Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas #1)(29)

Nova closes his eyes and leans his head back, his face toward the open sky. It really is beautiful, like a black-and-white photo. I inhale the cool, salty air, and allow myself to sink into the reality of this plane.

It startles me when I look at both ends of the horizon. The moon and the sun are out at the same time. On one end, the sun is a white circle hidden behind the overcast sky. On the other side of the horizon is a sideways, slender crescent moon, the points facing up. Something swells inside me, a faded memory of bedtime stories about them reaching across the sky to join together—La Mama and El Papa. I touch the moon necklace between my collarbones.

“Is that our moon?”

Nova stands beside me. His boots crunch the gravel. “Yeah.”

“But that’s not our sun?”

He shakes his head. “The passage of ‘time’ is marked by the movement of the moon and sun across the sky. They travel from one end of the horizon to the other, bypassing each other. That’s a cycle, what we’d call a day. Every cycle, the moon and sun get closer and closer to each other.”

“Like the story of La Mama and El Papa traveling across the galaxy to find each other.” I used to love that story as a kid. The two major Deos were once separated by their enemies, and so they had to reach across the heavens, creating night and day.

“Exactly,” he says. “When they eclipse, that’s when the Tree of Souls takes all of its energy and metabolizes it. Then, the Devourer feeds on the power for herself.”

“How do you know that?”

“You’d know too if you went to Lady’s classes.” He takes out the map and flips it over. “Also, it says so right here.”

There are a few notes scrawled in nearly illegible handwriting. I wonder who it belongs to. My father? Aunt Ro? Maybe Mama Juanita. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table when she thought everyone was asleep. She had a cigarillo in one hand and her fountain pen in the other. Usually, a bruja writes their initials after an entry in the Book of Cantos. The map of Los Lagos, and the notes scrawled on the back, are unfinished, anonymous.

“Wait,” I say. “If the Devourer is siphoning out the energy, wouldn’t that kill the land?”

Nova stares at the shore across the silver river, clutching his prex. He rubs the blue stones one at a time. My mother does that when she’s uncertain and when she’s praying.

“I don’t know, Ladybird. What I do know is the moon and sun are still far apart. We have time. We’ll have to see how fast the cycles pass to mark our pace.”

“You can say day, you know.”

He shakes his head and walks west.

I start to follow, but I see something moving in the water. I walk to the edge of the riverbank. My boots kick gravel into a current so fast it doesn’t even ripple. I try to find a sense of calm in the rushing water’s silver waves. I reach my hands to touch the salty water, but Nova yanks me back. I fall on my butt.

“What the hell?”

His face pales as my foot dangles over the river, silver waves licking at the tip of my boots. He grabs me again and drags me back a few feet.

“Don’t touch things just because they’re shiny.”

“I wasn’t.” I push myself off the ground and dust the moist earth from my pants.

He makes a deep guttural noise that makes me think of my neighbor’s pit bull.

“Do me a favor. Let’s have the rain forest that sets itself on fire be our warning for the rest of our time here. Don’t touch anything. You don’t know what kind of water this is. You’re not back home, Alex. We’re in another dimension. If I can’t make that clear for you, then you’re dead, and I’m dead with you.”

I cringe at the smell of burning rubber. I look down to find a hole at the top of my boot where the silver water splashed me. Right. Don’t touch anything.

“Welcome to Los Lagos, Ladybird,” Nova grumbles as he leads the way. “Come on.”

? ? ?

We walk at a safe middle distance between the edge of the rain forest and the edge of the silver river. The clouds thicken in dark-gray mounds above us. Every shadow, movement, and splash makes me want to jump out of my skin. What else is going to get set on fire? Is everything here made to kill? I take off my shirt because of the thick humidity and stuff it in our backpack. In minutes, I sweat right through my tank top.

“Did you see that?” I point to the water. “There’s someone in there. I saw it before.”

“You saw what that water did to your boot. I don’t think it can sustain life.”

I know what I saw but I drop it. A light rain starts to fall, which makes our walk more slippery.

Nova searches the horizon with a frustrated scowl. “The ferryman is supposed to be somewhere here.”

If the water burned a hole in my boot, how does it not burn a boat?

As the rain gets progressively harder, the rain forest to our left shudders as lightning strikes.

“There!” Nova points ahead.

I grab hold of him and together we run, trying not to slip as the earth softens under our boots. We take turns almost falling, but when the golden glint of something bobbing in the water becomes clearer, I’m the one pulling him.

Disappointment comes swiftly. “That isn’t a ferry. It’s an oversize rowboat.”

“It’s a small Viking ship,” he says. But even he has to admit it wasn’t what we were expecting. “This can’t be right.”