Chapter 1
Robado was a night place, and tonight Lucha Moya was glad of it. In night places, no one looked twice at a girl like her. Even one with a long knife strapped to her belt.
In the south ward, at the very tip of the city, the streets were already filling with workers ready to celebrate the end of a grueling day.
Revelry wasn’t Lucha’s purpose tonight, but the crowd served her needs nonetheless. She slipped in among the bodies, moving north, trusting that her expression would deter conversation if her knife didn’t. She had no friends to worry about offending. None in the south ward, and none in this entire cursed city.
But no one came to the Scar—named for its utterly barren land—to make friends. In fact, no one came here at all. You were born here, you died here, and you lamented your rotten luck every day in between.
Lucha lamented her own as she fought her way out of the neighborhood she called home. The long, windowless manufacturing buildings with dilapidated worker housing crowded in alongside them. The narrow tail of land pushing right up to the bank of the blighted salt river.
Too many bodies, Lucha thought. Not enough space to breathe. But that was how it had always been. If you wanted air, you had to pay for it. And the price was too high for most.
She stayed to the center of the road despite the crush, avoiding the river. She’d always been repelled by its expanse of murky nothingness. The salt that leached into the soil and killed everything living for a mile in any direction. The tang of it tainted the air, too. It warped the pressed wood-pulp walls of every structure, making gaps for the dark humors of the forest to steal in…
Enough, Lucha chastised herself. Plenty of monsters you can see in this world, no sense worrying about the ones you have to imagine.
Lucha knew the monsters of Robado as well as anyone—she’d lived here as far back as her memory stretched. In a larger unit with windows until she was nine. That hadn’t been quite as bad. But then her father had died, and everything had changed: their household income cut by half, her mother growing less and less reliable in her grief. They climbed down the housing ladder one rung at a time. Ever closer to the river. Beginning again, and again, and again…
But none of the units or sectors of the south ward Lucha had lived in had been remarkable. There was only one remarkable thing about Robado, and it came into view as Lucha turned onto the stone-paved road heading north.
The Bosque de la Noche was nothing but a massive, dark shape on any map she’d ever seen. The southern border was always defined by the curve of the river penning it in. But the forest itself extended to the northern edge of the page, staining it with solid ink, giving the impression the mapmaker’s brush had simply gone on until it could go no farther.
No one knew what was on the other side—or if there even was one.
Lucha’s steps slowed without her permission, her eyes drawn as always to the trees. Everyone else in this place seemed to avoid looking at the forest. Its seemingly sentient presence. But Lucha had never grown out of her childhood fixation with the wall of greenery that was their constant companion.
The forest was said to be uninhabitable. The governors of the Elegidan continent—skittish as squirrels and twice as greedy—refused to recognize any territory north of the river. They took their shares of Robado’s ill-gotten profits readily enough, but they claimed no authority in the city. Or any of the responsibility that would go with it.
The mapmakers, for their part, blotted the wood into their landscapes without sparing a stroke for this wound of a place clinging to its edge.
Like we don’t even exist, Lucha thought, still loitering in the middle of the road.
“Watch it!” snarled a man heading south. Lucha staggered backward, reminded of the dangers of standing idle. The little cart the man pulled turned sharply and splattered her shoes with mud.
She was about to shout something rude when she saw the cart’s tiny passenger. A girl of no more than four. She dangled her bare feet over the edge as her father rolled her along.
Lucha smiled, remembering her younger sister, Lis, at that age. Her huge brown eyes and shining curls…
“Better watch out!” the girl called in her lisping baby voice. “El Sediento will get you if you look too long!” Sticking her fingers into the corners of her mouth, the girl stretched her smile too wide and rolled her eyes back so only the whites showed.
The cart rolled on. From the direction of the night greenhouses drifted a song in a language she did not know. Lucha turned her boots north again. Along with the crowd of greenhouse workers, she moved into the city’s center as twilight gathered above the treetops.
It was here that the bodies around her became an impediment. The stream pooled at the Plaza de Centro like the huge marketplace was dammed. Greasy animal-fat lanterns flared to life as Lucha fought against the workers already queueing up to buy. Her pulse picked up speed.
The stall counters were lined with food and drink. Jars of cloudy cider made from a berry that was poisonous until fermented, carved wooden boats filled with chunks of meat in the same oil that made the lamps burn.
Other stalls sold handmade wares to tempt the superstitious. Stone talismans for protection, bundles of herbs for luck or love or money, tiny candles in every color said to ward off this or attract that. At one booth, an old woman sat silent in a black veil. In front of her were tiny painted portraits, their eyes drawing Lucha’s gaze.
The pale, angular face of a man, eyes black as the night itself. In his hands, a clay cup of blood. El Sediento, Lucha thought with a thrill. They’d all been warned as children not to linger too long in the trees for fear that he’d steal their souls—and even skeptical Lucha, so consumed with the practical details of her family’s survival, had seen him in her nightmares more than once.
She averted her gaze out of instinct. It landed on the next portrait instead, a woman this time. A goddess. Her face was round and shining. Her hair streamed all around her. Her eyes were somehow penetrating, even in this diminutive size.
The contrast was clear.
Good and evil. Shadow and light.
Lucha turned away from this one, too. The old woman behind the counter was tempting fate even displaying it. Talk of this goddess, or any other, was forbidden in Robado.
The crowd grew livelier as Lucha reentered it, and she more desperate to be free of it. Not a single proprietor named their true product. They didn’t have to. The legitimate goods were just for show. It was what was under the counters that sold—passed from closed fist to shaking fingers. Paid for with teetering stacks of rusty coins, or else desperate promises that they’d pay tomorrow. Tomorrow…
Olvida. The forgetting drug.
In the Bosque de la Noche, and nowhere else on the continent, grew a short, scrubby bush, with silvery leaves that seemed to catch even the dimmest light. The Pensa plant. So named by the roaming witches and wise men who had once chewed it, it had been part of religious rituals before Robado had even existed. The leaves produced a mild, sleepy euphoria. They enhanced the voices of the spirits with whom the users communed.
If only people had left well enough alone, Lucha often thought. If only no one had ever discovered that, smashed to a pulp, its potent juice wrung out and heavily processed, the Pensa plant became infinitely more powerful. No longer used to gently open the mind to greater currents of inspiration. Instead, to obliterate it.
And so the greenhouses of Robado had been built to grow a domesticated version of the Pensa plant, and the manufacturing buildings to process it. The purified result was a powdered substance called Olvida—which produced a powerful forgetting effect. For a time, it would steal your cares, your worries, your memories. An effect in high demand in a city like this, where every day was a long, dangerous trudge toward sleep.
Olvida was the lifeblood of Robado—and the rotting death creeping through it.
“Forget for a night?” asked a hooded man at a stall without a line as Lucha passed. “All your worries gone, little sister. Your dreams at your fingertips.”
Lucha knew she should keep her eyes forward, but there was something about the way he said it. Little sister. It snapped in her like a dry twig begging for a flame. As if Lucha weren’t out here tonight because of her o
wn little sister, left hungry by the drug in the man’s pockets.
She stepped up to the stall, anger kindling in her chest. The acid emptiness in her stomach only fed it. “You’re lucky I have somewhere to be,” she said, pulling her knife before she could think better of it. “If I didn’t, I’d slit your throat.”
Instead of cowering, the man only smiled. The row of teeth he exposed was rotten. “You’ll be back, little sister,” he said. “They always come back.”
“I won’t,” Lucha spat. “Not ever.”
“She’s holding up the line!” said a high, thin voice from behind her. “Out of the way!”
Several more voices joined in, a queue building behind Lucha as she stood with her knife exposed. Her cheeks flushed with a fury that died when she turned to look at them.
Lucha wanted to kill this man. To kill every bastard who sold Olvida in this marketplace. In Robado. In all of Elegido. Instead, she sheathed the knife and pushed through the crowd of faces with their haunted eyes, trying not to look for her mother’s.
The north ward was deserted by the time Lucha reached it.
All the rest of Robado was built on the salted ground, safe from the forest’s rampant growth. But Los Ricos, the self-appointed rulers of this lawless city, had grown greedy, and thus the north ward had come to be the kings’ seat of power. Carved into the center of what had once been an ancient woodland.
As far as anyone in this place knew, there had never been Robado without Los Ricos. They had built it, they controlled it, and Olvida funded it. For most people, that was plenty of knowledge. What did it matter where the city had come from when your whole life was built around surviving another day in it?
Lucha remembered the smell the day the kings burned the clear-cut trees to make room for the metal buildings that formed their compound. Like a snuffed mourning candle. Her family’s own mourning candles had still been burning then, her father barely a month in the ground.
Lis had suffered from nightmares as the bonfire raged, Lucha remembered. She’d cried out in her sleep.
The forest hadn’t taken the invasion passively, either. The morning after the burning, the former copse had been filled with white mushrooms, each one taller than a man. Silent sentinels. A warning, unheeded.
When they’d tried to cut the mushrooms back, two more had grown in the place of every one. Eventually they’d stopped cutting, and the mushrooms had become a permanent fixture. A graveyard. A place of endless superstition and speculation.
“What’s your business here?”
Internally, Lucha swore. She’d been counting on making it to the gate uninterrupted.
“Miss? Your business?”
The soldado seemed sober now, but the haunt of past forgettings hung around
his eyes and bracketed his mouth. His expression betrayed his impatience. The taut line leading to his next fix seemed a second from snapping.
Lucha knew this look well enough from home. She would need to tread carefully.
“I have an appointment,” she said, betraying none of the fear tunneling into her bones.
The soldado stepped closer. “Girls are supposed to report to the west entrance.”
She bristled at the way his voice lingered on the word girls, his tone somewhere between shaming and lechery. “I have an appointment with Señor Marquez.” Lucha didn’t drop her gaze, though the soldado’s posture demanded deference. “He’s expecting me.”
As she’d predicted, the man’s eyes dilated slightly, the sour perfume of his fear on the air. She should have known better than to be relieved. Fear was a knife’s edge, and there were two sides you could fall on.
“Señor Marquez can pick you up at La Casa del Pecado like he does all his other putas,” he said at last, confirming Lucha’s worst suspicions with the narrowing of his bloodshot eyes. “This isn’t the salt swamp. In the north ward we don’t let trash spread its stink unattended.”
The soldado grabbed for her before Lucha could come up with a contingency plan. Instinctively, she stepped out of reach. Her heart pounded wildly. La Casa del Pecado was the exclusive club of Los Ricos—kings of the Olvida trade and the closest thing Robado had to a government. Girls disappeared into the west entrance every day.
Lucha had known a good many people who’d gone in—some willingly, some not—but not a single soul who’d come back out again.
The soldado charged at Lucha now, enraged by her escape attempt. He had both her arms in his grip before she could retaliate, dragging her past the mushrooms toward the compound’s fence.
“You can’t take me there,” she said through gritted teeth. “I told you, I have an appointment with Señor Marquez. Take me to him. He’ll tell you.” Lucha bit her tongue before she could say please.
She’d stab him before she begged him. If only she could get a hand free…
The north fence stretched across the road from edge to edge. As they passed through the gates, the soldado wrenched Lucha’s arms back, forcing her to look up at it. It was all metal. Twelve feet tall and topped with
vicious spikes.
The soldados never bothered to wash off the blood. Every desperate olvidado who tried to climb it—tempted by storehouses full of fix—left a piece of themselves as a warning.
In Lucha’s chest, fear curled like a leaf at first frost. “Just take me to Señor Marquez,” she repeated, thinking of her sister, alone and hungry. Her mother, who had been doing so well…
Her captor was indifferent. Even if Lucha screamed, no one would come. She wouldn’t be the first or last victim of soldado cruelty in the north ward tonight.
But you’re not a victim, said a voice inside her. Would you really have made it to sixteen in a place like this if you were?
She didn’t think, didn’t plan. Just let her body go limp, forcing him to bear the full weight of her. He was too disciplined to let go, but he grunted with the extra effort, loosening his grip on her arms just enough.
This was madness, and Lucha knew it. She’d never make it out alone. A fight with a soldado inside the compound was suicide. But a quick death fighting for her freedom was better than a slow one at the hands of the vicious, greedy men awaiting her.
And if she was very lucky (or very good) she might just avoid both.
She wrenched herself free and drew her knife, sweeping the man’s legs with a low kick. She pressed the sharp edge of the bone blade she carried to the thick vein in his neck.
“You’ll pay for that, puta.” His eyes were murderous, a sheen of sweat on his brow. He lunged before she could act, ignoring the knife, his hand grasping her throat.
Lucha gasped; the knife clattered uselessly to the ground. The soldado’s grip was iron, and his pitiless eyes told her that Pecado would have been a mercy. That she’d be cocooned by the worm-white roots of the forest before the sun rose.
Beneath her, the roots themselves seemed to agree. The soil swelled, tossing like a wave. Her breath, trapped in her chest, caught fire. Lucha’s body, as it scratched and pulled and writhed, felt far away now. No more than a dream. Her gaze, going hazy and strange, sought the tree line like a last glimpse of home.
What she saw was much stranger.
A tall, slim outline of a man, face pale and sharp as her blade. Long dark hair. Too long for a man’s in Robado.
Lucha remembered the painting, the little girl on the cart lisping and chanting. Had Lucha looked too long? Was he here to collect her soul?
She would be ashamed to admit it later, but it was the fear of this that made her fight.
Push back against the still-swelling ground. Dig her fingernails into the back of her captor’s hand until she drew blood.
You won’t take me today, she thought. Even as her lungs promised to burst in her chest. Even as her vision went dark, the soil revolting against the soles of her boots.
It was the end, no matter how she fought, or feared.
And then, just as surely, it wasn’t.
The hand released her, and Lucha took great gulps of precious air. Her fingers fisted into the soil, which had gone still the moment she drew breath.
She looked up when she was able, squinting through her tears. She searched for the soldado who had let her go. But all she saw was a mushroom.
Tall as a man. Pale, with bleeding red spots.
The warning, Lucha thought, backing away. The same message the forest sent when a tree was felled.
The guard was still standing, but the mushroom’s flesh had grown around him—through him—until his rage-twisted countenance was all that remained. Set into the stipe of the mushroom like a horrible, twisted clock face.
He was deathly still, and Lucha was alone.
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