Chapter 2

Feed. Need. Blood. Now.

Yeah, she’d heard it the first time. And the second. And every thirty seconds since she’d started walking.

Shut up. I’m working on it. Your fuckin’ nagging isn’t going to make food appear.

The desert stretched ahead in high definition, every lizard heartbeat, every insect wing-stroke, every chemical trace the wind carried across the scrubland. Someone had cranked all the settings to maximum and forgotten to include an off switch.

She’d been walking maybe twenty minutes since leaving Ah Puch standing there with his bullshit ancient wisdom and his predatory male gaze. Twenty minutes of sandals crunching through dust and gravel, torn crop top doing absolutely nothing against the desert cold, thermal foil shroud crackling with each step like the world’s loudest survival blanket.

She looked like a burrito made by someone who’d given up halfway through.

The hunger sat in her stomach like broken glass, sharp and constant and getting worse. Not the hollow ache of missing meals. She’d known that feeling her whole life, from Father’s “discipline” to Raúl’s “cost-saving measures.” This was different. Deeper. Like her body was screaming for something it didn’t have words for.

Blood, apparently. Because of course.

Here we fucking are.

The desert was cooler than it should be. Or maybe she was just colder than she used to be. Hard to tell when your body temperature matched the fucking dirt.

She walked north because that’s what you did when you escaped. You went north, toward the imaginary line where things were supposed to get better. They never did, but people kept walking anyway. She’d learned that watching the other girls during the crossing. Hope was the real killer, not the desert.

She stopped near some tall cactus and listened to the night. Traffic hum from the distant highway. Coyote yips. The particular silence that meant predators were hunting.

The desert at this hour was a frequency she was only beginning to learn to read, the way the creosote carried the particular dryness of midnight heat stored all day in the dust and released now in slow exhales, the scatter-pattern of small heartbeats in the scrub moving in arcs that bent around her shadow the way they had never bent around a shadow before, the chemical trail of every living thing that had crossed this ground in the last six hours written in the air like a map she could feel on the inside of her dead lungs.

Join the club.

That’s when she heard the footsteps.

Heavy boots. Male gait, compensating for an old injury in the left leg. The jingle of metal, belt, keys, probably a weapon. And underneath it all, a scent that made her dead blood sing with recognition.

Of course. Of course he came. That was the whole point.

The footsteps came from the south. Heavy boots, confident trajectory. He wasn’t searching randomly. He walked straight in, the way a man walks toward a dot on a screen that has finally stopped moving.

She pulled the chip out of her pocket, the little plastic eye she had pried off the packet back in the dirt where she woke and carried with her ever since. Still ticking. Still red. Still telling whoever sat on the far end exactly where his merchandise had gone to ground. She had hauled it the whole way for this, because bait you throw away is just litter.

Right on time. Come collect what you paid for, cabron.

She closed her fist and crushed it. Plastic splintered. The red light died against her palm. The dot on his screen would wink out right here, and a man this close did not need a screen anymore; he had her footprints and a bellyful of confidence. Let him finish the walk on those.

No beacon screaming my spot while I eat. One guest is plenty.

“¡Muñeca!” The voice cut through the night. “¿Dónde estás, mi amor? I know you’re here. The signal stopped right here.”

Raúl’s voice. Same tone Father used. Same bullshit wrapped in fake affection.

Here we go.

“Come on, baby girl. Don’t make this harder than it has to be. You know you belong to me until we reach the delivery point. And those drugs... ¡Ay, muñeca! You’ve cost me a lot of money running off like this.”

Babydoll set her back against the ocotillo before he cleared the rocks, the way she always put something solid behind her, the one thing in her she had never learned to switch off. Nothing got to stand behind her. Not a man, not a door, not the dark. The spines dragged along her spine and shoulder blades as she pressed in, and she felt every one of them, fine and sharp and catching at her skin, each one a small exact pressure her dead nerves logged and set aside, the hurt that should have come with them simply gone. A wall of thorns was still a wall. She would take the thorns over an open back any night of whatever this was now. The shadows and her stillness were the rest of her cover. The hunger twisted sharper.

She had learned stillness from the coyotes during the crossing, the kind that settles into a body already committed to what comes next, waiting only for the moment to move, and she was still now in exactly that way, lungs holding air she no longer needed, everything quiet inside her except the hunger and the certainty.

My body knows what it wants. And he just delivered himself.

“I can smell you, mi muñeca linda. That cheap perfume you wear... it doesn’t hide the fear, you know. Never did.”

Closer now. Maybe fifty yards. She could hear everything, the wheeze from too many cigarettes, the limp, the metallic click of the pistol shifting in his waistband.

He’s armed. I have fangs and anger. No idea if that’s enough.

“But don’t worry. I’m not angry. Well, not too angry. You’re young, stupid. Girls like you always think you can run. But where you gonna go, huh? No papers, no money, no family who wants you back.”

The words were supposed to hurt. Aimed at every weak spot. But Isabella would have believed them. Babydoll’s irritation answered instead.

Yeah, yeah. Heard it. Moving on.

“Besides, I been good to you. Fed you, protected you from the guys who wanted a turn. Wasn’t like I passed you around to just anyone. You think you would’ve made it this far without my protection? ¡Por favor! You should be grateful, muñeca. Grateful and obedient.”

Grateful.

Grateful he didn’t share me MORE. How generous. What a hero.

The hunger spiked. Raúl’s approach suddenly felt less like a threat and more like takeout showing up at her door.

The night carried everything he had eaten and everything he had been doing since before dark, the cigarettes and the tequila and the particular sour note of a man who had been driving for hours, his pulse steady at fifty yards, no idea yet that he should be afraid, each footfall telegraphing the limp he’d carried since Hermosillo and never seen a doctor for, his body a system of readable patterns she could now parse the way she had once parsed client faces for the moment compliance became unavoidable.

“¡Muñeca!” Sharper now. “Stop playing games. I can see your footprints. You think you’re clever, but you’re just a stupid little girl who doesn’t know when she’s beaten.”

Thirty yards. His heartbeat loud enough to count. She could smell the adrenaline starting to spike.

About time someone else felt uncomfortable.

“Found you.”

The flashlight beam caught her. Blonde hair reflecting the glow, foil shroud making her look like a ghost.

“¡Ay, Dios mío!” He laughed. “Look at you, muñeca. All dressed up like some kind of vagrant. You had me worried there for a minute.”

“You came all this way.” She made her voice do the old thing, the soft thing, the thing that had bought her another hour more times than she could count. “For me. That’s almost sweet.”

Penis or fists. That is all a man ever is, the two dials, and you read which one is turned up and you work that one. He is turned up on penis. Always was. Easiest kind.

She let the foil slide off her shoulders, crumpling to the dirt, and pulled the torn crop top over her head and dropped it. Topless in the flashlight beam, desert dirt on her, blonde hair throwing the light back, and she did not cover an inch of herself, because covering was for girls who still thought the body was theirs to lose. She had stopped thinking that a long time ago. She was about to find out what it was good for now.

“Or you want me to apologize properly?”

Same move. The exact same move. Knees in the dirt, eyes up, make myself the thing he wants before he decides what he is taking. I have done this to stay alive more than I have done anything else. Tits and fangs. Seventy percent of the time it works every time. Only this time the back half of that sentence is new.

She dropped to her knees in the dust, looked up at him through the beam, and let her voice fall into the purr, the promises wrapped in surrender, the whole inventory she had been made to learn before she was old enough to drive.

“Come here, papi. I’ll make it worth the trip.”

His hands. Watch his hands. Gun in his waistband, flashlight in his left, and in about three seconds he hands me both because a man looking at this never once kept hold of anything else.

His face shifted, confusion melting into that satisfaction she had seen on a hundred faces, a man certain the world had gone back to working the way it was supposed to. She was surrendering. Offering herself up the way she always had. He tucked the flashlight into his belt. Both hands free. The gun already forgotten, because she had pointed his whole body at one thing and the one thing was not the gun.

He stepped closer.

Close enough to smell the tequila on his breath, see the yellow stains on his teeth. Close enough that when he reached down for her hair, his fingers would find...

She came up off her knees and took him.

Her hand closed on his throat with a strength that turned his grin into a wet click of surprise, and she rode him down to the ground, thighs locking around his torso the way he had once locked her down with his weight, except now she was the one on top and the one deciding when it ended.

Look at me now, papi. Same position. New management.

She leaned in close, lips at his ear, voice still doing the purr because the purr was the cruelest part now.

“Aye, papi. So grateful.” His own word, handed back to him with her mouth against his skin. “So, so grateful.”

Her fangs extended with a soft snick.

Bite.

Her teeth found flesh.

Punctured.

Blood flooded her mouth.

The world exploded.

Everything was blood and copper and salt and need and she was drinking and he was screaming and struggling and it didn’t matter because the hunger was finally finally getting fed and...

She pulled back. Slammed her fist into his face. Felt bone crunch. Did it again. His nose shattered. Blood spurting everywhere. Her knee drove into his ribs and she heard them crack and...

“This is for calling me muñeca.” The words were coming out of her mouth. Someone was saying them. Was that her? “This is for violarme.”

He tried to crawl away. Her hand caught his ankle, dragged him back like cargo.

“This is for every time you treated me like property.”

His wrist in her hand. Squeeze. Bones snapping like dry twigs. His scream was distant. Underwater. Not important.

“This is for stuffing drugs in my panocha.”

Her fangs found his neck again. Drank. The memories came with the blood, his life, his crimes, girls whose names he’d never learned, clients who’d paid in advance, delivery schedules, property management...

She drank and drank and drank and somewhere in the blood she saw herself through his eyes, cargo, merchandise, investment...

She drank until the struggling stopped and the heartbeat stuttered, until the warmth went out of the blood.

And then she was sitting in the dirt, staring at her hands, and they were covered in blood, and there was blood on her bare skin blood on her jeans, blood everywhere, and Raúl’s corpse was sprawled in front of her and his face was...

What. What did I. What.

She looked at her hands. Blood under her fingernails. Blood dried on her wrists.

I killed him. I. I killed. Did I. I don’t. Some of that I don’t remember. When did I. His face is. Oh, fuck his face is.

She stood up fast. Too fast. Stumbled. Caught herself. Her hands were shaking.

Stop shaking. Stop. Stop it.

Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

She looked at the body again. At what she’d done to his face. His chest. The way his arm bent wrong where she’d broken it.

I did that. While I was. I wasn’t even. I checked out and my body just. Knew how. Knew exactly how.

The hunger had gone quiet. Satisfied.

But she was shaking and she couldn’t stop and there was so much blood and...

He deserved it. He did. He absolutely fucking deserved it. So why do I feel. Why am I. This should feel like. Something. Anything. Why doesn’t this feel like anything?

She nudged his body with her foot. It moved. Heavy. Dead weight. Just meat now. Nothing else.

The desert around her had been conducting its business throughout, a striped skunk moving through the ocotillo to the east, its indifferent white chevron catching no starlight, the scatter of rodents whose small hearts she could still hear routing through the scrub in arcs that curved wide of the smell of what had just happened here, the scent of blood already pulling something distant and winged toward her position with the patient attentiveness of things that fed on aftermath, the whole ecosystem registering the death as information and adjusting accordingly.

Her body moved on autopilot. Kicked him onto his back. Positioned his arms. Splayed his legs. Mouth open. The same way he’d always left her.

It came up flat, the way the road memories came up now, scrubbed down to mechanics. Raúl finishing and leaving her where she lay, arms wherever they had dropped, legs wherever he had stopped caring, a tool set back on the bench. Stepping over her on his way to the door.

“Clean yourself up, muñeca. We move in an hour.”

She had never once given him the show he wanted with it. No tears for a man who fed on them, no screaming to prove he had reached something worth screaming over. She lay there and she catalogued. Cargo that had been used. Property that had been tested. Merchandise that worked as advertised. She filed the contempt behind a face that did not move, already two moves ahead before the door shut, because the part of her that stood off to the side and kept score was the one thing the road never got its hands on, not Raúl, not any of the men who took a used girl for a broken one.

That was the posture her body knew. Every time. A girl keeping the ledger on the man who thought he was the one writing it.

She looked at what she’d done. The positioning.

Why did I. When did I decide to. I don’t remember deciding. My body just. Knew exactly how he’d left me. And put him the same way. Fuck.

She looked down at herself. Bare from the waist up, his blood drying on her chest and her stomach and smeared across her breasts, and she felt none of what a girl was supposed to feel about it. No reach for the top. No flinch. For eighteen years this body had been the thing they looked at and took and graded and posed, and tonight it was the thing that had emptied a man into the dirt. The same skin. The first time it had ever belonged to the one wearing it. The torn crop top lay a few feet off, next to the crumpled foil. She would put it back on because the desert was cold, not because there was anyone left out here whose comfort she owed a single thing.

She grabbed both. Pulled the crop top back on, the cloth taking on more of his blood, but better than nothing. Wrapped the foil shroud around her shoulders. The metallic crackling cut sharp through desert quiet.

She kicked dust across his groin. Pure reflex. Her body moving because if she stopped moving she’d have to think about what just happened and she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

The border dark at this hour had a particular quality she was only starting to make sense of, the way it pressed flat and enormous and offered no witness to anything that happened within it, the stars at this altitude too plentiful to seem real, the Milky Way a wash of indifferent light that suggested scale but offered nothing like comfort, the desert floor stretching in every direction, ground that had swallowed countless crossings, countless left-behind objects, countless things that happened here and simply vanished, no record kept of any of it.

“There,” she said out loud. To no one. To the corpse. To the desert. “That’s what you get.”

The words sounded hollow.

She stood there. Blood drying on her hands. Foil shroud wrapped around her shoulders. Torn crop top ruined beyond repair.

The desert wind picked up. Dust starting to drift. Starting to cover.

The wind came from the southwest carrying the ghost of Pacific moisture that never quite made it this far east, just the trace of it, the salt note her dead nose sorted automatically from the alkaline grit and the creosote oils and the distant exhaust of the highway running somewhere north, and under all of it the slow erasure process already underway, the powdered caliche taking back the ground and filling the depressions left by boots and knees and a struggle that would leave no mark by morning.

She needed to move. Should move. But her legs wouldn’t carry her right. Her hands still shaking.

I killed him and I barely remember half of it. I was. Somewhere else. And my body just. Took over. Knew exactly what to do. Like it had practice.

She forced herself to start walking. North. Away from all of it.

Don’t look back. Don’t think. Don’t feel anything. Move.

The hunger’s gone. That’s good. That’s. That should feel good. Why doesn’t anything feel good? Why do I just feel. Empty. Still empty. Like killing him didn’t. Didn’t fix. Didn’t change.

She kept walking, blood still wet on her hands, the shaking that would not stop.

Nothing behind me worth preserving. Nothing behind me but a dead coyote and too much blood. Just keep walking. Just. Keep walking.

The hunger was gone but the hollow place remained and she couldn’t remember all of it, couldn’t remember the parts where she’d...

She walked faster. Like she could outrun what she’d just done. What her body had known how to do.

The night stretched ahead, empty and suspended.

She picked her way through rough terrain, her new senses mapping every gully and outcrop in the desert darkness. The San Pedro River was still miles away, but she could smell its ghost, old water, mineral stone, the metallic tang of minerals leached from a hundred desert springs. The river marked another threshold. Once she crossed it, she’d be truly deep in the American wilderness, far from the transport routes and the organized networks. Alone.

There was no comfort in that.

As her legs carried her northward on autopilot, she heard them, engines in the distance. The sound had a professional precision to it. Patrol vehicles, moving in a pattern, searching. The distinct hum of CBP running a night sweep, probably because someone had called in activity.

Probably Raúl’s body.

How long before they find him? How long before they start tracking me?

She forced herself to move faster, abandoning the trail and cutting into pure wilderness. Scrub and ravines stretched ahead, unmarked, terrain most humans couldn’t navigate in daylight. She wasn’t most humans anymore.

The scrub opened ahead of her in a geography her new senses read differently than any map she’d ever tried to use during a crossing, the terrain writing itself directly into her awareness in gradients of heat and moisture and the biological signatures of whatever moved through it, each arroyo a channel of cooler air she could feel before she reached it, each stand of mesquite a landmark she could smell before she could see it, the whole dark landscape yielding its structure to her the way a city yields its grid to someone who has lived there long enough to stop needing signs.

The open desert without marked crossing points or organized routes was disorienting in a way she hadn’t expected. Every crossing she’d survived had someone ahead, a coyote, a group, a trail worn smooth by thousands of desperate feet. Raw land stretched north here, untouched by human order, dark all the way to the horizon.

Behind her, Raúl’s corpse cooled in the dirt. By morning, the carrion birds would find him. By next week, nothing but bones and belt buckles.

This was the border’s particular brutality, the way it absorbed things whole, the alkaline dust and the dry heat and the carrion economy of birds and insects and coyotes working through whatever the desert received with an efficiency that had nothing to do with justice or memory or the names people carried with them when they set out, the land simply processing what it was given, indifferent to the difference between someone who had been trying to escape and someone who had been doing the catching.

Isabella Martinez was dead.

Babydoll walked forward with blood-stained hands and a hunger that was quiet but not gone; just sleeping, waiting for the next time.

She could already smell them; distant, coming from the north. Metal and determination and professionalism.

More people coming to kill me. Of course. Because this night wasn’t already. Wasn’t already fucked enough.

Her hands were still shaking.

She kept walking anyway.