“Luminous paint,” Calla told him, explaining the scraps of cloth glowing blue green in the dark. “They’re how we find each other.”
Lamps lit up patches of different-color flowers. Bulbs set near the ground made the trees glow from underneath. But they were flickering off. And that glowing blue green would mark them until first light licked at the dark sky.
Calla finished the knot. She offered her arm to Gloria, who tied a band onto Calla’s small wrist. The gesture was so intimate, a thing done between cousins who were more like sisters, that it stung.
Watching them, the careful motions of Gloria’s fingers, put a ringing in Fel’s brain, like the echo from a thunderstorm.
He knew this. Not just the scene of two Nomeolvides girls caring for each other.
He knew this work of siblings marking each other.
Fel shut his eyes, and saw his brother’s hands tying a scrap of cloth onto his shirt. On that scrap, his brother had written a name.
The first three letters Fel knew. They had been pinned to his shirt when Estrella found him. Fel.
But the longer he shut his eyes, the more letters showed themselves, like glowing paint appearing in the dark.
Fel.
Felipe.
And then a name he could not make out.
He heard his brother arguing with the men who had told them what to do.
You can’t have two last names, the foreman yelled at them.
They’re not two last names, Fel’s brother said. It’s our father’s name and our mother’s name.
Well, pick one, the man said.
Fel’s brother said he would not choose between their mother’s name and their father’s. So he had told the man they would use their second name—Felipe, a family name; they both had the same one—as their last name.
This was how they had marked themselves in the gray world, where the threat of death was so close it hovered like a low ceiling. They wore their names always tied onto their clothes, last name first, then first name, so that if they died they could be known.
Fel’s brother had not wanted this. Wearing this tag, and switching their names—last name, first name—had seemed like an admission they were already dead. But the other men had talked him into it.
You think the foremen keep track of us? Fel remembered these words, the rhythm of a man’s accent. You think you matter any more to them just because you came up from slate picker? And your brother—at this, he’d tilted his head toward Fel—to them he’s always gonna be a breaker boy. We all are. They give us our dollar a week and then they forget about us.
You wear this, another man said. Fel remembered he had hair as black as Fel’s, but fine and straight, hair that looked neat even after a day’s work. He knew little English and no Spanish, but he had met Fel’s eyes with his own, the brown so deep it felt cool. For your family.
Without our names pinned on us—a third man this time, another unknown accent, a hangman’s laugh—our mothers’ll never know if we’re in the ground or the gambling halls.
Now Fel opened his eyes, finding no light but the moon and the glowing bands the Nomeolvides girls tied onto one another’s wrists.
The gardens were full of not just one caballuco, but a hundred, in as many colors as La Pradera’s flowers. They rushed through the trees in reds and oranges and greens. They sprouted dragonfly’s wings, enormous and sheer. They flew above the highest boughs. Their golds and purples streaked the dark. They screamed across the stars.
The caballucos had become too big for his hands. He could not hold them. They stood bright and fearless. The tans and browns of Fel’s body and clothes could never match their gold and green.
He and his brother had carried those carved wooden horses in their pockets, a charm against their fate. They had thought the caballucos would keep them from death. No harm could come to them as long they carried them.
But this had been a fairy tale. The same as how his brother had talked of buying land, how both he and Fel would decide whether their first horses would be grullos or palominos. But his brother had never had his land. He never taught Fel all the names for the colors of horses. He never told Fel another trick for staying out of fights he never wanted into in the first place.
Because Fel had lost him as much as he’d lost himself.
Fel’s own stupidity bit at him. He had never wondered how the caballucos had turned up in these gardens. How they had come to gather in a tiny, colorful herd on Estrella’s shelf.
They were here, because this was where Fel and his brother had died. The caballucos were a sign of death, but Fel had turned his face away, refusing to see it.
The caballucos had been the only bright color in the gray world, the world that had once stood in the same place as these gardens. The gray world was not flowers but rock and rust. It was Fel and his brother sleeping outside in their clothes, dust sticking to them so hard it felt like part of their skin. It was getting rich men in town drunk enough to win money off them, not for fun but so he and his brother could pay to get broken bones set.
The gray world was the truth of this place. La Pradera was the lie. Everything Estrella and her cousins had given him was lies. Their family’s legacy was fairy tales. What to them was the color of raw gold dust was to him the shade of a dun horse, or the color of a quarry they had made into a garden.
Fel wished the caballucos could grow to the size of real horses. He wished they would gallop across these grounds and break through the walls of the stone house. Their brays and the buzzing of their wings would scare every Nomeolvides woman into telling the truth.
He thought he heard Estrella saying his name, but he couldn’t hear. The caballucos laughed their laughs that were half-horse and half-human. Their color was the milk from a thousand indigo mushrooms, pouring everywhere, dyeing the night air.
They were laughing at him because he had believed he had life and breath of his own.
He had believed they were things he could hold in his hands.
The sounds he had forgotten rushed at him. The crumbling and collapsing of rock. Men calling out in fear or warning. Rubble crashing down, folding them all into its wave like it was night falling.
This was why he could not remember his brother’s name, or face. It hurt too much to remember him, because he had lost him in the gray world.
“Fel.” Estrella’s hands slid onto him.
The feeling of her touch, this girl with one palm on his back and the brush of fingers on his forearm, broke him into pieces. He was made of wood and paint, a caballuco figurine, splintering.
She’d found every crack he’d shown. Like his dreams of the caballucos disappearing between floorboards, she’d slid her fingers into those open places.
He wrenched away from her. This girl had been part of the family who turned a graveyard into a garden. They had hidden and covered over the truth of his brother’s death and his own.
To anyone but his own brother, he had been nothing but an underaged miner. He was an immigrant whose name no one cared to learn. He wore his own name on his shirt because he was not worth listing on a role sheet.
Fel looked at Estrella, still in that blue dress, the sky color bright against the night. Her skirt traced a wide arc behind her. A few drowsy fireflies hovered their tiny bulbs near the glowing bracelet on her wrist.
“You lied to me,” he said.
His mouth still felt warm from hers, the night air cold against his lips.
“What?” she asked.
“You hid this,” Fel said. “All of you. You took the truth and you turned it into flowers.”
When she blinked, the indigo of the milk mushrooms showed on her eyelashes. “Fel.”
She reached out for him. Her fingers struck his forearm.
He drew back. She grabbed him, one hand landing on his upper arm, the other on his side. Her touch, the first from her he hadn’t wanted, shocked through him.
His breath pulled in on itself. In one half-second, there was less air in him than he needed.
“This is what your family does?” he asked. “You take all this blood and death and you make gardens out of it?”
“Fel,” she said. “I don’t know what…”
He held up a hand.
“No,” he said. “Stay away from me.”
His steps crushed the grass, and it let off a scent like leaves and citrus.
Estrella was a girl drawn in blue and brown and gold, and he wanted to hide his face from her.
She could have her gardens and her family and the lies she spoke as a first language.
He had been cared for and watched and taken into this family, and they had all covered over the thing that had killed him and his brother and so many others.
“I loved you,” he said.
He tried to throw it all away. Estrella spreading blue paint on his skin. The pond giving off light like it was full of stars. The caballucos screaming through the dark. Estrella and him cooking the indigo mushrooms until they turned teal.
“Fel,” Estrella said, coming toward him. Her stricken face broke through the dark. She cut through that blur of stars and memory.
Gloria set a hand on Estrella’s shoulder. “Let him go.”
It was the one thing he could still be grateful for, the oldest Nomeolvides girl stopping the girl he had loved from following him.
La Pradera turned to a beautiful, terrifying fairy tale. Trees in bloom and bushes covered in color grew from the earth. Thick stripes of flowers banded the ground. Roses and vines dripped from wooden frames. Branches drooped so heavy with blossoms they should have broken.
The gardens were a whirl of petals. The stone and brick walkways were winding paths that led nowhere but back onto themselves. The flowers stood so bright and full they looked like frightening magic, their heads nodding in the wind so they seemed like they were watching him.
He had one decision left to him. There was a little of his own life still in his hands.
Fel crossed the gardens. Water lilies sat still in the fountains. A broken champagne glass had left shards over the flagstones.
Stone steps led to the still-open French doors, strewn with flowers and lost bracelets and curls of lemon peel. Wind puffed up the curtains, airing out the smells of cologne and liquor. The traces of women’s perfume faded, giving way to the nectar and petal scent of the blossoming trees outside.
Inside, the ball had been left behind in scraps. Shoes had been cast off. Half-full glasses sat abandoned. Flowers, taken from arrangements to be tucked into hair or pinned to lapels, had been discarded. Lost beads and buttons freckled the floor and tables.
All the guests had gone. Reid had probably passed out somewhere.
Fel would wake him up.
He now understood why Reid’s touch had felt as uncomfortable as hands wrenching his wrists. Why he had shuddered away when Reid set a hand on his back.
Reid would answer for the things his family had done, and then covered over.
Fel looked for him on the first floor, then the second, stopping at the room Reid had claimed as his study.
Reid was not there, not passed out on the desk or on the leather-covered chairs.
Light from the hall showed the desk, messy with letters.
The paper looked so heavy, so woven, that Fel could not help picking up the leaves.
He sifted through them, the handwriting of rich men declaring that they wanted their own estates to have grounds like La Pradera.
One referred to how his wife would love to have a rose garden like the one here, screened in by wooden lattices.
Another mentioned the wide flowered valley, calling it a sunken garden.
A third included a last line that Reid should stay in touch when you start sending them out.
Sending them out. Like the Nomeolvides women were books. Like they were things to be possessed, given away and returned.
This was why Reid had wanted so badly to impress them, why he’d made Estrella perform in front of them.
He wanted to interest everyone watching.
Estrella had thought Reid just wanted a favor.
She had no idea he had turned her into an advertisement.
Fel backed away from the dark-polished desk.
The Nomeolvides women had worried over what Reid might do with La Pradera. He’d heard their worried whispers that princesses would start saying their vows in the courtyard of blooming trees. Presidents’ sons would hold their eighteenth birthday parties here just because girls would love the flowers. They’d worried that Reid would take the enchantment of this place and turn it into a spectacle.
But Reid planned to send the Nomeolvides women to other estates. He would order them to wealthy family’s houses, where their skirts would skim unfamiliar ground and they would press their hands into dirt they’d never touched. Men they did not know would tell them where to grow crowns of spring buds.
Reid could send them out to every rich man who wanted them, and always call them back to La Pradera. They could never get free from him, because this place held them. Running from Reid meant running from this place that held their lives. If the ground sensed them fleeing, it would strike them down.
Fel’s lungs tensed as he thought of Estrella, her hard, gasping breaths, the pollen and blood on her sleeves. He wondered if Reid sending them out would bring the same wrath down on them, and his chest grew tighter, like a cramped muscle. He worried the same thing he’d worried when Estrella led him through the dark.
Would the land know? Would it understand that these women didn’t want to leave it, that it was only on Reid’s orders?
Another question spun through him, a worse one.
If Reid made them draw up flowers on someone else’s ground, would La Pradera grow jealous and vengeful? Would it hate them for sliding their fingers into different earth, and kill them for it?
“What are you doing?” a voice came from the doorway.
Reid still looked a little drunk, blurred around the edges. But when he saw the papers in Fel’s hands, the air around him crackled like the sky before a lightning storm.
Fel’s best chance was playing startled, lost. He dropped the letters. He held his hands out in from of him, showing his palms, proving he wasn’t trying to pocket anything on the way out.
But when Reid came forward, when he grabbed him, it choked the words out of Fel.
He knew better than to speak. He knew the way to survive rich men was to seem harmless and stupid. Reid would give him some rough lecture about touching things that weren’t his. Maybe he’d strike him. Then he’d shove him out of the room.
But Fel could not keep his lips still.
“They’re not your property,” Fel said, spitting the words out. “None of us are.”
“You’re going to mind your own business,” Reid said, his voice low, reasoning. “You’re going to walk away.”
“Did you even think about what this could do to them?” Fel asked. “Leaving could kill them.”
“You’ve seen them in town,” Reid said. “Did it kill them? Try thinking next time you talk.”
“This is different,” Fel said. “You know that.”
Reid tightened his grip. “And you don’t know anything.”
“I know you can’t do this. They won’t let you. I won’t let you.”
He tensed for Reid to hit him.
Reid got behind him, setting his forearm against Fel’s throat.
“Say it.” Reid set his arm harder against Fel’s neck. “Say you don’t know anything.”
The pressure against his throat built until he felt it in his forehead. It raked through his hair.
“Just say it,” Reid told him, “and we can be done here.”
Fel kicked back at him, catching him in the shin hard enough that Reid stumbled. Reid came at him again, and Fel drove his hand into Reid’s jaw, hard enough that he felt the backs of his own knuckles splitting.
The Briars had already decided the loss of him and his brother were no more remarkable than misplaced slips of paper. Whatever the Nomeolvides women had done, he would not let Reid do this to them.
Fel would give the grandmothers the truths he had found on those heavy pieces of linen parchment.
He grabbed the sheets he’d let fall. He took them down the stairs, the inside of his rib cage hot with these things he needed to tell.
Reid caught up with him. He threw him down in the lightless gardens, hitting him so his chest clenched and he gasped to breathe.
The papers fluttered from his hands. He hit back, catching Reid in the stomach and the side. But for every strike, Reid returned a harder one. Every blow darkened the edges of his vision like an old photograph.
Fel kicked at him again. But the edges of him were going numb. His eyelids. His fingertips.
Gasping at his next breath paled the sky and made it seem close, like the moon was a chandelier in the center of a room.
Fel tried wrenching out from under Reid’s hold. He was losing the feeling of his own body. He shut his eyes, trying to get a full breath. Through the blunt pressure of Reid’s fists, only thin threads of air made it down to his lungs.
There was more will and rage in him than his body could use. It vibrated out of him. The flowering trees all arced toward a center point in the sky like the asterisk in a star marble.
Fel tried bucking out of Reid’s grip. Reid twisted his arm, sending a rope of pain up to his shoulder.
Reid forced him back down, and Fel landed against the earth.
Blue petals brushed his skin. His hands found borraja. Forget-me-nots grazed his neck.
Estrella’s ocean. Her sea of flickering blue.
The petals crushed under him. But beneath their soft blue, the earth didn’t harden into solid ground against his back.
The earth gave.
Fel bucked again, throwing a shoulder up toward the sky. If he could move fast enough, just once, he could break Reid’s hold.
But the earth was pulling him, taking him. It was folding him into its dark ground.
It stirred. In the flashes of opening his eyes, Fel caught the ground whirling and spinning around him. It moved in currents. It shifted like wide ribbons of water, glinting like the moon and sun off a river. A storm, but it did not rise. It stayed low on the ground. He could hear its faint thunder, how it tunneled deeper underground.
He tensed against Reid’s grasp.
With the last will he had in him, he reached up toward the light.
But then the ground spoke.
Don’t fight, it whispered, not in La Pradera’s voice but in his brother’s. I’ve got you. I’m not letting you go.
He felt it in his own body, as though his skin was turning to shale.
Waves of earth tumbled over Fel. The current broke over his body, weighing him down. The rivers of ground folded him into their countless grains.
The storm bound him and covered him. It took the blood on his knuckles and the glowing band on his wrist. It held him so close it was teaching his body to become the ground. A ribbon of earth, thick and heavy, slid over his eyes, so he could not have seen even if he could open them.
The current shifted again. He sank as fast as if he’d plunged into water. He fell into his brother’s voice, telling him he would take him into the earth to save him. I have you. You’re okay.
Then he was nothing but ground.