BOOK FIVE
DENDRA
THIRTY-TWO
As I wake, I start to dig.
My body knows what to do. I'm not even fully conscious yet, but already my hands are scrabbling at the dirt around me. It's dry and loose, and my skin tingles from having been buried for… more than a few days. My clawed hand breaks through, and I've shifted enough in my makeshift grave to get my feet under my body and shove my way to the surface.
I flop on the ground, spitting dirt out of my mouth. My jaw aches, but it moves like it should, and I spend a few moments exploring my face with my fingers. My skin is tender in places and my eyes water if I press too hard on the bridge of my nose, but my face has healed.
It's just as Escobar said. We can heal ourselves. It isn't a truly revolutionary idea—any time in the humus heals—and most of the minor scrapes and cuts I've sustained over the last few weeks are gone. But I needed serious work on my face, and my other wounds were still tainted by the weed killer. I can still feel the poisons in my blood, too, but their influence has been lessened. I am stained now, instead of being foul, and the act of making such a distinction is troubling.
I'm in the shade of several palm trees, behind a nondescript villa with a plain porch. The setting sun makes the sere hills glow, and the sky overhead is vast and blue and I can see the glint of a few stars already. Next to the villa is the tall trunk of an aged monkey-puzzle tree, its burred branches curling like simian tails. I smell the air, and it's clean and dry with just a hint of fermenting fruit. It's the wrong season to be growing grapes, but there are vineyards nearby.
There's a light on in the villa. I drag myself out of the grave and brush off the worst of the dirt and dust. I'm not wearing any shoes, and it feels good to walk across the tiny yard with bare feet.
There's a screen door in the back of the villa, and the interior door is open. Through the wire mesh, I spot Mere standing in the kitchen. She's standing at the counter, preparing a plate of fruit, and she's wearing tan cotton pants and a cerulean-colored top. Her hair is pulled back but left unrestrained. She glances up as I enter, and then goes back to finishing the task at hand. “Well,” she says, “there you are.” As calmly as if I was just returning from a walk.
“Here I am,” I reply somewhat hoarsely. My throat is dry. “And where is here?”
A ghost of a smile crosses her lips. “About an hour outside of La Serena, up the Valle de Elqui.”
I nod, though I'm not sure of where that is.
“About a day's travel north of Santiago,” she says. “It's a bit of a tourist spot, what with the observatories and all the pisco distillers, but Phoebe said the soil was good.”
“It is,” I say. “How long have you been waiting for me?” I ask. There are several dozen other questions queuing up behind that one. Observatories? Pisco distilleries? La Serena? And, farther back: Montoya; Belfast and Secutores; Jacinta and the garden on Rapa Nui; my role in what happened on the island. And Phoebe. Where had she come from? How long had she been watching us?
“Five days,” she says. She looks at me again out of the corner of her eye and she can't quite suppress the shudder that runs up her arms.
“My face is healed,” I give voice to what she doesn't want to acknowledge.
“I can see that,” she says, visibly tensing. “I couldn't handle it,” she continues. “I had Phoebe pull over before we had even left the city. It was either you or I in the trunk. The back seat wasn't good enough. I could still hear you trying to breathe through…” She raises her hand toward her face. “And I let Phoebe dig the hole out back. I couldn't look at you. It was awful, Silas. It was really awful.”
“I'm sorry, Mere. I didn't do it on purpose.”
She chokes out a laugh. “Did you kill him?”
Him being Alberto Montoya. “Yes.”
“And is the rest true too?”
“That I killed Escobar's wife? Yes.”
She finishes preparing the fruit and brings the plate over to the table. She sits down, and when she doesn't say otherwise, I join her, figuring that there will be time enough to talk about everything.
There are bananas of differing sizes and colors on the plate, along with slices of oranges, papayas, passion fruit, lemons, as well as a couple of other fruits I don't immediately recognize. I try to savor them, to not grab the plate and immediately shovel all of it in my mouth, but the fresh fruit is a cup of water to a man dying of thirst. We eat in silence for a few minutes, as if we can put off plunging back into a strange reality we both set aside for a few days.
The round fruit with the shadowed green skin is dark inside—it isn't a date or a plum or a persimmon, though it tastes like the mixture of all three. I scrape the skin with my teeth, getting every last bit, and then I chew on pieces of the rind. “What is this?”
“Sapote,” Mere says. There's half of one left, which she shoves toward me as she goes for a long slice of papaya.
I don't give her a chance to change her mind, and my fingers are stained black when I'm done, like I've been dipping them in ink or as if I've been burned.
“If I close my eyes and wish really hard, I can imagine that it is just the two of us,” Mere says, lightly sucking at the tips of her fingers. “Look at you. Sleeping in until nearly sunset. A plate of fresh fruit prepared for you by a beautiful woman. An entire valley filled with vineyards. The quintessential romantic vacation.”
“That would be nice,” I tell her.
She raises her head and takes a long, hard look at me. The corner of her mouth turns up, and there's a glimmer of something in her eyes that I can't quite capture, and then she looks down at her hands again. “I've had some time to think,” she says. “Lots of time. And Phoebe… well, she's not the best conversationalist, but once I figured out how to interpret her silences, it got easier.”
“She tell you what happened? How she got to Santiago?”
“A little. Talus drove her off the boat. Says she knew something was wrong as soon as you reached the tender, but that Talus was already coming at her. She had no choice but to go overboard.”
I wince at the idea. “And?”
Mere shakes her head. “She won't say. I think she swam.”
I shook my head. “That's not possible.”
“Well, she's here, isn't she?” Mere rubs her arms. “Is that what did it to her?”
I think back about how different Phoebe had looked in the car. So dark, like a vengeful shadow. “She's been out in the sun,” I say.
“But it's only been a few weeks since we were all aboard the boat. You can't get that good of a tan in that time. And her hair? It's purple. Almost black, but not quite.”
“It's what happens,” I say with a shrug.
“But I thought you didn't like sunlight.”
“It's not sunlight that's bad for us. It's what's in the air that causes grief. It's like any viral infection. As long as you can keep the bad stuff out, you can shrug off a lot of things that could kill you. Once it gets in, things get a little dicier.” I remember a summer—in Iceland, a long time ago—and smile. “Sunlight is good, Mere. It makes things grow.” I hold up one of the small bananas. So green and sweet. “But then the Industrial Revolution came along and changed so much.”
“Yeah,” she says, dropping her gaze. “Things changed.” She wrestles with something for a minute, arguing with herself. “Look,” she starts, “I should probably apologize for—ah, maybe, I don't know…”
“It's okay. You don't need to. We survived. That's all that matters.”
“Yes, but—” She breaks off, and I wait—patiently, anxiously—wondering why my heart is tripping in my chest. “How many died in Santiago? How many men did you kill?”
I shrug as if the number isn't that important, even though I realize such indifference isn't the right answer. But what can I tell her? I've killed a lot of men over the centuries. These last dozen or so don't change the total that much.
“And Alberto Montoya. You killed Escobar's wife and grandson. You've killed his family, Silas. You're just perpetuating a cycle. Don't you see?”
I think of Priam, wreathed in silence, collecting the mutilated body of his son from the Grecian camp. All the violence and destruction that had come prior to Hector's duel with Achilles, and how Hector's death—the brief peace surrounding the funeral notwithstanding—did nothing to quell the bloodlust that burned in the hearts of both armies.
This is what Mother does. She hides the past from us, so that we don't get caught up in regret. So that we don't overthink what it is that we are supposed to do.
She rubs her face with her hands. “I'm an accessory. Don't you get that? I'm responsible.”
“No you aren't,” I say softly. “What happened in Santiago is not your fault.”
“I took us to the restaurant. I knew who owned the place. Come on, Silas. I knew what was going to happen.”
“Did you want it to happen?”
“No,” she sputters, “but that's beside the point.”
I shake my head. “There's a difference between seeking to cause bloodshed and being capable of doing it. That's the difference between being an animal and being a warrior.”
“It doesn't make it right.”
“Whatever you have to do to survive is the right thing to do.” I reach over and catch her hands. “It's okay, Mere. No one will fault you for wanting to live.”
She shivers slightly, but doesn't pull her hands away. “But that is what frightens me,” she whispers. “That I'm going to be okay with wanting to live. With doing whatever…”
She's fighting the loss of her innocence, and I wish I could undo what has been done. That I could keep her safe and untouched by the bloodshed that surrounds me. But it's too late. War changes everyone—not for the better, most of the time. Mere is going to have to find her own way to deal with the emotional and psychological trauma. In her own time.
Mere is staring at my mouth, her teeth worrying her own bottom lip. “Phoebe said if we couldn't find good soil that you would need blood.”
“I don't,” I tell her.
“But that's part of how it works, isn't it? It's part of being an Arcadian. You really do drink blood. Like a…”
“Like a vampire? Yes.”
Her teeth nip harder at her lip. “Would you have…?”
“You're not my type,” I tell her, but my gaze belies my words. I'm fascinated with her lower lip. I can see her pulse in her throat, a tiny butterfly moving beneath her skin.
She smiles, a curl of her mouth that is both shy and sensual. “I'm O negative,” she says, trying for some levity. “I'm everyone's type.”
I laugh, and the noise tears something in my chest. She laughs too, and yes, for a moment, I can imagine the same dream she did. It's just the two of us. A romantic vacation. Nothing else exists. Nothing else is true.
And then the distant buzz of a tiny motor outside breaks the illusion. I go completely still and hold her in place too. “Are you expecting anyone?”
Her shoulders sag and she sits back in her chair. “That's, ah, that's probably Pedro,” she says.
“Pedro?”
“He's just a kid. My local scout. I recruited him a day or so after we arrived.” Mere extricates her hands from mine, and the last glimmer of the illusion vanishes as soon as the connection between our flesh goes away. “He comes by around now. Brings us groceries and gossip.”
She gets up and comes around the table, laying her hand on my shoulder in a signal for me to stay seated. “He doesn't know you. You'll spook him. Plus—” She brushes dust off my shoulder. “You're dirty.”
I settle for listening from around the corner. Pedro sounds like nothing more than an eager teenager taken with the flame-haired American woman hiding out in this villa. His Spanish is inflected by a syllable-swallowing accent, and it's a bit hard to follow the torrent of words that come out of his mouth, but at the very least, it is clear he takes his job of being Mere's eyes in the valley seriously. Either he doesn't know that she understands little of what he is saying or he doesn't care. He delivers his report earnestly and breathlessly. I pay attention when he starts talking about cars. Mercedes and Land Rovers. Or maybe it is the same car; it is hard to be sure.
Mere knows how to work a source, and she makes the appropriate noises during his rapid-fire monologue. When he finishes, she congratulates him on his diligence, and in my mind, I can see him standing taller upon receiving her warm encouragement.
“He's too eager to please.”
I glance over my shoulder. Phoebe is sitting in the chair Mere was recently in. Phoebe's skin is a warm bronze color and her hair is a dark and vibrant purple. She doesn't have it pulled back into a pony tail, and it lies loosely about her shoulders like a bruised shadow. How clean is the air here? I wonder. My chest aches at the thought of being able to walk about so freely in the sun. She's calmly cutting a papaya into long wedges, completely oblivious to my scrutiny.
Distantly, I hear the tiny motor of Pedro's scooter start up, the fierce roar of a tiny lion, and then it quickly starts to fade away.
“Do you think he's drawing attention?” I ask.
Phoebe nods as she finishes sectioning the papaya. She picks up a wedge, strips off the skin with a single smooth motion of the knife, and then—delicately, showing very little teeth—starts biting off pieces from one end.
“Is it going to be a problem?”
She pauses, a tiny slice poised to disappear into her mouth, and shrugs.
Not a problem for us, apparently.
I want to ask Phoebe about what happened on the Cetacean Liberty—where she's been for the last few weeks, how she managed to find us, did she really swim all the way back?—but Mere returns to the kitchen before I can start.
“So,” Mere says as she enters the room, “what did he say?” She doesn't seem terribly surprised to see Phoebe.
“Mercedes,” Phoebe says as she picks up a second piece, unconcerned about the strip of black seeds along the inner edge of the wedge. “G Class. They look like Land Rovers.”
“I thought it might be something like that,” Mere says. “I heard him say ‘Mercedes' a couple of times. Expensive, right? Otherwise he wouldn't have noticed.”
Phoebe nods.
“And not just passing through,” I note.
“Right,” Mere says. “What's our plan?”
Phoebe finishes her second slice. “Where are we going?” she asks.
We both look at Mere, who raises her hands helplessly. “I don't know. I'm still working on it.”
“Work faster,” Phoebe suggests, reaching for another piece with more calm than her words suggest.
Mere grabs my arm and hauls me from the kitchen. “Come on,” she says. “Now that you're awake, let me show you what I've got.”