‘Iwas ten-years-old when my father left me at an unfamiliar house.An older woman led me inside, and she had me undress, then she took some photos of my body at every angle.After that, she left me alone for a while, and with nothing to do, I put my clothes back on.When a man came, and the woman let me out of the room, they talked about me like I wasn’t there, said they might take me to meet another man across the river.I was a little too brown-skinned for a good price, but I would do.And I turned my head, saw the open door to the yard in the back.The man had a gun.If I ran now, he would shoot me, wouldn’t he?Right in the head, or right in the back?Even thinking this, my legs started moving beneath me, and I broke out into a sprint, heading out of the house.The man, and the woman, didn’t run after me; there was no way out of the yard, nowhere for me to run.But I didn’t want to stop running, even if there was nowhere to go.I reached the dirt outside, and I saw tall cement walls, barbed wire over the top of them.’
‘When the man called after me, calmly, I twisted back, heart beating my ribs until they cracked.Then, right before me, his skin pulled apart, then the bone, and blood spilled in between.An invisible sword, by an invisible hand, had just ripped him to pieces like bread pulled apart by your fingers.And before the woman could hurry into the house, her head tensed, like someone grabbed it, then crushed into nothing but redness, no hint of bones, of brain, or eyes.I thought I was next.I went to cover my head with my arms, and I screamed.But then, Michael, you revealed yourself to me.You told me, do not be afraid, but I continued to cry.You begged me, do not be afraid.I couldn’t stop screaming.’
‘Days later, my father told my mother that his boss had instructed him to bathe me before I was trafficked.I wasn’t supposed to be listening to him or my mother’s sobs, but I remember thinking: he didn’t bathe me.He should have bathed me.If he was going to send me away, couldn’t I get a bath first?’
Joana blinked, could hardly tell apart the shapes of the world before her, but she could still feel Michael’s arms, and she could smell the distinctly brisk, petrichor scent of the chief prince, and there are some places that you can sense you’re in even with your eyes closed.The way that the wind blew, here — she could recognize it alive or dead.A park, a plaza; it was large with pathways intersecting it like veins, and there were countless benches, some tall trees at the northern side, opposite the church at the southern end; and at the center, there was a circular gazebo, some five steps off the ground with curled railings caging the interior platform.‘It was here that we always used to talk, Miguelito.’
Hazily, she lifted her gaze and saw the chief prince, and she realized that her body was draped over his lap, wrapped in his reddened cloak.On the same bench they always used to sit on.Her head was pounding, her throat was raw, her nostrils burned.
“Something in your pocket,” said the prince, slow, his grasp of the language as fragile as she remembered it to be, “keeps shaking.”His helmet was missing, perhaps on the ground by some flowers.
Elsewhere, Tadeo had ridden throughout the night, unable to sleep, his mare oddly awake with him as they traveled in the darkness.The same couldn’t be said for Dina; the angel was behind the young man on the saddle, hugging Tadeo’s ribs and pressing his face to his warm, human neck while Tadeo held the romal reins of the horse with his free hand.His other grip was preoccupied with the phone he was using to call Joana.It was a phone he’d borrowed from his aunt, the one who lived on the coast, since Tadeo’s had been destroyed from the water and, likely, from burning to a crisp by the Leviathan.His aunt’s husband, too, had lent him a hat, anothertejana, saying he should protect his scalp from the sun.
It was dark now, too late for the hat on his head to be of any use.Tadeo shouldn’t worry that she wasn’t answering his constant calls, should he?But he’d felt compelled to ruin her night anyway, to bother her, to want to talk to her.‘I’m scared,’ he knew.He kept thinking of the Leviathan, how enormous it was, how it’d almost burnt him alive.If he’d stopped healing, if he hadn’t been able to force it fast enough, would he have died?Died again?Swallowing thickly, Tadeo glanced at Dina, then he sighed.‘I didn’t tell you about Hell, Joana.I want to tell you.’She was the only person that he felt he could talk to, at times.She was his only friend.
Putting his phone away, he remembered a young Joana from several years ago, shoving a radio phone into his teen hands.‘Take it,’ she’d insisted.‘Contact me through this.Only this.Do you hear me?’Her hair had been braided back, though a rebellious dark curl fell to hook right between her brows, and her face had been a little too rounded still.Though they were both young, Tadeo had always been bewildered by her, how old she tried to act, how stone cold.He saw perfectly well the flash of insecurity in her eyes.She wasn’t perfect; she was a child; but it was the desperate trying that fascinated him.
In the park, Joana croaked, head pulsing in pain.“How long have I been passed out?”
“Some hours.The sun will rise soon.”Michael adjusted her in his lap, but he kept his cloak around her tightly.Like his body, the angel’s clothes could remain hidden from any human onlookers until he decided to reveal himself, and so the two were perfectly invisible in the corner of the park for now.“How do you feel, Joana?”One of his gauntlets went to her hair, smoothed down the curls tenderly, and his empty face betrayed a touch of emotion in his eyes, something tender like an open wound.
“Like shit,” Joana said honestly, then shut her eyes again.“Are you looking for Tadeo?Why should I tell you?Maybe he’s gone to Hell, Miguelito.And you can’t go there or you’ll run into your girl.”
“The devil is here,” said Michael, which made Joana snort.
Tadeo held onto the reins tighter, shakily, remembering even though he never, ever, should.But he was alone, apart from a dozing angel.Maybe it was safe to remember, to not fear inconveniencing anyone with his suffering:
‘When I woke up, I was naked, drenched in blood — some my own, some not.All the breath in my lung felt foreign to me beneath a foreign chest like I’d just been born.Perhaps I had.I had died, felt the bullet pierce my eyeball to have it burst, shatter the bone, burrow through my brain, do away with my consciousness in an instant.But I was awake again, and my body was different.It was like a human’s once more, but the flesh was so novel against my fingertips that I could have believed I was never a person before they’d killed me.Back from the dead.I had returned from a grave, and I had killed.For this body, I had killed.I was back from the dead.Maybe I’d always been dead.It had all been wrong.Since I was born, it had all been wrong, like I sagged with rot alive and, now, dead, I had remade myself how I always should have been.But my stomach was heavy with meat.I had eaten them.I had made a backward Eucharist out of them, turned their bodies into bread on my tongue.My first miracle.’
Joana said, “Oh?”then laughed weakly.“Is the world really ending, then?Is this the end?”
Michael hesitated, then replied, “Only God can answer that.”He put his hand over her forehead, as if to feel for fever, but his gauntlet was in the way.
‘But the victory in me,’ thought Tadeo, ‘was soon replaced by terror.I realized I had killed and the weight of what had killed me crushed my newborn heart.My nails scratched at my skin until talons tore out from my fingers, and I felt my body curl forward, and I saw behind me without turning — an eye had just opened in the back of my neck.I saw the end of the road.Another eyeball must have torn open inside of me and made me see my own wounds.When a cry fell out of my mouth, it wrenched me forward, and I curled into the limbs sprouting out of me like new bones.I screamed out again, then I began to run, and I headed for the drylands out of town.None of it was freeing.It wasn’t liberating.A part of me was still being killed, I realized.Perhaps I hadn’t come back from the dead at all.I was on the ground, and I was with those soldiers.And it was happening now.I could feel it.Like a power drill, whirring my insides until the tissue had been made wine.But there is nothing poetic of it — the burn.It hurts.They are killing you now.Run, Tadeo.That is your name.Tadeo.’
Grunting, Joana tried to sit up, and Michael let her, but as she tried to free herself from beneath the cloak, a spell of dizziness and nausea sent her back down.“Ugh.”
“Rest,” Michael told her.
“I can’t,” Joana said.“I need to find Tadeo too.”
‘I spent a few years dying.It was constant.Every second, I was back on the ground, the world collapsed over me.My ribs were broken into.I was not a man.I was a tearing thing.There is nothing poetic about it, dad.Rape.There’s really nothing that I can say to make it easier for you to hear.Itisnothing, for periods of time.It all goes dark, you die, for a minute or two.Emptiness, and then you’ve been turned over.It’s nothing really.I’m sorry.You probably don’t want to know this.The details.I’m not supposed to talk about those.Not supposed to explain it.Please don’t be mad at me.For telling you and for living it.I was just going home.’
‘Maybe I didn’t want to come back.If the pain would end, then I’d be happy to die.I’m sorry, dad.You wouldn’t want me to die like that.I’m sorry for telling you.I’ll stop soon.Soon, I won’t bring it up again.It hurts.It’s embarrassing to say where it hurts.I won’t.I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.We don’t talk about that.The burn.It’s a burning sort of feeling.A lot of what isn’t fire burns.There are burns worse than what fire can do to you.At times, I think there is somewhere worse than Hell.There are people worse than the devil.And they are here, dad.They are here with us.’
Michael said, “It’s not time for him to die.I won’t hurt him.”
“Shut up,” said Joana.“If you’re here, the end is coming.”But she really couldn’t bring herself to get up, to move away from the prince she’d spent so long dreaming would come back to save her like he had on that night.‘After I stopped screaming, my gaze flashed back to the piles of limbs and bones and blood— then I jerked forward with a retching.I vomited between us, but you took my shoulders, held me back, held me.’Michael didn’t tell her, then, why he had been there.It was only some other night that he said he’d come to find the anti-Christ on God’s orders, a Beast that had been born from a resurrected body the year prior.‘God sent you, a year too late for Tadeo.God is always sending you to find what can’t be found.’
Tadeo thought: ‘One day, I returned to town.I don’t know why.I spent a year and forty days, forty nights, waiting, but the devil never appeared for me as he had for Jesus.And so I returned, and when I did, I told them that the child they loved had died.I was someone new.That would be easier to explain.I didn’t want to tell them what I’d done to my body, so I would say God did it to me.’
Michael said: “The prophecy must happen in order.I can’t kill him yet—” He paused, then teased rather nervously: “I thought I told you this.”
Joana scoffed at that.“I was, what, a kid?Sorry for not remembering how your apocalypse works.”
“I forgive you,” Michael teased again, and Joana huffed and finally began wrestling out of his touch to sit down.
Unbelieving, Tadeo’s family had first ordered him to leave their house.They called him a demon, dressed in the pulled skin of their missing child.Nahual, his grandfather called him.And even after they’d accepted Tadeo, he remained in hiding, in the shadows, refusing to leave.He feared his body.He feared everything.‘They asked me: Did you see Heaven as you lay dead?I told them that I couldn’t remember because I was too scared to say that all I ever saw was blood.’
