Cazadora

by Romina Garber

  “We need to change,” notes Cata, and she reaches into the back of her shirt, like she’s digging for its tag. “These fabrics have a winter setting,” she tells me. “Just crack the tab.”

  “I’ll help you,” says Tiago, and when I look at him, his white shirt is already a turtleneck and his sneaker-like shoes have become boots.

  His breath is on my neck as his fingers slip into the waistline of my indigos, feeling along the seam until they snag on something. He places my fingers where his are, and when I snap the tab, my legs grow warmer as the fabric of my pants thickens. His hands find the neckline of my shirt next, and it grows into a sweater.

  Breathing in Tiago’s heady scent, I think of how he fought our way out of the Colosseum, and I feel a rush of feeling that goes beyond appreciation or admiration or adoration. It doesn’t make me want to kiss him or cling to him—it makes me want to get stronger, so I can protect him too.

  Tiago drops to the icy ground and presses the tongues of my Septimus sneakers. They lengthen into boots, the soles toughening and the inseams growing plusher.

  He looks up at me, his hands grazing the sides of my body as he rises to his full height. His lips hover by mine, and I feel a tingling in my tongue, a craving—

  “Let’s go,” huffs Cata, pushing between us. Despite the warm clothes, she and Saysa look cold and miserable.

  Tiago takes my hand as we step onto a frozen pathway on the ocean’s surface, where we’re surrounded by nothing but blue sea. A chill nips at the exposed skin of my face, and in the nearing distance, I trace the outlines of colorful constructions cut from crystal or frosted glass.

  Water slops over the edges of the ice, and I’m relieved for the boots’ protection. The sensation of crossing an ocean on foot is so surreal that it’s hard to walk while taking it all in, so it’s a good thing Tiago is pulling me along.

  Sand covers the ground when we reach the mainland, and my stomach knots at the sight of dozens of Septimus going about their afternoons. Crystal buildings sandwich a large icy avenue flanked by sandy sidewalks. All manner of sleds whoosh down the ice, in every size and variety, and I’m itching to admire everything, but Tiago and I have to keep our heads down to avoid being recognized.

  Most Septimus here are dressed in glistening cloaks that shimmer like liquid, similar to the silver one Zaybet wore in Lunaris. We are clearly not excelling at blending in. We’ve barely made it past a blue building, when a mega-sized watery screen materializes over the street.

  ¡NOTICIAS!

  The word keeps flashing, and the four of us exchange panicked looks. The other Septimus have also stopped moving—even those in sleds stall their vehicles—as footage begins to play. It’s of me running out of the Colosseum with Tiago.

  A reporter’s voice narrates the montage of shots in Spanish. “Have you seen this Septimus? Her name is Manuela, and she’s on the run with Santiago Rívoli, also known as the invincible wolf and star of El Laberinto’s championship-winning Junior Septibol team. If you spot them, contact your local Cazadores immediately.”

  Tiago’s fingers close on my arm, and the four of us slip into the sandy alleyway between the blue building and a squatter green structure.

  “Should she cross your path”—the reporter’s voice goes on behind us—“beware the girl’s misleading eyes. Despite what you think, she’s not a Jardinera. In fact, multiple witnesses claim she’s not a bruja at all.”

  I’m dragging my feet, so Saysa and Cata have sprinted ahead of us. When I realize where they’re about to step, I open my mouth to warn them—but I’m too late.

  Their feet go right through the fuzzy mushrooms poking out from the sand, and they’re sucked belowground.

  “If reports are to be believed, she would be the only one of her kind.”

  As Tiago tugs me toward el Hongo, I glance back at the watery screen one last time. My eyes are glassy, my hair is matted, and my expression is blank. I look less like a lobizona and more like a lost little girl.

  “She’s a biological and historical anomaly.”

  The newscaster’s voice reverberates in my ears.

  “The first—”

  7

  My belly tickles as I drop.

  Then I’m standing upright with my friends in a cobweb-infested cavern.

  The air is warm and toasty, like we’re very deep underground. If this is el Hongo, then the webbing wrapped around the walls must be mycelium. I move closer and spy small sparks lighting up the white bands, like the firing of synapses in a neuron network.

  Cata and Saysa dig their fingers into the webbing until their whole hands are buried in the mushroom’s root system. Then they close their eyes in concentration, and the veins of their arms begin to glow white.

  “What’s happening?” My voice comes out a murmur, and I have goose bumps.

  “They’re plugging into el Hongo,” Tiago murmurs back. “It’s how we sync with Lunaris if we want information, or to send a message, or even just to commune with the land.”

  Ma never took me to any places of worship, nor do we observe any religion. I’ve never set foot on any ground I’ve personally considered sacred or hallowed. Yet as more and more lights spark in the mycelium’s brain-like network, I feel a keen sense of cosmic smallness.

  I’m inside Lunaris’s mind. Maybe even the universe’s.

  “This feels like discovering el Aleph.”

  I doubt I’d drop a Borges reference in any other company, but I already know Tiago’s a fan. El Aleph is about a guy who finds a window into the universe through which he can see all of existence exactly as it is, without distortion. A point in space that contains all others.

  “That’s one of my favorite stories,” says Tiago, his voice not just lower, but deeper. Like the words are coming from a profound place. “That’s how I feel when I’m with you.”

  His slight accent resurfaces, and as I feel the intensity of his blue gaze, my winter clothes grow stifling. El Hongo starts to shrink so much that we could be back in Tiago’s secret bookish cave in the Everglades.

  “All set,” says Saysa, and the tension disbands as she disconnects from el Hongo. “Sent a meeting place to Zaybet. Now let’s go and hope she shows.”

  “You’ve been trying her for days,” says Tiago. “Why do you think she’ll listen now?”

  “She’s the one who forged Manu’s Huella. If she sees her on the news, she’ll put it together that we’re on the run and Yamila must be trying to cut me off from my allies.”

  I wonder if the class where Saysa met Zaybet was Criminology 101.

  “Anything useful?” Saysa asks Cata as she joins us.

  “Never found anything useful about the Coven before, so why should that change now?” She shrugs and crosses her arms. “There was one thing, though. It’s not useful, but it’s interesting. There’s a theory that if the Coven exists, the only way it’s possible that no one in history has been able to expose it is that Lunaris must be complicit.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  Saysa’s eyes flash with something like pride. “It means we’re her children too.”

  * * *

  Saysa and Cata leave el Hongo first to buy us the cloaks everyone in Marina wears. Tiago and I wait until we think they’ve had enough time, then we follow them through the exit within the webbed wall.

  Just as I watched Cata and Saysa do, I insert my fingers into the mycelium. It feels both intrusive and insubstantial, and as I step forward, it’s like I’m walking through a curtain of thick cobwebs that smother my face until I almost can’t breathe—then we’re back in the alley between the blue and green buildings.

  Out on the street, I see Septimus congregating in groups, no doubt discussing what they just watched.

  Cata and Saysa are now cloaked in pink and green fabrics that match their eyes. Tiago accepts a sheet of sapphire. My cloak is a light shade of brown, more amber than gold.

  “We used all the semillas we had left,” says Cata. “We
were a bit short, so we donated some blood.”

  Tiago’s dark skin seems to pale, but he clenches his jaw and nods.

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “The most powerful potions need a particular blood type, depending on what the spell is and the element and the method of disbursement—”

  “Not now,” says Cata, cutting off Saysa’s lesson.

  A group of cloaked brujas has turned the corner, and they’re headed toward the mushroom patch beside us. They’re so busy tittering about me that they don’t immediately notice we’re here.

  “¿Vos te creés lo de esta chica?”

  “Para nada.”

  “¿Por qué nos van a mentir así?”

  “Capaz los Cazadores se la creen.”

  While they debate whether I’m real or a hoax, Tiago and I twist away to pull on our cloaks. They’re windbreakers that guard against the chill here, and they can be sealed all the way up, until they cover one’s whole face—minus their eyes.

  Most Septimus leave their hoods off, but Tiago and I raise ours. The brujas are closer now, and they’re still debating the footage of me. Falling back on my old anxious habit, rather than focusing on the meaning of their words, I translate them.

  “Para mí que es una bruja.” I think she’s a witch.

  “Pero dicen que la vieron transformarse—” But they say they saw her transform.

  “Debe haber mezclado demasiadas pociones de potencia física y algo le falló.” She must have mixed one too many performance enhancers and something went wrong.

  “Que algo le falló es obvio.” That something went wrong is obvious.

  In my periphery, I see Cata and Saysa nod to the brujas in greeting. All this time, the two of them saw me as potentially being some kind of revolutionary symbol, but the Septimus are no different from humans in their ability to see what they want. This entire mission is starting to feel not just hopeless, but pointless.

  As we’re leaving the alley, the massive screen has vanished, and the scene has changed. Most sleds have been parked to the side of the icy street and abandoned, and the crowd is thinning out as fast as it formed.

  When only a few clusters of Septimus remain, I realize they’re all making for the nearest mushroom patches. Many of them are running around and searching the ground, even though the streets were lined with mushrooms moments ago.

  “Too many of us accessing el Hongo at once,” explains Tiago.

  “The mass exodus could start any moment, so hurry,” says Cata.

  Since we have the street nearly to ourselves, I venture to ask, “What are these huge screens that keep appearing from out of nowhere?”

  “They’re called pantaguas, and they’re created from water droplets that get magically charged,” says Saysa. “The water stays dormant until it’s activated. We have handheld versions too.”

  “Why don’t wolves have to show their eyes?” I might as well get all my questions out while I can.

  “Right?” says Saysa, as though I’d made a declaration and not posed a question. “They’re so afraid of our magic that they’re desperate to control it.”

  “That’s not it,” says Cata. “We’re a pack species, and eye color reveals a bruja’s brand of magic. It’s how element sisters can identify one another.”

  “That’s about as naïve as I’ve heard you get,” says Saysa, earning herself one of Cata’s patented scowls. “You think a bunch of brujas woke up one morning and decided it would be a fun challenge to force a dress code on themselves forever?”

  “That’s reductive, and you’re missing the point. Sometimes you take your argument so far that it infantilizes us. You make it seem like brujas don’t have any agency of our own.”

  “What agency? Look at the gender imbalance in the tribunal and the Cazadores! Or the fact we’re not allowed to explore Lunaris without a wolf escort—”

  “Calm down,” says Tiago, but Saysa is a few orbits past calm.

  “If we’re so weak and wolves are so almighty, then why is our scariest storybook monster a girl, la ladrona?”

  “La ladrona?” I echo. The word means thief. “What’s that?”

  “A bedtime story,” says Saysa with an eyeroll. “She’s this demon who will supposedly be born if—”

  “Where did you say you first met Zaybet?” Tiago sounds like he’s run out of patience. I get the impression he doesn’t care for this story.

  Saysa takes a long moment to answer, and then she mumbles something even Tiago and I can’t make out.

  “What?”

  “La Isla Malvada.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Tiago practically stops moving, and I have to nudge him. We’re approaching a coastline with a boat harbor, so we won’t have privacy for much longer.

  “That place is supposed to be swarming with Cazadores!” says an outraged Cata.

  Saysa looks straight ahead, keeping her voice even. “It was the most secure message I could think to send, in case the Cazadores intercepted it. Meet me where we met.”

  “I thought you said she was an old classmate?” I ask.

  “Obviously you don’t use someone’s real identity for illegal stuff. You call them an old classmate or a cousin.”

  Sometimes Saysa acts like the rest of us graduated crime school with her.

  “This is going to be impossible,” huffs Cata under her breath. “Especially now that everyone’s looking for the two of you! We should split up—”

  “We can’t,” says Tiago, blowing off her suggestion. “Brujas can’t enter the island without a wolf escort.”

  “But this isn’t Lunaris,” I argue. “I thought that rule only applied there.”

  “It applies wherever the tribunal sees fit,” Saysa corrects me, with the air of one who’s just proven her point.

  We stop talking as we approach the harbor, where there are no signs of any mushrooms left. There’s still a handful of Septimus aboveground, but thankfully they’re gathered around a screen. I don’t breathe easy until we step off the sand and onto the sea’s surface.

  This frozen pathway is wider than the one we took earlier, so we walk side by side, forming a wall against the bitter gales. Our hoods are up, covering everything but our eyes.

  There are Septimus in the distance ahead of us, and squinting, I make out a sky-high glacier pressing into the horizon, armed with hundreds of thousands of long, thin blades of ice, all leaning in the same direction. The sight looks almost extraterrestrial.

  “They’re called penitentes,” says Tiago, his voice muffled by his cloak. “They’re formed by the high altitude and strong winds, and they always point to the sun.”

  They form in the human world too. I recognize them from images I’ve seen of the Argentine side of the Andes mountains.

  The Septimus ahead of us have vanished, and as the mist clears, I spot a dark mouth in the ice. I raise my voice over the wind and ask, “Are we going inside the glacier?”

  “It’s not a glacier,” answers Tiago. “Whatever Lunaris force forged this island, its magic is beyond even the brujas’ abilities.”

  “Some think it’s a stepping stone to Lunaris,” chimes in Saysa. “Since creatures sometimes get through, we know there’s a portal on this island that’s active all month, but no one’s found it.”

  “That’s why you need lobizón escorts?” I ask.

  “Some of those creatures are immune to magic,” says Cata. She’s the only one of us who keeps her hood off. Her hair blows behind her, pink eyes glowing gently, like she’s embracing the wind as an old friend.

  “That’s why Cazadores are always on patrol for protection,” says Tiago, and now I’m beginning to see why this is such a bad idea.

  A chill that has nothing to do with the ice ripples down my spine as we step inside. I tilt my neck back to take in the frosty construction, and I feel like I’m in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

  A gust of wintry air blasts from the island’s depths as we arrive at a h
ollow and high-arched main hall.

  There are a couple dozen Septimus here, and the Cazadores are easy to spot—they’re the wolves who walk with a predatory gait. Their eyes seem to move in more directions than the typical Septimus, and I watch as one of them approaches a group of teens. “You’ll need a second wolf escort for so many brujas,” he says in Spanish.

  Tiago scowls at Saysa, like the guard’s words are her fault. Then he makes a sound at the back of his throat that sounds like a grunt.

  “You can’t still be upset,” whispers Saysa as we take a sharp turn down an empty passage. “That was five years ago.”

  “Betrayal doesn’t expire.”

  “Betrayal?” she balks.

  “Both of you really need to get over this,” snaps Cata, who appears familiar with this argument. “Tiago, you came back from your first trip to Lunaris a folk hero, while your sister still had another year to go to inherit her magic. She was clearly jealous and—”

  “I wasn’t jealous,” Saysa cuts in. “I just wanted to do my own thing.”

  “You could have told me that instead of selling me out!” he growls.

  “I didn’t sell you out—”

  The wall to our right evaporates into mist, and Saysa’s voice drops out.

  We’re now part of a chamber that’s populated with Septimus. There are gasps as we’re revealed, and some of them march toward us.

  I think I’m going to have a heart attack, but they walk right past us to investigate the passage.

  Tiago and I keep our gazes lowered, while Cata and Saysa scan for Zaybet. When Saysa grazes my arm, we keep moving.

  The four of us file through an archway into a round chamber where a group of Cazadores are chatting in a corner. The high ceiling makes it harder for sound to travel, but I feel a punch to my gut when I catch the word lobizona.

  Only they’re not talking to me. They’re talking about me.

  Faint screams ring out in the distance, the echo reverberating off the walls, making it impossible to pinpoint where it came from. A few Septimus hurry out of the room like they’re eager to queue up for whatever fun ride that was.