December 15, 2078. The first of the V-mails never sent. The mask cracked.
Hello, Jaime.
I just thought you should know, that scarf I gave you isn’t a double brocade. It’s technically a brocatelle. It’s a weave type that tends to stiffness, which is why I used the heirloom cotton that Rosa brought me back from Oaxaca. So it would be soft, but you could still read every stitch with your fingertips. I’m glad you refused to give it to the Colibrí. Even facing a masked vigilante pointing a gun to your head, you wouldn’t let her take what I had freely given. I could have kissed you, cabrón, if you weren’t so busy betraying me.
Right. Deep breath. See—I’m telling you something, Jaime. I don’t always hide myself from you. But you—who you are—who I am—sometimes makes it necessary. Whenever we’re together these days all I can feel is this barrier, like some overgrown cactus with spines that tear apart your hands and chip the machete and grow back thicker than before the next day. Did we ever talk, Jaime? I think we did. I could swear that we did, and yet now all I can do is weave and weave and pray that you’ll understand what I mean when you feel the stitches. I loved your hands from the moment we met—you wouldn’t remember . . . I—
They say that you’re falling for the Colibrí. Berenice told me you spent all of Paco’s party talking about how sexy you find her, how much you admire her. Berenice was surprised because you’d never been particularly interested in politics, let alone the class struggle, and now she was worried that you might leave me for some bandana-masked Zapatista vigilante who’s stealing from our rich parents and giving it away to the poor. Some down-city lady Chucho el Roto. I laughed and told her that you were still firmly in my clutches.
But you’re not, are you? After tonight . . . you met her. Pure dumb luck, when the Colibrí is busy robbing five hundred thousand pesos of rocks from your own aunt’s neck—
Jaime, I’ve been thinking about making something with our story. You and me. Ha, you and me and the Colibrí. A video, a documentary, a collage of lost and hidden histories. If you saw it, you’d know me. And you might just hate me. Here, this is how it would start. Imagine the smoky voice of the narrator, suspiciously similar to the Colibrí’s—but then, according to Berenice, everyone wants to be her these days:
December 2078. An eighteen-year-old girl sits on the balcony of a west-facing tower of the Estratósfera, the elite citadel that rises above the flooded streets of Mexico City. The lights of the towers and the monorails stretch out behind her, reflecting the black water of the canals, and disappear into the cream of the December smog. We pan across the famous towers of the city’s political elite, from here smudgy silhouettes: Cuauhtémoc, Anáhuac, Balderas. The girl is dressed in only a thin white huipil blouse, decorated at the collar with fractals of red and orange diamonds in thick embroidery thread. They are neatly done but faded with age. The girl stitched them herself in another world, with another name, with another mother. Before she was adopted into this strange, glittering mirage.
How is this, Jaime? Mi Jaimecito? Is this honest enough—
Her arms are bare, and even in the ambient light of the Estrato, the bruises are starting to show, purple against brown. A laceration stretches from her collarbone to her chin, shiny with medical sealant. Self-applied. Her hands tremble slightly. Her eyes are red and glassy—a surprise. Aurora never cries.
And cut. You complain about not knowing me, Jaime, but when have you really tried? Aren’t you just afraid, deep down, of who I might be? Not that fresa girl you met at thirteen, a mildly shocking dresser, a better kisser. But someone whose very existence threatens you?
No. No, chinga tu madre, Jaime, how could you—I know you’re blind, but how could you have looked at her like that, how could you have flirted with her like that, how could you even now be trying to get in touch with her again?
December 17, 2078. I found this early, within a few hours of you posting. Even so, your uncle’s spy team managed to scrub it from the net the next day.
My name is Jaime Torres de la Garza, and I’m recording this poem for—for who? It used to be easy, they were all for her, I inhaled free verse and exhaled pentatonic scales and they all traced the contours of her cloth beneath my fingers, and kept the shuttling rhythm of her loom. And now—someone new. A different sort of beat. I don’t know how to reach you, Coli, so I’m posting this publicly. The gossip feeds will fucking eat it up.
Above the Highline direction Borealis,
Which I hate to ride because I still remember the last time I had my eyes,
I felt you a moment before you spoke
Manifested like the spirit they claim you are
In my uncle’s private car
To tell his wife just how much you admired the look
Of the rocks around her neck.
I’ll give you some flowers in exchange, you said, or would you prefer feathers?
And touched your crown, which I imagined buckling and glinting
Like a morning oil slick on lake Xaltocan.
I hear Moctezuma loved them, you said.
And I laughed.
I gave you my jacket and my obsidian ear plugs
Because I wanted more of the deep dry of your voice
When you stole from us.
The outlaw gave a speech, but unlike in the old telenovelas
It was a woman who had come down from the hills
To accuse me of crimes I’d been born to commit.
This will go to the families of the women you disappear, the farmers whose land you’ve stolen or drowned or poisoned past use. Think of it like a tax, Doctora Torres.
You asked me for my scarf, but that, I told you, I would fight for.
Fight for what?
An angry jab of that rough smoke voice, an angry press of one finger against my chest.
I thought:
For that silk sheath of hair always scented with plumeria.
For that laugh like cane liquor, a burning draft.
For that last unmelted iceberg, and all I’ve never seen beneath the surface.
I said:
For double-brocade weaving of blue and gold and jade in heirloom Oaxacan cotton, with a greco motif reminiscent of the crenellations at Monte Albán.
You removed your finger, you left as silently as you came.
I would tattoo my chest there: a teardrop with a fingerprint.
But they say that it hurts
My love
And I’m already burning.
January 3, 2079. Spilling your secrets to the outlaw in the mask.
Tell me how you first met the Colibrí.
Well, I was taking a private rail car with my aunt, the mayor’s wife. And you—she got it to stop on the tracks somehow and held us up. . . . I wrote a poem about it.
How did you feel, that first time?
Like I never wanted her to stop talking. This is weird. Do I have to talk about you in the third person? Who makes a documentary about themselves, anyway?
I want a record.
For what?
In case anything happens. Will you help me or not, Jaime?
I’d do anything for you, Coli. I’m . . . I’m going to leave Aurora for you.
You’re—I thought you loved her.
You and I talk more than Aurora and I ever did, and we only met in person that one time when you were robbing me! I can’t stand it anymore, no matter how much I try, she won’t let me in. Maybe that’s all she is, in the end. A fashion-obsessed Estrato girl.
And you’re really that different? I don’t remember you doing anything when your uncle gassed and shot at those protestors who came to Los Pinos.
That was the president’s call, and anyway what do I have to do with—
And you know the femicides and disappearances they’re protesting are very much a family business—
Oh, not you too! There’s nothing I can do about Beto; he might be my cousin, but he’s unhinged, we all know that. Like I told Aurora, there’s no point in getting disowned by my own family for something I have no control over.
So maybe she’s not only fashion-obsessed after all.
You’re different. You . . . try, at least, to understand me.
Me? A criminal revolutionary with a billion-peso bounty on her head? That your uncle put there? I’ve never taken off my bandana in front of you.
I don’t care. These eyes don’t really see anything, you know, they just recognize patterns. A new face is just noise to me. Your voice, that matters. Your touch . . . would matter.
And yet I recognize that scarf, Jaime.
January 4, 2079. Imagining conversations we could never have.
You said the other week that you loved me but you didn’t know me. That I never let you in. And I—this is hilarious, right?—couldn’t even respond. I was angry. Open up? You have no idea how much you’re asking of me. You couldn’t. Your life hasn’t been easy, I know that, but it has fewer layers. Your uncle is the goddamn mayor. You’ve lived your whole life in the Estrato. You navigate this fresa life without anyone questioning your right to it—your pale güero skin, your perfect accent, your grammar that can slide from high castellano to fresa slang without ever passing through that muddy, indeterminate zone of a poor india who barely speaks Spanish. I spent years in dread of a careless s slipping out in my second-person past tenses, of being too vulgar, of not being vulgar enough. I trained my voice out of rising and dipping with its double entendres, and into that flat nasal twang I needed to survive up here.
That’s why I started weaving again. That’s why I make all my own clothes. I discovered my superpower at thirteen: reinvention. I could be whoever I wanted to be, so long as I dressed the part.
Your friends never understood why you bothered to date me, when you could have whatever lily-skinned supermodel you wanted. But they don’t understand, you wanted me exactly because of how good I am at playing fresa, how good I look on your arm, how neatly I have folded myself to fit into your life. When did you decide to fall in love with me instead of use me?
When did I?
I got messy. I tried to tell you about what mattered to me. I tried to get you to see all the injustice that makes even sweetness taste like poison up here, but you never wanted to hear me. Oh, if the Colibrí talks about redressing systemic wrongs you pause and consider what she’s saying. But when it’s just Aurora, your fresa girlfriend, somehow it doesn’t seem to register—I’m always exaggerating, or getting emotional, or not telling you enough. Do you remember when I finally forced you to talk about Beto? I sat there in the hallway even though I knew that Rosa could hear us and my voice got low, the way it does when I get angry.
You backed against the wall, I remember. And I growled that you knew that your own family was associated with the kidnapping of those girls. You flattened your palms against the marble, one finger at a time. Your voice had as much color as one of those rags Rosa uses to mop the floor.
And you said, because you are a coward: “And what can I do about it?”
But you knew about those parties, the unpaid domestic labor, the sexual slavery, and, yes, the murders. You knew about your cousin—and so did your father and uncle. You were finally hearing me, though. I felt this sick, lurching thrill, because for a few dizzying seconds I wasn’t lying to you at all. You heard me and you didn’t even want to. You saw me and you flinched away. I felt taller than you. I admit it—I felt better than you.
I told you, “Aren’t you an artist? Aren’t you a musician, a poet? Do you know what great poets in this benighted city used to do? They’d die in prison protesting their government’s evil.”
And you froze. You jerked and reached for my hands and brushed my calluses from the loom with your calluses from the guitar. You bent your head and rested your forehead against my collarbone. I breathed the eucalyptus and grapefruit of your shampoo, and I remembered why I was here, and I remembered how you lost your eyes, and I remembered why I could never hate you, even if I didn’t always respect you, and your breath hitched and you said—
“I’m sorry, Aurita. I’m sorry I’m not stronger. But I can’t face down my father. Even the Colibrí can’t.”
“Maybe she can,” I said.
But that was it, you were gone already. “She has better things to do, I hope. Beto isn’t the government, he’s just a fucked-up man-child with too much money—”
And I asked you about your uncle, your brothers, and your father.
Now you pushed me away. You were angry, finally. “My father doesn’t have anything to do with that!”
I laughed. I’m not proud of what I said to that, Jaime. We don’t know what relationship your father has with those women, if he engages in the trade or just tolerates it.
But tolerating it is evil enough. You would understand that if you really believed that those of us struggling down below were every bit as human as you are, as you imagine me to be.
January 5, 2079. Rosa Trujillo Ramirez interviews with a disguised associate of the Colibrí’s. Amazing what she saw when I wasn’t looking.
You mentioned that Aurora has been arguing with Jaime? About what?
I hear a lot, you know, as the housekeeper. Those Estrato types tend to forget when I’m around. This was back in November, just after Mayor Torres put that billion-peso bounty on the Colibrí’s head. Aurora was telling Jaime that she’d heard rumors that his cousin Beto was planning another of his famous clandestine parties. The kind that go on for three days at a time, attended by senators and bankers and businessmen and narcos. Jaime’s cousin Beto is much older than him, Mayor Torres’s son from his first marriage. He had been in charge of city security until the Highline terrorist attack. I remember because it had been in the news, how it had been his own cousin’s fault that Jaime went blind.
Jaime didn’t want to listen to her, of course. He couldn’t do anything about it, he said.
Aurora laughed. Oh, the way Aurora would laugh when she thought that no one but Jaime could hear her. “A laugh like cane liquor, a burning draft”—I remember that from one of those poems he published yesterday. The ones they say are for the Colibrí. But I know. He wrote that for her.
She said, around that laugh, “You don’t have the first idea where your daddy goes, junior.”
He used the Lord’s name in vain and then said “Aurora” with the exact same tone. And he told her, it was so strange, he told her she was hidden, like a switchblade in wrapping paper.
His face looked at her, so bleak with those special eyes, and I remembered—did you know?—that he couldn’t cry. They had to remove his tear ducts along with what was left of his first pair of eyes.
He can’t really see, you know. Those eyes allow him to sense things, but it isn’t processed visually.
You don’t say? Maybe that explains the scarves. Aurora would spend afternoons on the balcony, reading while she worked on her loom. He would find her after he had finished his music lessons, and they would just sit together. Sometimes he would touch the fabric and admire the pattern, since she tended to weave in brocade. And then she would tell him if it was red or blue or had eagles or jaguars and the sort of skirt or jacket or thigh-high boots she planned to use it in. They were so quiet, and yet every time they spoke it seemed as though there was something else beneath it.
And what do you think of Aurora?
You say you’re with the Colibrí, you’re one of her band? No, it’s all right, I can guess why she wants to know. May God always bless the Colibrí; up here in the Estratósfera they think she’s a criminal, but they don’t know what it’s like down on the lakes. The narcos and the government, they’ll take all the money you have and kill you for more. But the Colibrí, she gives it back. Some say the narcos kidnapped her daughter, others say she was just born a man-hater—as if you have to hate men to see the evil in those bastards. She’s a saint, stealing back what’s rightfully ours.
So Aurora, she wants everyone to forget where she came from. Most everyone goes along with it, but I don’t believe her act. She was thirteen when she lost her parents in the Highline attack. That’s old enough to know where you come from. So I don’t know how she managed to turn into that girl who’s always on the gossip feeds. She’s more fresa than a born fresa.
So she never talks about it.
Not even to Jaime—though, I admit, I always thought there was something different between them. He was in that blast, the same as her, and he lost his eyes in it. So it seems to me that neither of them can really forget how they got to where they are, but they don’t talk about it. Not to me, not to their friends. Not even to each other. And yet he spent nearly every day here before the troubles between them—ah, may God always bless the Colibrí, but those are two I wish she could have left in peace. After all they’ve seen.
Did they ever mention his cousin Beto again?
Not where I could hear. I think Jaime didn’t like to think of his family that way. But Aurora was right. All those juniors, even the ones who would never go, know what happens at those parties. They know about the disappeared girls, the ones forced to prostitute themselves until one day someone killed them for nothing at all. My little niece, the daughter of my oldest sister, is one of those missing girls. My God, I hate these people sometimes. My God, may the Colibrí give them what they deserve.
January 10, 2079. I could barely stand to say your name.
You did it, then. You broke up with her.
You almost sound as though you want me to apologize.
How do you even know that I’m attracted to you?
Don’t you keep calling?
It’s not safe for us to meet. I’m not your girlfriend.
I know. It’s okay. I admire you. I love you.
You can’t love someone you don’t even know.
Aurora was . . . is . . . I’ve never seen your face, I don’t know your name and I know you better than I ever knew her.
You were with her for over a year.
The only language Aurora really spoke was her loom and her clothes. Too bad for her I can’t fucking see them.
Communication isn’t only about talking. What do you and I even have in common? Have you even wondered about everything I’m hiding?
You’ll never know all of anybody. But you can love what you know about them.
But what you know might be the wrong part, Jaime.
February 7, 2079. A disguised associate of the Colibrí’s interviews Daniela Q, when she was still at that gossip rag.
How have your readers reacted to the latest activities of the Colibrí?
Our fan base at Mejor Que Tú magazine is teenage juniors and their elevator-riding tween groupies. Most of our attention has to be focused on the tabloid angle, the Jaime/Colibrí speculation. These days, that includes Aurora, though before she wasn’t particularly important in the feeds—I mean, it’s not every day a Zapatista lady thief who runs around in a hummingbird feather headdress and a bandana mask steals some mireina’s tabloid-star boyfriend, you know?
The Colibrí has been making her way through the whole city senate—she’s robbed five in the last month! It’s uncanny, the way she gets past their security. Chucho el Roto for the twenty-first century. She claims in her videos that she acts alone, not for the Zapatistas or any organized group. This didn’t stop the city legislative assembly from raising the bounty on her head on the grounds that the Colibrí is an operative for the New Zapatista Liberation Army. It’s still political poison to associate with them, though that international tribunal cleared them a few years ago. Now the theory is it was really some narco hit. Anyway, no one in the office pays much attention to the political side. Mostly all the juniors and wannabes have been swooning over the message that the Colibrí sent to Jaime in her last video. Did you see it? She’s in the woods somewhere, face hidden by the bandana and the headdress. The girls are all trying to imitate that voice, that sort of take-no-prisoners gravel swagger has gotten very a la moda. But we have an expert in-house who swears she uses a sublingual vocal mask—which makes sense. If anyone could find the Colibrí, the mayor would stick her head on a wall in the zócalo, like the Aztecs. Here’s the video.
There’s something my grandmother used to tell me, Jaime: Never trust a man with power over you. And sure as hell don’t kiss him. Well, I haven’t yet, but I need to know—what am I to you? A poor indígena who should be grateful you bothered to notice her? Or just a challenge, a new flavor now that you’ve gotten bored of the old one? You seem to think I should notice you—so tell me why. How are you worth it? If we’re both symbols, between the bloodred fruit and the spiny cactus and the eagle and serpent in its claws—which is you and which is me? The sour cactus pear? The eagle alighting with the will of a god? The serpent struggling in its claws? The cactus is poisoned, Jaime, poisoned from the roots. What good are your spines if you won’t use them? Go back to your good fresa girl if that’s all you want out of me. I ain’t waiting.
Well, I can only imagine how Aurora felt watching that one!
Has she done anything in response?
Did she ever! She revealed herself in public for the first time in a month last night, at the gala fundraiser of Todas Juntas, that woman’s crisis charity that her mother runs. If she was hurting, she didn’t show it last night. She stepped out of the Hill family car in her most incredible outfit to date: a floor-length ball gown trimmed in eagle feathers. The fabric was some kind of hand weave in blue and gold and white—no one knows where she sources her fabrics, she must special order them—and it swept upward over a fitted bodice studded with jade. The most astonishing thing, though, was her hat. It was all fabric, stiffened and folded in a way that looked distinctly eaglelike, with these long feathers woven in to brush her shoulders. She looked more dangerous than beautiful in that outfit, a genuine predator. And, given who stole her boyfriend, it was a response more perfect than words. Eagle eats hummingbird. Sorry, no disrespect intended to your boss. I know relationships end all the time.
None taken. She saw the outfit. It was well done.
Aurora’s always spoken more eloquently with her clothing. She gave me a brief interview, though she refused to so much as mention Jaime. All she would say about his new maybe-girlfriend was, “I sympathize with many of the injustices that she decries in her videos. I, of course, take issue with her methods.” The look on her face when she said “methods” will probably pay my rent for a month. Subtexual gold, the commenters love it.
I did an interview with them before the breakup. It didn’t go anywhere at the time, but now I’m remembering this odd exchange between them.
We were adjusting the cameras, so Jaime started flicking through his feed, which he can do just by accessing something with his eyes, I’m unclear on the details. He was ignoring everyone, and Aurora turned to him and said:
“Who would you be if you had to face just a little of your discomfort?”
It sounded harsh to me, but he barely raised his eyebrows. He didn’t look at her, he just said, “Less fucked up. The same as you would be if they hadn’t killed your parents.”
She bent over as though he had punched her. He didn’t seem to notice for nearly a minute. But just when we had finished with the cameras, he reached over, squeezed her hand and kissed it, and I thought—I swear to God, shows you what I know, no wonder I’m still single—that theirs was a true love.
April 19, 2079. The poisoned roots.
How do you feel knowing that your family is intimately involved in a corrupt drug-funded slavery and prostitution ring?
You actually want me to answer you on camera? Beto could go down tomorrow and all I’d feel is relief.
And what about Mayor Torres? Or your father?
Coli . . . they’re not perfect. They’re corrupt machista assholes, fine, I’ll give you that, but I can’t believe that they know about this. I just can’t.
If you do, how could they not?
Don’t make me answer that. I’m worried about you. I’ve heard things.
What things?
That you’re threatening city assembly members. That you’re connecting them with high-ranking members of the Conquistador cartel and sending the information to pirate net broadcasts. That you managed to hack the mayor’s personal video channel for an hour. And that—
What? Tell me.
You’re breaking into our homes. Stealing things . . .
Oh, say it ain’t so, Jaimecito. Things?
They won’t tell me specifics, Coli!
But you know.
How can I know?
Say it, baby. Say it. Don’t play innocent fresa boy with me. You know what I’ve been doing because it’s in the center of the frame you’ve been trying to pretend isn’t actually on the wall all this time.
Wait—the girls? You’ve been stealing Beto’s girls?
They’re human beings that someone else bought. Or do you think there are different rules for lake-dwellers and indígenas like me?
No, of course not! Of course you can’t—you’re freeing them. Of course.
You sound surprised.
I just don’t understand why my father—he said you were stealing things and that I had to stop betraying my own blood and help them catch you. He said that you’re just using me to get to them. I know it’s not true—
Oh, but it is, Jaimecito.
You’re not—it is?
I’m only talking to you like this because I want you to hear me, at long goddamn last. I want you to see, er, metaphorically speaking—
Oh, for God’s sake, Coli.
Sorry. I mean that you have spent your whole life shying from real responsibility. And you do it by denying your awareness of the evil around you. Well, now you’re talking to me, Jaime. Now you know. So yes, I’m using you. I’m using you because I want you to help me.
You want me to help you. Help you how?
I can tell you the names of girls my people have confirmed are missing and almost certainly have passed through Beto’s orbit. I can even give you vocal clips for a few of them. You visit your cousins and talk to the domestics of your aunts and you get yourself an invite to one of those terrible parties and then let me in the back door. I get those girls out one at a time.
You can’t be serious!
Why not?
I could get killed!
You know that your own family is capable of killing you and you still defend them?
Defend them? Look at me, I can’t stop laughing and I’m so scared I could puke. My father told me to denounce you and I told him to go to hell.
So pick a side, Jaime.
Don’t ask me this, Coli. I want you to survive. I want us to meet in person again. My uncle and my father are planning something. They want to find a way to bring you down.
Tell me something I don’t know, mi vida. So will you?
I don’t want to die.
Neither do I.
Send me the names. And the voices. God help us, Coli, but I won’t let you do this alone.
May 8, 2079. I nearly sent this. I very nearly did.
When I knew you were going to leave me, Jaime, but you hadn’t done it yet, I would lie in my bed and imagine all of the ways I could convince you to stay. And the wildest thing was, I knew that I could! All I had to do was betray my family and everything that I’d dedicated my life to. And now you’re gone, months gone, and I’ve had my cry, as Mamá would say. Now it’s time to get back out into the world!
The trouble is, I see the world through your . . . well, not eyes, obviously, but your voice, your poetry, your laughter, those silly songs you would improvise for me on our walks. But you don’t want me. Not the parts of me that I could give you, anyway.
I was making you a scarf. I’d had an inspiration the night of the first V-mail I never sent, and I sat in my backstrap loom though it hurt like hell from the bruises, and I worked out the basic pattern. I’m finishing it now, Jaime, and oh, it’s so beautiful. You would have loved it. The colors of the ocean mixed with a thread that shimmers like a quetzal feather. The embroidery is thick, nearly a quarter of a centimeter high, a pattern of feathers. I finished it and hid it under my bed. I think Rosa found it, though.
I’ve started to regret not telling you back then, so I’ve decided to say it out loud now and see how I feel about it. It seems to me that I’ve spent so long unable to trust anyone, that my secrecy has grown inside me like a tumor. Maybe you would have understood; maybe you wouldn’t have blamed me.
But now you would, I think.
Here, a truth.
My parents didn’t die in the Highline attack; my mother is still alive. I was with the New Zapatista Liberation Army, protesting the new station, and I saw the bomb just before it went off. It wasn’t our bomb, Jaime. You have to believe me. The government blamed us, that’s all. There was a boy my age nearby, in the path of the blast. And I grabbed him and pushed him onto the tracks. He and I woke up in the hospital, forever changed. The Señora Hill—Mamá—adopted me. I’ve been able to use her access—and yes, yours, Jaime—to pass government information onto my mother and the others in the movement.
I never meant to use you when we met. I was surprised that you even wanted to talk to me. I thought we had so much time, I thought that I could control how much my mother demanded of me. I couldn’t. And I couldn’t tell you. For years I had a nightmare where I would tell you who I was, and then I would wake up to a different nightmare, where I couldn’t.
So I tell you now, when you can’t hear me. Maybe this will go in my documentary, my collage, my forbidden portrait of a distorted heart.
June 3, 2079. I cried the first time I watched this. You found poetry even in betrayal.
You had the most beautiful voice. I read the rumors about the sublingual mask, but I didn’t believe them. That voice went through me like a dart, mezcal and woodsmoke, something cold and something still burning.
I had given you information about four girls I was able to find. Two in Beto’s apartment and the other two with a lowlife friend of his who lived a few floors down in Cuauhtemoc Tower. I told you that I had tried to look discreetly among my uncle’s staff and my own family’s, but I hadn’t. I realized, and then couldn’t stop remembering, the way the girls would always change in my uncle’s house. Their soft voices folding into one another, the texture occasionally brightened by sobs in a bathroom, my aunt’s quiet disapproval of the sentimentality of her waitstaff. Once, stumbling home late and drunk from a party, I smelled blood on the pool house bathroom towels. My brother told me one of his girlfriends had gotten her period. And I remember thinking, but not saying, Period blood doesn’t smell like that, Jorge. So I told you about Beto. I figured it would be enough.
“And your parents?” you asked, so cool and so sharp. My heart rocked against my breastbone.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes you do, Jaimecito,” you said, and disconnected the call.
A week later you got in touch again. “I’ve got the four out,” you said, warm this time. “I’ve been thinking, would you like to visit me?”
I came to Star Hill three days later. Though you kept the bandana up, you didn’t blindfold me, because outside of Estrato tech my implants struggled to make sense of the world. The lake and its reflections made me feel as though I had fallen through a looking glass. You brought me there on a flat-bottomed boat and I held myself rigid, the stink of that black water filling my nostrils. I couldn’t even catch a whiff of that foreign-familiar smell that I remembered from the time you robbed us in the railcar. You poled the boat well, I’m sure, but every time we rocked I was convinced we were about to fall in. You must have been laughing at me the whole time. And all I wanted to do was touch you, at last, to make sure that you were real.
We stopped, I couldn’t tell where. I could get a read on a small structure with just one other person inside. My network connection was laggy. It couldn’t register locations, let alone faces. I stayed inside the boat. I didn’t trust myself to get out on my own. You climbed back in and handed me a glass.
“Pulque,” you said, when I sniffed at it.
I’d never had pulque before, but I took a sip. It was sour, viscous, bubbly. Nothing like a good beer. Berenice once told me they fermented it with dog shit, but I thought better of asking.
“It’s good stuff,” you said, laughing a little. “But give it to Juanita if you don’t want it.”
Juanita, the person whose face I couldn’t read, introduced herself. Her hand dwarfed mine when she shook it. She was at least a head taller than both of us. She took over the pole in back and you sat across from me at the front of the boat. You told Juanita to take us through the chinampas garden plots, which I’m sure would have offered a beautiful view for someone else. I wondered what you wanted. Why had you agreed to see me after keeping me dancing for so long?
“I’ll take you back anytime you want,” you said. “If it’s too hard just tell me.”
I took another determined swig of the pulque. “It’s not too hard. I’ll adjust. I’m just used to . . . having more information.”
“You’re not used to being blind.”
I tilted my head, though even as I did it, I recognized the gesture as something Aurora would do when I said something she didn’t approve of. I missed her. When had that happened? “I’m always blind, Coli,” I said. “What I do now isn’t seeing.” I could only rely on my unaugmented senses to orient myself. The rain started. It washed over our little corner of the world, a soft rush that nearly drowned our voices, drumming on the tiny pavilion roof.
The air smelled clean, and green, and silent.
“We’re entering the chinampas plots,” you said. “The corn is half again as tall as you are.”
I could have laughed. My implants had made the figures look like swaying giants. They had never seen corn before. And, I thought, didn’t that make me precisely the sheltered, privileged Estrato boy she said I was?
“Isn’t it dangerous to grow food with the polluted water?”
You had leaned toward me in our silence, but pulled back now. There had been something—a scent, a memory, a familiarity in that gesture. But I couldn’t hold it. You turned very Colibrí, as if there were cameras ready to broadcast one of your “messages to the people.”
“The chinampas traditionally are nonpolluting. And we have ecologists working with local farmers to introduce algae and plants that are cleaning up Estrato waste.”
“It’s not only Estrato waste,” I said.
“Sure,” you said, “you assholes outsource plenty of it to multinationals too.”
I sighed. “Didn’t I help you?”
“You did,” you said, with something odd in your voice. “But I’m still not sure if it’s because you want to get in my pants or because you care.”
“I care,” I said, softly, but you didn’t respond. We were silent for a while.
“Look,” you said, “it’s a double rainbow.”
I looked up and tried to get a read, but outside of the boat everything was noise. I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be much use, anyhow. Aurora . . . she used to describe colors to me.”
“Tell me, how would she have described a rainbow?”
I was surprised that you asked, but even more surprised when I started to answer. I had tried so hard not to think about Aurora in those months of pursuing you, as though to admit what I had loved about her would mean admitting that I had made a mistake. But you asked, and there she was, smiling against my ear.
“It’s really a circle, she told me that first. But the earth cuts through it, so we only see one half. There’s never an end to a rainbow. And the bottom band is purple, as faint as chiffon. Quinceañera chiffon, Aurora called it. Though she made her own quinceañera gown, and didn’t use any chiffon at all. Then a blue of a sky in a sun shower, the blue of lapis lazuli dusted with chalk. Green so green it seems fake and flat, just to prepare you for the purity of the yellow. Somewhere in between gold foil and parrot feathers, she told me, the ones that puff out close to the neck. And then, last, the crimson that bleeds into the gray of the clouds behind it. And just where they mix, the red of freshly spilled blood.”
“Oh,” you said, and I caught it again, that sweet breath of something familiar. But the rain was dissipating, and the breeze blew it away. She twisted in her seat. “Juanita, let’s get back. Bartolomé should be here soon and I need to talk to him about the next raid.”
We went back to the first structure, which turned out to be a cantina. I had finished my pulque, somehow, so they gave me another. It tasted better this time. I sat with Juanita while you went off to talk to the priest with the booming voice. He was talking about going into the Lomas, because the girls who weren’t killed immediately always seemed to pass through there.
You said something I couldn’t make out and then both of you moved out of hearing. I took a long gulp of my second glass of pulque.
“So, whereabouts do you live?” Juanita asked. “Far from here, I’m sure.”
I felt my throat jumping, the way it does when I’m scared or sad. “Lomas,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “I hear it’s nice up there. Not even flooded.”
I could only nod. I hadn’t told you anything about my family. Nothing about the slow parade of desperate girls. Had I doomed myself when I agreed to help you? Had implicating Beto led you to my own home? I started shaking and told Juanita I was cold.
“Take the boy home, Coli,” she called. “Our pulque’s too strong for him; you don’t want his junior friends to think we’ve poisoned him!”
There were six others in the cantina now, and they laughed. You came back and put your hand on my shoulder.
“Is everything okay?” you said.
That was your mistake, you know. Even though the voice was still lower and rougher, the tone was like a dream I had been dreaming for a year and forgotten upon waking every morning. It was everything I had missed and tried to forget and resented and never, ever understood.
I stood up and gripped your hand. You knew.
You let Juanita take me back. By the dock, as you handed me down into the boat, you gave me a scarf. The raised pattern was of feathers, you said, quetzal blue. The weave was so tight that the cotton felt as smooth as your hair, falling over your shoulders. It was a work of art, Aurora, and you gave it to someone who could only appreciate half of it.
I pulled down your bandana and leaned in as though to kiss you.
“How is this possible?” I asked. My voice cracked twice on the last word. I could not believe how much I believed it.
“I never could tell you,” you said, in both of their voices. “But I still need your help, Jaime, Jaimecito. We still—”
“I’ll let you know,” I told you. That voice I loved, I couldn’t stand to hear it any longer. I couldn’t stand to smell you and touch your fabric and the feathers of the headdress that you still hadn’t taken off. You nodded and let me go.
So this is my answer:
No. I can’t betray my own blood for someone who has never, behind either mask, never once shown me her true self.
August 5, 2079. The sleeper agent.
It turns out that Aurora has a very interesting history. You’re her real mother.
Dios mío, Aurita, do you think this is a good idea? Are you really recording this?
I’ll keep it secret until it’s safe to use. So you’re a councilmember for which organization?
The New Zapatista Liberation Army. Why are you asking me things you already know?
Because I might not always be around to know them, Mamá. Just speak, you owe me that much.
We intended for Aurora to be an agent on the inside, and she reported back to us for years, it’s true. But about a year ago, the assembly had agreed that we needed more leverage in the fight against the redistricting for the new Highline stations—yes, they’re planning to destroy the entire neighborhood to extend that so-called Estratósfera. They won’t even allow us to use their goddamn monorail or set foot in those towers, and their proposed payment is more of an insult than honest robbery would be. They are going to destroy our sixteenth-century church, which we only managed to save from the flooding with the savings and work of generations. They’re going to destroy our homes, our public spaces, an entire Nahua community, for a shopping mall and luxury apartments. How could we not fight back? But I supposed that Aurora had spent too long up there among those criminals. I supposed that she had forgotten where she came from. Perhaps it was too hard on her, to have to pretend to be an orphan in the blast. We rarely got to see her. And then her father died last December, and she couldn’t even attend the funeral.
You don’t seem very sad about it.
Of course it hurt me to lose her! I pray for her every night. That first year I cried so much I lost my salt. But there was no one else, and we had to take advantage of the opportunity. She and her aunt were our only activists to survive the blast. But then we realized, no one in the hospital had any idea who she was, and that rich woman was begging for an orphan. We had to let her go! She had a special role to play in the Hill family. But this year we told her . . .
You told me to kidnap Jaime.
I wish I had fought harder against the idea. It goes completely against our principles. Just because they accuse us of unspeakable acts doesn’t mean we should lower ourselves to their level. You refused, and that was the last I heard from you for months. Not until I saw the Colibrí . . . Aurora, does anyone else know what you’re doing?
Just Bartolomé and a few from the band, Mamá.
At least your cousin is there. He’s always looked out for you. Oh, what will become of you? You can’t come back here. And if your Estratósfera family ever discovers what you’ve done? If your precious boyfriend ever finds out? Oh, then I won’t even have your body to bury, and they’ll still build a tower where our home used to be.
August 10, 2079. You knew that I knew, and I loved you for it.
You finally call, Jaime? I thought you hated—
There’s a body in the bathroom, Coli. My father told me to wait in the greenhouse. But I’m in the laundry room instead. I can still hear them talking upstairs. They want to clean it up quietly. But it’s a woman, Coli. A young woman dressed like a maid, but her face doesn’t register.
They . . . where are you?
At my uncle’s house in Lomas. I don’t know how you get into our houses or do what you do, but I think you should come here.
You do.
I know your people have stayed away from Lomas since—but I think you have to come here now. I can’t stand this anymore.
Jaime, Jaimecito, what can’t you stand?
I can’t stand that you might have been right.
August 11, 2079. And there comes a time when all that’s left is your own blood.
Juanita was sure it was a setup. You had refused my calls for a month. Our spies said you seemed to be working for your father. You had rejected me, so why call for help? I agreed with her, but I argued that we should go anyway. Your voice was so strained and quiet. You didn’t want to say it, not a word, and yet you were trying to tell me something anyway. You only called me Coli, which meant you hadn’t exposed me to your family.
Juanita shrugged and said, “Let’s get those bastards, then. If we’re lucky we’ll get enough to bring down the mayor. And if we’re not, God will still take care of it when we’re worm food.”
I reached up to hug her, which is a joke between us because she’s so big I can only reach her shoulders. “This is why I love you,” I said.
And she smiled and said we should make sure Bartolomé was willing to risk his neck for my junior boyfriend.
He was, Jaime. Which you know. Or will know, if you survive.
It was one in the morning by the time we arrived, dark from the thick smog blocking out the moon and even the lights of the Estratósfera towers to the east. We decided that I would go in first. Bartolomé would wait for my signal dressed in full Colibrí gear. We’re almost exactly the same height and build; with the sublingual vocal mask it would be hard to tell. I got in—no, I won’t tell you how. I still don’t know if you’ll betray me, Jaime.
The greenhouse was dark and empty. I had to break open the padlock. The flagstone paths inside were covered with dead leaves and flowers and dirt. I flashed the ultraviolet light that I couldn’t see and waited.
You snuck up behind me—you didn’t need light to find your way, after all.
“No headdress,” you said.
I jumped and swung around. You were alone. “The Colibrí is waiting to see what’s really happening.”
“They already got rid of the body,” you said. “A truck came.”
“Convenient.”
You smiled. “But I got the license plate. My uncle’s press secretary is driving.”
It was a very good offer, Jaime. Not your father, not your property, but damning political leverage all the same. I sent the photo to Juanita and told her to follow with Ulises.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
It hurt to see you. I had thought of you so much in the last month that I hadn’t expected it to. But you had chosen to be the rotten fruit of your family’s rotten tree. You hadn’t chosen the hummingbird.
“Why am I here, Jaime?”
Your throat jumped. “So you can tell me to my face,” you said, “why you lied to me. I loved you, or I loved both of the creations I thought were you—did you ever feel anything for me? Did you ever regret using me? Did you think, oh, poor blind Jaime, he can’t tell the difference?”
“You came after me! I never asked for your love affair with the Colibrí.”
“You sure didn’t reject it! You seduced me with my ideal woman, and none of it was real.”
That made me freeze. Because my heart was breaking, I suppose, though I had thought it was already in pieces. “Was she really? Did you really love nothing about Aurora? I wove you a thousand stories in a thousand threads, everything I could never tell you . . .”
You took a deep breath and put your hand to my cheek. “No,” you said, and shoved me to the floor. Glass shattered and floodlights blinded me. I fell at your feet and found my com by touch, to yell at Bartolomé to get the hell away from here. It was too late, of course. He’d already come inside when he hadn’t heard from me.
Someone yelled, “Hands up, Colibrí.” And you left me there on the floor, ran to stop your father’s soldiers from killing us. And instead they shot you. Bartolomé they left to drown in his own blood among the poinsettia.
No one suspected me. They cleaned me up and took me back to Mamá’s and said they would tell me when your condition changed. They were all laughing, what a good joke, they said. Of course it could only have been a man who robbed them like that. But what a good joke to play at being a woman. Poor blind Jaime probably didn’t even know. Don’t worry, they told me, we won’t let his identity go public. Poor Bartolomé. Even in death he’s stuck with my secrets.
We caught your uncle, by the way. Definitively connected him and your cousin to various femicides and disappearances. Impeachment hearings start tomorrow. I’m praying to the virgin you’ll be awake to see them. Hate me all you want, hate me for the rest of your life. But you always knew me, mi vida, you knew more than I could ever tell you.
October 3, 2080. Some wars end because the soldiers refuse to fight.
Daniela Q: Let’s move to something more personal. Just this past week you’ve been taking your first public steps since your near-fatal shooting last summer. Five days ago, you testified in the legislative assembly about the need to unilaterally restrict further Estrato development. So I have to ask, why now? Why has the junior golden boy at last turned political?
Jaime: I spent a lot of time on my back, to be honest. The Colibrí gave me—gave us all—a lot to think about. She gave us a promise that I think we all have to try to make real. She told me once that I never faced my own discomfort. Her death made me face it. She showed me a . . . truth, about myself, about herself, that it took me a long time to understand.
Daniela Q: Your family has been through a number of changes. Your uncle was forced to resign as mayor before the impeachment hearings began. Your cousin Alberto was assassinated by a presumed cartel member. And unlike every other Torres of the last five generations, you’re studying law at the public autonomous university.
Jaime: I never wished misfortune on my family, but I do want justice. I’m lucky to have finally understood how I can use my influence and position in society to help redress the wrongs of systemic inequality.
Daniela Q: Are you writing poetry again?
Jaime: Yes. I’ve even written a couple of songs lately.
Daniela Q: Is there a special someone?
Jaime: I’m not sure, to be honest. There’s just someone—I’d like to get to know better without all the pyrotechnics. I have this feeling we might just get along.
October 4, 2080. The thread and the loom.
Hello again, Jaime. I admit, that poem caught me off guard. A year without a word, and now hearings in the assembly! But I believe you. It’s been a hard year for both of us.
I put this together for you and I thought I wouldn’t send it, that it would just stir up bad memories. But then I reread that poem, and I realized that you knew me—that you knew us—both of them who were always, always me.
I’ll read it and then I’ll press send. It’s time you learned the whole story.
I met an iceberg who wouldn’t tell me her name
But wove it in a hundred thousand strands of blue-black thread.
The color of the lake, polluted, she once told me,
Is the color of a hummingbird’s crest.