Labyrinth Lost Read online

  Nova walks over to sit on the tree trunk. He shifts all his weight to his right side when he moves.

  “You’re limping.”

  “I came down on my left side. I’m fine. It’ll fade.”

  “What’s that humming sound?”

  “It’s the magic of this place. Don’t you feel it?”

  I feel something, like a pulse so rapid all you hear is a vibrating sound.

  “Los Lagos is a place of power. You have power, whether you want it or not. The land calls out to us. It’s saying hello.”

  I stare at the brilliant-blue bug that looks like something out of a prehistoric exhibit. It scurries across the dirt, right past my feet. Then it opens up its hard shell, revealing wings. It flies around my head.

  “Hello,” I say, while Nova laughs at me.

  “I wouldn’t touch anything,” he says.

  “Is it poisonous?” I jerk away from the buzzing little bug. Then it loses interest in me and flies away into the trees.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “but it’s just common sense to not touch things unless you know what they are.”

  “You could always volunteer as a test subject,” I muse.

  “So could you.”

  The heat starts to rise. I can feel the air turning to steam. I sit beside him on the tree trunk, facing the map. It’s the most precious thing we have right now. I touch the thick parchment, whisper a rezo for my family.

  Nova nudges me with his shoulder, sending a spark of pain from the landing.

  “We’re here.” He taps his finger on a dark sketch of land labeled Selva of Ashes. “It’s a land unto its own, separating it from the rest of Los Lagos by a river. We have to get across the river, through the Caves of Night, take this middle path from the fork in the road that leads through Meadow del Sol, over this small mountain range called Las Peñas, and boom. We’re at the labyrinth. Cake.”

  I want to hyperventilate and slap him at the same time. There’s a black blotch above the Tree of Souls, at the center of the labyrinth, like someone set a pen there and let the ink run. “A small mountain range? Are you crazy? We don’t have the supplies for that!”

  “With your powers and my brilliant survival skills, it is cake, Ladyb—”

  “Why can’t we take the path on the left and cut across? There’s an arrow pointing to it.”

  He holds the map up to my face and points. There’s a sliver of a trail between a place called Bone Valle and the Poison Garden.

  “What part of Poison Garden makes you think we should go there? And Bone Valle.” Vah-yey. He puts an emphasis on that last word. “That’s straight up what it sounds like. A valley of bones. Not to mention it borders Campo de Almas. Now, I may not spend a lot of time around them, but I’ve been told wandering souls can get pretty nasty.”

  I get what he’s saying, but whoever drew this map made a direct line through the worst-sounding places of Los Lagos.

  “It’s the most direct route,” I say, wavering on my instinct. I wipe the sweat from my brow. I drink more water. The insects that were surrounding us start to fly up to the canopies.

  “Look,” he says. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

  “Yeah? Because you trust me so much.”

  “I don’t,” he says. “You tried to suck the life out of me. If anyone should have trust issues, it’s me.”

  “I’m not the one who spent three years at a juvenile detention center.”

  “I’m not the one who sent her family to hell.”

  I stand and walk away. The tree canopy shudders and a thick, warm rain falls. I raise my face to the heavens. I know that Nova is right. I have to put all of my trust in him, not just because I’ve paid him, but also because he’s all I’ve got. It doesn’t mean I have to like it. I don’t know why I’m so hard on him. If Lula were here, she would say this is why Rishi is my only friend. When I was with Rishi, I never felt like there was something wrong with me. Maybe it’s because Rishi hasn’t seen this side of me, the girl with the power. The girl with the selfish heart.

  I wonder how my sisters are right now. I wonder if they’re in pain. I wonder if this creature, this Devourer, is hurting them. I wonder if they’ll ever forgive me. I wonder so hard that my own tears mix in with the warm rain, and it feels really good not to have to brush them away.

  When the rain stops, soft, gray light filters through the canopies. Strange, fat, black-and-green birds weave between branches, higher and higher until I lose sight of them. Bright-yellow snakes slither around thick, red tree barks and race up, up, up.

  Behind me, Nova’s shoved all our things in the backpack. He shoulders the weight and comes up behind me. The smell of a just-put-out fire clings to him.

  “Like it or not, Ladybird,” he tells me, “we have to trust each other just enough. Not completely, but enough to know that I need you alive to get my money and you need me alive to get your family back.”

  “Good point,” I say darkly. I have to keep reminding myself that Nova isn’t helping me out of the pureness of his magical heart. When he looks at me, he sees a dollar sign.

  And when I look at him, what do I see?

  A boy with a handy switchblade, a borrowed mace, and more tattoos than you’d expect on someone so young. It makes him look older than seventeen, older than his dimples and casual humor suggest. I wonder what made his skin so tough, what made the cuts on his face. Our paths crossed the moment Lula’s boyfriend almost ran him over, and now they’re aligned, two freight trains side by side. When do we collide?

  My face flushes as he pulls up the hem of his shirt to dry off his face, but between the heat and the rain, it’s a lost cause, and he takes it off completely. His muscles are bulky and taut, like he works hard to stay so big. But his muscles aren’t the most fascinating part. On his solar plexus is a tattoo of a sacred heart surrounded by thorny rosebuds and a brilliant starburst. Around it are more tendrils of black ink, same as his hands.

  “Let’s get one thing straight.” He leans forward and a part of my brain tells me to pay attention to the way his abdominal muscles flex when moves toward me. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never been here, and I made that clear. It’s fifty percent suicide. But if we don’t do this, you’re already dead. And if I don’t try to get that money, I’m dead too. Let’s get out of this rain forest and through the Caves of Night. Then we can bite each other’s heads off trying to pick a fork in the road.”

  “Fine,” I say, snatching my water bottle from him.

  “And another thing,” he says. “No one needs to know the details of why we’re here. Whatever or whoever we come across, just lie.”

  That should be easy enough.

  Above us, a flock of the fat birds perching on a branch snap awake. Their eyes glow amber, their howls so human that it makes my skin go cold. They spread their wings and vanish deeper into the rain forest.

  There’s that smell of cinder again.

  “Do you smell that?” I ask him.

  Nova grabs my arm. He looks up to the canopy. There’s smoke coming from a plant where a beam of light shines down. A pop of flame makes me jump. It burns fast and hard until there is nothing but a patch of ash where the plant used to be.

  “Selva of Ashes,” I whisper. For ashes, you need fire.

  Another pop at our feet. We jump back. Nova stands directly under a beam of light. I can feel the anxiety bubble in my chest, and I scream. I push him with a blast of my magic. He hits the trunk of a tree. The place where he just stood goes up in roaring flames.

  Nova jumps around the fire and grabs my hand. He doesn’t have to say it. My legs are already moving.

  We run.

  14

  Rain of fire, birth of ash.

  Born again, the gods will clash.

  —Song of El Fuego, Bringer of Flame

  T
he Selva of Ashes goes up in flames around us.

  No wonder birds and insects were traveling upward. But Nova and I can’t climb. I’m not even sure if we’re going the right way, but I don’t stop running. We race across the beams of light, their heat pulsing against the ground. Even though I know it’s coming, I can’t stop from jumping every time a blaze of fire pops. It’s like we’re surrounded by land mines.

  I thank La Mama that I decided to join the track team last year. I jump over fallen trunks like hurdles. I pump my arms at my sides. I’m surprised Nova is keeping pace beside me, and I can’t help but think that he’s had some practice at running from things too. He shoots me a challenging smile. He nods to the light ahead, where a line of trees in silhouette marks the end of the rain forest.

  I run across a beam of light just as it explodes. It burns my shoulder, but I keep going. Fire is catching up behind us, and it licks at our feet. I feel the burn in my legs, my lungs, but the end is so close, I throw myself out of the line of trees.

  Nova falls beside me.

  We’re out of the Selva, and the light-gray sky feels infinite.

  “Oh my gods,” I say, sprawled out on the ground.

  “And here I didn’t think I’d get in my daily cardio,” he says between heavy breaths.

  I cough and get up. My adrenaline is buzzing and so is the magic around us. The entire floor of the Selva has caught flame. We watch as the underbrush burns quickly to ash. Then it stops. Then, the sky breaks and the rain comes and washes away the black ashes, revealing dark-green buds.

  “Why is this land separate from the rest of Los Lagos?” I ask Nova.

  “Not sure.” He’s still trying to catch his breath. “Let me add that to my list of Los Lagos mysteries.”

  “Okay, genius.” I put a hand on my hip. “How do we get across the river?”

  Now that the Selva of Ashes is behind us, we can only look forward. At the end of the rocky bank is a silver river that gleams in the gray light. The river rushes in an undulating current. On the other side is a black line of caves. The Caves of Night look more like an impenetrable wall. The bank, the river, and the caves—they all go east to west as far as my eyes can see. It makes the land feel so expansive, like it’ll never end no matter how far we walk.

  Nova closes his eyes and leans his head back, his face toward the open sky. It really is beautiful, like a black-and-white photo. I inhale the cool, salty air, and allow myself to sink into the reality of this plane.

  It startles me when I look at both ends of the horizon. The moon and the sun are out at the same time. On one end, the sun is a white circle hidden behind the overcast sky. On the other side of the horizon is a sideways, slender crescent moon, the points facing up. Something swells inside me, a faded memory of bedtime stories about them reaching across the sky to join together—La Mama and El Papa. I touch the moon necklace between my collarbones.

  “Is that our moon?”

  Nova stands beside me. His boots crunch the gravel. “Yeah.”

  “But that’s not our sun?”

  He shakes his head. “The passage of ‘time’ is marked by the movement of the moon and sun across the sky. They travel from one end of the horizon to the other, bypassing each other. That’s a cycle, what we’d call a day. Every cycle, the moon and sun get closer and closer to each other.”

  “Like the story of La Mama and El Papa traveling across the galaxy to find each other.” I used to love that story as a kid. The two major Deos were once separated by their enemies, and so they had to reach across the heavens, creating night and day.

  “Exactly,” he says. “When they eclipse, that’s when the Tree of Souls takes all of its energy and metabolizes it. Then, the Devourer feeds on the power for herself.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You’d know too if you went to Lady’s classes.” He takes out the map and flips it over. “Also, it says so right here.”

  There are a few notes scrawled in nearly illegible handwriting. I wonder who it belongs to. My father? Aunt Ro? Maybe Mama Juanita. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table when she thought everyone was asleep. She had a cigarillo in one hand and her fountain pen in the other. Usually, a bruja writes their initials after an entry in the Book of Cantos. The map of Los Lagos, and the notes scrawled on the back, are unfinished, anonymous.

  “Wait,” I say. “If the Devourer is siphoning out the energy, wouldn’t that kill the land?”

  Nova stares at the shore across the silver river, clutching his prex. He rubs the blue stones one at a time. My mother does that when she’s uncertain and when she’s praying.

  “I don’t know, Ladybird. What I do know is the moon and sun are still far apart. We have time. We’ll have to see how fast the cycles pass to mark our pace.”

  “You can say day, you know.”

  He shakes his head and walks west.

  I start to follow, but I see something moving in the water. I walk to the edge of the riverbank. My boots kick gravel into a current so fast it doesn’t even ripple. I try to find a sense of calm in the rushing water’s silver waves. I reach my hands to touch the salty water, but Nova yanks me back. I fall on my butt.

  “What the hell?”

  His face pales as my foot dangles over the river, silver waves licking at the tip of my boots. He grabs me again and drags me back a few feet.

  “Don’t touch things just because they’re shiny.”

  “I wasn’t.” I push myself off the ground and dust the moist earth from my pants.

  He makes a deep guttural noise that makes me think of my neighbor’s pit bull.

  “Do me a favor. Let’s have the rain forest that sets itself on fire be our warning for the rest of our time here. Don’t touch anything. You don’t know what kind of water this is. You’re not back home, Alex. We’re in another dimension. If I can’t make that clear for you, then you’re dead, and I’m dead with you.”

  I cringe at the smell of burning rubber. I look down to find a hole at the top of my boot where the silver water splashed me. Right. Don’t touch anything.

  “Welcome to Los Lagos, Ladybird,” Nova grumbles as he leads the way. “Come on.”

  • • •

  We walk at a safe middle distance between the edge of the rain forest and the edge of the silver river. The clouds thicken in dark-gray mounds above us. Every shadow, movement, and splash makes me want to jump out of my skin. What else is going to get set on fire? Is everything here made to kill? I take off my shirt because of the thick humidity and stuff it in our backpack. In minutes, I sweat right through my tank top.

  “Did you see that?” I point to the water. “There’s someone in there. I saw it before.”

  “You saw what that water did to your boot. I don’t think it can sustain life.”

  I know what I saw but I drop it. A light rain starts to fall, which makes our walk more slippery.

  Nova searches the horizon with a frustrated scowl. “The ferryman is supposed to be somewhere here.”

  If the water burned a hole in my boot, how does it not burn a boat?

  As the rain gets progressively harder, the rain forest to our left shudders as lightning strikes.

  “There!” Nova points ahead.

  I grab hold of him and together we run, trying not to slip as the earth softens under our boots. We take turns almost falling, but when the golden glint of something bobbing in the water becomes clearer, I’m the one pulling him.

  Disappointment comes swiftly. “That isn’t a ferry. It’s an oversize rowboat.”

  “It’s a small Viking ship,” he says. But even he has to admit it wasn’t what we were expecting. “This can’t be right.”

  Nova takes a step onto the golden pier that goes out a few yards over the river. The gold boat has a curling bow and stern, and high sides that might prevent the passengers from gett
ing splashed with the corrosive water. There are four oars resting across a bench, and it looks like it seats up to six passengers.

  “Hello?” I shout. I realize I probably shouldn’t announce myself like I’m at the bodega.

  Then a man appears from thin air.

  “I’m right here, girl,” he says in a raspy voice. “No need to shout at the wind.”

  I take several steps back until I collide with Nova’s chest. His hands fly protectively to my shoulders.

  The man isn’t exactly a man. He’s got the face of an old man, yes. His moss-colored skin looks rough to the touch. His eyes are like swirls of gold, and when he smiles, two perfect rows of gold teeth flash back at us. His torso is hidden beneath a long, black cloak that’s caked in mud at the hem. He hobbles when he steps toward us.

  “Fear won’t get you very far in these lands.” He extends a furry finger that ends in a sharp, black nail. He breathes deep, as if he smells a perfume he likes. “Though…perhaps your magic could.”

  Nova steps in front of me, to block me from the creature’s golden gaze. Nova’s posture changes. He digs one hand in his pocket and relaxes his shoulders like he’s not afraid. He tilts his chin up.

  “You the ferryman?”

  The creature tilts his head from side to side, amused. He moves like molasses and speaks just as slowly. “I am Oros, the duende of the River Luxaria. I provide crossing to the other shore.”

  “Shut up.” Nova’s sudden enthusiasm makes me panic. Where did my street-savvy brujo just go? Instead, he looks like he’s about to jump on the creature’s lap and list everything he wants for Christmas. “My grandma told me you guys were all extinct.”

  The duende makes a sour face. He keeps that long, craggy finger pointed in my direction.

  “Most of my kind was sent here by El Terroz, Lord of the Earth and its Treasures. He is our father and protector. I am charged with passage across the Luxaria, or as common witches call it—Lover’s Lament.”

  “Lover’s Lament?” I look at the hole in my shoe. “Why do they call it that?”

  Oros hobbles to my side. I follow his gaze to the silver water. “Watch.”