“Before I go, do you have any questions?”
Sky Taylor paused. Ariel clearly was filled with so much to ask, yet she didn’t know where to begin.
“Thank you,” was all that Ariel managed to say. Sky hugged Ariel, and then like that, Ariel woke up in the same dingy dungeon she had been in before. She was in the same place where she’d been ruthlessly dragged; she was still in the torture chamber. However, she felt full, healed, and even with an enjoyable sense of euphoria. She and all of the girls in the room, her sisters, were healed, and beautiful, and glowing. They were in the same place, with the same marks of brutality existent on the walls, but there was something different in the air.
The girls were excited to see Ariel, as they had made their way down the hallway, and they had so much to say but didn’t know where to begin. Instead, they shared a series of hugs and proceeded toward the unlatched door. As they cleared the room and continued their way down the hallway toward a plausible stairwell, they heard familiar voices. Interestingly, instead of the expected guttural language filled with filth and malevolent intentions, they heard a series of apologetic and contrite voices. Once these men, who had seemed grotesque and savage in every way, with beards, sweaty residue upon their countenance, and the stench of hell, had now changed in every possible way to become a more clean-cut, physically-fit, and a slight glow of gentlemen, appearing down the hallway. They beckoned kindly to the girls as they all in unison said, “It is okay. We’re here to help you get home and to make amends in the best way we can. We’re so sorry. Oh, what were we thinking and why? We were lost in self-indulgence no matter the cost to anyone else. We’ll never be able to repay humanity for the injustices we have committed, but we will serve humanity through the rest of our lives, even if that is forever because we know that only in the service of our fellow brothers and sisters can we have joy.”
In every way, all who had been in that building the night before seemed pleasant, genuinely kind, and contrite. All of the conversations led to three things: the Iridescent Scorpion, Eliza Williams, and getting the girls home. This chapter of human brutality had come to a close. Sky Taylor had given each person, good or bad, enough strength, grace, and clarity of mind to see an end to the barbarity they had each been a part of, whether through suffering or through causing it. Those who had caused this suffering helped each person one-by-one, to see the error of their own ways, and build protections for any potential victim no matter where they would go. The world was full of beauty and was meant to be enjoyed, and not meant for shattered dreams.
When Ariel and her sisters arrived at each of their homes, they were surprised to find out that their parents not only looked much younger and healthier too, but Sky Taylor had visited them as well. They told Ariel of an account where an Imam from Afghanistan had met with the “nice” couple many years before and had worked with them to build this dreaded network. He had met with them again two years prior to Sky’s visit, and that’s what solidified her next mission. There were so many connections because as she combed their minds, she saw larger networks to visit and she healed rather than punished them. Vindication would come later when the Correctional Matrix was proliferated worldwide amongst the populous, but for now, the Iridescent Scorpion was the tag. Through all of her healings, she had indeed combed their minds, she arrived at the girls’ parents, healed them, and eventually, she confronted the “nice” couple, healed them, and helped them to see with clarity the things they could do to help humanity advance forward with promise toward the future. While they journeyed through the Virtual Universe, they revealed so much to her.
It was through this same network that Sky discovered another network of terror, crime, cartels, and vicious brutality. This system ran its course with roots stemming from Peru and Colombia via a far-reaching web of corruption thru to the somewhat peaceful seeming capital city of Chihuahua. The violence between cartels was typical and all the more brutal along the US border, across the Rio Bravo from El Paso, and inside the border city of Juarez within the State of Chihuahua, in the United States of Mexico. The “nice couple” apparently had dealings there not long before Sky met them, and a remarkable family was in danger, so she made haste.
Chapter 50: Laetitia Zemani
Database Moon Archive, Celestial-Sol Date: 2022 July 27. Erin Carter and Joanne Gallant, Pathway President and VP, summarize the experiences of Laetitia Zemani in one of Sky Taylor’s many critical journeys through 2023. We also learn of Sky’s 1000 daughters. These memories are from Ariel and Sky, as recorded within the Virtual Universe and interfaced within Pathway Melrose Campus. Input by: Erin Carter, VP, 2018-2022, and President of Pathway, 2022-2029, Joanne Gallant VP of Pathway, 2022-2019.
The Zemani family owned a blue agave ranch just south of Chihuahua’s state capitol and had been in the farming business for a number of generations without incident. For the most part, individual cacti were slow money makers, but Laetitia didn’t seem to mind, as she would spend hours on end traveling a different path home each day, on her way from school, looking closely with finely-tuned hazel eyes she would see the progress of their growth. As the wind blew through her sun-bleached light brown long hair, she would pull nearby weeds as they popped up and let her Dad know when a particular row of agave was ready for harvest. Once done she would simply sit on the dirt near the growing vegetation to read, study, and do her homework.
Since each cactus took nearly eleven years to fully mature prior to reaching its peak in flavor and was thus ready to harvest, she would see how the different areas of the acreage were doing each day as her father had taught her. Many times, on her way home, she would let her brother go a different direction, as she would stop by the first row of crops she could recall planting when she was only five years old. It was the baby blue, not seeds, but chutes that were planted. She knew through math that she’d be sixteen years old when her row was ripe and ready for harvest growing to full maturity, at least if the harvester wanted to do it right.
As it was, the Zemani family owned an area that was approximately six miles by six miles, eleven kilometers by eleven kilometers across, for a total of 3840 acres, and their family and some family friends maintained every single one of the cacti with love.
Once each of the areas had matured, ripe and succulent cacti were harvested and shipped off to a distillery for the purpose of developing lovely spirits and even supplemental health products. The pulp would then be sent off to a repurposing facility to make paper goods and more. Many people coined the yield the Zemanis had harvested and the liquor it was turned into as the nectar of the gods; their product was each distillery’s favorite. The zoned location of their farm and the legal revenue it brought in to the area through each part of the process seemed to earn the Zemanis a bit of a pass when it came to anyone predisposed to violence or brutal schemes. After all, you don’t attack your own people, no one does. In 2018, however, things seemed to change, from a blissful reality into a real-life nightmare.
As demand began to grow, so did the value per kilo of Chihuahua’s desert blue agave. Of one-hundred-eighty-one zonal areas approved throughout Mexico for the licit growth of agave, most of them were located within the state of Jalisco, a zone that was supremely natural for it. With a series of mountains to the southwest of their acreage, the Zemani crop had a natural water resource for mild irrigation, which in turn helped bring in substantial revenue for Chihuahua’s capital city, Chihuahua. Their state benefited with each step of its path to the final product which helped a population that was upwards of eight-hundred-thousand people. Granted, there were factories and haciendas all over the state capitol dedicated to a variety of other resources, manufactured products, and services, but there was something inherently special about agave.
With 80% of their product going to the US, revenues were promising, but shipping through one of the most violent cities in the entire state was part of the risk. The people in Juarez, who lived just south of the US and Mexican border town, El Paso, Texas
, for the most part, ensured that the established cartels left the Chihuahua-state and home-based product alone. However, this didn’t stop new organizations from trying to infiltrate the land, usurp it, and establish their authority through brutal means. The ruthlessness of any and all cartels was on the rise and had culminated by 2018 where, in just the first month, Juarez saw thirty individuals alone viciously maimed and murdered, and Chihuahua’s capital city had lost two of their own. One of these was Andres, Laetitia’s oldest brother.
About a year and four months prior, September of 2016, the Zemani’s eldest son, Andres, who was twenty years old at the time, had finished junior college studies in Chihuahua and had begun attending law school in Mexico City, Mexico. Laetitia, who was twelve at the time, the youngest, as well as the Zemani’s only daughter, had begun to notice the presence of out-of-state trucks around their property. When asked, they would calmly state that they were only stopping there for a break. As time went by and while journeying with her other brother, Tito, who was fourteen at the time, they noticed movement around their acreage as they walked to and from school which was located just north of Vía Carrizalillo.
Finally, Laetitia brought what she had noticed to the attention of her parents. These strangers hadn’t taken any crops but seemed to merely observe the harvest as it went on—as if to try to learn how to do it themselves. During the winter holidays of 2016, Andres came home to visit with a look of concern on his face. It wasn’t until the harvest of 2017, that the friendly tone of those who stopped by their land for a break in their drive along Highway 45 seemed to become a little more recluse and somber. The Zemani Family farm and home had seen an increase in speculative activity, of no part of their own, but several rows of agave that were ready for harvest had already been harvested.
With the scattering of irrigation systems and the many sheds distributed throughout their land, the environment there must have seemed an ideally remote and easy weigh station for any cartel group wishing to set up their base of operations, and their farmland must have seemed an easy means of money.
Apparently, Andres wasn’t wrong with his speculations, because it seemed that shortly after he had made friends with another young man his age, named Carlos, in law school that he had realized too late that he was actually part of a strategic arm of this new cartel that was infiltrating the Chihuahua market of the drug trade and other black-market items. As soon as Andres found out who this other young man was, or at least his background, he realized that he had shared too much about their agave ranch and took an opportune break from school to come home to inform his father. A little over a year later, Andres was dead.
Their farm home was just outside of town, away from any policing eyes, a couple of miles from Highway 45, and for any cartel, it would serve as an advantageous weigh station.
Unfortunate for this new cartel terrorist group, Los Wiskis, they had not prepared for the network of friends the Zemanis had. The Zemani’s friends from Chihuahua, each with their own robust caches of illegal weaponry, built up for the purpose of protecting the families of the school kids and many others who had worked together on the ranch, had done so to successfully suppress any attack that was planned against their family and their agave ranch. Laetitia’s father had built a get-away shelter beneath the home many years prior, in the event that violence called for some hiding. The fighting went on for several hours and was stalled by a false white flag by Los Wiskis. Los Wiskis called Andres’ out, in exchange for leaving his family alone, and his family watched in horror as Andres willingly went out to stop the violence, but unfortunately, it had cost him his life. Opening up fire on Andres, point blank, just before they left the scene, Carlos, and Los Wiskis realized that for a while the Zemanis would have some reprieve.
After losing their son, even though their friends from the school and their families had banded together to protect the family, the Zemanis decided that enough was enough and they agreed to escape, after barring up their windows, securing all their doors, hiding anything of value and leaving their farm behind. Laetitia’s father had no desire for any further barbarity and had secured the services of an unusually kind coyote. They traveled from Chihuahua to Juarez and then crossed the border to the US. It was now 2022, four years later, and Laetitia had hoped that they would be able to return home in time to see her row of agave, two years into maturity and ready to harvest.
Laetitia would get her wish, but perhaps not in the way that she had hoped. Typically, not knowing who to trust or who had been corrupted in the surrounding towns, villages, and cities, had been a daily and somewhat consistent issue within Mexico. But, her family had quite a group of friends there in their hometown as well as in the US, and they always had each other’s backs.
Laetitia, who had been fourteen at the time that they had left, had begun her schooling many years before along the southern border of Chihuahua’s city with a substantial class of students when she was young, but had realized all too subtly as the years went by, how the number of students dwindled quite substantially. Many had died, moved, or had quite simply joined the cartels to save their skins. Nevertheless, those left behind were united in so many ways and given a chance, they would fight back to protect their families in every possible way, against the cartels. Losing family, nevertheless, meant rearing more children in the hopes of passing on honor and legacy through them—maybe one or two would grow up to have a family of their own for many of the same reasons.
The life expectancy of anyone who joined in this ideological and murderous charade was a very short one from the start. The threat was often, “take the money or take the bullet,” and the money was the hook toward corruption, blackmail, and something that could have been compared to a terminal disease. Although, the more brutal they were, the more assured their success seemed to be, for a time, until they too had their light extinguished by someone who had swayed their hearts more their way to gain their seat of power. Different waves of cartels would come in, and each one more powerful than the next, or seeking to establish their dominance, and as such many would die in a deadly swath of “points being made.”
If you wanted to succeed, you had to be tough as nails, smart, and ruthless, if you weren’t you would die much sooner. There was no time for mercy, kindness, shared respect, or forged alliances because you never knew who you could trust. Sometimes the only ones you could trust were family and hopefully long-time neighbors, but sometimes you couldn’t even trust them. Economics-wise, drugs were illegal in the US, and as everybody knew, the black market drove up the value of unlawful commodities, of which a whole host of drugs and their sub-variants were near priceless amongst the groups of youth who were vulnerable and lacked any goals based in ethics but instead were awash in numbing agents for all of the woes they had conjured up in their minds. All that they purchased came with a price, and with any sort of contraband enforcers, hitmen, mercenaries, and those passionate for power by any means were in plentiful supply, with many others that were much less lucky left dead and dismembered in their violent and depraved wake. There was a lot of money to be made for those lucky few at the top—for quite a substantial price. Usually, that price was the cost of your humanity in all ways that mattered.
Trying to raise an honest family in any cartel-rich part of Mexico came with constant sorrow, a lot of wits to outsmart the outlaws, or laying low and under their radar with plenty of long-suffering. On the farm, most of the Zemani’s home was hidden away underground for hiding, ricochet from inopportune bullets, and the hope of living in peace.
In most cases, the Zemanis had been indeed left alone. For fourteen years, Laetitia had grown up without any issues that impacted her immediate family. She had been going to school and spending time with fellow students, listening to their concerns and tragedies for a while, and it was common-place to hear about and eventually experience in her own way the fact that for everyone she knew, there was a near and dear family member or relative who had been brutally murdered by one faction or
the other of the cartels. Several who she knew, had family members who, due to survival instincts that ruled their ethics, were a part of or were linked to the cartels. Still, she had hope that one day they would see the error of their ways and turn around. It wasn’t until her brother had died that she had felt a deep wound within.
Nevertheless, she kept her mouth shut; her eyes were opened in a very unsuspecting manner, and she listened to everyone and everything. Laetitia lost one of her two older brothers to violence, after one prominent criminal organization stormed their ranch looking for volunteers or a life, or perhaps one of each, and found no one else ready to surrender their soul for the sake of survival. Her brother was noble. He had wanted to become a lawyer and was halfway through his remote law school studies when the tide had changed for the family. He had been targeted by a fellow student, named Carlos, nicknamed “El Jemelo” who had joined the cartel and sought potential “Johnny-do-gooders,” to either recruit or kill. After killing her brother and before leaving the ranch, Los Wiskis assured the family they would be back.
Not long after the murderers had left, Laetitia’s father gathered the family and they escaped to the US, to live in peace. Four years later, they were discovered and exposed by the law-abiding neighbors who had immigrated legally and saw no reason why their neighbor couldn’t have either and reported them to the authorities. The Zemani family had grown rather fond of their neighbors and they had felt a shared bond, but little did they know that from day one the neighbors had been plotting, scheming, and waiting for the right moment to do their due as law-abiding citizens. Interestingly enough, their neighbors had also been connected to the “nice couple” in Europe and several of the cartels, and in particular Los Wiskis, for quite some time, and were thus able to afford to come to the US legally.
Further than Before- Pathway to the Stars Page 84