“A man,” Ava whispers.
I snap my head right and spot a lone figure standing among the kangaroos. Stained denim covers his six-foot frame from wrist to ankle, disrupted only by an oversized silver buckle dividing his thickset waist. His feet sport worn leather boots with rounded tips, and his head is crowned with a spotless western hat as white as the clouds that never seem to form above this roasted piece of land.
A living, breathing cowboy.
He tilts back his wide brim, revealing his weathered eyes. Yards stretch between us, but his message still reaches me. So loud and clear I can almost hear his thoughts shout above the shrieking wind: Get out.
I hesitate, but Lucía pulls me forward. “No tenemos miedo.” We show no fear.
The cowboy walks relaxed and unhurried to a gate near the end of the holding pen, his gaze never leaving our pathetic party. Filthy and possessionless, we must look like nothing more than beggars. Ava lifts a feeble hand to the man, a greeting the cowboy does not return. Instead he pushes down his hat, blocking his face, and shuts the gate behind him with a deliberate bang. Several kangaroos slam against the fence, causing the three of us to jump. A male who’s been stalking our path punches and kicks the metal barrier, a number of his lethal jabs making it through the bars, nearly striking my head.
No fear.
We huddle close and continue our laborious quest forward as the man moves onto the gravel road. He stops a few feet from his front porch, turns, and holds out a commanding hand: we’ve come close enough. His massive palm is calloused and red, and I note how easily it could wrap around my throat.
“Those signs said this here is private property,” he growls, his voice every bit as threatening as his appearance.
Barely able to raise her head, Ava clears her throat and pushes out a plea just above a whisper. “We were sent here . . . We were told this is a safe house . . .” Her voice trails off and I wonder if he heard the last few important words.
I lock eyes with the man and conjure up my last fighting vigor. “Safe house!” is all I manage to shout before my voice vanishes with my strength. My body sways and my vision blurs.
The cowboy tips back his hat, and I see a dark warning in his glare as his eyes study each of us in turn. He locks his thumbs around his buckle, emphasizing a giant knife sheathed at his waist.
“You three better leave this property. Now.”
My knees give, my will breaks, and I drop to the ground with a resounding thud. The grit and sand fly up around me, and I hear the shrill scraping of the kangaroo’s talons ripping at his cage to my left.
I, too, will be inside a cage soon. Death or capture. The only two things that await us. I’ll be trapped inside a box either way.
Lucía looks back at the endless inferno. “No puedo volver. No puedo . . .” I can’t go back. I can’t . . .
Ava turns to me, and her eyes find mine through the dust and despair. A light of conviction still burns in her eyes. It’s dim and fading, but the flicker is there. She straightens her weakened frame and takes a step toward the man, who moves to unsheathe his knife. Ava continues to advance, nothing left to lose.
“Resist much, obey little. Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved. Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.”
The man stares at Ava in uncomprehending silence. Lucía stops breathing beside me, and even the kangaroo ceases his incessant rattling.
The wind shifts, and suddenly the cowboy smiles. He lets loose a deep belly laugh that transforms his entire demeanor into a genial host greeting long-awaited guests.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Stay below ground,” Kipling tells us from the top of the steel ladder.
The rusty hinges squeal as he lowers the ceiling door and seals us inside an unlit passageway. Immediately I’m thrown back into our own hidden tunnel in Dallas. The memory pierces my heart as the lights abruptly flick on and I see a gloomy concrete path that once led me to my home.
“If the lights start flashin’ red, don’t even breathe. The Guard sniffs ’round here every coupla months.” Kipling’s voice echoes above me, pulling me from the past.
I descend the final four rungs and fall in line behind Ava. Her faraway gaze on the passageway’s smooth walls tells me she sees the phantoms too.
“I think my stinkers throw ’em off,” he says as he reaches the ground and turns from the fixed ladder. He points up to the muted thumping of kangaroos hopping above our underground roof. “My male western ’roos.”
He chuckles amiably and squeezes past me to get to the head of the line. “Sorry about that sour welcome, thought ya’ll mighta been spies. Can’t be too careful nowadays.”
Lucía presses tight against the wall as he moves in front of her, shielding her eyes from him with her ragged scarf. Kipling readjusts his hat, and the clicks of his boots guide our travel-weary train down the narrow tunnel. Lucía has not spoken a word to him, guarding who she is with silence. She holds her rosary firmly by her side, pushing forward bead after bead with quick fingers, counting her prayers with blistering speed.
I peer up at my sister’s face protected beneath her hoodie. I wonder if Kipling knows who we are. Maybe cowboys don’t frequent the Internet or stay current with news from the outside world. If he does know, he’s being coy. He’s given no indication he’s put two and two together and has added up what Ava and I are. Twins. A life sentence in a prison farm.
A few steps ahead, a wall sconce illuminates an oval door painted in the same bright yellow as the safe house in Amarillo. Kipling pulls out a set of identical gold keys from his jeans pocket and expertly selects one. He turns the key inside the lock and shoulders open the heavy door with a forceful shove.
There are shadowy figures everywhere. Huddled around wooden tables eating jerky, resting on metal cots with no mattresses, crowded in every corner dealing cards or swapping hushed stories. The vast room is poorly lit, relying on a single bulb that hangs precariously from the high ceiling, obscuring their faces from me. But I can feel their collective energy as Kipling leads us farther into the room.
Fear and uncertainty smother the very air of this space, making it difficult for me to breathe. But as I stumble on, my eyes adjusting to the blackness of the poorly lit room, I catch a glimpse of the faces packed against the wall. There’s a restrained hopefulness, a quiet determination, set on every feature of every individual we pass. An unmistakable courage that mirrors Lucía’s and tells me as plain as day who these people are.
Gluts. Those from beyond our unwelcoming shores and beyond our unconquerable borders. Maybe even hidden multiples.
At first I hear only faintly accented English and the familiar Spanish, but as we move deeper into the claustrophobic room, I hear fragments of French, Mandarin, Russian or a similar Slavic language, and another guttural dialect I cannot begin to identify. The whole world is in this room. Or as much of the world as I’m ever going to see.
My old self would yearn to find a friendly face, my curiosity barely containable, and ask them to share everything there is to know about their culture and the land they left behind. But as our guide stops near a table beside a row of cabinets, I keep my eyes low to respect their privacy, and lower my hood to respect mine.
My gaze lands on the feet of the table’s occupants beside us. Their shoes are caked with dirt, ripped and tattered, soles worn down so thin they might as well be barefoot. I imagine how far these people must have come. How much they must have overcome.
Kipling’s keys rattle as he twists the lock of a dented steel cabinet. He grabs a generous handful of jerky and hands it to Ava.