Eddie finally answered. Because you’re an impostor. Because all of this should have been mine, it was promised to me. It couldn’t be anyone else’s. The pregnant girl had told him he had to end the lineage, there could be no more children, the doors had to close.

Eddie no longer resisted. He was moaning. It’s not the pain, he told Juan, I don’t care about the pain. The pain is to lose and lose and lose.

“Help me,” Juan said to me, without looking at me.

I went closer, and once I was beside him, he stood up and smashed Eddie’s sternum with a kick. The boy screamed and fainted. Why was he so weak? He had fought and it was hard to breathe in the Other Place, but I felt like he hadn’t put up enough resistance. Outside, he had killed. Inside, he surrendered. Eddie started to cough blood, and he was bleeding from the nose. I reacted and handed the white Afghan blanket to Juan. Being naked in the Other Place made me feel vulnerable in a new, obscene way. I expected at any moment to feel a hand hit me or touch me between my legs, or to be carried off to the Valley of Torsos, where my body would be used as decoration. But I was with Juan and he was the guardian; he would protect me.

Juan placed Eddie on the blanket and motioned for me to pick up the end with his feet. He did the same with the other end. We carried him like a wounded soldier being removed from the battlefield on an improvised stretcher. My feet were wounded as I walked over the bones, and I felt the breath of the Other Place directly on my skin. Eddie weighed very little, but I couldn’t take in enough air. Juan only looked at me once, to check that I could do it, and I nodded.

I didn’t know where we were going, but the path of bones we were following had broadened. It was a road now. We came to a narrow passage leading away from the Valley of Torsos. We picked our way down it until we reached a clearing that was like the others except the trees were farther apart, some of them only trunks, others with treetops. I asked Juan for a break and he nodded. Eddie was moaning. When I could focus on the clearing and its trees, I saw the shapes hanging from the branches. They were people. Juan took Eddie out of the blanket and pushed his body so it would roll down the hill. Then we went down on our own, more easily. Juan carried the blanket and gave me his hand: it was freezing, unlike mine, which was burning. It’s because you’re alive, he said, and I didn’t answer. He was going to hang Eddie with the others. It was a mechanical act, an old, repeated task. There were several empty trees, and he chose one with a relatively low treetop, its branches within reach.