The landing came hard, and I tumbled several meters before my roll found its end in a prickly bush. At least I hadn't broken something. I stood and brushed myself off. Far off, the campfire still glowed, half a kilometer from the base of the mountain but crisp as crystal in the clear air. I looked back to where I had come from and found only empty sky.
All right. No, I could do this. I had made up my mind.
I took a deep breath, washing my senses in the mountain air. That prickle of magic that had opened the window for me would be my last until I had a grounding better than the one I'd been using. I was not walking further into a war with Coyol unarmed. If I could gain control of my fire magic, I could keep myself, Jem and Emma all safe from whatever came next.
Something to be proud of. Something to love.
I hiked my bag over my shoulder and set out down the rocks.
The fire had simmered down to coals by the time I neared the camp. It reminded me of the hunting or fishing settlements that members of Grillo Negro would set up on lengthy trips. Those were temporary, so this one was probably connected to something larger, too. I stumbled towards it. Only when I reached flat ground had it sunk in just how exhausted I was. It was long past midnight, and I'd been on my feet since early morning after a terrible night's sleep. Those dreams felt like years ago.
Was I really about to meet other people? After years of imagining this moment, it felt surreal. Like I had fallen asleep on the couches after all, and was dreaming this walk where the ground stretched away before me, demanding a seemingly endless number of steps. Other people. What would they look like? Would they even be friendly? What would I say?
Before my tumbling mind found answers, I was suddenly close: a hundred meters out at best. My steps froze as a dog's growl rippled the darkness. It barked, and two others joined it. Shadowy figures around the fire scrambled to their feet.
"I'm safe!" I called, one hand on my knife in case I had to fight. I repeated in English, then Nahuatl. "I'm safe!"
Someone called the dogs in Nahuatl. The growling stopped, and a four-pawed shape emerged from the darkness as I awaited further instructions. The dog trotted circles around me, then sniffed my jacket hem. It wagged its tail. I wondered if a trace of Xolotl or his dogs lingered on my clothes.
"You can come," called a woman's voice. Someone else threw wood on the fire.
I walked the rest of the way to the camp with the dog trotting at my side. Two men and three women stood in the firelight with their hands on their weapons. Their eyes widened when they saw me.
"Gods above!" a woman murmured. "You are not from the village."
I swallowed hard. "I'm from a village. Are you as well?"
"From Tepepia. Who are you?"
Their hands had eased, so I took mine off my knife. "Adriana Atenco Mendoza, from Grillo Negro. I'm lost."
"Well, I can see that much." The woman looked me up and down. She was very short, with a round face both warm and stern. Her hair, like mine and all of her companions', was thick, black, and straight. Hers was braided to her waist. "Come. We can talk around the fire."
They hemmed me in as I followed her to the coarse furs laid out around the glow of their campfire. I took a seat on the bare ground, but was waved up again. One of the men brought me a sitting-fur of my own.
"I'm Izel," said the woman when I had settled myself. The others followed with their names. "How did you lose your village? Are they nearby?"
"Not nearby." I decided to stay as close to the truth as I could. I couldn't keep a lie straight through the slow spin that my body's want for sleep had put on my brain. "My two friends and I were sent to investigate smoke... a town that caught the disease and burned. But the disease wasn't gone entirely. We were split up, and I had to run before it caught up to me."
There were murmurs around the circle. Two dogs prodded my jacket with their muzzles. I held out a hand to one, and she licked it.
"Do you think your friends are still alive?" said Izel.
"I think so. I was closest, so they had a head start when I shouted for them to run. But there were coywolves in the area, too, so they might have had to go far to find safety."
That was all true, if incomplete, and I let my face show it. Izel mulled it over. She nodded. "Tenoch, keep watch for the two. Adriana, you must be tired. Would you stay the night? We can talk more tomorrow."
"Thank you."
They rearranged themselves to make space for me near the fire. I crawled into my sleeping furs and was out in seconds.
The camp packed up the next morning to return to their village: they were, as I had suspected, on the tail end of a multi-day hunting trip.
Izel fell into step beside me and wasted no time in picking up where we had left off. "You said your village's name was Grillo Negro? What is its story?"
It was an odd question, but perhaps the most relevant one given the circumstances. I told her about the founders and their escape from Petram Radix, then Grillo Negro's four-generation journey south in search of other life. She nodded throughout, like she understood.
"And what about Tepepia?" I asked when we had chatted about my family and hers—I reminded her of one of her daughters, who she called a restless adventurer. Her village's name, meanwhile, meant They guard the hill, and I was curious to know where it came from. "What is its story?"
"Once, a whole village." She shielded her eyes against the light grey sky. Its smoky layers seemed thinner than they had been last time I'd been on the ground. "Then, a mine. A company from the north found metals in the mountains, dug them out and left again, leaving the forest wounded and the village fractured. Half left. We stayed. We rebuilt, slowly. When another company tried to come back, we kept them out. But there are things you can't protect a mountain from."
"The fire?"
"The smoke. We were too far for the fire. The smoke brought the cold, and the forest died. People did, too. We had to leave."
Izel spoke like she herself had been there, and the faraway look in her eyes could have convinced me. But the forests had crumbled just years after Fuego covered the sun. Tepepia's escape must have been just as long ago as Grillo Negro's. I was not sure what I had been expecting from another village once I found one, but it had not been another story of escape.
Izel shook herself from the memory. A village memory. "It's past. Now we are the people who guard the desert. Maybe one day the mountain will support us again."
A shout from a man beside us revealed that the village was ahead. The world warped as we walked towards it. I was almost sure we were back in Grillo Negro. Antelope-skin tents, domed and flap-fronted, blended into a backdrop of low hills and scruffy vegetation. Cookfires at the village center burned low and hot. Men and women soaked and ground maize, handled fish and game, stretched furs, or sewed them into clothing. A cluster of women twisted baskets from sheafs of grass. More worked on a ring of backstrap looms identical to those I had seen in the village in my fire-cave visions. Their laughing conversation could have belonged to my aunts and cousins.
Heads swivelled as people realized I was not a familiar face. Children ducked behind their parents, teenagers elbowed their friends, and adults lurked with scarcely veiled curiosity. I received greetings and questions that Izel fielded for me. The fact that Grillo Negro would have responded the same way only heightened the parallel.
I could find only two differences from Grillo Negro as I scoured every edge and corner of the village. The first was the children. From the newborn in a sling on a mother's chest to others who looked ready to celebrate their quinceañera, there were kids of all ages in Tepepia. My heart decided a running pace wasn't enough and took up a drum's pound against the inside of my chest. Could this be my grounding? This village had what Grillo Negro did not.
The only other difference was that nobody here had curly hair.
I began to see Grillo Negro everywhere. In people's greetings and exclamations, some of which I now recognized as Nahuatl, not Spanish, woven into Grillo Negro's vocabulary. In the pat of a tortilla and the pattern of clothing. In the smells of cooking and the sounds of storytelling from an older woman seated before a veritable flock of children. Had the two villages converged on so many mannerisms by chance? Or did the desert have its own way of shaping people?
Or maybe it was that and more. I had heard before that many of Grillo Negro's founders were from the mountains, or had ancestors who were mountain people. Izel had told me that the old Tepepia had been one village among many, scattered throughout the old country Mexico's mountain ranges. What if it was those villages that had shared mannerisms? What if Grillo Negro's were not so newly invented after all?
What if this was the world before?