Ballad & Dagger, page 12
“I mean, technically, this wasn’t for your—”
“And no preemptive strikes.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I mean, Tolo’s not above doing them himself. He just doesn’t want me following in his footsteps. Especially because my dad and his fell out over the fear of that exact thing happening, basically.”
We stop in a relatively calm area, where folks are mostly just debating and showing each other annoying memes on their phones (like that’ll convince anybody of anything, but okay). I see Maza and Maybelline bickering with each other like old people—I guess they’re on opposite sides of this issue—and there’s Vedo and some other kid from school, whispering quietly.
“Tolo is trying to stop the island from rising!” someone wails.
“That’s not true,” a voice snaps. “You literally just made that up!”
“And anyway, isn’t this our homeland? I was born here!”
“Don’t bring that crap over here, bro. You know it’s not that simple.”
“Do you want the whole world to know who we are? There’ll be theme parks on the three peaks and more tourists than Galeranos!”
Chela pulls some scrunchies out of her pocket and starts bunching her hair into puffs. Which may or may not mean someone else is about to get got. “Anyway,” she says, “I did what I had to do to protect my people, Mateo. And I’ll do it again if I have to.” From the expression on her face, it looks like she won’t have long to wait. “And so will you.”
“I…”
“Anyway, I’m not convinced Trucks was even actually—”
“Ahoy, shalom, and welcome, mi gente!” Anisette’s voice booms out over a megaphone, cutting Chela off. “Things got a little out of hand last night, it’s true! But it’s a new day for Madrigal! For our community, for the island! Soon we will see our homeland rise again!”
“Actually what?” I whisper at Chela, because come on! You can’t just start a sentence like that and not finish it.
“Enough with the niceties!” a voice calls out from the crowd. “What the hell is going on?”
“¡Los Muertos están trastornados!” an old woman yells. The dead are a damn mess, basically. Then she adds, “¡Nuestros Muertos!” Our dead, to emphasize the point. (But, like, who else’s dead would be all jacked up over this, honestly?)
“I saw Muertos in the lavandería esa mañana!” Beatrice La Verjez calls out.
“Hey, spirits need their clothes washed, too!” some pirate yells back, and people laugh, but a few others cuss him out trilingually.
“There were spirits in gym today!” Maza yells. “They attacked us!”
This sends a ripple of panic across the crowd. “En la escuela?” “Attacking the children?” people mutter and gasp. “Pero puñeta…”
“Okay, yes, yes,” Anisette acknowledges with a squeak. “But today’s business will help resolve all that! That’s why we’re gathered here!”
“Mateo!” Tams whisper-shouts as she makes her way through the crowd toward us. The two of us hug, and then she says hey to Chela, who actually smiles at her. They exchange a friendly elbow bump as Tolo moves through the crowd toward the stage.
This is supposed to be his moment. But so was last night, and we all saw how that went.
Tolo’s mom, Mimi, was the only known casualty when the island went down. She’d been on the Cabildo at the time, and her husband, Si, was already here and busy setting up his criminal empire. So Mimi’s best friend, Anisette, took the role. And it was always understood that she was just holding the spot for Tolo, and she’d pass it on to him when he came of age. The one thing that’s always been true about the pirates’ Cabildo seat is that whoever sits in it appoints their successor. There may be some disagreement and fighting, but in the end, that’s the pick that always wins out.
So, what was supposed to happen last night—the official announcement of her endorsing Tolo, and then the vote to confirm it (pirates always gotta vote)—was largely ceremonial. At least, it would’ve been if it had actually happened.
Now, as he stands a few feet from the makeshift stage, Tolo keeps his face inscrutable. Impossible to say what’s on his mind, but if I had to guess: murder. A few of his heavies hover close by—Safiya the Butcher and Big Moses, but mostly Tolo is surrounded by Galeranos of all ages, all creeds. He looks somehow both very much like a gangster and very much like a leader, which I guess is about right for us. Over by the stage, Gerval has his eyes on Tolo, his whole body tight, glare intense.
“As we move to fulfill the prophecy,” Anisette continues, “and unite our three communities to finish raising the island, as we bring together the three initiated children of our original santos, we need very special leadership to see us through these times!”
There’s another pivot coming—I can feel it a mile away. I’m not the only one. A dark murmur ripples through the crowd around me.
“And that’s why,” Anisette says, “I’ve chosen Maestro Grilo Juan Gerval to replace me as pirate leader on the Cabildo.”
What?!
A riotous uproar explodes all across the intersection. No one seems to know what to think or do.
“I’ve had it!” Tolo’s deep voice thunders as he barges through the crowd. I’ve never seen him mad before, let alone enraged. The man is like a slumbering volcano—his wrath usually unspoken but unmistakable.
Before Tolo can reach the stage, someone shoves someone else and a glass bottle breaks. The violence ricochets through the street as people tumble and yell and run.
Beside me, Chela glares at the councilwoman with a face made of pure murder.
People start to peel off to opposite sides of the intersection: either Anisette’s or Tolo’s. There’s yelling and jeering back and forth, a raucous duet of cymbals and snares, neither side waiting for the other to finish, and the mood of impending violence fills the air again, like a breath that’s been held too long.
“This is bad,” Tams says. “I don’t fully get it, but it’s all bad.”
“Word,” I mutter, trying to keep track of whatever it is that’s about to happen. It feels like it’s coming from all around us.
I nudge Chela. “Hey,” I whisper, just as angry yells and screams start rising from the rear of the crowd. “You never finished what you were saying. You’re not convinced that Trucks was actually what?”
The crowd howls as one and splits like the Red Sea, revealing what all the fuss was about: a crew of five absurdly tall figures in full body armor and face shields stand perfectly still in the crosswalk. A whole battalion of Trucks.
“Human,” Chela says, and she leaps into action.
NOW THERE’S NO MUSIC, JUST silence, and it’s the worst kind of silence. Not the kind between beats or before a measure starts. It holds no promise of music, no hint of tension, even. It just stretches on and on, blank. Sure, people are yelling, shoes and body parts slap the pavement, fists and clubs meet flesh as fighting erupts all around me. But these towering soldiers—they empty the air around them of rhythm, melody, movement. For all that clatter and crush exploding on either side, an infinite vacuum seems to cover the street, like a black hole has been born in our midst.
The armored figures step forward as one, slashing with their clubs like swords. I see one crack across an old guy’s head, and the man clatters to the ground like an empty suit. It’s bad enough that these…whatever they are move in unison, but then, as if on cue, they each spring forward in different directions, plowing through the crowd and swinging every which way.
Terror rips through me. I’m frozen in place.
But this is the moment everyone has been telling me was coming since last night. This is where I’m supposed to be. Whatever strange powers come with being an initiate into the secret healing society of Galanika, they are meant to be used during this rupture, this shattering.
I know it, but I wish I didn’t.
I’m not ready.
I don’t know how to heal, not really. I barely know how to move.
“Come on!” Tams yells, yanking me through the crowd toward the edge of the chaos, toward safety. And the need to be safe throbs through me, a constant panic that wells up and up and up.
Louder still, though, is this other voice, this voice I’m coming to hate, the one that understands I have a role to play. It’s in Tía’s words from last night, and Chela’s from tonight, but most of all, it’s Galanika. I didn’t ask for his powers to move through me, I didn’t cry out for hands that heal, but I have them anyway. And now there’s no pretending I don’t.
“No,” I say, stopping in my tracks. My shaky voice doesn’t inspire much confidence, I know. But it doesn’t matter. I have to try. So many people are already sprawled across the blacktop in bloody piles. “You don’t have to stay.” Tams looks at me like I just told her I have a second head. “But I do.”
“If you stay, we stay,” Maza says, appearing behind Tams.
Tams lights up some, but she still throws a scowl at me. “Mateo is a healer,” she says. “He’s going to…” She shakes her head at me, but I can tell she’s proud, too. “He’s going to try to help these people. We gotta keep him covered.”
“So it’s true!” Maza says. “I didn’t know if he’d stepped into it! Okay, cool, cool, let’s do this!” They grimace, eyes tight on the people streaming all around us, and get into position on the other side of me like a bodyguard.
“And for the record,” Tams says, glancing around, “I was gonna say that, too—if you stay we stay. Just FYI.”
I chuckle, and it feels good to laugh even though terror still rips through me like a bolt of electricity. “I know you were, Tams.”
We move toward the crosswalk where the Trucks-like figures first appeared. They’ve moved on through the crowd now, leaving none close to us, and people are starting to fight back—mostly Tolo’s crew, from what I can tell. I watch Tolo himself barrel into one of the soldiers and both of them go clattering to the side. Then the crowd closes in around them.
Chela is nowhere to be seen, but then again, I can’t see much.
Up ahead, the old man who was bludgeoned lies still, blood trickling from his open mouth, his chest rising and falling in occasional gasps, his skin paled to a grayish dusty hue. Bad.
“We got you,” Tams says to me. “Do your thing.”
My thing.
I wish.
My hands are already shaking, and bile leaps up into my throat, filling my mouth with that spiky acid taste, threatening to spill out into the street.
I won’t crash and burn. I won’t puke. I won’t blow this.
There’s so much noise around me, but inside is only silence. Which is the worst.
I crouch beside the man—it’s old Edgardo Pio, I realize; he used to run the shoe store—and place my trembling hands on his chest.
No, on his head. That’s where the injury is, right?
Maybe?
Nothing makes sense. My whole mind is a scattered disaster, and so is the world around me.
And nothing’s happening. What did Tams say last night that got things working? Close your eyes. Right.
I do.
And I immediately know why I was drawn to his torso first. That’s where the problem is, the real problem. Yes, Edgardo got smashed on the head, but it’s his heart that’s giving out. I feel the fluttering, feeble pulse as soon as I touch him—it’s like a tiny frantic bird trying to escape his rib cage. Which means his blood is barely moving through him. That’s why he’s gray. It’s all there, at my fingertips. I can see it, feel it, the quickening catastrophe within.
The strain of all this chaos and then being hit must’ve caused a heart attack.
But…what can I do about it?
This is bigger than anything I dealt with last night. This man is dying; he’s dying in my arms. I feel no clinch, no purchase—just the quickening, the fading, the sand of his life slipping away from my grasp.
“All good?” Maza calls from nearby.
I exhale. Don’t answer. Nothing is good. What am I supposed to say?
“You gotta let him concentrate,” Tams chides.
“Oh, my bad. Keep going, dude.”
People are screaming in pain nearby, up ahead, all around. The sounds of fighting grow louder and recede again. I reach for that sense of gripping something, that power, and…nothing.
Crap.
My mouth still tastes like bile, and wave after relentless wave of nausea rolls through me.
Crap, crap, crap.
What if I can’t figure this out again, if those powers were wasted on me? What if I just— “Watch out!” Tams yells, and my eyes blink open to see a huge soldier guy plowing through the crowd toward us, club raised to strike.
Both Tams and Maza step in front of me, side by side, squared up to take whatever blow comes, but instead, a flash of something zooms out of the crowd and crashes smack into the soldier.
Chela.
Her blade glints in the streetlights as she pulls it back and then shoves it into the opening beneath the guy’s face shield, the same place where she got Trucks.
“Holy—” Maza boggles.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Tams yells.
Chela stays in a kneel, whispering something under her breath as the figure beneath her writhes and then goes still.
No blood.
I glance up at her, and she’s watching me, panting, just like last night, but this time there’s no rage in her eyes. She steps forward, and Tams and Maza move out of her way, staring in some kind of awe. “Keep watch,” she says to them, crouching down in front of me. Then: “Thank you.”
Tams and Maza turn back to the crowd, which is now thinning around us. Then all I see is Chela, her breath back to normal, her eyes calm, almost sleepy.
“It’s n-not…” I stammer, feeling every inch as pathetic as I sound. “It’s not working. It worked last night, kind of? But I can’t…” I throw up my hands.
“You’re not listening,” Chela says.
I shake my head, scowl. “There’s nothing to hear. It’s all blank. Just silence.”
“Not the world,” she says. “Not what’s around us. You’re not listening to yourself. The healing is inside you.”
I blink at her.
“Just like the music.”
I feel like one of my eyes might be twitching. Because even though I don’t fully understand what she just said, I know it’s true. I feel its truth all through me. My whole body tingles with it.
“Got it?” she says, rising. And then, without waiting for my answer: “Good. Gotta go.”
Then she’s gone.
And all I see are Tams’s and Maza’s smirking faces, both glancing over their shoulders.
“I don’t wanna hear it!” I snap, and then I look back down at Edgardo Pio, still unconscious, still dying. A tiny melody slips from my lips.
It’s just a single phrase, simple: Badabeeee badooo ba-bahhhh, but it feels like each note is inscribed in gold as it leaves me, like the world is different because of that phrase. New. And it is, because Chela was right: it’s inside me, the music, the healing. They’re one.
I sing the melody again, and my focus stays on the sounds as they slip like a shimmering thread through the air and skim along Edgardo’s wrinkled arms. Then I hum the riff once more, a little faster this time, with blue notes thrown in, some verve, and the song dives below the surface of his skin.
For a moment, darkness overwhelms me. I am both crouching beside Edgardo Pio on a crowded cross street in Little Madrigal and ranging through the inner workings of him, sliding through cellular networks and across synapses. I am light, I am sound. I am neither, both, something else entirely. The breath of healing sweeps across each burning filament and cataclysm like a night wind, changing everything I touch, becoming everything I approach, expanding, filling, lighting, lifting.
“Holy crap,” I whisper, somewhere far away from myself, and Edgardo Pio’s eyes open.
The melody cycles through me again; it lengthens, contracts, and then explodes. I feel each tiny sliver of it spin outward through the interstitial spaces of his inner workings, take root. That flutter resolves into a double tap: thuh-THUNK. And then another. Blood pours through his veins like a river flowing free after a drought, floods through his tissues, which brighten, strengthen, fortify.
I feel Edgardo Pio’s heart heal. Crinkled gray tissue expands, refreshes, glows vibrant crimson again. Chambers that had jiggled uselessly now thump out an even, steady beat. The world inside him awakens.
We help each other stand, the old man and I. My breath is short, either because I can’t believe what just happened or because I was working so hard, I’m not sure which.
When I look around, Tams and Maza are staring at me with wide eyes.
“I…I’m a healer,” I say. “It really is inside me.”
“Excellent,” Tams says, “’cause we just got backup.”
A wide circle of people surrounds us, facing outward. They’re burly and look ready to fight. Tolo’s crew.
“WELL, WELL, WELL.” MY TÍA’S wry voice cuts through the strange darkness of healing as I finish up with the last wounded person, Idi Benyamin. Idi’s a librarian; she’d gotten sprayed with some kind of chemical amid all the tussling. She blinks away the last few tears, her eyes cleared up, and looks at me with wonder, shaking her head.
“Gracias, Mateo,” Idi says, touching a light brown hand to my forehead and bowing slightly. Then she’s gone and Tía Lucia walks toward me out of the protective circle Tolo’s crew had formed.
“Ah, let me begin by saying—” she starts, but colorful spots have clouded my vision and the world curves into a spin around me. “Ah, ah, ah.” Tía crosses the space between us, faster than I would’ve thought possible, and catches me as I start to drift toward the pavement. “Easy, easy,” she whispers. “I got you.”
And somehow, she does, she does. Even though she’s a fraction of my height and three times my age, Tía Lucia manages to hold me up, support me. I’m enveloped by that familiar cloud of Florida Water cologne she always wears, and for some reason, this time it brings me straight back to my childhood. It must’ve been one of those brief stints we spent staying at her apartment between trips; I was probably three or four. I’d slipped on the just-mopped kitchen tile and split my lip open, and Tía Lucia had swept in like a great fragrant eagle, scooping me up and cooing gentle lullabies to me as I sobbed. “Cúrate, Mateocito,” she had whispered. Cure yourself. “Try it.”
