thirteen

Seventy-two hours later, I was riding high in the cab of a Peterbilt truck, rolling across the dry, severe Arizona terrain, heading back toward California.

I was exceedingly grateful for my military service, because having my fingerprints in the system had streamlined the process of proving who I was—and therefore my citizenship—to consular authorities. Of course, they’d wanted to hear the whole story, and I’d told it to them. I stressed the part about Nidia’s disappearance as I had with Juarez, but it didn’t make much of an impression. Nidia was not an American citizen, therefore not their problem.

I, on the other hand, penniless and stranded, was their problem. They arranged for me to get on a bus to the U.S. border, where I’d stuck out my thumb and eventually found what I was looking for: a truck driver headed to Los Angeles. That was Ed. Ed had rusty, curly hair and seemed decent; he kept his hands to himself and, as evening fell, had given me his jacket. At the hospital, they’d found me some civilian clothes to replace the ones that had been ruined in the attack. They gave me jeans and running shoes, and a T-shirt with the word NAVY on it in block letters, which I’d taken with a small inward smile. A little joke on the part of the universe.

“You’re young to have been on your own in Mexico,” Ed said. “You’re what, nineteen, I’d guess?”

People always lowballed my age, because of the open, guileless features I’d inherited from my father.

“Twenty-three,” I said. Then: “No, wait, twenty-four. I just had a birthday.”

July five, the day after I’d been shot. I’d turned twenty-four in my sleep.

“You got someone you can call when we get to L.A.?” Ed asked.

“Several people,” I told him. “There’s one friend in particular I’m dying to get caught up with.”

I was thinking, of course, of Serena. I still didn’t want to believe that my old friend had set me up, but it was the theory that best fit the facts.

Serena used to call me prima, meaning cousin. Yet I’d heard her call other girls hermana, or sister. I had never been sure if this was because they were sucias or because they were Mexican like her. It would have been uncool to ask. But the very fact that she made that distinction troubled me now. I was white, and since I’d moved north, I was no longer an everyday friend. Had those things made me expendable?

It was painful to consider that possibility. But if it was true, what had been her motivation for setting Nidia up? Money? Serena knew a lot of people, and she saw and heard a lot. Maybe she’d known that someone wanted Nidia, and had exacted a price for helping them to get her. Maybe that was why, when I’d called her from El Paso having second thoughts, she’d said, I don’t think you should interfere. Of course not, not if her big payday depended on me getting Nidia to the abduction point.

But if Serena’s incentive had been money, what was the motive of whoever had hired the seven men in the tunnel? Juarez’s skepticism on that point was entirely understandable. Seven armed men had braced us in a tunnel in a sophisticated maneuver, and shot me, and they had done all this, apparently, to abduct or kill a nineteen-year-old daughter of Mexican illegal immigrants. How to explain that? To have a plausible theory, didn’t you need to start with a plausible event?

I bit my thumbnail and shifted in my seat.

“You okay?” Ed asked.

“I’m cool,” I said.

It wasn’t necessary to think so far ahead. The theory I had now—that Serena set me up—was enough. It was credible and I could act on it.

That was why Los Angeles was my destination, instead of San Francisco. I was going to ambush Serena, and then she’d have to tell me what was going on.

Either that or I would screw up my ambush and she, being Warchild, would kill me.