This was Beatriz’s thesis: The Sorias must have once upon a time confronted their own darkness in the same way that all pilgrims were asked to confront their darkness. Somewhere along the way, a Soria must have lost the taste for facing their demons, however, and either died before performing the second miracle, creating a legend, or merely stopped the practice in its tracks, proclaiming Soria darkness too difficult to tackle. And so Sorias forgot how to solve their darkness, and they let it build up inside them until it became too treacherous, with a handful of Sorias being struck down each generation, falling prey to years of backed-up darkness.
The only way Beatriz had to prove this theory, however, was by testing it on herself. And if there was any other explanation—if Soria darkness was truly impossible, or if it had become impossible—Beatriz might become wood like Daniel’s parents or blind and breathless like Daniel himself.
“Take Salto and go,” she told Marisita. “I don’t know what will happen.”
“I won’t go,” Marisita said. “I endured my own darkness and I will endure this, too.”
“Then take Salto and at least ride a little ways off so you can watch safely.”
She waited until Marisita had retreated just a little with Salto, and then she went to her cousin. She tied her bootstrap to his wrist so that nothing could carry her away from him before she could give him back his eyes and breath. She called her thoughts back down from where they were soaring with the buzzards and the other lechuza, the one with the woman’s face, the one who had hatched from the fire. Then she peered at the strange owl still on the ground, the one with Daniel’s face.
Do you have darkness inside you?
Beatriz thought of how Marisita had just overcome her darkness, and the twins, and Tony.
Do I have darkness inside me?
She remembered those owls sitting on the edge of the radio telescope, watching her hopefully, and she knew that she did.
The miracle swelled inside her.
The lady-faced owl dipped down low from above, finding the promise of the miracle irresistible, but that was not the owl she needed. She let her pending miracle rise even farther, huge and terrifying. It was such an enormous, backed-up miracle that it began to call to owls as far away as Bicho Raro, and beyond. She heard their distant cries as they began to flap toward this scrub as fast as they could, hoping to get to her before it was over. The miracle grew so much that now, finally, the owl with Daniel’s face could not resist its call. It hopped slowly toward her, as she had hoped it would. All of its evasion was gone: It simply wanted to be as close to this oncoming miracle as possible.
She let the miracle out.
Immediately, she felt darkness surge up behind it. If you have never had a miracle performed on you, you cannot quite imagine what it feels like to have your invisible darkness suddenly given flesh. It is a little like reaching for a step and finding there is no ground beyond it. The sudden weightlessness and vertigo make it seem for a brief moment like you have no body, but you realize a second after that you will be given this body back just in time for it to be dashed to the ground. It is not fear, but it is something people are often fearful of, so it is easy to see how the two are confused.
Beatriz’s vision began to narrow. She was going blind, like Daniel.
Doubt widened.
Doubt was not truth, though; it was opinion. She pushed past it to a fact: She needed to get ahold of the owl with Daniel’s face before her miracle left her completely blind.
As black curtains pressed on either side of her line of sight, she seized the owl. It was not a real animal after all; it was only fear and darkness under her fingers, which seem solid only until you have them in your grasp. She tore Daniel’s face from it and sucked his breath into her mouth. She saw his eyes appear on her own hands, painted lightly, like his spider eye tattoos, and she knew that she had taken his vision from the owl merely by touching it. It no longer wore his face or ears, so she knew she carried them too. The owl nodded to her, and Beatriz saw that it had wanted her to figure out this puzzle all along.
She couldn’t thank it for the lesson because she still held Daniel’s life breath in her mouth, and she couldn’t let it escape until she reached him. So she simply nodded back.
The owl vanished at once with a sound like a wind kicking up in the distance.
Above her, the other, lady-faced lechuza swept low, right over Beatriz. The owl’s wings brushed her face and she just had time to catch a glimpse of how it was now wearing Beatriz’s eyes.
Then everything went completely black.
She did not have much time. Now that Daniel’s darkness was gone, the only breath he had was in Beatriz’s mouth, and it was useless there. Lost in darkness as complete as night, she hurriedly felt along her bootlace to Daniel’s wrist, and then from his arm to his chest to his face. Leaning swiftly, she breathed his breath back into his nostrils first, so that he would not die, and then she pressed his eyes back onto his eyelids and his hearing back into his ears.
She did not think she could bear it if it was too late.
Because Beatriz existed mostly in her own head, she was never generally overcome with wanting for anything that she didn’t have. The things that made her happiest didn’t have concrete forms, which made them extremely hardy. Ideas couldn’t die.
Cousins could die.
She wanted Daniel to be alive, and the ferocity of that wanting hit her harder than anything she had felt so far. She could not believe she had told Pete Wyatt that she didn’t have feelings, that anyone would have told her that she didn’t have feelings, because even if the force of her fear for Daniel’s fate hadn’t convinced her of their existence earlier, the force of her wanting him to be alive now would have.
Daniel gasped.
She gave herself only half a second of relief before she hastily untied herself from him. His darkness was cured. Hers was not. That meant that her second miracle could be interfered with, and even though Daniel’s lesson was that Sorias could interfere with miracles didn’t mean that he was in a state to help her.
“Give him water,” Beatriz said to Marisita, though she had no idea if Marisita was still close. “Don’t come close to me!”
“What should I do?” Marisita called.
“Don’t talk to me!”
Beatriz kept backing away, hands outstretched in the blackness. Above her, the lechuza’s wings batted air at her, out of her reach. There were no more miracles for her to perform to draw it close, however. And in any case, she didn’t think that she was supposed to solve her darkness in the same way that she’d solved Daniel’s. This was about her, somehow—a lesson, not a fearful punishment. She asked herself what she had learned, and what she still needed to learn. Casting her thoughts up again, out of herself, into the dark air above her, wherever her eyes were, she imagined looking down at the pilgrims. From that height, she considered how they had healed themselves. She mused on how the Sorias’ real collective darkness was that they would not let themselves help others because they were too afraid of losing themselves, that they were so afraid of being open and true about their own fears and darkness that they put it in a box and refused to even accept that they, too, might need healing. And the longer they blocked it up, the more the pilgrims also blocked up, and the worse everything got, until husbands and wives parted and siblings fought and everything was terrible.
But this was not the puzzle Beatriz had to solve, because Beatriz had broken the taboo against helping the moment she suggested interviewing Marisita. So her darkness must be something else. Now, for the first time, she truly realized how difficult it was to be a pilgrim, a realization Daniel had just come to days before—a realization that all budding Saints should be led to. It was often so easy to identify the darkness from the outside. But from the inside, your darkness was indistinguishable from your other thoughts.
It could take forever to learn yourself.
Something touched Beatriz’s hands. She flinched back, but the touch pursued her and she realized it was another set of hands, gripping hers. She tried to pull back from them, but they hung on.
“Beatriz,” Pete said.
“You left,” she said.
“I did.”
He’d tried to, anyway. He had walked out to the main road and he had even convinced a trucker to pick him up so that he could hitchhike back to Oklahoma. But as he thought about leaving the desert, he realized he didn’t think he could actually survive it. He’d already broken his heart once that night, and he thought that if it happened again, it really would kill him. In fact, it was only love that had kept him dying from the first heartbreak. It has a way of plugging holes in the heart even as it punches new ones. But he knew there wasn’t enough love in the world to help him survive leaving the desert so soon after leaving Beatriz, and so he asked the trucker to let him out. The desert was so moved by this act of love for it that it cast a wind that rose the sand and dust, and this amorous breeze rolled Pete head over heels over scrub and fence and through dry riverbed, tumbling him through the night like one of its weeds, until it brought him here to Beatriz.
Once he saw her, he knew what he needed to do.
“You can’t be here,” Beatriz said. “You’ll get my darkness.”
“I know,” Pete whispered. “It’s already here.”
“What?”
Dread seeped through her, and he held her fingers more tightly.
“Don’t let go of my hands,” he said. “I can’t see anything.”
Faith is a funny thing, and Beatriz, as only a reluctant Saint, had never truly accepted it. But now Pete was relying on her to be able to cure herself so that she could cure him.
“How do you know I can do this?” she asked.
“I reckon I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know much of anything about what’s gonna happen. I don’t know what I’m going to do now that the truck’s gone. I don’t know if I’m ever going to see again. But I guess I do know this: I want to be with you.”
In her head, Beatriz heard all of the arguments she had mounted against the possibility of a relationship with him, a young man so kind and so soft, and her, the girl without feelings.
And then, of course, just like that, she had it.
“I was upset,” she told him.
“I know,” he replied.
“I was upset every time you said it,” she said.
“I know.”
“I don’t show feelings like other people.”
“I know that, too.”
She hesitated. It felt very peculiar to express this out loud, but she suspected that meant she was supposed to. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have them. I think—I think I have a lot of them.”
Pete wrapped his arms around her. He was covered in all the dust the desert had rolled him through, but she didn’t mind.
“I know I have a lot of them,” she said.
The sun rose, and they both saw it.