THE MAN HAD CROSSED THE FIRST HUNDRED METERS BY THE time Luz clawed up the loose shoring of the ridge and ran into the pine forest. Dried needles crunched beneath her sneakers. She needed to get far enough into the forest for the trees to obscure her from the narco’s view once he topped the ridge. She estimated the distance and guessed she had about fifteen seconds.
Shut up. Run.
She grasped at a tree and swung herself in a new direction. Her ghost runner tangled his feet and stumbled, and she pushed ahead. The webbing of her lungs strained. Her abdominal muscles knotted tighter.
Through the trees she saw the ground fall away. She slowed, halted, and stood, gasping at the edge of a U-shaped cliff, its arms stretching away. Rock hills crinkled into the distance. Buzzards turned in the smokeless air. She fled along the curve and faded back into the trees.
Her stomach convulsed. She was going to throw up. A brief but clear image of the narco in pursuit finding her vomit and tracking her made her hold it in for a few moments longer, and she found a depression within the pines, a little crater lined with pine needles. She fell to all fours, sharp broken rock beneath the needle bed, and she retched, the bile burning in her throat, and she stifled her vocal cords and strained, and then it was done and she collapsed onto her side. Her limbs were stone themselves, no feeling, but the pain in her stomach was like a boot stamping into her abdomen. She lay there. Get up, she told herself. Get up. But she couldn’t.
Felipo. They had him. The laceration through the dead man’s lips blazed in her mind. She had gotten away, and shitty luck ran her right into them again. Why, why. The cramp spiked. She scrunched into a ball and clutched her knees.
There was silence except for her own raging pulse and the rustling when she shifted her weight against the needle bed. Inches from her face, a gray spider burrowed. She rolled to her back and gazed past the trees to the white sky. She narrowed her lips and forced slow breaths and willed against the pain in her gut.
Footfalls, boots on stone. The man was whistling a happy little ditty.
Luz held her breath, rolled gingerly onto her stomach, and crawled to the edge of the crater, where she could peek through the bottoms of the evergreens.
The narco was there, taking in the view over the valley. He wore a western shirt and jeans and cowboy boots. He held a pistol at his side. His other fist dropped into view, a cigarette trailing smoke. He whistled again in awe.
Luz dug through the pine needles, closing her fingers around a loose rock. If the man turned, he might see her face. He might press through the trees and level that pistol, and the rock would do her no good.
She pulled the shard free and squatted and held it. Gray and jagged. Dirt caked to it. The man dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of a boot.
Now, she thought. Now, or he will turn and see you and you will be dead.
She stood and pushed through the pines.
The narco wheeled, startled, but quickly a pleased expression melted across his sweating face. He was older than Luz had expected. Deep wrinkles and gray-flecked hair. He grinned. “Hello—”
Luz reared back and hurled the rock across the few short meters.
The rock pelted against the narco’s eyebrow with a wet solid smack.
The man clapped his free hand over his eye, and he stepped backward and dropped from sight.
No sound. He had been there. Now he was not. No sound at all.
Adrenaline sucked away from her, and the next breath brought absolute pain wrenching from beneath her navel, knocking her to the ground. She was a live and quivering bait shrimp impaled and forced to the curvature of a steel hook. She pressed her forehead against the sun-warmed rock and cried out.
The pain crashed and rushed away, but it was still within sight and would return. She dragged herself into the crater and hid while the hurt racked her. Her very molecules howled. It subsided, leaving a blue and pulsing afterimage. Water leaked from her eyes. Luz knew what was happening even before the blood started seeping through her slacks.
She managed to unbutton her pants and pull them down, and she lay there, clinging to the pain.
Jonah, she thought. She reached. Mamá, please.
She held onto silence by the thinnest of shreds. Voices passed through the trees. Hunters. She tumbled through the hours and the falling dark, and the universe swung over the tops of the pine trees. A bottomless sky threaded with drifting smoke.
The future—everything she had come to accept, everything to which her life would shape itself—bled away. It bled away and went home to the earth.