Chapter 1
CHELA HIDALGO.
She sits beside me in this little motorboat; the wind makes a huge and glorious halo out of her beautiful hair. All around us, the crashing waves of the sea. Up ahead, the three peaks of our homeland rumble upward into the sky. Our lost island has returned, and so have we.
A few weeks ago, Chela was just a girl in my neighborhood whose bat mitzvah I’d played piano at. I barely knew her. Now I will fold my life in half and break open the world to keep her safe and right here by my side.
I know.…Both dramatic and fast, Mateo. But listen: our…whatever this is—love, for sure, although that barely seems to encompass it—goes back centuries. Not being poetic here. Chela and I were spirits once, just spirits. And we surged across the water searching for safety and found it by creating this island—San Madrigal, the first freedom seekers called it when they landed here, refugees like us. And as the strange city at the foot of those three peaks grew and sang and came to life, so did our love, our partnership, our bond.
We were just spirits, ethereal things of the salty air, and we knew one day we’d enter human forms, find true homes in those bodies, in each other, and we did, we did.
But somewhere in there, other forces came into play: sabotage, empire, disaster. Our memories were shattered, those three peaks sank, and the people of that lost island found a new home in Brooklyn, New York: Little Madrigal.
Well, that’s about as smoothly as I can put it all together, anyway. Like I said, at some point the spirit I am, Galanika the Healer, became one with the boy I am, Mateo Matisse, brilliant pianist and chaotic teenager, thank you very much. Everything that happened before then comes to me only in scattered shreds, and usually only when I’m close to Chela.
Chela. The short, fierce girl beside me holds so many truths at once:
Okanla the Destroyer.
San Madrigal the Creator.
Burakadóra, she who punctures holes, to her gangster cousin, Tolo.
To my higher spirit self, that buff old island santo Galanika, she is a million mystical memories—warrior, lover, confidante, muse.
But to me, Mateo, she is just Chela, the blazing, unstoppable force of nature at my side. The one who gets me, who sees through me, believes me, checks me. She is just Chela, and that’s all I ever want her to be. She’s a terrific dancer and a terrible singer. She saves her smiles for when she really means them. She doesn’t get shook by demons or bullies, and she’ll tell you the truth even if it means cutting your throat. She’s also very good with blades, of which she has two.
And that’s another thing I’m grateful for right now, since we’re about to land on the shores of a long-lost island that’s probably inhabited by demons in the thrall of a two-hundred-year-old maniac named Archibaldo, who happens to be my ancestor. Uh, long story.
“It’s time,” Chela says as the beaches of San Madrigal rise to the surface of the frothing water up ahead. The sandy embankment leads to a grove of trees, and beyond that, the stucco rooftops rise and fall around the two bell towers of the old synagogue that Chela’s father, Rabb
i Hidalgo, used to run.
It’s real, San Madrigal. This isn’t a corny poster or simulation. This is the place where I, Mateo, was born, but I barely saw it. (I was only one year old when it sank.) The place, lifetimes ago, that I, Galanika, helped found and became one of the leading saints of. The beaches glisten; water pours from the windows and doors of the buildings. There’s not a single sign of life from what I can see, but what does that mean in a world of ancient spirits and creepy old guys named Archibaldo? Nada.
Standing hand in hand, Chela and I turn to each other, and in her eyes I see that special look she saves just for me, that easy glint of affection. A sly smile, eyebrows raised. It’s so much, that glance says. No one but us has done this, understands this, will live this moment.
I nod.
The bottom of the boat wedges against the sand with a bump.
Now all we have to do is survive.
I drop anchor and leap over the gunwale, feel the warm Caribbean waves slosh against my knees. Step onto the shore. Madrigal.
Immediately, a song rises within me.
I recognize it. It’s the same lonesome, joyful hymn that I felt come to life within Chela when I went to heal her, the night I realized I had feelings for her.
This, though, the song of the island—it’s like a variation on the theme. Whereas with Chela it came in sonorous, reverberating harmonies, the San Madrigal version arches upward in a single melody line that seems to stretch over the thunder of a hundred pounding drums. A phrase, a pause, another phrase. Lonesome, full of love, full of life.
The world is made of music—mine is, anyway. It’s what holds it all together. So I take note of the song, store it away in my memory banks to play with later when I’m back at the keyboard.
Right now I’m home, in a weird, off-center sort of way. But what is home? I spent most of my childhood in hotels all over the world, waiting for my parents to finish their shifts saving lives in local clinics. It’s only recently that our little enclave in Brooklyn truly became a place where I felt like I belonged, and even that is all tied up with me being a big-deal spirit and kinda-sorta saving the day. My
tía Lucía’s apartment felt like home, but ever since everything went to hell and she was killed there, it hasn’t felt like anything but a morgue.
Truth is, the only time I really feel home, besides on the inside of a song, is when I’m with Chela.
It’s weird: we’ve been inseparable these past few weeks. We’ve grieved together, loved each other. We know things no one else does, see the world like no one else can.
But there’s still so much we haven’t said out loud, like what exactly we even are, what our status is. It seems absurd to think about that in this moment of moments, but that’s how you know it matters. And when has anyone ever accused love of making sense?
I turn back to tell her all this and freeze.
She’s still standing in the boat, her eyes wide, mouth hanging open. But now it looks like she’s about to scream.
“Chela! What’s wrong?”
CHELA
Mateo Matisse Medina wants to know what’s wrong.
As if I could explain. Even he, the one person I know who also happens to be some kind of weird embodied spirit of our lost island, would have trouble wrapping his big head around this one.
For a moment, he wears that wide-open face of his—same one he made when he saw me take out that first bambarúto a couple of months back on the night of the Grande Fete. The night everything changed. That face…He’s just a kid, really. We’re both just kids. I saw him grow.…Right in front of me, the boy became something else—came into his own, really—and what a thing it was to see. Still is.
You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but Mateo loves order, needs it to survive. Have you seen his bedroom? Mateo Matisse is the only teenager I know who folds up his pants and puts them away after taking them off. That’s why music has such a hold on him: he can write it down, fit it into a staff and time signature. It helps him make sense of this broken world, he’ll tell you poetically. As if. There’s no sense to be had, only chaos.
That’s good for me, though, because chaos is the only thing that mak
es sense to me, dissonance the only harmony I know.
And chaos is what’s erupting all around, right now, except no one can know the full extent of it but me. Not even Mateo.
Why? Because even while whatever it is—I’m not exactly sure yet—is very much happening in the world out there and will soon be all around us, it’s also happening inside me, through me, from me.
When I don’t answer, Mateo’s face goes from surprised to concerned. Eyebrows scrunch like they’re trying to meet in the middle, and he cranes his neck, squinting at me.
I don’t answer because I can’t. There is no answer. It’s all so much more than words, even music (don’t tell Mateo) could encompass.
It’s bigger than everything, what I feel.
When I open my mouth, nothing comes out.
It started as the three peaks crested the waterline.
I thought it was just the thunder of all my power working—power I barely understand. Felt like a faraway train passing, a distant whisper that shook the foundations of the world, but the faraway was deep within me.
As the island rose, so did the feeling. It rose and expanded, a flower opening in my gut. Then another. The impossible sense of falling while standing still.
Surely, it’s my powers, I kept telling myself. Reassuring myself.
There are two spirits within me, who are me: Okanla the Destroyer and Madrigal the Creator. They’re opposites, and they’re the same—we’re the same. These are the riddles, divine and confounding, I’ve been living with recently. The Destroyer, I get. I’ve known, in some distant way, I’ve always known that Okanla lives within me, that I am her, even. I sense her flickering to consciousness in very particular moments, sometimes utterly mundane ones—at a club, when the beat really hits, in the midst of an extra-competitive soccer match. She simply rears to life; a howling, unstoppable ferocity surges, a wild and tactical ruthlessness takes over.
Then, more recently, there’ve been actual battles for her to relish, and that’s a whole other kind of holy terror I won’t even get into.
But Madrigal—that gently glowing, floating patron saint of the island, that serene and benevolent creator—who is she? How is that me? What’s that got to do with me?
I know what. I possess the power to make life. To bring flesh to shadowy spirit forms. I’ve seen it happen. Felt it flow through me.
But it doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t feel like me, not the way Okanla does.
Of course, life doesn’t make sense. This broken world. We are one, we three, and the island is part of us, too. Madrigal created it, after all. It’s what creator spirits do. She, I, we, imbued it with that sweet, sweet creator-spirit essence, and so it’s an extension of this tangled mess of spirits and girl that is me.
And now, right now, I can feel the island come to life like a trembling earthquake in every cell of my body.
That’s what this is. Not my powers, not my fears. Not my death. It is the living island rebirthing itself, rising from the depths of the sea after fifteen long years of sunken hibernation.
I feel every shimmer of water slide off each leaf, the crumbly creak of stones and concrete resettling, cracking. Eyes open—many, many eyes—and blades of grass reach toward the sudden sky. Geysers of ocean course through the streets of me, gush forth from my houses and temples. I am once again whole, returned to a fullness I never knew I possessed.
And now I know why I’ve come, why San Madrigal had to rise. Why the spirit Madrigal had to return to the place Madrigal.
It wasn’t just because I can.
This land is me, unstoppably, undeniably me.
And I won’t have it overrun with beasts and some maniac who’s lived past his expiration date.
We vanquished a god several times over.
We witnessed visions of the past, saw my aunt Mimi betray the empire pirates she’d secretly aligned with, saw the storm I’d gathered to block Vizvargal’s return, the beginning of the end of this island, of our own amnesia as we entered these human bodies.
And now we’ve returned ourselves to ourselves, and San Madrigal to the surface.
Whoever I am, whatever the fullness of my powers entails, there’s no version of this where I cede a single inch of this island without destroying anything that tries to take it from me.
“Are you…? Can you come?” asks Mateo, ankle-deep in the waves, hand outstretched.
His voice, his eyes holding mine, the wholeness of him and what we are—an ancient and brand-new thing that has no name—it all pulls me to the surface.
The shouts and rumbles awakening within me simmer to a whisper. I stare at Mateo, trying to memorize him in this moment: his tan skin and long arms, his broad shoulders and the glint in his eye that says he’s trying to find the humor in all this, a way to shake me out of whatever I’m going through. He’s coming up short, though. I want to tell him he doesn’t need to comfort me or do anything funny or heroic; he just needs to be him, be near, and that’s enough.
As our world in Brooklyn fell apart these past two months, I watched Mateo step bravely into himself. Saw him rise to meet the madness of our time and stand by my side against the impossible. Immediately, he saw me. Knew me. Knew how to care for me, be silent when I needed a refuge, be brave when I needed a warrior at my back. He lost his aunt, and instead of crumbling or throwing it all away for revenge, he came and found me, fought even harder. And won.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve had centuries of being spirits together, a celestial love beyond mortal understanding. And yes, Mateo saved my life, took a blade to the chest for me. Literally died. For me.
All that is myth crap, though. It’s epic. It looks good on paper. It’s breathtaking in the moment. It’ll sweep a girl off her feet, yeah. Even an ancient destroyer-creator archangel girl.
But that’s not what makes a partnership, not necessarily. He could’ve done all that and still been a total drip, or one of those dweebs who doesn’t know how to listen, or whatever, and none of this would’ve worked.
No. Mateo Matisse is my person, and I will reshape the world into a better place for him if I have to. But not because he’s a hero or a god or any of that mess. It’s because he’s Mateo. It’s the silence between us, the particular knowing we have. The tiny ways we move with each other, the way he holds me. The way I know he’ll tell me the tru
th no matter what.
“Mateo…” is all I manage to get out before the catastrophic symphony of rebirth screams to a fever pitch inside me. Eyes spring open in the dark as bursts of soil and water and debris reinvent themselves into new shapes, and each one is a tremble, a burst, a pulse inside me.
I try to reach out my own hand, clasp his.
Instead, I feel thunder crash within me, sense a sliver of shadow along the crest of my shoulder, see a young girl with haunted eyes, her black hair blown into a swirl around her face. And then there’s just nothing, nothing at all.
ALL ACROSS THE TUMBLING DUNES AND HIDDEN CAVERNS, THE awakening hisses and growls and writhes. I rumble and rise and flesh stretches across bone and sudden gulps of air gasps of life lungs filled hearts tremble then shake then thud to a grumbly start and all around all around teeth and claws guttural cries and the opening of pathways sliding mud unstoppable water gushing and shushing through it all, falling away, away, always away.
Chela, wake up, please.…
Unstoppable the water unstoppable the sea unstoppable me.
Nowhere to turn because I’m everywhere, everything, life itself.
Sneakers thump the sand, underbrush rustles; a chest rises and falls against my face.
Crumbling destruction and brand-new caverns, ancient caverns, lost secrets, hideaways now dust as new crevices form new histories written across the island that is my body.
Life, unimpeded and uncaring, rages forth.
Chela, please.
Through the slithering darkness, the steady rumba of drips and drops, and the never-ending shush of the sea.
Through the impossible tunnels, past makeshift nesting grounds, splatters of blood and ichor, the scribbled ravings of a broken mind.
Chela, I need you!
A heinous green glow as the black water sloshes away.
A creaking and sputtering.
A crease in the darkness. The two chitinous curtains unclasp from each other, the towering beasts step away, and within, an ancient, half-decayed face crinkles into a smile beneath bright green glowing eyes.
Chela holds my gaze as she slides downward, like if we stare hard enough at each other, somehow she won’t collapse. I lunge toward the boat, making it tilt precariously, and manage to snatch Chela before her head cracks against the hull.
“What…?” I try to ask, but I don’t even have the question.
She’s still kind of awake.…Her eyes blink up at the sun, then return to me. “So…many…” she mumbles, lost. “So, so many.”
“So many what?” I grab the satchel with her blades in it and drag her to the shore.
“Eyes…Eyes, Mateo.”
Lay her down on the beach.
“So many opening eyes.”
I’m a healer. A whole entire spirit of healing, in fact. I’ve faced off with death itself and won.
But this…This is different. Bigger, somehow. I don’t even know where to start. Chela lies limp in my arms, shivering, soaked, eyes half-closed.
When I was lost, first learning how to heal, it was Chela who told me to find the music, that the music would help me know how to move. And it did. I’d close my eyes and let the song rise and guide my hands, my focus. I can reveal a hidden aneurysm out of the shadows; I know the way a melody crinkles around a broken bone, the jangly, off-rhythm cadence of oxygen-starved tissue.
It’s different with Chela because Chela is different. She’s something else, and she’s someone else to me—the beating heart of my world. How am I supposed to…? None of this makes sense, and I hate it.
Death must be stalking me from the depths of vasculature, it’s everywhere and nowhere at once. Over the past couple of months, I’ve seen more of it than I had in my entire life. The violence sweeping through Little Madrigal claimed my tía Lucía, and she left a dead man on her apartment floor for me to find—one of her attackers. Before that, I took a life, even though I didn’t mean to, and I saved someone else immediately after. The sightless, empty gaze of Arco Kordal still glares back at me on nights when I can’t sleep.
And sure, Chela and I are immortal, supposedly, but so was the demon Vi
zvargal, and I killed him, too. It just seems like I have been running and running since October, and I thought we’d made it out, that our happily-ever-after was at hand. But I was a fool. You can’t outrun death, even if you’re immortal. And now it’s catching up to us.
“Ba…bam…” Chela mutters, then trails off. Pretty sure I know what the rest of that word was supposed to be, and it’s not good. What I don’t know is whether it’s a warning, a clue, or just confused rambling.
Music, Mateo, find the music.
The waves crash and hiss behind me; the wind whips all around. My knees press into the soft sand of San Madrigal. Up ahead, rooftops rise over a dense forest that gives way to more buildings. The city snakes partway up the sides of all three peaks. I’ve seen this image on hundreds of posters, lock screens, album covers…and there it is, real.
Something moves in the trees up ahead. Not just fronds swishing in the wind—this is branches and trunks being shoved out of the way.
We don’t have much time. As far as anyone knows, Chela’s aunt Mimi was the only person to drown when the island sank. But it turned out my creepy old ancestor Archibaldo was still alive and probably survived, and who knows what other monstrosities he’s been keeping around all the while.
And if the rest of that word she started to say is barúto, we have a serious problem. Back in Brooklyn, we didn’t know what to call these towering creatures with labyrinths sprawling across their ichorous skin and mouths as big as a human torso. They had no name when they showed up uninvited in our neighborhood, so we called them bambarúto, or bogeymen in Ladino. The honor guard of the demon Vizvargal, they were mostly just spectral at first, their horrific visages hidden behind body armor. But then a few of the creatures managed to take corporeal form using Chela’s powers of creation, and they became even more terrifying.
One shredded my face, in fact, nearly ripping out my eye and leaving me with a scar I’ll carry for the rest of my life.
“Chela, we gotta go. Chela!” I’m trying not to yell in her face, but she doesn’t seem to hear me, hear anything. Her eyes
slits, her mouth opening and closing with a whispered mumble.
I can’t heal like this. I’ve done it in the midst of battle, but I knew what was happening then, wasn’t caught off guard. And Chela was watching over me.
Chela.
I can’t lose her. We’ve only just found each other—again? For the first time? Doesn’t matter. What matters is we get out of this alive, both of us, so we can be together.
The first bambarúto bursts out of the trees ahead with a horrific shriek. It skids to a halt in the sand about twenty feet away, its long snout raised to the salty breeze. Then it turns to see me huddled in the sand over Chela, and it snarls, all those hundreds of teeth glistening in the Caribbean sun.
Chela is just a slight thing, easy to toss over my shoulder and run with. Still, the sand is uneven beneath my pounding feet. I’m terrified and have no idea where I’m going and get winded in about ten seconds.
Behind me, the snarls and shrieks grow louder as more bambarúto come charging out of the woods.
CHELA
The sickly green light glints off cold cavern walls; the darkness seethes.
Deeper. We are so much more gigantic than anyone could’ve imagined. A whole city of tunnels beneath the city by the sea. They stretch, wind, connect, and pull apart. Tributaries lead to vast sunken storehouses, crumbled stalagmite kingdoms, an impossible labyrinth of whispering shadows.
Measures were put in place to conceal all this.
A desperate, ancient magic.
All of this was hidden from us.
It is part of us.
Frantic etchings cover some of the walls. Music notes and a jagged, angry alphabet. Code. Or ravings. Both.
Deeper. A tunnel veers off to the side, away from it all.
Away from it all and deeper still, a place apart from these hideaways, cache within the cache.
The stone corridor narrows, then juts steeply upward, and we climb, we climb, past the forever dripping and flowing and swirling of these underground tide pools, and here, near the surface, speckled sunlight enters through a grove of trees above. Out in the world, a tremendous rush seems to pass overhead; a freight train of memories, lost loves, battle scars, hopes and fears—all thundering closer and closer through the sky.
Will it smash into the mountain? Will it devour us all?
Instead, it gets more and more intense, until I can almost make out voices, muffled chitterings of excitement, wonder, expectation.
And then, very suddenly—it all goes silent.
I’m surrounded again by the drips and hushed sighs of this cavern.
Down here, something stirs.
Another peel of green light opens as the shadows give way around it, unfolding themselves in dim silhouettes, then
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