They paused just at the edge of some kind of clearing. She stopped. Ursula was there, facing her across the darkness of the open space, as though suspended above it. The wind ran its fingers through her hair, brought the smells of the burning forest and wild coyote fur and the dried flowers crunching beneath her feet, right beside puddles of wax from long-expended candles.
“It brought us here,” Ursula called. “Why?”
“Where is here?” Jaila whispered, so that her intention could be discerned more by the pattern of smoke leaving her lips than the thready sound of her words.
Ursula laughed, and the wind kicked a spray of brown-orange petals into the void.
“The well,” she said, and the wind said, and the coyote said, just as Jaila felt sharp teeth—his teeth—bite hard into the back of her leg. She stumbled forward, but instead of rocks, her right foot encountered cold, dead air. She was on the edge of the sacred well after all. She hadn’t marked the edge, and so she overbalanced, and she fell in.
Ursula screamed. Her face receded more slowly than it ought to, as though Jaila were sinking into water and not miles of empty air. Then Ursula took a breath and dove in after her.
*
Jaila had only ever been to the sacred well once. It was meant for rituals and sacrifices, solemn processions winding their way for hours through mountain paths until they reached the edge of the world. A hole in the earth, a navel in the belly of god, so wide and so deep that no one could see the bottom, or hear an offering crashing against it. It did not end—or at least, where it ended was not a place the way the hills and the rocks and the trees were a place. It was a conduit to the gods, a between-space, where in the right time and after the right rituals, the mundane world could communicate with the divine.
In the old days they had sacrificed humans above the well and then thrown their bloody bodies inside. They did it at the start of the rainy season, to give the gods their due and rebalance the scales of the universe, so that the rain might fall and the harvest might be good, and fertility of the earth renewed again for another hard year. These days they sacrificed turkeys and chickens, but it meant the same thing. The gods understood. A boy would fast for months beforehand, purifying himself for his brush with the gods. Jaila had come to the ceremony when she was eleven. He had been thirteen then, dark skin and long bones and a rib cage like a wooden box you keep fruit in. He had already been skinny, but as he fasted he grew into something else—frail and ferocious, like a sapling clinging to a cliff face. She had loved him before, but in an ordinary sort of way. He showed her how to knock down paper wasps nests and collect the honeyed combs; he brought her back the first young corn from the maize field; he called her “string bean” to her face and stupid names to impress his friends and then apologized after.
But on the day of the ritual, she saw him transformed. He didn’t look at her once, though he was nearly naked, and before it would have embarrassed him to be seen that way in front of the whole town. He stood calmly through the blessings, so still that she had nudged Ursula to ask if he was still breathing. His eyes were so wide, his pupils so black; even before the sacrifices, all he could do was stare at the sacred well.
The blood splattered him when he killed the chickens and turkeys. Jaila flinched, though not because of the death; she was used to that. It was because at that first moment, he had stared straight at the two of them, and something moved behind his eyes, something great and inscrutable and not him.
She had loved him truly after that. He’d never gone back to being the boy he was. He chased power, chased whatever it was that had called him on the edge of this precipice. He chased it even when it became dangerous, when it destroyed him, when everyone begged him to stop.
Those people deal in death, brother, Ursula had told him during the last fight that Jaila had witnessed, there is nothing holy in it.
And he had turned to her, his eyes blasted black with something more substantive than divinity, and said, There is nothing more holy than death, sister.
Jaila heard him again now as she fell. There is nothing more holy than death. The light of the stars and the moon and the first wisps of dawn were fast receding.
Ursula reached her, crashed into her chest and held on, and then they spun together, down and down to their deaths, as the coyote had commanded.
“I’m sorry,” Jaila said in the language of the trees, and the flames singed her dandelion hair and illuminated the inky black perfection of the rock around them.
Ursula hugged her. She didn’t say anything. It was okay—the wind rushed around them now, and Jaila couldn’t hear anything at all. She waited.
*
But they didn’t crash. They just kept falling. They were bunched up inside the wind, as though it were a net. Jaila knew they ought to have died already, but without any light to see, it felt more like floating through a tunnel. Ursula lifted her head from Jaila’s shoulder and then reached out her arm.
“What’s happening?” Jaila asked. She chose the weakest words, lobbed them past where she guessed Ursula’s head would be, and the fire unfurled like two flowers spinning around their heads. They were a meter away from the black wall. Ursula’s eyes were narrow with concentration, and her nostrils flared.
“I called the wind,” Ursula said.
“You can do that?” Jaila asked.
“Your grammar can catch fire?”
“I don’t know how that happened. You two were the powerful ones.”
“He always said that’s how it would be with you. That you’d have to find your power to come back to us. That you would when you wanted it enough. But you came too late for him.”
“Don’t say that. Didn’t you see the coyote? He brought us here.”
Ursula snorted, and the air surrounding them bucked and twisted. Jaila flung herself forward to keep her balance, and her hand brushed the wall. She shrieked, anticipating pain. But it didn’t hurt. Her fingertips had passed through, creating oily currents as she floated down. She snatched her hand back, but in the lingering light of her shriek, she saw weird figures in the slick.
A procession—a hundred people in brightly woven huipils and capes, walking behind men dressed in costumes of jaguars and eagles and fanged gods. Then a pyramid, an ancient temple with steps gleaming white and a chapel at the top painted blue and red. Ursula—it had to be Ursula, she had her nose and her hair and her mocking, mischievous eyes—but she was wearing the same clothes as the women in the procession, with golden plugs in her ears and lower lip. She was painting a figure on an accordion scroll of cedar bark paper.
“Ursula?” Jaila said. The girl’s head jerked up. For a moment their eyes met.
The image broke apart, spilled its constituent colors down the wall and re-formed again, briefly, into something more familiar: the woods of the surrounding hills. Jaila was running through them, her hair on fire, her laughter leaving a trail of ashes behind her. In the deep shadows of dusk, a coyote kept pace beside her.
The images faded as the wall regained its stillness.