Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Mila
The wind's been coming at my back for two hours, and I stopped feeling my hands somewhere around the sixth mile.
Doesn't matter. I need my feet, not my hands.
The man on the gate is a cartel soldier.
I knew it from four hundred yards out, from the way he came out of the block hut to look at me and then went back in and didn't come out again.
Club men need to know what you are. Cartel men already know, they're only working out whether you're worth the walk.
He's been watching me through the glass for eleven minutes.
I keep my hands out of my pockets. I keep my feet where they are.
I don't look at the fence and I don't look at the road behind me, because the second you look at the way out they know you're thinking about it, and a woman thinking about it is a woman who came here to do something.
I have come here to do something. He doesn't need to know that yet.
Then there's a shape coming up the gravel and my body knows before my eyes do.
He's bigger.
That's what my brain reaches for.
Ten years and it hands me he's bigger, like a coin dropped down a well.
He's filled out through the shoulders and the neck, and he's got a beard now. There's gray in it at the corner of his jaw where he used to get razor burn he'd complain about like a dying man.
Gray. In his beard.
My back teeth come together and I let them.
He's walking fast. There's a red stripe up his forearm that's bleeding and I’m not sure if he knows it.
Twenty feet, then fifteen.
For eight months I've had to think about this moment. To build it with my bare hands.
I built it on my mother's kitchen floor with my hand flat on the linoleum where she died.
In a Greyhound bathroom in Tucson with my head against the wall.
Every night in a bed in Marie Kincaid's spare room with the door open, because I can't sleep with a closed door anymore.
I built it hard, built it right, and what I built is nothing, really. That's the plan. I will give him nothing.
He gets to the gate and puts one hand on it. "Ma'am."
It's his voice.
His actual voice, out of his actual mouth, in the air, and it goes into me sideways like a splinter under a nail and I don’t move.
He tips his head toward the buildings without taking his eyes off me. "It's forty degrees. Whatever this is, you're not doing it out here."
He doesn't know.
He's looking right at me and he doesn't know, and I feel my lips press flat because of course he doesn't.
I've seen what's in the mirror at Marie's.
There's a woman in there with my mother's cheekbones and my father's chin, and she's forty pounds lighter than she should be, with gray under the eyes and her hair's coming in wrong at the temple where men pulled it out time and time again.
I look at him.
I take my time about it. Ten years. I want all of it.
His face is the same and it isn't.
Lines coming in around the eyes. A scar through his eyebrow that wasn't there when I knew every millimeter of that face in the dark.
His mouth is the same, and it's the most obscene sight of my life, that it gets to keep existing, that it's been out here in the world this whole time doing whatever it wanted.
Then it happens.
It comes up through him like water finding a crack.
His eyes go wrong first.
Then his fingers hook into the wire, and his knuckles go white and yellow, and his mouth opens and shuts and produces nothing.
He makes a sound.
I've heard a lot of sounds.
I heard a man make one like that once when they brought him out to the yard for something I never learned the name of, and I've spent years not remembering it.
It comes out of Finn Kincaid on a Wednesday, and I have to stand here and hear it.
His eyes are wet.
They're wet and he's not doing one thing about it.
He's not turning. He's not wiping. He's standing in a road holding a fence with both hands now, both of them, coming apart in front of a cartel man, God, and me, and the water goes down his face into his beard.
Ten years, and he's crying at a gate.
Nothing. I give him nothing. My hands stay where they are and my face stays where it is, and my jaw is locked so tight I'll feel it tomorrow, and he doesn't get one flicker.
"Mila."
My name.
He gets it out with no air at all, the way you'd say a word with a hand around your throat.
Nobody's said it.
Not one time.
The men who took me had a number for me and the women had a face.
My parents are dead and the only two mouths on this earth that ever made that sound are in the ground in Sierra Vista.
It comes out of him and my knees try something.
They try something and I shut it down.
He sees it. I watch him see it.
"Mila—" His fists close on the chain-link and he shakes it, the whole run jumping and rattling for thirty feet in both directions. "Mila. Where—"
He stops.
He tries again. His mouth is doing something I've never seen a mouth do.
"You're—"
Nothing.
His hand comes off the gate and goes up toward me, stopping in the air between us. "Are you—"
He can't. He physically can't.
There are a hundred things behind his teeth and not one of them will fit through, and what finally comes out of Finn Kincaid, after ten years, after every day of my life is, "Are you cold?"
Are you cold?
Heat comes up fast behind my eyes and it's moving before I can get in front of it, pressure building at the bridge of my nose, my throat going tight, and my chin does what it hasn't done since I was twenty-two years old.
One second.
He gets one second.
Then I put it back where it lives.
"Open the gate," I say.
His hands are already moving.
He fumbles with it.
He's got hands like a bricklayer and he can't work a gate latch. He gets it on the fourth try and hauls it back on the runner and it screams on the track.
Now there's nothing between us.
He doesn't come at me.
I had a plan for that. I had a whole plan for what my body does if he touches me, and I don't need it, because he takes one step and stops like he's hit glass.
His hands come up open at his sides.
He knows better.
He doesn't know why. He's reading how I'm standing and it's telling him something, and he stops.
That's the closest he'll come to an apology today and he doesn't know he's making it.
I walk past him onto the gravel.
The desert on this side of a fence is the same desert.
Cholla. Ocotillo standing up out of the ground like somebody's bones, and past all of it the mountains a long way off with snow on the tops.
I stand there and look at that snow because I can. Looking at things is not a right I've had for a very long time and I'm still not used to spending it.
Behind me the gate screams back along its track.
"Mila." He's found some air from somewhere. His boots come around into my sightline and stop short. "Mila, look at me. Please look at—"
An engine coming down from the buildings, fast, not slowing.
I don't turn around. I've learned things about turning around.
The truck comes off the gravel run and swings wide and stops thirty feet out with the front end pointed at both of us, and the door's open before it's finished rocking.
The woman who gets out of it is small.
She's five-four in boots with cherry red hair.
She's built like a woman who's never carried anything heavier than a phone, and she's wearing a cut with a president's patch on it, and there's nothing about her that would make you cross a street.
The cartel man comes out of the hut with his hands where she can see them.
My mother had an aunt like this. Four-eleven, and the whole family rearranged itself when she came into a room.
The president comes around the door and stops and takes it in.
An open gate. A stranger on her gravel. Her prospect twenty feet back with his face wrecked and his mouth open, blood going down his arm.
Her expression doesn't change.
She lifts the radio in her hand and doesn't key it. "Why the fuck haven’t either of you said shit on the radio?"
Nobody answers.
"I've been on this channel six minutes." She says it like she's asking about the weather, and she sets the radio on the seat behind her without looking. "Marco. You called in a woman on foot at eleven-forty, and then everybody on my property went quiet."
Marco's hands stay up. "Prez—"
"Not you."
He shuts up.
She looks at the gate. She looks at it long enough that I can hear the wind in the fence and the tick of the truck engine and Finn breathing behind me like he ran here.
Her eyes come off the track and find the latch. "Who opened my gate?"
"I did," Finn says.
It's the first steady thing out of him. His voice comes back for that and only that, and I hate that I notice.
She still doesn't look at him. "On whose authority?"
"Nobody's."
"Mm." She nods, slow, like he's confirmed something. Then she turns and puts all of it on me at once, and everything before this was her being polite. "Who are you?"
Here it is.
One card. I've had one card since I sat on my mother's kitchen floor with a Manila envelope and a strip of postcards and an address in my father's handwriting, and I only get to play it once.
"My name's Camila Bacani."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"No." I let it sit. "It doesn't."
Her chin comes up about a quarter inch. That's not anger. Anger I could work with. "You walked here?"
"Yes."
"From where?"
"The highway." My backpack strap has cut a line into my shoulder, and I leave it there.
She lets that sit. "Before that."
"Arizona."
Her thumb taps the truck door once. "And you're at my gate because?"
I turn my head and look at Finn.
He's gone gray. He knows what's coming.
He's been standing there ninety seconds waiting for the roof to come down, and here it comes, and there's nothing on this earth he can do about it.
I look for something in myself about that.
There's nothing there.
"Because of him," I say.
"He's got a name."
"He does." I bring my eyes back to her. "It's Finn Kincaid."
Nobody moves.
The wind comes across the gravel and pushes a plastic bag along the fence line and I hear it the whole way.
Amara doesn't look at him.
Not one inch. She doesn't turn her head toward the man twenty feet away, and her hand stays flat on the truck door, and she won't spend a second of it in front of me.
She looks at me for a long time.
"Get in the truck," she says.
"No."
That gets me a blink. A fast one at that.
Her hand comes off the door. "Excuse me?"
"I'll walk." I get my backpack up higher on my shoulder. "You've got one road in, and I've already seen it. I want to see what's at the end of it."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I've got some things to say to you," I tell her, "and I'd rather say them where I can see what's around me. And because you're going to say no to at least one of them, and I want to know what I'm running from when you do."
The wind again.
Then the president of the Reapers Rejects, Mexico charter, looks at me across thirty feet of gravel, and one corner of her mouth pulls, and it isn't a smile.
"Say them now."
I look at the truck, then back at her. "Here?"
"You're on my ground, standing in my road, and my prospect's bleeding." She pushes the door shut with her hip and it doesn't catch. "Here."
Okay.
My mother's floor. A bus station bathroom. A spare room with the door open.
I put my feet where I want them and I say it.
"I need three things." I hold up my hand, and it doesn't shake. "One. I need a roof. Not forever. Until I can disappear, and I'll tell you when that is, and it won't be long."
She doesn't move. "Two?"
"Two." My throat wants to close, and I swallow it down. "He's going to look me in the face and tell me why he left."
Behind me he takes a breath and lets it go.
She tips her head an inch toward him without turning. "That's between you and him."
"No, ma'am." I wait until her eyes come back. "It stopped being between me and him the day it got my mother killed."
Her hand comes off the truck.
"And three?"
Here.
This is the one I've carried for eight months and thirty-one hundred miles, and nine of them on foot this morning.
The one I've been saying in my head since I put my hand flat on a door in the dark and lied to a girl I've never spoken to.
My voice comes out, and it doesn’t sound like mine. It's not steady and I don't care.
"There are eleven women being forced into trafficking in a hole in the ground in Cochise County, Arizona, and I walked out and left them there."
The wind stops. It actually stops.
"I told them I'd come back."
Amara's eyes don't leave my face.
"You're a motorcycle club," I say. "So you're going to help me go get them."