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So much death.
And now I had caused it.
Guilt stabbed into my chest as I tried to run away from the memory of taking a life.I let the guilt tear my heart to shreds, but didn’t stop.
Ducking into the shadows, I pressed up against the side of a house. The walls were thin enough that I could hear laughter inside. I reached up and touched my uncovered ears to ensure I hadn’t lost the remaining gold earring.
The laughter warmed me from the inside out, and I found it harder to move by the second. Not because I was weary. I had once thought that living on Antonio’s estate, Rosa de Oro, had been lonely, but I was wrong. Now, I was good and truly a solitary warrior, seeking a false sense of company in an alley.
Standing there, surrounded by the echoes of families and friends, I analyzed my options for the hundredth time: bribe one of the exporter freight captains, or find the Comerciante Nocturno the Dreg had told me about.
Approaching a freight captain while dressed like an old Guardia and bearing gold and diamonds would raise suspicion. I didn’t know if there would be one corrupt enough to consider it. Yet, I knew that Comerciantes Nocturnos had a network of contacts which spanned far and wide, potentially catching a few government workers. They were also grotesquely wealthy because of their heinous exports, wealthy enough to buy actual gold from a strange young woman who appeared on their doorstep.
Sweat blossomed in my palms.
Going to find this man would be one of the most idiotic choices I’d ever make.
But caged animals fought back.
I had no more choices.
The best some Trabajadores and Artistas could do was provide enough to keep their family members from the ugly Mercado Nocturno.
No family was around to provide such luxury for me. I took a deep breath.
As if on cue, Antonio’s voice came into my head.
“Carmen, you’re being an idiot.”
This time, it didn’t feel like mere imagination. I could feel his potent presence, feel the warmth that always seemed to seep out of him and into my skin.
“If you were here, maybe I would actually listen to you,” I whispered into the air.
Then a door opened and shut.
I jerked off the wall where I had been ‘not resting’ and snuck further back into the shadows of the narrow space between houses.
“Ya llegamos al momento donde nos decimos adios,” two drunken men sang.
More laughter peeled from inside the house.
“¡Yo solo trato ser igual que tu conmigo!” a feminine voice from the inside shouted in response.
More laughter.
A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth while they sung a popular cantina ballad about heartbreak, something the citizens of Arrebol knew intimately.
Another part of me hurt, lurking in the shadows, groveling for some scrap of human connection from people I didn’t know.
I needed to get out of here.
Taking a deep breath, I tore myself away from the happiness and continued along the shadows between houses and crowded apartment buildings while searching for the elusive symbol. I hugged my arms to lock in any warmth I still had in me and crept closer to the houses so I could peer behind the winter-barren plants.
I walked up and down one street with flickering lamps overhead. Then I walked down another. And another. Before I knew it, I had gone down almost every street in this district.
My eyelids dropped, and I shivered as I shuffled. Then I tripped over a cracked piece of pavement.
I cursed and stumbled into a defective lamppost for support. It was a fight just to get my body to obey.
