they knew where they were coming from.” The rest of the children went quiet, and the girl continued. “Carlito insisted on going. That was when we last saw him.”
“But why are all of you here?” Rosalinda said, her voice loud, echoing off the ruins. “No adults, no parents … where are they?”
Gabriela beamed. “Oh, they’re up north! In Solado. Eduardo took them there.”
“¿What?” Emilia yanked her hand away from the skull.
“Our parents couldn’t take us with them, so we stayed here.”
Pablo rejoined us and with him came many of the others, some of them carrying skulls of these horrible bestias, but most carried random objects.
Una cobija.
Un rebozo.
Serapes.
Little items, things that someone could leave behind.
Things that reminded the children of who had continued on.
Without them.
“Eduardo promised that as soon as he could, he would come take us back to them,” explained Pablo. He opened his hand to me. A small stone, a brilliant green, shone there in the starlight. “This is h
is promise,” he said. “That he would come back for me.”
“But why?” Emilia asked. “Why would they go there?”
“For work,” said Gabriela. “To build us a new life, and then invite us there when things are ready.”
Emilia had her hands on her temples, and panic flooded her. “Xochitl,” she said, “they can’t go there. I barely escaped from it.”
“You’re from Solado?” The one who had brought us the first skull lit up. “Can you bring back our parents?”
Emilia’s eyes went glassy.
She turned and ran off, past the wall and into the darkness.
“Go,” said Rosalinda. “I’ll talk with the others. She needs you.”
I followed after her, my eyes still adjusting to the surreality around me. I hopped over a section of crumbled wall, hoping she had not gone far. Even with the starlight above, I was in an unfamiliar place. The shadows taunted me with untold horrors lurking just out of sight.
“Emilia?” I called out softly. “Please talk to me.”
I saw her outline, a dim shape not far from me. I came up behind her and I fought the urge to smother her in an embrace, to kiss the back of her neck, to tell her that everything would be fine.
I did not know her like that.
I probably never would.
So instead, I stood next to her, and we stared out across that vast expanse, that empty desert that stretched so far in front of us, out toward the towering montañas we would have to cross the next morning. I existed in that silence there, wondering so many things. What awaited us in Solado? Had los pálidos maintained their hold over la aldea? How were we ever going to find Simone?
And what if Simone wouldn’t help me?
I swallowed down my anxiety, unsure once more if it was my own or if it belonged to one of the stories in my belly.
“We have to go back,” she said, her voice soft but certain. “Not just for Luz. Not just for Simone. But for them, too.”
I laced my fingers with hers.
“For all of them,” I said.
And I meant it.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but we can’t let this go on.” She squeezed my hand.
I squeezed back.
“I am not sure what we’ll find in Solado, Xo. And I can’t promise it’ll be easy.”
“I never thought this was going to be easy,” I countered, smiling.
“But … los pálidos,” she said. “I know where they live, and I know how to get into Solado, but … it’s going to be really hard.”
“It’s worth it,” I said.
And I meant that, too. Maybe not in the way she did, but I did. It could not be easy to be around me, but she still was. That had to mean something, right?
“Let’s head back,” I suggested. “Get some sleep. We’ll figure things out in the morning.”
“Yes,” she said. “In the morning.”
She guided me back.
The whole time, she held my hand.
* * *
The children suggested that we sleep outdoors. They had not done so in a long time, but they felt safer with us around. Rosalinda was concerned it would be too dangerous. “What of the attacks?” she asked. But they said that there’d be some of them on patrol. We’d be fine.
The idea was too strange to me, but they wouldn’t accept any arguments. “We know what we’re doing,” Gabriela assured me, and she lifted her chin up when she said it.
To refuse her would disrespect her, so we accepted.
I spread out my sleeping roll not far from the underground entrance, then found a spot nearby to relieve myself. I covered up my waste, then ran water over my hands to clean them. When I turned back, Emilia was sitting on her own sleeping roll next to me.
“Eat something else,” she told me, and she held out some dried cabra for me. “Even if you aren’t hungry.”
I begrudgingly took the food and bit off a piece. Then I collapsed onto my sleeping roll, chewing.
“We should make it to Solado tomorrow,” said Emilia.
Tomorrow.
Only another sunrise before I found the person I was looking for.
Another sunrise before this was all over.
Before my life changed forever.
I hoped.
“And then what?”
My question hung there between us, pushed us apart. At least I thought it did. But I heard her roll over, felt her hand on my arm.
“We could figure it out,” she said, her voice low, deep. “Together.”
I liked the sound of that.
The echo of her words reverberated inside of me, waking Emilia’s story, but only for a brief flash. All of them—they settled.
They waited.
Because soon, this would all be over.
* * *
They came in the middle of the night.
I saw only the muted glowing of their eyes, first a single pair of them, then another, until the section of the wall I was next to was surrounded by them, dim yellow spots and nothing more. They made no other sounds. Just watched me, countless pairs of eyes so still in the night. I hoped they were guardians, not the terrible creatures that had tormented the children of La Reina Nueva.
They did not move, did not come in for the kill, so I relaxed, but only a little. Was I unworthy? Uninteresting?
I thought of waking Emilia, of trying to find the others, but I worried that any movement at all would set them off. But they never made their presence known otherwise. I watched them for a while, and then they began to wink out, to fade into nothing, until we were by ourselves again, and I drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed of nothing.
The howling woke me up.
The terrible, mournful sound ripped me back into consciousness. I was upright a moment later, and my eyes took a little while to adjust in the fading starlight. Dawn was coming soon.
Emilia still slept. Somehow, during the night, one of us had moved closer to the other. Maybe we both did. I rose as quietly as I could, not wanting to alarm Emilia. My stomach ached again, but the pain was different this time. Not a cramp. Something deeper. I had not been eating much on this journey, and perhaps my body was telling me so. I stood there in the silence, my hand on my belly, willing the pain away.
Another howl ripped through the early-morning darkness.
I walked toward the wall, stood next to it, gripped the cold stone in my hand.
Crickets chirped. Silence filled the space between their calls.
I waited. I opened myself up to the darkness that grew before dawn, to the desert, and it responded.
Rustling.
Thumping on the ground.
They were coming.
I rushed back to Emilia, threw myself down onto the sleeping roll, began to dig through my pack for la pala, wishing that I’d thought to bring a weapon, and—
But it was Pablo. He climbed over the rubble, breathless. “Xochitl,” he said, huffing.
“What is it?” I whispered harshly. Emilia stirred beside me.
“They’ve come back.”
“Who is ‘they’?” grumbled Emilia, rubbing at her eyes.
He didn’t answer at first. He bent over so that his hands were on his knees. “We’re surrounded,” he choked out.
Emilia sat up. “Surrounded? By what?”
“They’re all around the camp,” he explained, still hunched over, his curls bouncing when he looked back up at us. “The guardians.”
The eyes. They hadn’t been part of un sueño. They had surrounded me.
“They’re asking for you,” he said. He straightened up, put his hands behind his head, still huffing. “I don’t know what they want.”
We left our belongings behind and followed Pablo, climbing over a ruined section of the wall, and a thick, nervous sweat ran from my underarms. Just into the next clearing, I saw the others. Rosalinda raised a finger to her lips, waved with the other hand, and we slowly approached them.
“I’ve never s
een guardians like this,” she whispered to me. “Big. Dark fur. Casi como gatos, pero … no.”
“Ours were ositos,” Felipe said, his voice even lower than that of his mother. “I think I like them better than these.”
I twisted around and around, trying to see what they were staring at. “I don’t see them,” I said.
“You don’t need to,” said Rosalinda.
“But I—”
“Listen.”
I didn’t hear it at first. It was so low, so present, that it nearly faded into the background. But as we all remained unmoving, it filled my ears: a humming, rumbling and deep, that seemed to come from every direction. It varied in pitch every so often, a slow, horrific growl.
We really were surrounded.
I tensed up, and it was there again: Emilia’s hand in mine. I pulled her to my side.
I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until one of them finally revealed themselves.
They came from the south, and they made no sound as each of their black paws gripped the soil. One step, then two, then the creature sauntered into the clearing, teeth bared, and in the newborn light of the morning, I saw that some of those teeth were stained red. Blood. It was probably blood.
But whose? Whose life had been taken?
They towered there, the monstrous bestia with black fur sleek and shiny in the early-morning light that reached up beyond the horizon in the east, and they stepped closer and closer, and I dared not move. I knew then that the slightest mistake could end in my death. So I kept my eyes locked on them, on their yellowed pupils, on the massive jaws that hung open.
They strode right up to me, and Solís help me, I was shaking, trembling right there in that spot, and they sniffed me, then glared, brows angling toward each other.
I heard something trickling into the dirt next to me, and slowly, achingly, my gaze dropped to a puddle on the ground. Felipe’s leg shivered in terror.
Do you know why we are here?
The voice was a rumble, neither masculine nor feminine, but something in between, something like you, Solís.
And it sounded in my head.
I focused on those yellow eyes. “You are the guardians of La Reina Nueva.”