Illuminate

by Tracy Clark

  Before I could speak to Raimondo about Claire, I received the call that it was time for the long trek back to Santiago with Will, Ehsan, and Adrian to visit this mysterious street food vendor who sold empanadas with a side of hand grenades.

  Mami Tulke didn’t know exactly why I was going on a group excursion to the city, or if she did, she didn’t let on. But her aura was as cold as her shoulder when I told her I’d be leaving with the men as soon as they arrived. She didn’t balk at having my daughter with her for the day, and for that I was grateful. How did parents get anything done in their lives? Grateful for Claire as I was, I’d suddenly grown a new appendage and was learning to walk again.

  Claire had crept into my room and made camp on my floor for the second night in a row. She rustled in her sleep when I stirred. I pushed a hit of happy her way, which settled her again. I longed to touch her curls but feared I’d wake her. Loving energy would have to do.

  The arrival of the car skidding in the dirt outside rushed me to the door. I said good-bye to Mami Tulke, who just replied, “Yah, yah,” as she stuffed a supplies list in my hand along with a wad of bills.

  I climbed in the SUV. Everyone was accounted for with an additional, unexpected extra, Will’s wife, Maya. “I need to get some things I can’t find in La Serena and get away for a day. You all are my captive audience,” she announced, crossing her arms over her chest. “I intend to use this time well.”

  “Will this one sorry cover it, guys?” Will teased. “I don’t want to keep repeating it. And for the record, opinions of the Maya do not necessarily reflect those of the management.”

  “Confusing,” Maya demurred. “Since I don’t recall promoting you to management.”

  We all laughed and set off on the journey.

  “Gentlemen,” Maya began, and the men surrendered to the inevitable fact that we were indeed captives and would have to listen to what she had to say. Maya’s charisma and strength commanded attention. Respect for Will demanded we give it, even if he was the most captive of us all and had likely heard her opinions many times over.

  “With the exception of Giovanni, you all know me to be frank and fair in my views.”

  “Mostly frank,” Ehsan goaded.

  Maya ignored the teasing and pressed on. “I want you to know that I do not agree with what y’all are planning.”

  Will pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maya…”

  “No, Will. I love you, but before you boys get all war-games on me and destroy our peaceful way of life, I will be heard.” She smoothed her hand over her black hair, which had been pulled tight away from her face and ended in a ball of pouf at the back of her head with a colorful scarf tied around it. Maya looked to me like an exotic black cat, earthy but sleek. The determined set of her mouth said she was not one to be trifled with.

  “My heart tells me that Giovanni truly wants to protect us, save us even.” She held up her hand to quiet me when I opened my mouth. “But my heart also tells me that by charging into a mindset of war, killing, and fear, it will only attract those things to us. This is basic Law of Attraction.”

  “Those things are coming,” I promised. “Uninvited by us and inescapable—they are coming. We did not create this, we are only reacting to it, doing what we must to survive. Is there not energy in that?”

  The excitement in her aura told me she had been eagerly anticipating this debate. “Every human on this planet is a being of energy. Thoughts have energy, they’re creative, they’re the roots of our reality. The world is the way it is because of the way we collectively think.”

  I struggled to stay calm. “If my thoughts and words are creative, then I create survival. I will not be passive about being exterminated.”

  Ehsan nodded affirmatively. “It’s not too hard to recall many, too many, historical instances in this world where one ‘kind’ of human exterminated another,” he said, stroking his black goatee. “Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, natives in the Americas, Serbs, Jews, Romani. In the Middle East, jihadists hunt and kill minorities they deem infidels. It’s heartbreaking and ungodly. In many cases, might was met with might to end the atrocities. Sadly, I think that war is sometimes justifiable.”

  The auras in the car settled into graven pools reflecting our dark thoughts. How did we become a world where one clan of human got to decide that another clan of human didn’t deserve to live?

  When Maya spoke again, her voice was soft. “All this talk of killing ‘the other.’ How does that make us any different than them?”

  Will put his hand on Maya’s leg. “Honey, we’re talking about defending ourselves. It’s not the same thing.”

  “But what if we could talk to them? If we—”

  “What would you possibly talk to them about? ‘Pretty please…please don’t do this thing you’re hell-bent on doing and that you’re likely being rewarded for doing.’”

  Maya’s head tilted, and she shot me a stern look at my sarcasm. “We are givers of energy. And our mortal enemy is our polar opposite—takers of energy. Doesn’t that strike you as perfectly odd? Haven’t any of you ever wondered why we were created as the two extremes of each other? Might there be a reason, a divine purpose and beauty in that symmetry?”

  “Beauty in murder? Beauty in your loved ones disappearing forever? Beauty in extinguishing an entire race of human?” My patience was waning.

  “Beauty in the duality,” Maya answered simply. “Don’t you see it?”

  “No,” Adrian said, throwing up his inked hands. “Girl, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m suggesting that there must be a higher purpose for the design of us,” she said. “I’m talking about duality. Opposites. Relativity. Light dark, up down, on off, yin yang, good bad. We exalt the lighter or more positive aspects of duality simply because they are more…pleasant. But it doesn’t make the light better than the dark. It is not inherently evil to take. It is the relative opposite of giving. You must have one to have the other. In this world, choice is possible only because we have opposites.

  “Joseph Campbell wrote, ‘I and you, this and that, true and untrue—every one of them has its opposite. But mythology suggests that behind that duality there is a singularity over which this plays like a shadow game.’”

  One by one, Maya looked deep into our eyes; she’d reach into our souls with her eyes if she could. “Think about that. Really think about that before you launch into this battle you’re preparing for. What is the shadow game we’re playing?”

  If Maya’s strategy was to plant a seed that would sprout into guilt, it seemed to work on the other men. Each was silent, staring out of the windows for a long stretch of time.

  Duality was thought-provoking but seemed too existential to matter. Surely Scintilla and Arrazi had endeavored for as long as they’d existed to find the “reason.” What if there were no reason? What if it was simple biology? Predator and prey?

  Santiago was bustling in the afternoon sun, frenetic in a way the city hadn’t been when we’d first arrived from Dublin. “The earthquakes must have shaken people up,” Will said, navigating the SUV through throngs of people in the streets near the Plaza De Armas at the city’s center.

  “Ha,” Adrian laughed a beat too late.

  Looking closer, it seemed this was something more. “Is there a political demonstration? A religious holiday?” I asked, curious as to how this many people could be out in droves in the middle of a weekday. I got shrugs in answer. “The earthquake must have hit harder here,” I guessed. We’d been unable to get news deep in the valley for a couple of days since the big quake hit. Telephone lines were still dead. Cell phones were spotty in the best of circumstances.

  “I hope there weren’t too many deaths,” Maya murmured. “Tragedies have a way of filling churches.”

  I followed her gaze to see a large church, the Metropolitan Cathedral, which bulged with people spilling out of its large triple doors, down the steps, and into the street. People were openly praying. Many
looked like they were camping out in the square in front of the church. Vendors walked back and forth selling rosaries, which swung like pendulums off their arms or off their street carts as they rolled them up and down the avenue. This had to be about the earthquakes. Maya was right, natural disasters had a way of bringing people together, and fear had a way of bringing people to church.

  The opportunists were out in droves with the worshipers. Everything you needed could be had at a price: rosaries, food, water, and merchandise. A universal truth was understood by all people: when there’s an epic calamity or disaster, you sell T-shirts.

  Will pulled the car over on a side street because we couldn’t find parking anywhere else. A man sat in his cracked driveway in a frayed beach chair with a cooler full of cerveza and a radio and charged us thirty thousand pesos to park there. “We’ll be out here forever, if we don’t,” Will complained. Adrian fanned himself with a dusty Texas Rangers baseball cap as we walked through the people to find our contact.

  “Always be on the lookout for an all-white aura,” I warned them, scanning the thick crowds for any sign of an Arrazi. The crowds made me tense. “I can recognize them by feel now, but not unless they’re close.”

  Ehsan muttered “And if they’re that close—”

  “Then it’ll be too late.”

  Nothing should have surprised me at that point, but Gerda did. I didn’t expect an elderly, female, German arms dealer in the heart of Chile. Ehsan explained that there was quite a large German population in Chile from immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gerda ushered us through a makeshift door made of two car trunks suspended by hinges in the doorframe. Will said he didn’t know her personal story, but her age and the mezuzah outside her trunk-doors gave me a hint. “I half thought you’d not come,” she said. “Too crazy out there.”

  Will wasted no time. “We had to come. It’s very important. We’re looking for weapons.”

  “When? What kind? How many?” she spat, but sounded distracted, half interested. “Why?”

  Will looked to me, and so I stepped forward to answer. “Any moment. Anything you’ve got. As much as you’ve got. And assume we’re fighting an army.”

  Her white brows shot up. “I’ve seen armies, young man. You five are no army.”

  “I’m willing to bet you’ve seen genocide as well. That is what we’re up against.”

  That is when her eyes squinted at us and she seemed to regard us for the first time. Three white men, an Afghani man, and one black woman. The question was written all over her face: how could this tapestry of humans be a target for eradication? What could we possibly have in common? Flies buzzed, horns honked outside, the world hummed.

  “I’m no longer in the business,” she said, abruptly shooing us out.

  “What?”

  “I think you bugged her out, man,” Adrian whispered. “We’re for real,” he said to her in a placating tone. “We really need your help.”

  “Go to God for help. Everyone else is,” she said, waving her arms toward the two bell towers of the church. “The end times are coming. You were my test. I passed. My sin is behind me. I passed and I shall stand on the right side of the Lord.”

  “What is she on about?” Ehsan whispered to me.

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you,” I said, infuriated. “Why’d we come here at all?”

  The woman perched herself in front of my chest and looked up at me. “Your visit was either an answer to your prayers or an answer to mine. Or both.”

  Adrian’s high-pitched voice cut through the dusty air. “What the—”

  “Guys,” called Maya from outside the trunk-door doors. “C’mere. I don’t think this is earthquake hysteria at all.” We found her on the sidewalk, inspecting a row of cheap T-shirts for sale from a crusty old man wearing a hat that was more holes than straw.

  I ripped a shirt from its hanger, ignoring his curses in Spanish. On the front of the shirt was a quote in Spanish, “Porque se levantarán falsos Cristos, y falsos profetas se levantarán, y harán grandes señales y prodigios, de tal manera que engañarán…Mathew 24:24.”

  Underneath the quote, a picture of a girl on her knees at the feet of St. Peter, her hands over the heart of a child, her picture the very face of angelic torment and sorrow.

  My body went cold.

  Cora.

  Nothing on earth could explain why her face was plastered all over cheap T-shirts next to cheaply made pocket bibles. “What is this?” I asked, thrusting the shirt at the vendor. “What does this mean?”

  Maya’s voice funneled to me the literal translation: “False Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to deceive…” But the words meant nothing—they weren’t the explanation I needed. My body iced over as I stared at the black and white picture of Cora’s stricken face. I spun on the sidewalk and saw others like it, all variations on the same beautiful and familiar face in the same unreal scene.

  I stumbled down the street in a bleary daze, finding more carnival funhouse versions of the mysterious event. What in the hell had happened in Rome? Was she okay? Alive? I’d been hiding in a remote seam of mountains in South America, waiting for the girl I loved to come home to us, and now her face was plastered everywhere I looked with bible quotes that ranged from claiming Cora was the incarnation of Jesus, or that the “Daughter of Man” came at an hour we did not expect, to bold red letters over her picture proclaiming she was the Antichrist.

  Will and Maya’s energies and hands reached for me. “I need to know what happened to her,” I cried, shaking the T-shirt in their faces. “This is Mami Tulke’s granddaughter.” Everyone’s eyes widened and their mouths dropped open. “Whatever happened to her,” I said, meeting Maya’s eyes, “it means that we are no longer in a shadow game. We are out in the open.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Cora

  Divulging to Edmund that I intended to go to Chile was a big leap of faith on my part. What choice did I have, though? He dangled resources that I didn’t have. I needed him, and since he seemed to need something from me, the deal felt right.

  Edmund’s aura was as clear and crystalline as Faye’s, the owner of Say Chi’s, the first time I met her. I came to trust that clarity because it coincided with clarity of thought, clarity of purpose. The texture of his aura was soft, nonaggressive. He felt nonthreatening.

  I used his phone to call Mami Tulke’s house again but got that same annoying out-of-service signal. Taking a deep breath and another leap of faith, I had called Finn.

  God, to hear his voice… He’d never know how deeply it strummed my heart. It probably always would. It hadn’t seemed to surprise him that Dun was with me. I knew then that he’d helped Dun follow me. If Giovanni didn’t have Claire to look after, he’d have done the same. When Finn and I hung up, I had to swallow more tears that threatened like they did in the airport. I never knew which good-bye would be our last. Forever.

  “What’s up, Cora? Did Captain Kilt say something freaky?”

  “He said he found something important but wouldn’t say what. He wants to get it to me somehow so I can see what imprint it holds. But that’s not the weirdest part. His last words were, push the triangles together.” I turned my palm up and looked at the Xepa symbol on the ring. I could envision what he meant mentally, but I blew hot breath on the car window and traced one upside-down triangle with my finger. I then traced the other triangle over the top of it.

  I’d seen the symbol—the hexagram—in surprising places, like the church at the tomb of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo, and then on the four corners of the painting of Jesus and Mary.

  “Jewish thingy?” Dun asked.

  “The hexagram,” Edmund corrected. “It was an important symbol long before it was adopted by the Jews. Unification of opposites; that’s what the six-pointed star really means. It’s a divine symbol of unity.”

  Realization struck. “So, symbolically speaking, to pull them a
part would mean to separate what should be unified.”

  Dun hung his arms over the seat and spoke into the leather. “More explanation would be helpful,” he said, sounding like he did when I used to tutor him on his math homework.

  “If I’m coming to the right conclusion, then Xepa’s whole agenda is to remain disconnected—that goal is symbolized by the disunion of opposites. If that’s what Xepa stands for,” I said, my brain barely accepting the idea that was forming, “then it would mean that the Scintilla and Arrazi are somehow supposed to be…united?”

  It was the most preposterous, the most impossible theory ever. That couldn’t be what Finn was suggesting. I immediately called him back. “Okay, one symbol means unity. One, separation. What do you think it means?”

  “I think it means that we’re supposed to be together.”

  Fear, disbelief, impossibility, and beneath all that, a wild sprig of hope. All those emotions stemmed my words while my heart ticked off the seconds until I could finally speak. “You mean the Scintilla and Arrazi?”

  I heard his sigh through the phone. “You know what I mean.” When I didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, he said, “We’ve come to the same conclusion. The trouble is—proving it.”

  “That’s what I need you to do. First off, can you find out for sure why this is their symbol?”

  “I’m on it. Ultana’s daughter has inherited control of all of Ultana’s business. Her brother’s ticked about it. But I’m getting closer with Saoirse. I’ll learn what I can. I hope she’ll come round to our way of thinking.”

  Closer…

  I shook off the rogue dart of jealousy. “Let me know what you find out. With luck, I’ll get myself to my grandmother’s. Were you able to get ahold of them?”