1 The city of Robado was a night place, so its emptiness beneath the stars was twice as eerie as any normal sleeping city''s might have been. Overhead, a crescent moon provided little illumination. The stars themselves felt distant. Lucha Moya, after days of traveling on foot through unforgiving terrain, had been prepared to stick to the shadows. To avoid detection. Pick her moment . But there was no one here to hide from. She wandered down the center of the north road.
The torches that had once burned with oily animal grease stood cold and dark along the roadside. The subtle colors of the night were easy enough to read after a solitary trek through much darker places. Still, the hair on the back of Lucha''s neck prickled. A warning. Behind her stood the forest she''d only just emerged from. The Bosque de la Noche. Most Robadans avoided even looking at it--afraid monsters from their folktales would snatch their souls for gazing too long. It had been the subject of Lucha''s endless fascinations as a child.
Though back then she''d never dared to go deep enough into the trees for the city to be lost to her. Now she''d traveled farther into the forest than anyone in Robado could ever have dreamed. She''d communed with it, summoned its power. Visited its goddess''s sanctuary. Defeated the feral, captive god intent on its destruction. Lucha felt she''d learned the forest''s rhythm, its language, but on this trip back to the town she''d never expected to come back to, that rhythm had been disrupted. Plants were overgrown, or else scarce in places where they should have been plentiful. The whispers had changed.
And now this. Robado, empty. In Lucha''s dreams she''d arrived to clear the city of innocents, then set the place on fire. Stood in the shadow of the trees to watch it burn. But she couldn''t burn it now. Not even as empty as it seemed. She couldn''t do anything until she knew the people would be safe--otherwise she''d be no better than him. During her long trek through the changing forest, Lucha had tried to keep thoughts of Salvador at bay.
The sneering son of Elegido''s revered forest goddess. The slender, pale young man who''d wormed his way into her consciousness. He''d convinced her their goals were aligned, only to betray her. She''d fought him just a few weeks ago. A battle where she almost lost something infinitely more precious than her life. She could sometimes still feel the decay as it threatened to swallow them both. On those nights, she woke with a scream lodged in her throat, believing she stood there still, on the precipice between creation and destruction, watching the mushrooms devour every bit of him that was left. In the present, an unseasonably chilly gust rattled the branches.
Sent two dried leaves skittering after each other down the road. You''re here, and he''s gone, Lucha reminded herself. And you still have work to do. But how to begin when she didn''t even recognize the city she''d returned to save? Lucha had come from the west, headed for the normally quiet stretch between the north ward compound and the marketplace. The last time she''d been here, she''d been imprisoned for months. Starved and beaten. Presumed dead by anyone who might have cared enough to look for her. That had been before she left Robado''s prison, Encadenar, in what one might consider spectacular fashion.
She''d taken her sister--Los Ricos, property at the time--and using power gifted to her by the goddess Almudena, enhanced by the dark presence of her monstrous son, Lucha had killed several guards, destroyed high-security doors, and generally left behind a tale worth telling. The question was, had the stories made a hero of Lucha? Or a monster? Lucha startled at a skittering noise behind her. With instincts born of years as a cazadora--hunting monstrous creatures to put food on the table for her family--she pulled her bone knife from the place where it had hung on her hip since she was thirteen years old. So armed, she whirled around to face the threat. But there was nothing there. A hunched shadow, perhaps? Disappearing into the trees? She was sure she''d seen something. Forgetting her purpose for a moment, Lucha ran to the place where it had disappeared, casting around for any evidence that someone had been following her. Had they heard she was coming? Cleared the city to confuse her? Were they surrounding her as she stood here wondering? Lucha''s heart pounded hard against her ribs.
It wouldn''t be the first time she''d been surrounded by enemies, but last time she hadn''t been alone . The thought of Paz fierce beside her, bowstring taut, stung worse than the nettle scratches along her arms. Lucha shoved the memory aside, irritated with herself for even thinking of the girl she''d left behind. She had more important things to worry about. And if there was no one following her, it was time to stop chasing shadows and get back to the task at hand. Lucha continued down the north road toward home--or what had been home until a few months ago. If the south ward was empty too . She could barely imagine it.
The bulk of Robado''s population lived crowded into a few dilapidated buildings up against the serpentine curve of the cursed salt river. The units were small, damp, and lightless. Nothing but holding cells to shelter the city''s workforce between shifts in massive warehouses. Warehouses built to refine and process Robado''s only export. Lucha didn''t want to think of Olvida now. Not after being away from it so blissfully long. But it was impossible not to remember here. Impossible not to think of her mother, lost in the drug''s potent forgetting as she held a splintered chair leg to her daughter''s throat.
Impossible not to remember Lis, wasted away to nearly nothing, a ladder of scars climbing her arm . Lucha''s entire life had been spent in the mud pit Olvida created. Subject to the whims of the cruel men who profited off its existence. Life in Robado was lived beneath their heavy boots. Dangerous, joyless, and usually short. That was how they kept the population hooked on the forgetting drug. Kept them chasing an oblivion that would never last. What Lucha hadn''t known, as she watched the drug poison her family and neighbors, was that it had been created by design.
A perverted version of a plant meant to help people commune with the gods. She had carried a grudge against Olvida and the kings since she first became aware of how things worked here, but after Salvador, she was more determined than ever to achieve the goal that had originally driven her from the city and into the fathomless wood it bordered. To destroy Olvida. Destroy the kings. Free Robado and all the people suffering here. The south ward greenhouses loomed into view ahead of her. Dark silhouettes against the slightly lighter sky. No illumination came from the ventilation shafts.
No sound of movement from within. Most workers would be off their shifts by now, gathering in the streets. The quiet was unnatural. Terrifying. In her whole sixteen years of life, Lucha had never heard the greenhouse machinery go silent. Sure, by now, that this wasn''t some elaborate ruse to lure her out of the woods, Lucha walked in disbelief down the path to the housing units. A path she''d walked so many times before that her feet followed it by rote. This left her eyes free to scan the dark, empty windows.
The doors open to the elements. The silence. Crushing here, too. Robado had never been a light place, or a joyful one, but there had been life here. Families. Children. Now there was nothing. Lucha meant to leave the moment she realized there was no one here.
Make her way to the north ward, see what she could discover. But her steps carried her onward instead. To the doorway of the last place she''d called home. Whatever she hoped to find there, she should have known better. From the moment her boots stepped across the threshold, she knew it was all wrong. Someone else had been living here, even before this mysterious mass exodus. There was nothing left of the Moya family. No bright quilt on her mother''s bed.
No flowers arranged in a jar on the table. No cinnamon stick above the stove, waiting to be shaved into corn porridge. Instead, there were bodies. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Covered respectfully, but piled and abandoned. Lucha ran back to the doorway, her stomach heaving. Lis is safe, she told herself. She''s at the sanctuary with Río.
With Paz. She drew the image of her sister around her like that quilt. Bright-eyed, green-robed, glowing with purpose as Lucha had left her. She was, at this moment, being educated in the healing and fighting arts of the acolytes of Almudena. She was safe. Safe. And their mother? She had made her choice long before this place gained new occupants. Lucha had never been able to change her mind, even in the end.
Lucha had made her peace with it. This was no time to unearth a hope that had nearly killed her. As she headed north once more, Lucha''s every nerve jangled in her body. Robado had been a dangerous and awful place for its whole sordid history. Its inhabitants were used to exploitation, addiction, cruelty, and worse. But the bodies in the housing.