Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Lucía peeled off her boots, wincing at the raw skin on her heels. Blisters were already forming across both feet. The price of hiking in cheap, too-new boots over uneven terrain. Her socks were damp with sweat, and her toes ached.
She didn’t have much to treat them, just a travel-size bottle of iodine, a strip of gauze and a roll of tape. She dabbed the iodine on, wrapped her toes as best she could and muttered under her breath when the sting made her eyes water.
Despite the cool air up here in the mountains, her shirt was soaked through with sweat, her hair sticking to the back of her neck. She stripped down to her tank top and jeans.
She hadn’t eaten since before sunrise. From the main pocket of her pack, she pulled out a Ziploc bag of tortillas, dried mango, and two small cans of tuna packed in oil. She peeled one open and dipped the tortilla in. The salt and fat were welcome.
She ate quickly, still standing. Then, digging into her bag, she retrieved her ghost laptop.
Dropping it onto the mattress, she got down on all fours and peered underneath the cot.
Using the light on her phone, she illuminated the far corners.
There was dirt, dead leaves and the carcass of something long-dead. But no snakes.
The floorboards were ancient. It wasn’t hard to pry her fingertips beneath one and ease it up. With the phone light, she checked the space beneath. It was dry and dusty, with no signs of rodent nests. It would do for hiding equipment if she had to bail quickly.
She got up, dusted off her hands, then set up her laptop on the table by the window.
Out came the signal-booster antenna. It was handmade, cobbled together from radio junk and a salvaged solar array.
She set it outside the window and angled it toward the southern ridge where the last usable cell tower stood.
Barely half a bar, but that was enough. She unrolled the thin solar mat, its cells catching the last of the light, and plugged it into the battery pack humming on the floor.
She waited as the machine booted up, the screen casting soft light in the gloom.
Then she began to hunt. Not for anyone in particular, but for anyone looking for her.
She started with her digital tripwires. Each alias, burner account, and crypto transaction she’d ever abandoned had been embedded with trace triggers—harmless-looking scripts that, if activated, would ping her ghost laptop and tell her someone was poking around in places they didn’t belong.
Nothing. Yet.
She leaned back in the hard chair and stretched her sore shoulders.
Her legs still ached from the climb. She hesitated, then opened the final tool: a cloaked identity packet meant as bait.
Just a username, tied to an innocuous-looking account buried in a low-traffic data pool.
She’d never used it for anything real, but the breadcrumbs linked it, indirectly to the last known alias she’d used in México City.
If someone was digging for her, they’d find this.
She clicked “Deploy.”
It was like sending a flare into the dark. Anyone watching the sky would see it. But only someone who knew what they were looking for would chase it.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe she should’ve kept hiding. Waited them out.
But that was the thing about shadows. They didn’t always pass. Sometimes, you had to step into the light and see what came running.
She encrypted the net, logged the ping trail, then closed the laptop.
The trap was set.
She pumped water from the rusted pipe outside the cabin and filled a battered kettle. The water was brownish at first, then cleared. She boiled it on the stove, poured half into a tin cup, and sat outside on the cabin step as dusk rolled in like smoke.
Night fell fast, all at once, as it did in the mountains.
The horizon went from gold to indigo in minutes, and with it came the sounds.
Insects hummed. Something with claws scrambled across the tin roof.
In the trees beyond, something howled, high-pitched and wild.
A coyote, maybe. Or a fox. But there were jaguars in these parts, too.
The forest whispered all around her: crickets and creaking branches and something larger, slower, crashing through the brush in the distance.
Maybe a boar. Maybe a big cat. Maybe nothing.
She wasn’t good with fear. Not the primal kind. Out here, it wasn’t the cartel that scared her the most. It was nature.
She drank, cradling the cup between her hands, and looked out over the trees. The scent of smoke from her wood stove drifted through the air. Then she got up and locked the door behind her. She stared at the darkened window for a moment, then shoved a wooden bench against the door, just in case.
She turned off the light and waited for the world to notice she was back.