‘You running from your dad?’ she guesses.
‘No,’ Luca says. ‘Papi was great.’ He rolls onto his side so he can look at her even though that means his arm is no longer stretched alongside hers.
‘Are you a spy?’ she asks. ‘I won’t tell anyone, I swear.’ She’s holding a piece of cardboard over her face for shade, and her black hair is all looped through the holes in the metal grate beneath them.
‘Yes,’ Luca says. ‘I’m a spy. My government received a tip about a nuclear warhead on this train. I’m here to save the universe.’
‘Thank God, it’s about time.’ Rebeca laughs. ‘The universe needs saving.’
The train rocks unevenly beneath them. Nearby, Mami chats quietly with Soledad.
‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘Why did you leave home?’
‘Sigh.’ Rebeca frowns. She actually says the word suspiro instead of sighing, which is funny despite the unhappiness of her expression. ‘Everything was bad, in the end.’ She sits up. ‘Soledad is super pretty, you know?’ She lifts the cardboard to the side of her face where the sun is.
‘Is she? I didn’t notice,’ Luca says.
‘Payaso.’ Rebeca laughs and uses the cardboard to swat him on top of the head. ‘Anyway. We come from a really small place, only a little scrap of a village in the mountains, or not even a village, really, because of how stretched out it is, just a collection of different tucked-away places where people live. And it’s a really out-of-the-way place – the city people call it a cloud forest, but we just call it home.’
‘Why cloud forest?’ Luca asks.
Rebeca shrugs. ‘I guess because of all the clouds?’
Luca laughs. ‘But every place has clouds.’
‘Not like this,’ Rebeca says. ‘In my place, the clouds are not in the sky; they’re on the ground. They live with us, in the yard, sometimes even in the house.’
‘Wow.’
Rebeca half smiles. ‘It was always soft there. Enchanted. And there was no cell service or electricity in the house or things like that, and we lived there with our mami and papi and abuela, but it was pretty impossible to make a living in that place because there was no work, you know?’
Luca nods.
‘So our papi, he was mostly away, living all the time in the city, in San Pedro Sula.’
In his head, Luca thinks, San Pedro Sula: second-largest city in Honduras, a million and a half people, murder capital of the world. Out loud, he says, ‘Ah, you are Honduran.’
‘No,’ Rebeca corrects him. ‘Ch’orti’.’
Luca makes his face into a question.
‘Indian,’ she explains. ‘My people are Ch’orti’.’
Luca nods, even though he doesn’t really understand the difference.
‘Anyway, Papi was a cook in this big hotel in San Pedro Sula, and it was almost a three-hour journey by bus from where we lived, so he only came home maybe once every couple of months to visit us. But that was still okay because this place, our little cloud forest, even though we missed our papi, it was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. We didn’t really know that then, because it was the only place we’d ever seen, except in pictures in books and magazines, but now that I’ve seen other places, I know. I know how beautiful it was. And we loved it anyway even before we knew. Because the trees had these enormous dark green leaves, as big as a bed, and they would sway in the wind. And when it rained you could hear the big, fat raindrops splatting onto those giant leaves, and you could only see the sky in bright blue patches if you were walking a long way off to a friend’s house or to church or something, when you passed through a clearing and all those leaves would back away and open up and the hot sunshine would beat down all yellow and gold and sticky. And there were waterfalls everywhere with big rock pools where you could take a bath and the water was always warm and it smelled like sunlight. And at night there was the sound of the tree frogs and the music of the rushing water from the falls and all the songs of the night birds, and Mami would make the most delicious chilate, and Abuela would sing to us in the old language, and Soledad and I would gather herbs and dry them and bundle them for Papi to sell in the market when he had a day off, and that’s how we passed our days.’
Luca can see it. He’s there, far away in the misty cloud forest, in a hut with a packed dirt floor and a cool breeze, with Rebeca and Soledad and their mami and abuela, and he can even see their father, far away down the mountain and through the streets of that clogged, enormous city, wearing a long apron and a chef’s hat, and his pockets full of dried herbs. Luca can smell the wood of the fire, the cocoa and cinnamon of the chilate, and that’s how he knows that Rebeca is magical, because she can transport him a thousand miles away into her own mountain homestead just by the sound of her voice.
‘The clouds were so thick you could wash your hair in them,’ she says. ‘But then one day something awful happened, because we were so isolated up there in our place, so when the narcos came through, and all the men from the village were gone away into the city for work, those bad men could do whatever they wanted. They could take whatever girls they wanted for themselves, and there was no one there to stop them.’
Luca blinks hard at her. He doesn’t want to experience this part. He suddenly dislikes Rebeca’s easy magic, the way he can feel those men barging through the forest, their steaming bodies vaporizing the clouds around them as they swipe and stomp their way through the undergrowth. But he can’t stop himself from asking the question. ‘Those bad men. They took you?’
‘No.’ Rebeca makes a kind of face that reveals all her straight, white teeth, but it isn’t a smile, not at all. ‘We were lucky because we heard the screams coming from our neighbors, because of the way those clouds could trap and funnel the sound, even from far away. So we stopped the fire from making its smoke, and we hid. They never found our place.’
‘Oh.’ Luca feels relieved. ‘But then?’
‘But then after they were gone, and we discovered what had happened, that they’d taken four girls from our side of the mountain with them, our mami decided that very day that Soledad and I had to leave that place, even though it was the only place we knew in the world. We didn’t want to leave it.’
Luca can feel his face crumpling for her, and he tries to arrange it into an expression of comfort instead of pain.
‘So the next day, Mami walked Soledad and me down the mountain and she put us on the bus to San Pedro Sula.’
‘Wait, what? She didn’t go with you?’
Rebeca draws her knees up in front of her and fans herself with the cardboard. She shakes her head. ‘She said nobody would bother two old ladies. So she and Abuela stayed behind.’