The Ghost Who Guarded Me

The sun sliced over the eastern mountains and turned the desert white. Catarina opened her eyes. Her body had stiffened overnight. Her shoulder throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Her tongue felt like leather. She forced herself to stand. The map said she had eighteen miles to the river. She had drunk half her water. Her wound was weeping. She walked. By noon, she knew something was wrong. Her skin was hot. Too hot. The desert heat pressed down on her, but the heat beneath her skin was different, wet, feverish. She stopped walking and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. Infection. She had seen it before. Her father had come home from runs with bullet grazes that turned septic. He'd soaked in hot water and iodine and refused to see a doctor. The club doesn't go to hospitals, he'd said. Hospitals ask questions. She had no iodine. No hot water. No doctor. She had antibiotics, if she could find them. The map promised a secondary cache. A cairn of stones, eight miles from her current location. She had memorized the route before she left the scrap yard. Now she struggled to remember her own name. She walked. The cairn appeared at dusk. A pile of rocks, waist-high, deliberately stacked. She fell to her knees beside it and pulled the stones apart with her good hand. Inside: a waterproof box. Water. Electrolyte packets. Antibiotics. A clean shirt. A pair of boots, broken in, her size. She swallowed two pills dry. They caught in her throat. She forced them down. Then she pulled off her ruined dress and sat naked in the fading light, waiting for the fever to break. It took three days to reach the river. She traveled at night, slept in washes and beneath rock overhangs during the heat of the day. The antibiotics worked slowly. By the second day, her fever had dropped. By the third, her wound had stopped weeping. She did not think about him. She thought about water. The next step. The next mile. The map folded in her pocket. She thought about her father. His hands on a guitar. His voice, rough and warm, singing corridos about men who crossed rivers and never came back. She thought about the body in the pit. His gray face. His open eyes. She did not think about Cade Rhodes. She reached the Rio Grande on the third night. It was narrower here than in El Paso. Slower. The water moved like syrup under moonlight. On the far side: Texas. Grass. Safety. She stood at the edge and stared at it. Eighteen miles behind her. A bullet in her shoulder. A dead man in her grave. A bag of supplies packed by the man who had put her there. She did not understand. She did not need to understand. She needed to cross. She stepped into the water. It was colder than she expected. The river reached her hips. Her waist. Her wounded shoulder. She held the bag above her head with her good arm and pushed forward. The current tugged at her legs. Her boots filled with water. Her teeth clamped together so hard her jaw ached. Halfway across, her wounded arm failed. She lost her grip on the bag. It splashed into the river beside her. She grabbed it , caught the strap and pulled it close. Her feet found the bottom again. She kept moving. She collapsed at the river bank. Her face pressed into the grass. Real grass. American grass. She lay there with water streaming from her body and her lungs heaving and her shoulder screaming. She was in Texas. She was alive. She did not know if she was free. Behind her, the river kept moving. It did not care that she had crossed it. It did not care that she had left everything she loved in the dirt on the other side. She pressed her palm to her stomach. Flat. Empty. But something stirred beneath her skin. Smaller than a heartbeat. Smaller than a thought. She did not know it yet. But she would.