THEY LANDED SOMEWHERE NEAR MONCLOVA. LUZ WALKED with the official into a squat, square building. She clutched the poncho shut. The ceiling lights spiked to the back of her eyeballs. A woman in uniform rose from her desk. Something flashed over the woman’s pudgy features when she looked at Luz—fascination or concern or even horror. But the woman composed herself and smiled.
“Marta,” the official said, “please assist this young lady—” He paused and glanced at Luz, and she provided her name. The man smiled, white teeth. Gray at his temples and a cleanly shaven face, even in the middle of the night. His name was Garza. “Marta, please take señorita Hidalgo to one of the rooms so that she may refresh herself. Find her some clothes, shoes . . . anything else she might need. After, I would have a word with her.”
Luz went with Marta down a long, linoleum-floored hallway. The last light panel in the ceiling flickered, and the hallway’s terminus alternated in and out of existence. Reality itself came into question. I am here . . . I am here.
Marta opened a door. A spartan barracks room. Narrow bed with papery-looking sheets. Bedside lamp. Particleboard wardrobe. A door opened into a small washroom with a sterile-looking shower stall. Luz entered and sat wrapped in the poncho on the narrow bed. The cramp beneath her navel ebbed. She thought she was still bleeding.
Marta returned with a stack of things in her arms and set them on the mattress. A folded towel, a bar of soap, a small bottle of shampoo. A pair of gray sweatpants, an olive-green T-shirt, and a gray sweatshirt. A pair of white socks and some cotton underpants. A box of maxi pads.
After Marta departed, Luz stood and stripped out of the clothes Felipo’s grandmother had given her. They were stiff and disgusting. She balled them up and threw them into a corner. The washroom floor was cold against her bare feet. The light fixture hummed. She was there in the mirror. Naked, cold, trembling, and alone. Her face was filthy, striated soot in her dried sweat. But her eyes in the midst of it all were sharp, and she ceased shivering by focusing on them.
The pain in her abdomen heaved back. Luz gripped the sides of the sink and forced herself to remain upright. All those times as a girl she had imagined the Guachichiles, the ancient warriors who came before her mother, before herself. As a girl she looked in the mirror, dreaming of that lineage, and envisioned the warrior who might stare back like a hawk. Luz gripped the sink and shouldered through the pain. And now the warrior was there, watching in the mirror. She was held in the eyes. She existed. A thought—a memory, perhaps, something Mamá once told her—arrived in Spanish: El espíritu está vivo a causa de la justicia.