It’s been twenty-four minutes since she left camp. What is the girl doing out there? She seems genuine, but in the cold midnight hours, my sympathy shifts to doubt.
I really should be sleeping. There’s only one more hour until it’s my turn to take over watch. Two more until the forty-mile hike to the next safe house. The sore muscles of my quads and upper back tingle, and I know at least my body is recharging. But my brain just won’t shut off.
It’s all this quiet. It’s deafening.
I look up to see my sister gazing down at me from her seat against the rocks, her binoculars still raised and pointed toward the placid darkness that borders our meager camp. I notice Father’s journal rests in her lap, pages opened to the clean, short lines of the poem.
“Have you slept at all?” Ava whispers, voice rough with fatigue.
For the first half hour, I tried to drift asleep to the soft mutterings of her recitation, visualizing her mouth forming each new word, repetitive and devout like the memorization of a prayer. But as my mind wandered in and out of consciousness, the nightmares were right there waiting for me. I was falling, the hands were everywhere, and this time my mother did not sing. Instead, I heard my father screaming.
“Mira, there’s two of us so we can do two things at once. You sleep, I guard. You guard, I sleep,” she says reasonably.
She turns back to the eyepiece, her elbows on her knees, and combs the desert with her night vision. The filters on the lenses make the eyes of her binoculars glow an emerald green, reminding me of our old eye color.
“Two against one is better odds if Lucía decides to attack us,” I reply.
“I thought you trusted her?”
Then everything happens in one synchronous moment. Lucía materializes from the shadows just as the first vibration of an aircraft thunders across the night sky, and I shout “Hide!” as Ava throws her hands over her head and nosedives into the umbrella shelter.
I cushion her landing with my arms and help her onto her knees. We huddle close, listening blind as the low buzz of the aircraft builds to a deep roar, surrounding and encompassing us. Swallowing us.
“Did you see it?” I whisper, her ear smashed against my cheek. “Is it a drone?”
“I couldn’t see anything above the clouds.”
“It has to just be an airliner. Even Roth couldn’t afford to send out a surveillance aircraft to search for us.” Ava nods, but the tension in her jaw tells me she’s not convinced.
Whatever is up there passes overhead, and I duck and cover beneath the hood of my vest, despite fully knowing that if it is indeed a surveillance drone, then the infrared cameras would have already detected our presence. But they won’t know it’s us, I persuade myself.
The oppressive rumble of the aircraft wanes as it speeds over our position, heading south—away from us and somewhere toward the heart of Texas.
One threat gone, I turn my attention to Lucía. I find her curled underneath a rock beside our shelter, scanning the starless sky.
“¿Dónde estabas?” Ava asks. Where were you?
Ava rises from beneath the canopy and tries to keep her voice calm, but her words sting with suspicion.
Lucía shifts her eyes to Ava and crawls out from the refuge of the cliff. She struggles to her feet against the strong Panhandle winds, the loose strands from her ponytail floating above her head as if from electric charges in the atmosphere. I notice her fingers are caked in dirt as she reaches for something in her pocket. Simultaneously, Ava and I reach for our knives. She fastens her eyes on Ava, then me, but we keep our weapons drawn. Slowly, she lifts her hand from inside her jacket, revealing a fistful of what looks like the small green pads of a cactus.
“Nopales,” she says. She holds out her open palm, offering us the pile. “Para darnos fuerza.” To give us strength.
There’s such frank sincerity in her countenance, it shames me into lowering my blade.
“También podemos usarlos como medicina,” I say, accepting the nopales with a respectful nod. We can also use them for medicine.
“Agarren más. Tengo muchos.” Take more, I have many.
Ava lifts her hand, palm red and blistered from the steady grip of traveling beneath her umbrella, and accepts several nopales from Lucía’s generous stockpile.
“Gracias,” Ava says and turns back to the fort to resume her watch.
Lucía nods, and with one last look at the pitch-black sky, she sinks down into the dirt. Molding her body into a shallow indentation along the cliff, she hugs her knees for warmth and closes her eyes.
I squeeze in next to Ava at her lookout and tuck my head into her shoulder. I drape my vest over our legs to shield us from the chilly air. As Ava scrapes away the spikes from the cactus pads with her knife, I replay the terrorizing sound of the aircraft in my mind. I dissect every layer of vibration, scrutinize every note, every tremor. Finally I conclude the engine sounded more like the vacuum noise of a passenger plane than the characteristic hum of a drone.
“Dron,” Lucía repeats as if she were listening in on my thoughts. “Era un dron.” It was a drone.
“Roth,” I exhale in a long, flat sigh. I clutch my sister’s hand, our cold fingers intertwining, uniting. Courage, Ava tells me with the pressure of her grip.
Lucía’s hair blocks her profile, but the wind picks up and blows her dark veil away from her face, revealing her worried, red-rimmed eyes. No need to ask how she knows this with certainty. Drones swarm the entire US-Mexico border, supplying 24/7 surveillance. She must have memorized their sound before she crossed, knowing they meant capture. Knowing they meant death.
She watches Ava and me closely, her eyes flicking back and forth between us before landing on me. Even with the dark as my protector, I shrink from her inspection. I lift my head from my sister’s shoulder and use the end of my vest to deflect her gaze.
“Está bien,” she says quietly. It’s okay.
There’s something in her tone that draws my eyes to hers.
“Ellos dicen que no soy bienvenida aquí tampoco.” They say I don’t belong here either.
I do not hide, recoil, or even blink. We stare at one another with an intense understanding before she finally turns away to nestle against the rigid rock face. Ava’s muscles harden, and she begins to rise.
“It’s okay,” I say, both to her and myself. “She doesn’t seem to know who we are. Just what we are.”
The tightness in her muscles softens slightly, but she releases her grip on my hand and moves her fingers to her knife.
“Three more hours of rest, then we move.”
I nod and close my eyes, the deafening silence from earlier replaced by the sound of my beating heart. In spite of the incredible danger, there is liberation, and profound relief, in having another person know I’m alive. In having this knowledge accepted with no outrage or indignation. No hostility or condemnation.
As I drift into oblivion, my last conscious thoughts are of Roth. The eye in the sky might have been him, but there are thousands of transients wandering around the open spaces still left in this country. Millions of acres left for us to drop off the map. We just have to keep him guessing.
Same game, different scenery.
Except now I exist.