THE GHOST QUEEN (BROKEN KINGDOMS #3)

PROLOGUE

The Girl in the Window

El Fantasma

The first time I saw her, I was busy dying.

I know the shape of that sentence now. Twenty years I have turned it over, held it to the light, and it does not change no matter which way I look.

At seventeen I knew three things, and dying was not among them.

I knew the cold. It had started in my feet and was working its patient way north.

I knew the smell of antiseptic and blood, and under it the wet-copper smell of a body doing in open air what it was never built to do.

And the ceiling above me was laid in the same square tiles as the schoolroom where my mother had taught, before the illness no one with money dies of took her out of it.

Mijo, she used to say, when I couldn't sleep. The dark is only a room with the light off.

I lay counting tiles and did not think, I am going to die. I thought only: the tiles are the same. The mind hands you a small, useless fact when the large one would break you.

They had left me at the doors because I was not worth the bullet it would take to finish me, nor the trouble of carrying anywhere I might be missed.

I had been an errand, a boy running another man's money down a mountain road, past men who would not have remembered my face by morning.

They took the money. Then one of them looked at me the way you look at a receipt you have already decided to throw away.

I don't remember the sound the gun made. I remember the road rising to meet my cheek. Gravel and diesel and a dog barking somewhere far off. Then a long nothing, and the doors of a hospital I had not chosen, and hands that did not know me weighing whether I was worth their evening.

They were losing me. I have learned to read a room since.

I have stood in a great many where a body on a table turns, minute by minute, into a position the room is about to lose.

Such a room keeps a tempo. The voices go short and flat.

One man says a number and another says a worse one, and the air itself leans in to see how it ends.

A woman had her hands inside a part of me hands are not meant to be inside, reaching blind across a tray, and her fingers closed on the wrong shape. I felt it go wrong the way you feel a wheel leave the road.

And then there was the window.

Across the corridor stood a supply room, and set high in its wall a small square window, and in the window a child. She should not have been there.

I have wondered since what she was doing in that room at that hour.

Waiting out the endless shift of a mother the hospital would not release, perhaps, or only gone looking, the way children do, for somewhere quiet to be.

I did not wonder then. Then she was simply the one thing in that building that was looking at me.

Everyone else was looking at the problem.

She looked at the boy the problem was killing.

He was grey now, going. And she did not do the thing everyone eventually learns to do, which is turn the eyes away from what the hands cannot fix.

She came down off the sill. I lost her a moment behind the shifting wall of adult backs. Then a small arm reached up through that forest of arms, and a small hand set a shape into the nurse's palm and folded the woman's fingers shut around it.

The right shape. I did not know what it was.

I have spent the years since learning exactly what she gave that woman, and exactly what it did: the name of the instrument, the name of the vessel it closed, the one quietly emptying me onto the table.

So I can tell you it as a matter of fact, with none of the mercy of not-knowing.

A girl of nine, who could not have named the instrument, reached past six grown adults and put the correct one into a nurse's hand at the precise second the alternative was a boy no one alive would have mourned.

The tempo of the room changed. The next number was better than the last.

The last thing I saw before the dark took me again was her face, still turned toward mine, untroubled by the blood. Watching to see whether it had worked. That, at least, is what I have decided across twenty years.

Then I was gone. When I came back, the world had a shape it had not held before, because I was still in it, and I had made no plans to be.

It was a long time before I learned her name. When I did, I did not use it.

I built a life most men would call a crime, and a few would call a kingdom, and I ran it from behind a word that is not a name.

El Fantasma. The thing you fear precisely because you cannot see it.

A man with no face casts no picture, and in a country where every strongman wants his legend on a wall, I made myself into an absence and learned that an absence travels further than any face.

In all those years I allowed myself one indulgence and no other. I knew where she was.

I knew the year she left the city that raised her for a colder one in the north, to learn to do with her hands, on purpose and for a wage, the thing she had done for me before she was old enough to know she was doing it.

I knew the coat she wore the morning she left, grey, too thin for that city's winter, bought by someone who had never once felt that particular cold.

I never spoke to her. I never let her know that somewhere in the world a stranger had made her survival the only thing he prayed to. That, I told myself, was the whole of it. A man is allowed one lighthouse. He is not allowed to sail toward it.

I believed that for twenty years, with the flat certainty I keep for things I have decided not to examine. I was wrong about a piece of it, and I did not yet know which piece, or what the knowing would cost.

Guarding a thing, it turns out, teaches the hands to think of it as theirs. I did not feel the lesson going in.

It is November, and it has rained three days, the hard, warm rain that gives these roads opinions of their own.

This morning my men brought me word of a doctor working out of an aid clinic eight miles from my walls. A surgeon, they said. Carrying clearances she has no honest reason to hold. Asking, in a soft and careful voice, the kind of questions that get a person buried in my part of the world.

They set her file in front of me as though it were news. I have held that file, in one form or another, for twenty years.

She is coming to me at last. After all this time the lighthouse is going to sail down into the dark and ask the dark its name.

And I, who have not once in twenty years been able to look away from her, will have to decide how much of the truth a man is allowed to keep from the one person on earth who is the reason he is alive to keep it.