Then her unlikely savior John Johnson had arrived, breaking her out of the cell, smuggling her off the base, and leading her through the derelict tunnel beneath the wall to find a new cousin, a new life, and the unexpected gift of Pilar’s presence, reversing the hardest choice Loup had ever made, undoing the hardest sacrifice.
As grateful as Loup was for it, the thought of everything and everyone she had left behind and the promise of hope unfulfilled still made her heart ache.
She might not be able to cry, but she could still hurt.
“You okay?” Pilar asked.
“Yeah.” She smiled at her. Pilar had left everything behind, too, and in many ways, she’d lost more than Loup. Life in Outpost wasn’t easy, but it was better than a jail cell. “I’m glad to be here. And really, really glad you’re here.”
Pilar turned pink. “Me too.”
“Okay!” Christophe said cheerfully. “Time to drive!”
The world was big and the road he called a toll highway was huge. Four wide lanes filled with whizzing traffic.
“Holy crap!” Pilar said the first time they approached a city. “Is that it?”
“No,” Christophe said patiently. “We’re still five hours away.”
“But it’s so big!”
“Mexico City is much, much bigger.”
They drove and drove and drove. After countless miles of concrete unspooling like a ribbon, Pilar wore out her sense of awe and went back to napping. Loup fought against a rising tide of exhaustion and stayed awake. She was pretty sure she trusted her newfound cousin, but Tommy had conditioned her to be careful all her life, to be mindful of the dangers she should fear, but couldn’t.
“She feels safe with you here,” Christophe observed.
Loup raised her eyebrows. “She is.”
“Yes, of course.” He gave her a quick sidelong smile. “You beat Mr. John Johnson, you don’t need to remind me. I guess you can… what do you call it? Kick my ass. No, but when we were waiting for you to come through the smugglers’ tunnel, she was so scared. So scared. I never saw anyone so scared, not in real life. Only in the movies.”
“Yeah.” She stroked Pilar’s wind-tangled hair, brown silk streaked with blond. “But she did it. You ever wonder what it’s like?”
He hesitated. “Finding someone like the two of you did?”
Loup shook her head. “Being scared.”
He smiled wryly. “Not really, no.”
They ate cold empanadas and kept driving and reached Mexico City by late afternoon. And it was big, bigger than any city they’d passed. It went on and on, sprawling in every direction.
“Whoa,” Pilar said, awake. “Does it ever end?”
“Yes, in time,” Christophe said. “But the old people say it used to be you could not even drive in the city. Too crazy, too much traffic.” He made a turn. “Then so many, many people died of the influenza.”
“Yeah,” Loup murmured, thinking of her mother’s death. “We had that, too.”
“Everyone did.” He was quiet a moment. “The worst had passed here when I was born, but I think it must have been a very terrible time. Only now are things beginning to return to the way they were long before us.”
The buildings grew taller, awesome in scale. Everything was taller and vaster than anything Loup had ever imagined. Fine and elegant, like pictures from the pages of fashion magazines worn as thin as onionskin that Pilar and Katya used to pore over for hours at the orphanage. Christophe pulled into the entrance to one of the most elegant of them all, a huge building with outflung wings and rows of arched windows.
“Are you serious?” Pilar asked, wide-eyed.
He grinned. “Oh, yes. I told you, you are guests of the Mexican government. And there is some American senator who wishes to talk to you, too. They are paying the bill for most of this. Tomorrow, I will take you shopping for suitable clothing so you may make a good impression.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously.”
Loup frowned. “Why?”
Christophe shrugged. “Does it matter?”
Before Loup could reply, a man in a crisp uniform opened the car door on Pilar’s side. She looked at Loup in sudden panic. “Ohmigod. Loup, we can’t go in there. I look like I crawled through a tunnel, then rode six hundred miles in a windstorm. ’Cause… I kind of did, you know?”
“Pilar…”
“I can’t!”
“Pretend you are a rock star, eh?” Christophe suggested, handing his keys to another uniformed man. “A rich and famous rock star who does not have to give a damn, yes?”
“Oh.” She thought about it. “Okay.”
It was enough for Pilar. She got out of the car and tossed her windblown hair, then sauntered past the doorman with a considerable amount of attitude. The doorman smiled and surreptitiously checked out her ass. Loup followed, amusement fighting with bone-deep weariness and the haunting empty sensation of apprehension she couldn’t feel. They waited in the lobby while Christophe talked to the woman at the registration desk. It was amazingly opulent, with rich lighting, gleaming wood, and elegant gold-hued furniture. Beyond they could glimpse marble floors and a huge, curving staircase. Everything was hushed, not even the familiar hum of a generator to break the silence.
None of it seemed real to Loup. A part of her wondered if all of this was just a dream, and she would wake to find herself in the stifling cell, waiting for the next in a series of endless interrogations.
“Look at those flowers!” Pilar whispered, nodding at a massive arrangement. “Jesus! I’ve read about places like this, but I didn’t really believe they still existed.”
Loup blinked, wavering. “Yeah.”
Pilar gave her a sharp glance. “Loup, how long has it been since you slept?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Not much in a couple of days. Maybe three. Not much for weeks, really. I never knew what time it was in prison and they kept waking me up to ask questions or hose me down.”
“You’re dead on your feet.” Pilar grabbed her hand. “C’mon. I’m gonna tell Christophe to hurry up, then I’m putting you to bed. And not in a fun way.”
Five minutes later, all three stood in the elevator. It seemed like something out of a movie. The gleaming doors closed and there was a strange sense of moving that both Loup and Pilar found disorienting. It stopped and the doors opened onto a posh hallway.
“Here you are.” Christophe led them to a room and showed them how to unlock the door with a plastic card. He carried in the satchel full of Pilar’s crumpled secondhand clothes. Loup, sprung from a military jail cell, had nothing. “I’ll be two doors down in Room 223. I arranged to have the bathroom stocked with extra toiletries. Anything else you need, charge to the room.”
“How?” Pilar asked.
“Just put your room number on the bill and sign it.” He stifled a yawn. “Call room service or the concierge. Or call me, though I will probably sleep very hard for a long time. It was a long night and day for me, too.”
She examined the phone. “Push the buttons where it says to, right?”
“You’ve never used a phone?”
“There haven’t been working phones in Outpost since before we were born,” Loup said mildly. “Only for the army guys. No phones, no TV except old movies that were all shot to hell.”
“Right.” Christophe nodded. “I keep forgetting. We think of America as being a sophisticated place despite the troubles.”
“We weren’t in America,” she said. “We were in Outpost.”
“Not Outpost,” Pilar said adamantly. “Santa Olivia.”
They exchanged a glance, both of them thinking of the only home they had ever known, the home they couldn’t return to.
“Santa Olivia,” Loup agreed.
Christophe showed them how to use the phone. “Okay. You call me tomorrow when you’re ready. No hurry.”
With that, he left them.
“Okay.” Pilar gave Loup a gentle nudge in the direction of the bathroom. “Go take a shower, baby. Then go to bed.”
“What about you? You slept almost all the way here, Pilar. You’re probably not even tired.”
Pilar picked up the remote control and hit the power button. A vast screen filled with vibrant images. She pushed different buttons, changing channel after channel, and smiled. “Oh, I’ll be fine.”
TWO
It was late morning when Loup awoke.
The room was filled with glorious light. She wriggled, reveling in the impossibly soft sheets and the luxurious feeling of being truly, utterly rested for the first time in at least a month. At the foot of the bed, Pilar glanced over her shoulder. She was lying on her stomach perusing an array of glossy magazines, the pages as crisp and new as though no one else had ever read them, not worn by dozens of fingers over dozens of years. Her smile made the bright room brighter.
“Hey, baby.”
“Hey, yourself.” Loup smiled back at her, feeling her heart roll over with unexpected gladness. She sat upright, running her hands through hair tangled by sleeping on it wet. “You didn’t go to bed?”
Pilar laughed. “Honey, you were out for like fifteen hours. I got up a while ago. You hungry?”
Her stomach rumbled, and she realized she smelled food. “Starving.”
“I figured. It’s still hot. I didn’t know what you’d want, so I just ordered everything I thought you’d like.”
Loup reached for the thick cotton hotel bathrobe that was nicer than any item of hand-me-down clothing she’d ever owned, and got up to explore two trays full of covered dishes. The domes covering the dishes were shiny, the silverware unscratched. The napkins were made of clean white cloth, and there was even a tiny vase with a real live flower on each tray. “Wow. This is so fancy! How’d you guess when I’d wake up?”