The twins arrived as the first light of dawn turned the sky the color of a bruise. Ana carried Sofía inside the church, where Abuela Lola—who had once been a nurse in a MASH unit—cleaned the wound with mezcal and stitched it with fishing line. Sofía did not make a sound. She stared at the ceiling, where a faded fresco of the Virgen de Guadalupe watched her with sad, knowing eyes.
Water.
At the front of the column was a man Valentina had not seen in ten years. Her husband, . He was gray and thin, his face carved by regret, but his eyes were the same. He stepped out of a beat-to-hell Ford F-150 and walked toward her. los heroes del norte
The bonfires worked perfectly. Five of the oldest men and women—Abuela Lola, who was eighty-three and walked with a cane, and Don Chuy, who was blind—stood by the highway with cans of gasoline and church candles. When the first black SUV appeared, they lit the fires and began to sing an old corrido about a bandit who had outwitted the rurales. The security guards, baffled and suspicious, stopped to question them. The elders played deaf, slow, and confused. The twins arrived as the first light of
But a guard dog, a lean and silent greyhound, had been sleeping under a truck. It did not bark. It simply ran. It caught Sofía’s ankle as she swung onto the bike, and she went down hard. Ana screamed. The greyhound’s teeth were on Sofía’s calf, shaking like a rattler. Sofía did not cry. She pulled a wrench from her belt and hit the dog once, twice, three times until it let go. Blood soaked her pant leg. She stared at the ceiling, where a faded
The twins looked at each other. They knew the smuggling roads. They also knew that a tanker of liquid nitrogen was sitting at a Desierto Verde depot fifty miles south, guarded by four men with rifles.
Elías, the mad hydrologist, remembered his university days. “Nitrogen,” he whispered. “Liquid nitrogen pumped into a borehole. The expansion will crack the rock. It’s been done in oil fields. If we can get a tank of it—”