Shades Within Us

Porque El Girasol Se Llama El Girasol-2

There is air, but it feels thick and strange in her mouth, and the Cheshire Man smell is so strong it scorches the back of her throat. It feels like she is standing on something solid, but under her feet she only sees the same glowing blue expanse. Far below her are dark shifting shapes.

The entangler twists in her stomach. She spins, following it, and sees the men and women from the van huddled together, the Cheshire Man towering over them counting heads. But where is her mother? She rubs her hand, where she can still feel the warm imprint of fingers.

One of the men beckons for her; she sees the uncitizen brand pink and shiny on his forearm and wonders how he got the chip out of it and if he crushed it with a rolling pin. She shakes her head at him. She is not going anywhere until her mother appears. She starts to count, unodostrescuatrocinco, fast like her fluttery heart.

On dieciséis, her mother is suddenly standing off to the side. Girasol darts to her, surprised that her feet press against the invisible surface, and seizes both her hands.

“My God,” her mother says, looking around. “My God. How do you feel, Sunflower? Do you feel . . .” Her mouth fishes open and shut. “Do you feel fine? Oh, my God.”

Girasol wants to tell her it looks like they are underwater, like in her netgame where she explores the ocean, but her throat feels all tight so she only nods. They join the others. The Cheshire Man looks different. His arms and legs seem too long and skinny for his body and she can’t see his eyes in the shadows of his face.

“Single file,” he repeats. “We do not want to create unnecessary ripples.”

They start to walk, Girasol in front of her mother so she can swing her hand back and feel her mother’s hand if she wants to. A few people murmur to each other, awed whispers, but the Cheshire Man puts a bony finger to his lips and they fall silent. Soon there is no breath to speak besides. The Cheshire Man moves quickly with long jerky steps, and Girasol has to jog to keep her place in line. The very old woman has a limp, but she limps fast.

Girasol wonders about the air that feels so thick and tingly in her lungs. It might have too much CO2 in it, which her teacher said came from cars and factories before she quickly said that America had the very least of it in the whole world, nothing like China where people had to wear hazard suits on the subway.

By the time the Cheshire Man raises his fist for them to stop, they are all panting. The man with the wiry beard is bent double.

“We’ll make our first exit here,” the Cheshire Man whispers. “Stay quiet. Stay alert.” He reaches forward and, with nothing but his long pale hands, makes a tear in the air. Girasol feels her entangler shiver. The Cheshire Man steps through, and everyone hurries after him, the one man still clutching his stomach and grimacing.

Girasol takes a last look at the blue haze, then at her mother, who gives her a nod. She steps through the dark gap and comes out in the normal world, with night sky over her head and dirt under her feet. This time it takes only an instant for her mother to appear beside her. Girasol feels dizzy. She tries to get her bearings: the Wall is still ahead of them, but the exterior fence is behind them. They’re in the restricted zone, where border guards are allowed to shoot who they like.

“Down,” orders the Cheshire Man’s buzzing voice. He is already bellied out in the dirt like a starfish; the others drop down to join him. One of the women is frozen until her companion yanks her arm. Girasol sinks to her stomach. Her mother is on one side of her. The very old woman is on the other.

Girasol hears the sound of a motor approaching. Her hands get sweaty. She can see headlights as the jeep rumbles toward them, and she can hear loud rough voices. She can imagine the men who match them: thick shoulders, bristly faces, black combat rifles strapped to their bodies. She has seen plenty of them in Las Cruces. They are friendly to her, and friendly in the hungry way to her mother.

They would not be friendly now. Girasol clenches her mother’s hand as the sound grows louder. The very old woman turns her head just slightly, and gives Girasol a slow wink.

The jeep does not stop. The engine sound fades away, and Girasol, relieved, scrunches up her whole face to wink back.

“Up,” says the Cheshire Man. He sets off, bent low, and a few metres later, he vanishes. Then the other men and women, one after another, and Girasol thinks how strange it will look in the dust, all the footprints ending in the same place.

Girasol’s ears are filled with screaming. She fumbles for her mother’s hand. Finds it. They are back in the blue, sparks drifting over their heads. Something else is drifting with them, too, and that is what the two women with headscarves are screaming at.

“Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,” her mother says.

Girasol looks. At first, her eyes cannot make sense of it. Bunches of muscle, raw red. Jagged pieces of bone. Bits of skull and teeth orbiting through a fine mist of blood. Then she sees strips of nylon jacket mixed into the floating mass and knows that it was a person before. It was the man with the wiry beard.

Her stomach heaves but nothing comes up, maybe because of the entangler. The Cheshire Man stalks over. His face is drawn. He reaches into the mass of meat and bone.

“His entangler failed,” he says, holding the spiny device up to his eye. “I’m sorry for your loss. This way.”

He drops the entangler, wiping his hand on the backside of his orange coveralls. It leaves a red smear. Nobody moves.

“This way,” the Cheshire Man repeats over his shoulder. “We don’t want to linger here. Fresh meat attracts predators.”

Girasol squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head from side to side, like she can wipe it blank, but still sees the man’s rearranged body on the backs of her eyelids. She lets her mother guide her forward. One of the women is sobbing loud.

“He understood the risks,” the Cheshire Man murmurs, maybe to himself. “One in twelve.” He quickens his pace.

When Girasol finally stops thinking about what it would feel like to be turned inside-out, she remembers what the Cheshire Man said about predators. The dark shapes below them seem bigger now. She tries to remember the other word for sharks.

Their second detour puts them in a dark room full of bodies. For a moment Girasol panics, waiting for a shout of surprise, thinking they have been caught. But she realizes the body heat and sweat-stink and rustling sounds are from men asleep. As her eyes adjust, she sees the rows and columns of workers stacked tight. She reaches behind her and finds her mother’s clammy hand.

She knows her father was in a place like this, back when they first started building the Wall, back before Girasol was even born. Her mother says he was sent there by mistake, and a year of breathing in too much quickcrete was what made him so sick.

The Cheshire Man creeps low along the row of sleepers. Girasol looks at their faces as she passes by. Even sleeping, their mouths are turned down and their brows furrowed tight. The only ones who look peaceful have a little blue Dozr tag jammed into their necks. One man sits upright as she sneaks past, and he stares at her in confusion.

They go through a sliding door into a bare corridor tubed with flickering florescent lights. Are they inside the Wall? Girasol wants to ask, but she knows better than to break the quiet. The Cheshire Man leads them down the hall, his steps silent, and Girasol tries to walk on the balls of her feet the way he does. His nostrils are flared wide like he is sniffing out a scent.

He turns to a wall and motions with a crooked finger, then steps forward, dissolving into the quickcrete. The very old woman follows, helped along now by one of the men with the uncitizen brand. Girasol and her mother are last in line again. Girasol is ready, this time, to step into the wall but actually step somewhere else entirely. But she holds her mother’s hand anyway.

“Please. Wait.”

The ragged voice comes from behind them; Girasol jumps. The man who woke up when she passed him in the barracks is standing there, bare feet mottled purple from the cold floor. His shoulders are slumped and his eyes are sad.

“Take me with you?” he mumbles.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Girasol’s mother says. “I’m sorry.”

The man bobs his head. Then he hurtles at them, arms outstretched, yelling take me with you take me with you please please please and Girasol’s mother shoves her toward the wall an instant before the man slams into her and they crash to the floor. The entangler is dancing madly in Girasol’s stomach but she can’t go, not while the man has her mother pinned. She scrambles over, trying to pry his arm loose.

Her mother gets enough space for an elbow, driving it into the man’s wailing mouth; his head snaps back. More woken sleepers are filling the corridor, drawn by the noise. From the other end come bellowing guards in body armour. Girasol’s mother slides out from under her attacker, cursing words Girasol is never allowed to use, and hoists Girasol into her arms, darts for the wall.

They plunge through.

“Move quickly, I said.”

The Cheshire Man’s voice is toneless but his long fingers are twitching at his sides. Girasol’s mother is trembling all over, and Girasol is shaking, too. The very old woman puts a hand on her arm and asks, in a thick throaty accent, if she is all right. Girasol only has time to nod before the Cheshire Man sets off again.

Something is different in the blue. The glow is dimmer now; fewer sparks float through the air or not-air. Girasol thinks she feels a ripple from down below them. It shivers through the soles of her shoes.

The Cheshire Man must feel it, too, because he hunches his shoulders and lengthens his spidery stride. Girasol looks down. One of the dark shapes is swelling. She looks up at her mother, but her mother is staring straight ahead, jaw set.

A low keening sound pulses through the blue, and the Cheshire Man starts to run. “The last exit is close. Hurry. Hurry.”

One of the men pulls the very old woman onto his back; she clings there like a bat. For a moment, Girasol wants to do the same thing, clamber onto her mother’s back and wrap her arms around her neck and keep her feet far away from the dark shapes underneath them. But that would make them slower. Girasol can run. She is third-fastest in her whole class.

The Cheshire Man is fast, too. He does not run how a human would. His arms and legs swing like gyroscopes. They all pound after him, through the empty blue space that swallows up the sound of their panting. The keening noise comes again even louder. Girasol chances a look down between her moving feet. The dark shape is gone.

“Here,” the Cheshire Man says, skidding to a stop. “Here it is.” He reaches with his sharp fingers and makes another tear, this one messier, ragged. Through it, Girasol can see dawn sky shot through with pink. How long have they been running? The Cheshire Man makes the tear even wider. Girasol sees dust. She sees a tiny electruck rumbling over it. She sees no Wall.

One of the men is crying with relief. Girasol looks at her mother, who squeezes her hand and beams. A safe distance past the border.

The dark shape erupts from nowhere. Ripples scatter outward; suddenly Girasol’s feet are no longer on a solid surface. She flounders, in air that now feels more like watery gelatin. Tiburón, she thinks, but the dark thing corkscrewing toward them is not a shark how she knows them. It is bigger and sleeker and thrashes dozens of whip-like tentacles. Instead of rows of razor teeth, it has a bony grill, and Girasol sees little bits of flesh and one stubborn strip of nylon jacket stuck to it, blots of blood leaking out. Its pale belly is full of blue sparks.

She spins, following the twist of her entangler, and sees her mother struggling toward her, half-swimming, half-running. She cranes her neck and sees the tear is above them now. One of the women is kicking toward it. Girasol cannot see the Cheshire Man. She pushes herself forward, reaching for her mother’s outstretched arms. She can feel a sob caught in her chest.

There is a rending sound and a screaming sound and Girasol does not look. She reaches her mother and clamps onto her. The creature’s tentacles are everywhere, snapping and slicing. A hot coppery smell fills Girasol’s nose.

“Oh, God,” Girasol’s mother says. “Oh, God. You’ve been so brave, Girasol, my Girasol.”

They spin in place and see the creature moving through a cloud of blood, its head turning toward them. Parts of a woman’s body are adrift around it. Girasol’s mother starts to kick, trying to propel them upward; Girasol tries to kick, too.

“Let go of me,” her mother says. “Girasol, let go of me.” Girasol wails as her mother rips her hands loose, freeing herself from her grip. She tries to grab hold again, but her mother keeps her at arm’s length. “Hacia el sol,” she says. “I love you.”

Girasol does not understand until her mother shoves her upward. She drifts toward the tear above them, where the very old woman is scrabbling through, only her trailing legs visible. Her mother’s momentum pushes her downward, where the creature is waiting with its tentacles extended. Girasol screams and screams. She tries to stop herself, windmilling her arms, so she can dive back down. But long bony hands seize her shoulders and pull her the last gasping stretch back into the world.

The electruck takes them up a rocky mesa overlooking the highway, away from the Wall’s shadow and its circling drones. Most of the survivors leave from there, heaving up their entanglers before starting the hike toward the closest pueblo. The very old woman stays with Girasol and strokes her hair. The Cheshire Man crouches in the dust, watching her.

Girasol ignores him. She is concentrated on turning slow circles, following the tug of the entangler in her stomach. She can still feel her mother somewhere over the horizon. She can feel the pull.

“She left a name and sat-address,” the Cheshire Man says. “I can take you there. To your aunt.”

Girasol is waiting for her mother to appear from thin air and squeeze her hand tight and tell her they are safe now. She cannot go to her aunt, not yet.

“Do you need help removing the entangler?” the Cheshire Man asks.

“I want to keep it,” Girasol says, and is surprised to find she has a voice.

The Cheshire Man shrugs. “Very well. It will eventually dissolve.”

But Girasol does not think so. She thinks she will feel it forever. She spins and spins in the dust, as dawn washes the sky pink and orange, then she finally climbs into the truck. They drive toward the sun.