The Cruelest Fight

Fina stood on the end of the harbour pier and listened to the sea birds cawing as the freighter hove to. It was the Outer Reach, as always, the only ship which ever came to the little port of the little community of Zevala. Tucked away in a tiny, secluded bay behind a cluster of tall hills or squat mountains, connected by nothing so much as a footpath to civilization, this ship was their connection to a wider world. Her connection.

It came every month, the Outer Reach, bringing supplies of special interest up the coast from who knew where. In Arroyo Seco and Campana it sold its mundane cargo; in Zevala it sold miracles. Every time she would see the traders gathering at both ends of the pier, putting up their tents and gathering up their wares. The visitors would offer something new in the way of exotic animalia, stuffed or salted. Last month it had been "underpemmican," a dried and preserved meat product made from something between a bird and a fish which the smugglers — for they were obviously, blatantly, even flagrantly smugglers — called an "underpelican." The meat was violet, even spiced and desiccated. The month before that had brought "black hart" hides. Before that, "ironjaw" livers. Each new creature seemed more fantastic than the last, and even though nobody in Zevala knew what was coming before it arrived, they were always, always willing to buy. Her father had explained it like this: "We take what they bring us, or they'll stop bringing anything." In any event, most of it was sold on to the strangers who filtered in over the cliffs, brought in by the guides who were the only Zevalans to ever leave the confines of the village. Fina knew that one day, she would be one of them… if she couldn't swing a berth on the freighter, that was.

She spied her parents at the end of the pier, and waved eagerly. They waved back. Her mother was beaming, though her father looked troubled. This was normal, in both cases; they knew what these visits meant to her, and reacted accordingly. She was pleased to see her daughter pleased. He was worried about losing her.

He was right to be worried, of course.

2003

17 October

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"Are you going to sing again?"

Fina spun in place, confused, then laughed as she realized the sound was coming from over the edge of the pier. She walked to the end of the boards, looked down, and saw her sister swimming in the bay. She considered kicking dust down onto her, there being no shortage of that thanks to the bowl of same they lived in, dotted though it was with strangely resilient thick copses of trees and scrub, but what was the point? She'd just dunk down and wash it off anyway. So Fina knelt down instead, and said "Maybe. Are you going to get chopped up in the rotors?"

Yésica dunked her head underwater — Fina sighed — then came back up and spat out a thick stream in her direction. She had already dodged to the side, expecting the assault. "Your imagination is too violent, mi reina. Big ships don't have rotors."

Fina snorted. "How do you think they move about?"

"They have engines."

She cocked her head to one side. "What do you think the engines do, stupid?"

They were speaking English, mostly. She was aware this was something of a peculiarity in Argentina, which was of course primarily Spanish, but Zevala was different. The Zevalans rarely if ever conversed with other Argentineans. If they spoke to outsiders, it was the crews of the smuggling ships, and the smuggling ship crews used English as their lingua franca. (She was just old enough to recognize the irony of this statement.) Fina had once read a comic book with a Spanish protagonist who had spiced up her English dialogue with Spanish phrases — helpfully translated by the editor in a footnote — for what she had to assume was meant to be ethnic flavour. Very few people on Earth used their mother tongue in this way, unless they were legitimately at a loss for words. In Zevala, however, it was the prevailing norm. English was perfectly serviceable, but it lacked a certain… something, sometimes.

Her sister had chosen to avoid the losing battle, and pulled herself up onto the pier instead. "You didn't wear the flowers."

Fina always bartered with the smugglers for the special blue flowers they brought from… wherever it was they went when they weren't trawling the coast of Argentina. They lasted a long time, keeping their colour and springy flexibility for far longer than did the local flora, and Fina liked to wear them in her hair. Sometimes she was still wearing them when the smugglers returned the next month, though by then they were beginning to grey and droop. "It looks desperate," she explained as her sister dried off beside her in the afternoon sun. "Bad bartering technique."

Her sister laughed. "You're already half-merchantman, eh? Maybe you think they'll hire you."

She tried not to stiffen at the remark, but couldn't entirely hide her reaction. Her sister raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "You're not seriously…?"

Fina stood up. "Forget about it. Where are Eloy and Jorge?" Two of their three brothers were young, though still older than Fina and much older than Yésica, and prone to running around wild during the day once their work was finished. Their oldest brother, Jorge, was always found at the watch tower on the northern end of town.

"Eloy is reading for school." The little school of Zevala handled all grades simultaneously, having only to teach nineteen students in total. Eloy would have been about to start university, if he'd lived in a big city. "And I don't know where Jorge is. I'm not his nanny."

"No, that's me." Fina ruffled her sister's soaked hair, to an indignant squawk of protest. "I'm nanny enough for all of you."

They watched the ship approach together as the sun rose higher and higher into the sky. Fina fancied she could see the speck of a distant airplane as her sister dove back in.

2003

18 October

The planes roared overhead. They were black, low flying, and slow enough for her to make out the insignia beneath each wing. A black and white swirl, with a red dot in the middle. She stared at the insignia while the boards of the pier exploded and the ship began listing to starboard and the figures on its deck began to dance and something wet splashed everywhere around here. Something exploded in the distance. The planes had passed over her, and she was untouched. The gunfire continued.

She turned to look behind her, in a sort of trance. She knew this couldn't be real, and the fact that none of it touched her confirmed this. She heard the groaning of metal as the ship's lower hull rose over the waterline beside her, saw the market stalls in tatters and the people lying in coffins of shattered pier-board, blood everywhere, and she heard the ones who weren't yet dead begin to scream as the planes crested the western hills and came around for another pass.

She walked dreamily to the side of the pier again, and looked into the water. Her sister was gone.

"FINA!"

She turned back toward the market, and there was one of her brothers. Eloy. There was blood on his shirt, but it didn't look like it was his. He loped toward her. "We need to go!"

She wanted to laugh. What an obvious thing to say! And what a silly one, too. None of this was real. None of it was happening.

The planes were strafing the village now, pointlessly peppering the odd metal sheds and silos with lead. As her brother hauled her by one hand to the end of the pier, past the bodies — they smelled like a barbecue in an outhouse — she saw a larger plane break off from the group and deposit a stream of parachutes along the western bank. They drifted down; they were already opening fire on the fleeing crowds with machine guns by the time she and Eloy had reached the square.

"Eloy!" a man's voice shouted, as the villagers cowered behind the grain stores or called out for their children or simply ran for their lives. It was Lanzo, the old man whose house was closest to theirs. Fina had stolen a pie from his window when she was only six, and they had been friends ever since. "Get your sisters to the hall! We're going to activate—"

He suddenly leapt in the air, and spat blood at them. Fina belatedly heard the machine gun fire, and traced it to a man dressed all in black who had landed on the dockmaster's flat office roof and was spraying the square indiscriminately. Eloy darted forward to catch Lanzo as he fell, but the old man was fat and awkward and all dead weight, so instead he only managed to dump the corpse onto his sister. They fell into the dust together, she and old Mr. Lanzo, and she felt something hot and wet spreading from his shirt to her skirt, and he drooled on her face as his body spasmed and that stench of iron and sulfur returned.

This is real.

She began to wail.

Her brother leaned down and heaved the old man's body off her, then grabbed her shoulders and shook hard. "We need to GO!" he repeated, stupidly, and she wanted to scream at him, and she scrambled to her feet and ran, ran back to the market, back to the pier, back to where the ship was sinking in the cove and more planes were filling the horizon, and she heard him calling her name but she didn't care. She was running back time, back to when the world had made sense.

She fell down again as a massive burst of air forced her off her feet, and another of those tremendous explosions sounded somewhere behind her. She rolled over onto her back, as it began to rain.

It wasn't rain.

Eloy wasn't following her anymore.

Eloy was gone. The end of the pier was half missing, the market had been obliterated, and the air smelled like the curing-house on slaughter day.

Across the water, planes were strafing the cattle herds in their enclosures.

She was covered in her brother's blood.

Her heart broke at the absolute top of her lungs, and she didn't even stop screaming when something crept up from the edge of the pier, seized her roughly by the straps of her ruined dress, and pulled her into the bay.

2003

19 October

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Not for the first time, Fina tumbled down in the inky depths of the Cala del Ciclo. But she had always been alone before, testing the limits of her lungs, pushing the boundaries of the world she could explore, against the better sense of her elders and even her peers. Now, someone else had drawn her in. They placed a hand over her mouth, and lifted her back up into the world of fire and smoke.

She coughed and spluttered, but the sound didn't carry far because the tiny fingers were still stretched over her lips. She fought fiercely against her attacker, kicking like a mule, and a voice hissed in her ear: "Stop."

She fought for a moment more before realizing she recognized the voice. She'd heard it in the late watches of the night, from the side of her bed, urging her to venture out and explore the village after dark. It was her sister. It was Yésica.

She stopped fighting, and together they floated beside the pier as the bombs continued to fall, and the great freighter canted dangerously away from its moorings. It was on fire. It was sinking. It was groaning as it rolled.

Eloy was—

"Look," Yésica breathed, and she pointed. The western end of the village sloped down to meet the beach, so it was hidden from their view behind the piles of the pier. They could see the sloping superstructure of the ship on fire, and over the bulk of its cabin, the setting sun blood-red. Against that backdrop, a woman was walking along the boards. She walked with a limp, and carried a cane. She stopped when she reached the end, standing in the centre of the bay, seemingly oblivious to the chaos all around her. Planes streaked across the sky, shacks disappeared in flashes of orange light, and the woman calmly placed both hands on the head of her cane and stared out across the waters to the ocean beyond. Another flash, and Fina could see she was a very old woman, very pale, with strangely distorted features. A deformity of some sort. A scar?

The unloading crane on the freighter suddenly swung toward them as the starboard deck touched the waters of the harbour, and it struck the water with a crash of spray. The woman didn't so much as glance in their direction. Fina kicked away from the pier, grabbed her sister around the waist, and began to pull them towards the shore.

"No," Yésica whispered, and pulled in the other direction. "No. Fina. This way."

Her sister knew the bay like no-one else. Their father liked to joke that she was half-mermaid. Fina let herself be led along the water's edge, shaded from view by the rocks. There were people scurrying back and forth now, people with guns. They were shooting. There was screaming. They passed a rock slick with blood, and then another, and then a body floating in the water. She wanted to scream, and she knew her sister wanted to scream, and she knew that neither of them would as long as the other didn't, so they were safe.

They were safe.

An eternity later, Yésica pulled them into a storm drain running beneath the southwestern road. They had swum across the bay, the long way around. They hid in the culvert, soaking wet but not shivering. The night air was hot. Hot with fire, hot with blood.

Hot with hate, she realized. She'd never known hate before, but somehow she recognized it now.

"Who are they?" her sister whispered.

She shook her head, long black hair sticking to her shoulders and restricting her movement. "I don't know."

"Who was that woman?"

"I don't know."

"What do you know?" Yésica hissed.

Fina pushed her back against the culvert wall. "Shut up." She looked out at the waters, which were glowing red, orange and yellow as the sun descended and the bombs still fell, then looked west to their salvation. For the first time since the pier, she really thought about what she was doing. She formed a plan. She started to move.

"Where are you going?" Yésica whispered behind her.

"We're going to the cabin." Fina heard her sister's feet stomping over the filthy metal. She was following.

"We should go home."

"We can't."

"Why not?"

She could still see the square. Old Man Lanzo.

Eloy.

"It isn't safe."

"But—"

"Mother and father will be in the town hall. It'll already be locked up."

"What about Ernesto? And Jorge? And—"

Don't let her finish. "They'll be fighting the fires."

"They need—"

Keep talking over her. Don't let her finish. Don't think about what she isn't saying. "We can't help them. We're too small."

"What happened to you?"

Fina stopped moving. Her breath was loud and heavy in the culvert.

"Fina? What happened?"

"We're going to the cabin." She reached back and seized her sister's hand. "I need to keep you safe."

The tunnel closed around them, emptiness ahead, fire spreading in the sky and on the water far behind.

2003

20 October

They crept along the cleft in the cliffside that led to their grandfather's cabin, the bursts and blasts of war receding in the distance and echoing through the trees. Fina went first, creeping like a mouse, urging her sister to follow only when she knew the coast was clear. Yésica was a fish out of water. She was no stealthier on land than was their father, more apt to step on a pig's tail than sneak stealthily through the underbrush.

"Where's your wife, old man?" a harsh voice sounded up ahead, and Fina pressed them both against the rock. She slid along the wall, up towards the edge, where fronds and blades of grass marked the plateau where her family had first settled long ago.

"Long out of your reach," her grandfather's voice declared defiantly.

She peered up over the edge, and saw him. Saw them. Two men in black uniforms and knit caps, with rifles pointed at her father's father. He was standing bare-chested in the wilderness, on the porch of his squalid home. He was blinking. He was probably drunk.

"Kids?" the speaking attacker snapped.

Her grandfather suddenly smiled. "You don't want to meet them."

The second man ignored the veiled threat. "You live alone, then? Any visitors? Houseguests? Grandchildren?"

"No-one." He crossed his arms. "Do what you came to do. Cross off your list."

And he spat on their boots.

"We don't have a list," the first man said. He pushed his rifle into her grandfather's chest, and pulled the trigger. A burst of flame that set his chest hairs alight, a burst of blood from his back, and he fell to the stairs with a heavy thud. "We're freestyling."

And they headed along the path, without so much as a backward look.

Fina made no effort to restrain her sister. They both loped up the dirt ramp and onto the scraggly lawn, then onto the steps where their grandfather lay bleeding, gasping and weeping in agony.

"Grandfather?" she felt herself saying. She didn't know what she expected him to say back.

"We have to help him." Yésica was crying too. Fina wondered why she wasn't.

"You can't," he gasped. His hand was clamped to the wound on his chest. She couldn't see where precisely he'd been shot.

Yésica shoved her. "You can move him into the cabin. You're strong."

"She's right," Fina nodded.

"I want to stay here," their grandfather grunted.

Yésica shoved her again. "He keeps booze in a cabinet. I know how to get in. We can sterilize—"

"Yésica…"

"WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!" she screamed, and this time Fina clamped her hand over her sister's mouth. Yésica's eyes were big, brown, scared and sorrowful.

"You need to be very quiet, child," their grandfather whispered. His voice, like his body, was shaking. "Like a little mouse."

Yésica's mouth worked against Fina's fingers. "Please…"

"You can't stay here." He coughed, and the sound was wet. "Take what I have, and go."

Fina let go of her sister's mouth, and leaned over her grandfather again. "Let me bring you where it's warm. I'll start a fire."

"Start no fires," he said. He had almost no voice left; when he spoke, it was really just the air leaving his body. "Start no fires, and let me lie."

She spoke her fear. "I don't want you to die."

"I'm going to die."

"No," Yésica whimpered.

"I'm going to die, right here, with you." He reached up with both hands — a great gout of blood rushed out of his chest, covering his legs and the steps below — and each of them seized one. "That's what I want. I feel numb. If you try to move me, I'll die screaming. I don't want you to remember me like that."

Fina's eyes were wet. "Why is this happening?"

He closed his eyes. "No deception lasts forever."

"What do you mean?"

"This place was a lie we told ourselves." He shuddered, and coughed again. "Until we believed it. But they didn't. They saw through. And we hid poorly… you'll have to do better."

"How?" Yésica almost wailed.

"Listen to your sister…"

"She's just a kid!"

His eyes opened again. They were unfocused. "She's never been just anything. Neither have you. Find your parents. Find your brothers."

"Grandfather… I saw—" Fina's voice caught in her throat.

"Find them," he repeated. "Promise her you'll find them."

"But—"

"Promise us both," he whispered.

He was watching her. She was watching her. The moon up above was watching her, and whatever God was letting this happen was watching her, too.

She nodded.

"Good," he said, and he smiled as the stars came out. "Sing me a song. Sing it softly."

She sang him "El Día Que Me Quieras," soft and low, so no-one else could hear.

He made it to the end, just barely.

Yésica was still sitting on the steps when she emerged from the cabin. "Where are we going now?" Her voice was dangerously flat, like she wasn't really awake. Wasn't really there.

Fina shouldered the backpack she'd found and hastily filled. "Where they won't find us."

"How do you know?" Her sister wasn't looking at her. She was looking at the body on the steps, hands folded over his heart, eyes still open to the stars.

"Because nobody ever has."

"What are we going to do there?"

Fina walked down the steps, avoiding the blood, and extended a hand. "You're going to figure out how to open these cans. I'm going to figure out…" She looked up, and let the wind dry her tears. "I'm going to figure out the rest of it."

2003

23 October

Zevala wasn't very big, but Fina was very small. There were wide open spaces between the shacks, but they were full of gardens and shrubs and little outbuildings that gave her more than enough cover for moving around in, even in broad daylight but especially after dark. She'd spent much of her childhood hiding in plain sight, spying on her neighbours or sneaking up on her friends.

What she was doing now was the equivalent of going professional from the minor leagues.

There were people in combat vests and combat boots and toques everywhere, carrying a wide array of personal weaponry. They were closer to irregulars than disciplined soldiers, but she knew that if any one of them caught her, she would be killed, and if she was killed her sister would die one way or another. But still she scoured the arc of the village around the bay, searching.

Searching for the rest of her family.

So it was that one evening, as the sun dipped down below the wreck of the Outer Reach where the bow still peeked up over the waterline, she was in the town square when a siren sounded from far in the north. She glanced across the bay to where the larger shacks were situated, the ones which had once housed small families of comparatively well-off villagers. There was no such thing as being rich in Zevala, but due to the vagaries of trade a few people were more comfortably well-off than others, and they lived on the east end nearer the beach. That was where the siren was coming from; she could see bright lights over there as well, and faint variations suggesting that a small crowd was forming. The occupiers around her hiding space next to the well were all heading that way with alacrity, so when she saw her chance, she headed that way too.

It took her about half an hour to make her way along the coast, hugging the cliffside and staying away from the winding roads, the parade of black-clad mercenaries — were they mercenaries? was that what they were? — with their strange fanwheel insignia keeping pace with her. By the time she reached the Aguado residence, at the head of a long crop strip and across the way from the main lighthouse, there were dozens of people standing in a semicircle around a much smaller crowd on the road. There was a woman, the same woman she and Yésica had spied on the pier, and there were two young men on their knees. One of them was Ricardo Sala, who sometimes tended their garden when her father was too busy with village business.

The other was her brother Ernesto.

The woman was speaking in a loud, clear voice at the cleft in the rock behind the Aguado home. "You know how this ends," she said. "You know there's no-one coming to save you. What's the point of spending your last few days in an airlock?"

It wasn't clear what kind of response she expected, or who or where she expected it to come from, but she was met with only silence. The crowd stood silent too, watching her every move intently. Fina slid down the cliffside until only her head was above street level, a tiny inlet of the bay far below her. The cliffs were much steeper on this side, and a fall could easily be deadly.

The woman was leaning on her cane, but only with one hand. Fina couldn't see the other. "I know you can hear me in there."

She glanced down at Ricardo, and then Fina saw what was in her other hand. Just before she used it.

"I'm sure you heard that, too," the woman remarked mildly. Ricardo Sala was lying on the street, the entire left side of his face missing.

"Please," Ernesto said. His voice was surprisingly strong. It carried over the crowd. "Don't."

The woman laughed at him. "Why are you asking me? I have no power over what happens to you next." She gestured at the cleft. "Ask them."

"I am asking them." He glared up at her defiantly, then called over to the rock face again: "Don't let her in!"

And the woman shot him in the ear.

Fina couldn't feel more pain. It wasn't in her to hurt more than she already did. She found herself slipping down the slope when just moments ago her footing had been sure, and she felt another burst of unreality fill her mind, and the endless throbbing agony crowded out the signals from her eyes again for just a moment, but there was no lower level of despair for her to sink to. All there was, was the sense that everything was unravelling and soon nothing would be left.

She caught a protruding rock with her foot just in time to avoid spiralling away to a death in the cold, wet black.

"Cause and effect," the woman was saying. "Resistance, and death. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration."

Fina wanted to throw herself up the cliff, through the crowd, take the woman's gun and… no. Not that. Not with the gun. It would be too easy. It would be too clean. She wanted to take the woman's cane away, and bludgeon her to death with it. She wanted to see the look in her eyes as her skull deformed from the impact, as her brain died blow by blow…

"You know I could bowl down that door if I wanted to," the woman was still speaking. Fina could barely hear it over the blood in her own ears. "Carve out your cliffside, bore straight through you and your women and children huddled in the hot dark. But I'd rather not damage my new property, so I'm going to keep asking nicely for the next little while. It's your call. You have… I'd say maybe a week's worth of chances to make the smart move. Half that if I get impatient, which has been known to happen in my old age. Take a good look at these faces, and decide if you're fine with losing them all for no good reason."

Faces. There were more prisoners.

Her mother? Her father? Her…

Her two…

…remaining brothers?

She lost her grip, and fell.

2003

26 October

By day Fina talked with her sister, told her stories, sang to her, and when they were both in the right frame of mind even passed along a few of their grandfather's survival tips. They gathered wood for the fire, bedrolls and food, and obscured their tracks each time they ascended the narrow way. At night she crept down into the village and followed the patrols along the winding roads, taking cover in the shadows of steel huts or dodging into the long communal strip plots of red-tinged wheat. She cased each home from outside, seeing where the guards were living and where they were storing things and where they were doing nothing at all. She raided the houses they weren't in, listened to their muttered conversations under opened windows or beneath open porches, even learned a few of their names.

She wasn't sure what she was going to do with all this information.

She tried thinking about it once.

Only once.

2003

27 October

Try though she might, Fina couldn't figure out where the occupiers were keeping the rest of her people. Most of the shacks up and down the bay were empty, or quartering troops, or full of supplies. It was possible they were being held in the town hall, but she thought it much more likely that it was being used for its intended function: a headquarters. Some nights she stood at the lip of the pass leading to their cave, in the dark, and looked down on the lights of her stolen home town, and wondered: which of those lights can my mother and father see? Or Aurelio and Jorge?

Or had they gone where lights could not penetrate?

Not gone. That was too passive. If they were in the afterlife, they had been sent there.

It was while pondering this dilemma for the hundredth time at least, creeping through the early morning light hauling a backpack full of stolen bread and water past the burned-out husk of her grandfather's home — the attackers had swung by shortly after his demise and torched the place with flamethrowers, saving her the trouble of having to both bury him and obscure his final resting place — that she got the answer to one of her questions.

Leaning on a tree, clutching his stomach, was Aurelio Ibanez.

Her second-oldest brother was still wearing his football jacket, though it was now frayed and there was blood seeping through the white fabric. Maybe the red fabric, too, but that was harder to see. He was in obvious pain. He was talking to himself.

So she ran into his field of view, easy enough with the height difference, and made him talk to her instead.

"Aurelio?!"

His eyes focused on her face. "Fina…"

"What are you doing out here?"

"Bleeding," he said. He smiled, weakly. The smile disappeared when she reached for the zipper pull of his jacket. "Stop! Don't." He looked back the way she'd come. "Not here."

She reached for his sleeve instead. "Come with me. We have a place."

He frowned, just barely distinguishable from the overall grimace of pain. "We?"

"Yésica and me."

The smile returned. "Yésica and I." Aurelio was one of their two school teachers, the apprentice to old lady Tapia.

"Sure," she agreed. "Yésica and you and me. Let's go." She pulled him away from the tree.

He bit down on his lip to keep from screaming. "I can't. It hurts."

"Big baby," she sneered. "Bite your tongue."

He reached out and grabbed the back of her scalp via her mass of uncombed hair. "Little bitch."

"Yeah." She led him to the hidden path. "Tell me more."

"Rotten little weasel," he grunted as they entered the switchback that marked the beginning of their difficult ascent. "Tree snake. OW!"

"Does it hurt, big baby?" she mocked him. "OW!" She laughed silently.

He was laughing too, though he clenched his teeth every time his mouth closed. "Wring your neck."

"I'll pull your hairs out, one by one."

"I'm still bleeding, Fina."

She knew it was serious if he couldn't keep the game going any longer. "I know. We can make a little fire."

"For what? Blood soup?"

She ignored him.

"What do you need a fire for?" he pressed.

"And we have bark for you to bite on. Just a little farther."

"Maybe I would rather die," he reflected.

It was a miracle he didn't wake the entire village with his screams. He certainly woke Yésica.

9 March

Aurelio was lying on one of the sleeping rolls Fina had liberated from an enemy barracks, and her sister was leaning over him. The scent of burned flesh filled the cave.

"Where did you come from?" Yésica asked. She was crouched down, but rocking from side to side. She hadn't been so energetic since the day of the attack.

"I was hiding in a granary." Aurelio's voice was soft and low. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open.

"My brave brother." Fina was standing at the mouth of the cave. She'd heard a few early morning mutterings on her way out of the village that made her itch to get back down there.

"I teach school," he reminded them.

"You never taught me anything," she said. It wasn't really true, though most of what she knew, she'd learned from one man only. Particularly the sort of things she needed to know right now.

Yésica glared at her. "Fina, be nice to him. He's hurt."

Aurelio propped himself up on one arm, with effort. "You only ever listened to grandfather."

"Only grandfather ever listened to me."

He shook his head. "Nonsense about leaving."

She turned to face them. "We should all have left. Before this." She gestured at the cave mouth.

He winced. "We didn't know."

"Grandfather knew something."

Yésica was looking back and forth between them as this exchange continued. "Did they shoot you, Aurelio?"

"It's a stab wound." Fina had seen one before. She'd made a few herself, on a dead deer. Her grandfather had believed in more practical pedagogy.

"Why would they stab you?" Her sister's face flickered back and forth between outrage and worry.

"Because they wanted me to do something, and I wouldn't." When Aurelio didn't want to expand on something, he phrased his responses like this. It was probably another teacher thing.

"Were you with mom and dad?" Yésica's face had settled on worry.

He shook his head. "They keep families separated. Trying to stop us conspiring to get out, I guess. I got lucky." He reached down to probe at his wound, jerking his fingers away each time as though it were an open flame. "In a manner of speaking."

"Did you hear them say anything?" Fina asked him. "Anything we can use?"

He considered. "They're bringing in some planes. A lot of planes."

This was what she'd thought she'd heard. It didn't make any sense. "How? There's nowhere to land."

"They're going to land in the harbour."

"What?" She walked over to hunch down next to Yésica. "What kind of plane can land in the harbour?"

He smiled paternally. "Surprised you don't know. Sounds like your kind of thing."

"What's in the planes?" she pressed.

He shook his head. "Machines, I think. I don't know what kind."

"Maybe they're here to fish," Yésica suggested.

Aurelio reached out to ruffle her hair. "Scoop you right up, Tuna."

2003

27 October

Fina must have been standing at the cave entrance for too long, too often, because eventually Yésica stopped tending to their brother and came over to bother her. It had been a rough couple of days, but Fina had scrounged up what she thought were antibacterial medications from the wreckage of the cabin below, and Aurelio seemed to be on the mend.

"What are you thinking about?" Yésica asked.

"I'm thinking about the planes," she admitted. They had arrived earlier that morning. She'd seen them sink below the treeline. She couldn't see where they'd landed in the bay. She wanted to. She at least wanted to see them taking off; she told herself it was to gauge their relationship to her existing network of active threats.

"Don't," Aurelio protested from the back. "You're staying right here. With me."

She waved him off without turning around. "Yésica will look after you."

"Fina—" her sister began.

She scratched her sister's scalp, like she was a pet cat. "You'll look after him."

Yésica squirmed away, face flushed for multiple reasons.

Aurelio's voice was still weak. "She's just a baby."

"You're just a baby," Fina retorted.

"Sing me a lullaby?"

She picked up her empty pack, and settled into a crouch. It was time to go. "Maybe when you're dying."

12 March

She was out of breath, more out of excitement than the difficult climb — which was no longer so difficult, increasingly agile as she was — when she crossed over the lip of the path and entered the cave. She had to inhale twice to get out her first sentence, not even checking to see who was listening. "I finally figured… out… what the planes are for. It isn't… machines."

There was no response.

Fina's eyes adjusted to the dark. Aurelio was sleeping on the bedroll. Yésica was sitting beside him, cross-legged. She was stroking his long, matted black hair.

"They're bringing in gas," she continued. "Great big tanks of gas."

Yésica looked at her, but didn't respond.

She walked over to them. "I think they're going to build a furnace. I don't know why, but it's going to be a huge one. I—"

Yésica burst into tears.

Fina hunched down, taking her sister's shoulders in her hands. "I'm sorry. It might not be a furnace."

The younger girl wrenched out of her grasp, falling to the cave floor and not bothering to soften the impact with her hands. She curled into a ball, and shuddered with the effort of forcing out her tears.

Fina reached out again, stopping just short of touching her. "Yésica?"

The voice that came out of her sister was small, so small and fragile that only the echoes of the cave gave it enough strength to be perceived. "Why were you gone so long?"

She had been caught out at night, so intent was she on determining what the insurgents were up to. She'd spent a few hours asleep in a tree, until it was just light enough to find her way back. "You know how slow it is. I have to be careful."

"So careful," Yésica whispered.

Fina rolled her over. "You want them to find us here? You know what they'll do to us? To a little girl and a sick man with a bayonet hole in his shoulder?"

"They won't hurt him." Her eyes were frighteningly blank.

Fina wanted to shake her. "They'll kill him, Yésica, and you'll wish they'd killed y—"

"HE'S DEAD."

A long, long time passed.

Seconds later, Yésica repeated herself. "He's dead." She gestured sharply at the cinders on the cave floor. "He's been dead since the fire went out."

Fina found that she had fallen back, and was now sitting on the cold stone. Her tailbone ached. Her eyes unfocused, and her mind's eye opened. She saw Eloy on the pier. She saw Ernesto in the square.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"That's it?"

She didn't answer.

Yésica crawled over to her, putting one hand on each of Fina's knees and staring her down from just inches away. "That's it? You're sorry? You're telling me you're sorry? You feel bad for me? Our brother died, so you tell me you're sorry?"

She shook her head. "I don't know what else to say, Yésica."

"DON'T SAY ANYTHING!" Her sister's face was soaking wet, her eyes wide and staring. "CRY! CRY, DELFINA!" She pushed off, and fell back into the cold ashes of their extinguished fire. "Why aren't you crying?"

They sat that way in silence for another eternity, this one a little more real. The light from the cave mouth was much brighter before Yésica spoke again.

"He was asking for you to sing him a song."

She wanted to cry. She wanted to cry. But it wouldn't come. "Did you sing him one?" she asked, very softly.

"I tried." Yésica's voice was thick and hoarse. "I couldn't remember the words."

Outside, a bird chirped. Once.

"I don't think he knew I was here, anyway."

It dawned on Fina, very slowly, that what she had taken to be her brother's sleeping form was instead…

She stood up.

"Where are you going now?" The mixed bitterness and fear in her sister's voice affected Fina even more than had the transformation of her living, breathing brother into a loathsome corpse.

"Not far." She took a deep breath. "I brought some water. You can make him look pretty again."

It had finished raining by the time Yésica was done. The ground outside the cave was soft, and Fina could dig with her bare hands. They buried their brother surrounded by the scent of wet earth, plant oil and worms.

2003

31 October