About thirty minutes ago we steered away from the ocean and began to climb the hillside. The farther we drove, the more uneven the ground beneath the car became until we were bouncing up and down so hard that I thought my head would smack against the roof, even with my seatbelt supposedly strapping me in. The road looked like little more than a path someone had carved out of the rainforest. Suddenly Aidan makes a sharp left turn, and the trees all disappear as he pulls the car into a clearing at the center of a circle of huge buildings, every bit as tan as the dirt at our feet. The jungle around the buildings feels like it’s closing in, like whoever was in charge of holding it back has long since left his post.
“Welcome to Llevar la Luz,” Aidan says as he hefts my duffle bag from the trunk of the car.
“So this place is kind of like a university?” I look around. Each building is more ruined than the last: glass is missing from half the windows, stucco crumbling down their walls. It looks like something out of a movie about being trapped in an ancient fortress in the middle of nowhere.
A horror movie. The kind you’re not supposed to watch before you go to sleep at night.
Despite the heat, a chill in the air raises goosebumps on my arms and legs. Aidan was right about one thing: the drop in temperature is even more noticeable in the heat. Spirits are near. I look around like I think I’ll be able to see them. All that time I spent in Washington, longing for my old life in Texas, and now here I am closer to Texas than I’ve been in months—sure, a totally different part of Texas, but still Texas—and my life is even more different from what it was in Austin. Maybe it always will be.
I hold my breath, waiting for another onslaught like the one I felt in the hospital parking lot, hoping Aidan will step in before I start having another spirit seizure. But the sensation doesn’t get stronger than the slight chill in the air, and my heart doesn’t start pounding like crazy.
It’s as if something is holding these spirits back.
I glance at Aidan, trying to decipher whether he’s doing something to keep the spirits from touching me, but if he is, it doesn’t show.
“It was sort of like a university.” It feels like I asked that question hours ago. “My wife and I ran it.”
“Your wife?” The hairs on the back of my neck prickle, and the stone full of unanswered questions lodged in my throat loosens. “You mean my mom, right?”
Just saying the words my mom and meaning anyone other than Kat feels wrong, creepier than the creepiest of spirits. From now on I’m going to refer to her as my birth mother or Aidan’s wife.
“Yes,” Aidan replies shortly, like the answer is so obvious that the question wasn’t really necessary. He drops his gaze and plays with his watch and then adjusts the cuffs of his shirt. Looks like his wife isn’t his favorite topic of conversation. “There are places like this across the globe,” he continues, waving his arm at the ruined buildings around us. I wonder whether those other places across the globe are in better condition than this one. “Most of them are just education centers, but this one became more of a lab over the years. It used to be populous with luiseach and mentor pairs, with a few protectors here to aid our work.”
The fact that everyone must have left doesn’t need to be said aloud. The emptiness is clear in the dilapidated buildings, in the fact that Aidan’s is the only car in sight, in the way no one emerged to welcome us, in the sound of his voice echoing against the buildings across the courtyard.
“Why did they all leave?”
“As my experiments stalled, more and more of the luiseach who’d stood by my side left me.”
“Including my birth mother?” I kind of regret asking this because when Aidan nods yes, it looks like his head weighs a million pounds.
Wow. She broke his heart.
He looks so sad that for a second I want to put my arms around him. Then I remember I’ve only known him a few days, and mentor/father or not, he’s still more or less a stranger.
So I turn away, trying to look anywhere but at him. It must have been beautiful here once. Directly in front of us is what must have been a glamorous mansion. An enormous wooden porch wraps around it, like the kind you see in movies about the Antebellum South. But the pillars on either side of the front door are covered in vines so thick that the cement is crumbling beneath the weight of the leaves. There are so many holes in the wood of the front stairs that someone propped a giant plank across them like a ramp. Is this where Aidan and his wife lived? Is this where I was born?
The jungle is dense behind the house, growing up around it like it’s just biding its time before it takes over completely. We’re standing in what must have been a sort of courtyard, and across from the house in the other direction are three buildings, arranged in a half-moon, rounding out the yard’s almost-perfect circle.
Nolan would love this place. He’s probably been thinking about going to college since before he started kindergarten. I’ll call him later and tell him every detail. He’ll start researching luiseach training facilities, trying to discover where on Earth the rest of them are. Maybe they’re in places as far-flung as Taiwan, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, and Sydney. Maybe Nolan and I will start saving up so someday we can travel the world, seeing each and every one of them, the way other teenagers backpack from one famous landmark to another.