He looked to be a few years older than Talia and not particularly dangerous. Unless he had a gun, but from her position as his passenger, she could feel every crease of his clothing, see down the seat of his jeans, and was pretty sure he wasn’t armed.

The girls in the facility said if you are ever attacked or need to kill a guy but have no weapon, shove your fingers into his eye sockets and twist them like corkscrews. Don’t be shaken if you take out an eyeball. Those things are not as well attached as one might think. Doing this will disable the guy so you can get in a kick to his scrotum. Once he’s doubled over, grab his penis and pull, and when you have him on the ground like a dying roach you can reach for a rock or some other weighty object to drop on his head. This is assuming you don’t have a knife. But if you do, it’s best to try to gash the throat instead of aiming for the body because between ribs and fat and muscle, wounding to kill with a blade is a gamble you’d better not take. It’s much more effective to bash his skull.

None of the girls were full-fledged murderers yet. Those kids were sent somewhere else, housed in a building with no prayer of escape. And should one get close to fleeing, they might be strangled or drowned in a bucket of water and have it labeled an accident or suicide. But some of the girls at the prison school were definite contenders for serious miscreant behavior. Not premeditated like a sicario, but potentially taking a life if sufficiently set off. A couple of girls had tried to kill their fathers, stepfathers, or uncles for molesting them, and who could blame them? One girl stabbed a teacher. She told Talia she couldn’t stand sitting in that class, listening to that arrogant perra lecture for another minute. But as the girls said, it’s not easy to kill by knife, so the teacher survived just fine, and the girl was sentenced to a year on the mountain.

The guy with the motorcycle didn’t ask Talia her name. He’d been calling her ni?a since they met. He said his was Andrés but everyone called him Aguja. She checked his arms and neck for needle tracks to see if that was how he got such a gross nickname but they were clean.

He leaned his head back and asked how far she wanted to go. He could leave her at the gas station up ahead or drive a bit farther if she wanted.

“Keep going,” she said.

“What’s your final destination?”

“Bogotá.”

“I can’t take you that far, but I can probably get you to Barbosa.”

They settled into the hum and pressure of the road. If she hadn’t doused Horacio with cooking oil, it would be just another school day for Talia. She was a good student, but the classes at the prison school were dumbed down and she refined her skill of keeping an alert face while falling into a trance, imagining her life once she got out of the country. Going to a new American school. Speaking En-glish. Enjoying life with her mother and siblings. She didn’t tell any girls on the mountain she had a ticket to the United States waiting for her. They’d gotten to be friendly, but some were rageful enough to sabotage the escape plan out of spite. Trust no one. That’s what her father always said. Trust only family, if you’ve got family to trust.

* * *

She didn’t remember much about her early childhood. It only came into focus around age four or five, when her father began appearing at Perla’s house more often, asking to see Talia. The rangy, sad-faced man, similar to the ones they found sleeping outside the doorway in the mornings before Perla opened the lavandería. Mauro always wore the same clothes and usually looked like he’d just woken up. Long unwashed hair. Walnut skin chafed by the highland winds. Still, there was something handsome about him. She hadn’t yet learned to be critical or judgmental. She looked at her father as a shining star, early inklings of what her mother might have seen in him when she loved him, before she let him go.

She remembers the day he showed up in new clothes, hair cut to his ears. Eyes bright and centered, not stray bullets shooting around the room like before. Perla let him into the living room, and they sat, the three of them, as if just introduced. Talia was seven that day, and Mauro made a big deal of it. He told her seven was a magic number and it would be the year that determined her destiny.

Perla said not to fill her mind with such nonsense. She didn’t like that when they started spending time together, Mauro would share with Talia stories from the Knowledge about the origin of the world that contradicted Perla’s imperial versions; that the first people were created not by God in the form of Adam and Eve or apes who learned to walk upright, but by the moon who put the earth into her vagina and gave birth to a son and a daughter. But even before the first humans, there was the darkness before light and the first beings the Creator, Chiminigagua, made were two black birds that spread wind from their beaks and from the wind came the breath of life that illuminated the world.

And that from the lake Iguaque, the great mother Bachué emerged holding a boy by the hand, and when the boy was grown she made him her husband and gave birth to his children, traveling the earth, leaving daughters and sons like stardust wherever they went. This was how the world was populated, Mauro said. Bachué and her husband educated their progenies, taught them the laws of humanity and the ceremonies to live and remember them by, and when they were old, they returned to the sapphire lake, transformed into snakes, and disappeared into the water.

Mauro appreciated that these stories offered explanations for his being, reminded him there was another land, a better one of divine logic wrapped inside this professed tierra de Colón, that he wasn’t pacing the earth blind as he often felt and Creation provided clues that made paths clearer, as simple as the blackbird song that announces oncoming rain and the whistles of the Andean sparrow that signal the clouds will soon part. And also because they were stories his mother had learned from her parents before leaving their ancestral home in Guachetá to find work in the city, and were the only inheritance she’d left Mauro before pushing him to the streets.

Talia once saw a movie about a dead grandmother who visited her family members from the afterlife. She came to them each night, stood by their beds, and gave instructions and advice for how they should go on in the world of the living without her. When Perla started forgetting, her breath already something she could only hold steady with the help of plastic tubes up her nose, Talia told herself she didn’t need to worry because her grandmother would still come see her after they buried her.

Mauro was living with them for a few years by then. Talia knew she would be safe with him. But she would miss Perla’s face, her voice, the way she talked about Elena and Talia as if they were almost the same person so Talia could feel connected to her mother even though she had no memory of her touch or embrace.

But after Perla died, she never came to see Talia, even as Talia kept vigil and whispered her grandmother’s name until she fell asleep. They celebrated a Mass for her in a church and Talia saved a space for Perla beside her in the pew. She set a plate for her at every meal and cleaned her room as if she might walk through the door at any moment. She recited Perla’s favorite psalms, sang the songs she’d taught her, and when her grandmother didn’t come, Talia sat before the large crucifix hanging in the foyer, staring up at the son of God—his glass eyes, that mane of real human hair—touching the five wounds the way Perla did every day before she left the house.

Mauro told Talia their Muisca ancestors believed the soul leaves the body at death and begins a long journey through gorges and valleys of golden and black soil, crossing wide rivers until it reaches the kingdom of the dead at the center of the earth, beginning a new immortal existence that’s not so different from this mortal life in the upper world.

Talia concluded that her grandmother was still in transit, among the hordes of the world’s newly dead, and if the traffic in the underworld was anything like rush hour in Bogotá, it would take her a long while to arrive. As soon as Perla sat down to rest, she would have time to visit her family.

Since there was no money for a cemetery plot with a proper tomb, Perla was cremated. Mauro sent the ashes to Elena in a package that was lost in the mail for three months before it arrived. During those months, Talia imagined her grandmother’s ashes traveling the world, flying over oceans and jungles and deserts, seeing things they’d only seen on television, the world outside the barrio she’d hardly ever left.