The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (22 page)

“Can you talk to it like you did with the Xolotl?” José María said.

“We can try,” I said. “But I have to tell you something about how I was finally able to talk to it.”

“Shoot.”

“It requires a blood sacrifice. He cut me, and he cut himself too, with his knife. He made us go through a blood exchange. Once I had his blood in me, we could communicate. Brings a whole new meaning to the human sacrifices of the Aztecs.”

José María shivered, and for once, he didn’t have a sardonic comeback. He was spooked.

The butterflies’ shine blinded me, just like most colors were hurting my single good eye lately. When the colors flooded my vision this way, I sometimes had to lie down from the migraines they induced. But I was learning to cope with the headaches. And I needed to see these green walls in order to try out my next idea.

I may have been damaged by the memories of the bloodshed I witnessed in Millennium Park and the world without light called Mictlán, but I wasn’t stupid. I had paid attention to what I learned in Mictlán.

I withdrew the obsidian knife from my backpack.

“Where’d you get that?” said my brother.

“Mom gave it to me.”

“Impossible! It’s supposed to be up in Minerva’s house.”

“You know about it?”

“Dad showed it to me last year when we helped her organize boxes up there.”

“So, besides organizing our attic three times over, he’s also organizing Minerva’s house?”

“You know that’s what he does when he’s stressed out,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“I wish I had an activity like organizing boxes for when shit gets heavy,” I said.

José María blinked and adjusted the sleeves on his T-shirt. He didn’t seem to buckle under
any
pressure.

We moved close to the wall and I plunged the knife into it. The dome grunted, and I detected its own musical voice. It made the tiny chirps we had heard before as we walked through its length. The wall of butterflies split under the blade, and black blood ran in a single droplet down the cut I made in the wall.

But the structure held strong. I tried peering into the cut, but all I saw were more butterflies.

Good.

José María cringed.

“You know I don’t like blood,” he said. The color drained from his face, and squatted on his haunches and panted.

“Relax,” I told him.

The knife’s jade handle felt right for the palm of my hand. I had enjoyed plunging its sharp edge into the living wall.

I took a deep breath and I rolled up the sleeve of my T-shirt. I put the blade on the meaty part of my shoulder, and I sliced across the muscle. Heat bloomed in a straight line on my skin.

Now that my eyes sensed colors so intensely, the red liquid that came up to the surface of the cut looked like molten lava. It ran fast, moving down my brown arm and onto my hand. I wiped as much of it as I could with my free hand, and when it was bathed in red, I plunged it into the cut I made into the wall.

A flash of green light blinded me, and then a thousand black spots detonated in my brain.

I waited a second, and soon, I lost track of my body, but I felt the dome speak to me in a skittering musical voice. And I spoke to it in blood, the way the Xolotl taught me. Speaking in blood allowed me to think in English, while my lips spoke words in another language I did not know.

“She speaks,” the dome said.

“Hi,” I said.

A hand yanked at my T-shirt sleeve.

“Oh, no, you dork,” José María said. “You’re not leaving me out of the conversation this time.”

“Just a second,” I said to the green wall, and turned to my brother. “You sure? You don’t like blood and—”

“I know, but some shit is worth it,” he said, and he yanked the knife from me. His eyes watered at the sight of my own bloody skin, and for a second, I thought he might cry, just like he used to when he got vaccinated as a toddler.
 

He sliced himself across his hand, and he jammed it into the cut I had carved in the dome.

He’s so reckless,
I thought.

My brother’s scrawny body jolted, and for a moment, I thought he might be having a seizure. He arched his back, and his eyes took on a watery appearance. And then he did cry a little. His skin flickered into a darker shade of brown, and then it came back to its original color.

José María withdrew his hand and sat down cross legged in front of the wall. He pressed his hand into a fist, and kept it as far from his sight as he could. I knew that if he saw more blood, he’d faint.

“Well, aren’t you a little chatterbox?” he said, and the skittering chirps from the dome turned into words.

“Humans,” the dome said. “We meet.”

“We need to go farther,” I said to the dome.

“You need to continue onward through the gate, then,” said the dome. “My path is free.”

“There are no doors here,” I said.

“Yes, there are,” said the voice. “You are standing in front of all of them.”

“How many are there?” I said.

The high notes of the wall turned into a screech, and silence fell on the circular room. For a moment, I felt as if the presence that lived in the wall had gone away.

“Don’t make her angry,” José María said. “You gotta learn how to talk
her
way.”

“Can you tell us who made you?” I said.

“Indeed. The Black Wings made me,” said the dome.

“My mother told me a wizard made you.” I said. A flash of purple swelled through the dome.

“Yes, the Black Wings called us to this place. You call him wizard, but my name for him is Black Wings. He built this structure, and the dome invoked my spirit to inhabit it. If you look down, you can see the footsteps the Black Wings left.”

On the other side of the dome’s circular floor, I spotted them. Black indentations made by men’s dress shoes. I guessed they must have been a size ten.

“And where is the wizard now?” I said.

“You don’t understand, do you?” the dome said, and I felt afraid.

“Understand what?” I said.

“Time will press down on you.”

“Can you repeat that?” I said.

“Time will crush you, and then you will see how there are beings that watch our every move. You will learn this. And it will be then that
he
will find you.”

“Who?” José María and I said at the same time.

“The wizard who goes by the name of Black Wings will,” the dome said. “He will find you one day.”

I didn’t like this riddle. José María held up his index finger to signal for me to wait. He was going to say something.

“Did the Black Wings wizard travel to Mictlán through your gate?” José María asked.

The wall’s chirps softened. It looked like the wound in my brother’s hand was clotting up, and now that he felt a little more confident, he put his hand on the wall. The butterflies remained frozen in their catatonic state, but José Maria looked pleased.

“Your male counterpart is clever,” the dome said to me. Its voice flowed out from the walls slowly, like a river of honey. “Very clever. No, the wizard Black Wings never reached Mictlán through this tunnel. He didn’t have enough power to go there. After he built this tunnel and dome, he returned to the world above. I have been abandoned down here alone for years in this kingdom of water.”

“Did he go by the name Guillermo?” I asked.

The dome hissed so loudly, I felt the sound brush my shoulders. It sounded like the word “yes.”

“And why would the wizard leave you down here?” I asked.

“To leave his legacy behind. He thought he would be remembered if he made me. Most men seek this type of legacy. This is why they build temples, towers and domes. To cheat time. That wizard used me for that purpose.”

The dome spoke to me through images then, and it showed me a sequence of them, one after the other. They were images of eggs, thousands of them, colored blue, like the color of the sky. More images followed: water, stones in water, and then a coiled nest that looked like a loop of ropes, sitting on the floor of Lake Michigan.

“Oh my god,” I said to José María. “She thinks—“

“Yes, she’s definitely a she, isn’t she?” he said.

“But how could she think that she is a female? I mean, she’s a—”

“But why not?”

“Clara, the dome thinks she’s a snake,” José María said.

Now I understood what the dome was trying to tell me. This long butterfly tunnel was under the delusion that she was a snake. A female snake.

“But who are we to say what she is or she isn’t?” my brother said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know at all.”

I supposed my brother was right. But how could this thing made of butterflies think she was something or someone else?

The dome sparkled in green and violet, and then it went silent again.

“What happened?” I said.

“She’s straining. It takes too much effort to talk through the dome,” José María said. “That’s what she said.”

“I didn’t hear her say anything.”

“Well, she said it to
me, reina
. Through its blood. This bloodletting language works after all.”

José María’s been having a separate conversation with the dome all this time.

“She said we have to go now,” José María said. “She’ll be waiting for us to come back through when we’re done, but for now, talking is too difficult for her.”

“How do we enter the gate, then?” I said.

“She told me. Like this!” José María said, as he grabbed me by the wrist. We sprinted toward the center of the floor.

“No, no, no!” I said. I wanted my little squirrel of a brother to stop, to stop and think, to wait just one second—

“Jump!” my brother commanded, and I used all the strength in my legs to leap. We jumped.

In midair, the dome’s voice filled our ears with a long, deep sound. As our feet approached the ground, the butterflies that formed the walls of this place shifted and folded like origami, and before I knew it, millions of insects rushed toward us, devouring us in green. As their tiny wings fluttered around us, I spotted white light bursting through the spaces between each butterfly.

And then, in the way in which my mind had exploded once as I had traveled through a glass door at the Aragon, my vision got pulled apart until I burst. This time, I fell into a sea of white light, and soon, I forgot the sensation of my brother’s arm wrapped around my wrist.

I moved through the gate and beyond.

Before I reached Mictlán, I glimpsed three cities. Ever since I saw those shocking cities, my life has never been the same.

It was a short journey, but as I soared through a white expanse, I caught glimpses through my peripheral vision. Though I could not see José María next to me nor feel his hand in mine, his presence moved alongside me. It was like seeing scenery roll by from a train, except that each image floated near me in a flurry of music, building up in my ears, then fading fast.

The first city was not much more than an image of flat lines that rose like a wall before me, and each of the lines went on forever, like a fence that ascended into infinity. The music in my ears informed me that the lines were only a protective structure, like a wall. The lines did not look solid but thin and ethereal, like gas. Beneath the lines lay the city, gnarled and rusty, like a junk heap. For a second, I caught a glimpse of an animal’s face staring at me from one of the towers in that city.
 

And then that city was gone.

I soared faster now, but I didn’t move forward. Instead, I twisted sideways, as if I might be expanding like a balloon. As I lost all sense of my body, I saw it: in the distance, a new city lay suspended in the air. The city was completely deserted but decked out in the most lavish gold architecture I had ever seen in my life. The metropolis was shaped like a nautilus shell, and it hung in space like a miniature planet.
 

It was deserted.

I felt the loneliness inside its steeples and its towers, and I felt very afraid.

And then that city disappeared, too.

The whiteness shrank, and I shrank with it. Soon, I was tiny, microscopic, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted four pairs of eyes watching me. They belonged to a creature that looked hundreds of feet long, snakelike and watery. The animal’s eight eyes emitted a cymbal sound, and then the animal crawled up a structure built like a spider web. I understood then that the web structure was a city, too, and that other eight-eyed creatures lived there. Hiding inside the tiny houses, I spotted little human figures with tiny pinpoints of light as eyes. They were watching me. I knew this, because I caught them staring at me from the corners. Soon, millions of eyes were looking at me. Both the animals and the humanoids took me in, analyzed me, sought me… They blinked in unison, and they spoke to me.
Come join us,
they said to me.

The sounds died, and then the web structure blew apart, as if made of dust. I had no body and no face, and yet I hung in this fast-moving white place.

And then, the white space of the gate spat me out into Mictlán.