The guy with the motorcycle didn’t ask Talia her name. He’d been calling her niña since they met. He said his was Andrés but everyone called him Aguja. She checked his arms and neck for needle tracks to see if that was how he got such a gross nickname but they were clean.

He leaned his head back and asked how far she wanted to go. He could leave her at the gas station up ahead or drive a bit farther if she wanted.

“Keep going,” she said.

“What’s your final destination?”

“Bogotá.”

“I can’t take you that far, but I can probably get you to Barbosa.”

They settled into the hum and pressure of the road. If she hadn’t doused Horacio with cooking oil, it would be just another school day for Talia. She was a good student, but the classes at the prison school were dumbed down and she refined her skill of keeping an alert face while falling into a trance, imagining her life once she got out of the country. Going to a new American school. Speaking En-glish. Enjoying life with her mother and siblings. She didn’t tell any girls on the mountain she had a ticket to the United States waiting for her. They’d gotten to be friendly, but some were rageful enough to sabotage the escape plan out of spite. Trust no one. That’s what her father always said. Trust only family, if you’ve got family to trust.

She didn’t remember much about her early childhood. It only came into focus around age four or five, when her father began appearing at Perla’s house more often, asking to see Talia. The rangy, sad-faced man, similar to the ones they found sleeping outside the doorway in the mornings before Perla opened the lavandería. Mauro always wore the same clothes and usually looked like he’d just woken up. Long unwashed hair. Walnut skin chafed by the highland winds. Still, there was something handsome about him. She hadn’t yet learned to be critical or judgmental. She looked at her father as a shining star, early inklings of what her mother might have seen in him when she loved him, before she let him go.

She remembers the day he showed up in new clothes, hair cut to his ears. Eyes bright and centered, not stray bullets shooting around the room like before. Perla let him into the living room, and they sat, the three of them, as if just introduced. Talia was seven that day, and Mauro made a big deal of it. He told her seven was a magic number and it would be the year that determined her destiny.

Perla said not to fill her mind with such nonsense. She didn’t like that when they started spending time together, Mauro would share with Talia stories from the Knowledge about the origin of the world that contradicted Perla’s imperial versions; that the first people were created not by God in the form of Adam and Eve or apes who learned to walk upright, but by the moon who put the earth into her vagina and gave birth to a son and a daughter. But even before the first humans, there was the darkness before light and the first beings the Creator, Chiminigagua, made were two black birds that spread wind from their beaks and from the wind came the breath of life that illuminated the world.