she is not Olmec. That if Endgame comes, he will not be fighting for her.
“I am who I am,” he says quietly. “Who my people, my family, need me to be. That’s all I can be. You wouldn’t understand.” He watches TV, he knows what life is like for people like her, who live sequestered from their own poor, who have infinite choices and no greater worries than alarm clocks and acne.
She threads her fingers through his, holds tight. “You’d be surprised.”
She tells him that she’s been taking ballet lessons since she learned how to walk—that her mother is a former prima ballerina who had to retire when she got pregnant, and who has never quite forgiven Alicia for ending her career. “She’s never forgiven me for being more talented than her either,” Alicia says, without modesty or bitterness, and Jago likes her all the more for it.
For thirteen years, Alicia has done almost nothing but dance. “Morning, afternoon, night,” she says. “I was homeschooled for a while; then I got into the academy, where classes are a joke—everyone knows nothing matters but dancing.”
“I bet you’re a beautiful ballerina,” he says.
“I was,” she says, again without modesty. He notes the tense.
It’s hard not to stare at the unfathomably long line of her neck, the graceful way her arms arc and wave as she makes her point. Every move is graceful, efficient, almost as if she were a fighter, like him. And maybe they’re not so different after all. The hard work, the oppressive training schedule, the tunnel vision for a life oriented around a single goal … he recognizes all of them, and wonders whether this is the magnetic field that draws them together, this singularity of purpose.
“I’ve been to Paris, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Cape Town—name a city, and I’ve danced there,” she says. “Danced, and nothing else. No sights, no culture, certainly no local foods. Nothing that would get in the way of the training regimen. No distractions whatsoever.” She peers at him through lowered lashes. “Definitely no boys.”
“It can’t be as bad as all that,” he says. “You’re here.”
“Exactly. Because I quit.”
“What? You said dancing was your life.”
“It was my life, and what kind of life is that?” She steals the rest of his anticuchos, gulping them down with relish. “I couldn’t handle it anymore. I just did one plié too many, you know?”
He shakes his head. Tries to imagine walking away from his life, from any of it. Declaring independence from everything he’s ever known. There’s such a thing as too much freedom, he thinks. Freedom from everything can leave you with nothing.
“My father was cool about it, but my mother?” She shakes her head. “Freaked. Out. I finally convinced them to send me down here for six weeks, kind of a trial separation from ballet, you know? I’m supposed to be ‘thinking about my options.’” She curls her fingers around the words, and it’s clear that she hopes to do very little thinking while in Peru. “I’ve basically missed out on the first sixteen years of life, Jago. I plan to make up for it, starting now.”
“That’s a lot to catch up on in six weeks.”
“I’m very efficient,” she says. “It only took me four days to find you, didn’t it? And about ten minutes to catch you?”
She’s so sure of herself—so sure of the two of them, even though they’ve spent less than a few hours in each other’s presence. “You think you caught me, huh?” he teases her. “I may be more slippery than you expect.”
She puts her arms around him, pulls herself onto his lap. “Just try to get away,” she whispers in his ear. “I dare you.”
Summer school isn’t like real school, especially in Juliaca. Alicia has plenty of friends to cover for her, and the teachers and guardians at the study-abroad program don’t require much covering. There’s no one to care if she spends all her time with Jago.
So she does.
It’s different than it’s been with other girls: she doesn’t want him to buy her anything; she doesn’t care about his power, or the things he can make people do. She likes to hear the details; she finds it fascinating, the contours of power, the things he knows, the strings he can pull. She likes to hear about corrupt officials—who gets paid off and how much—about how you can learn to attune yourself to the smell of weakness and cowardice, about how to sniff out an Achilles’ heel, and exploit it.
She likes it, but he doesn’t like telling her, because he can see the judgment in her eyes, hear it in her voice. She’s fascinated … but she’s also repulsed. “I just think there’s something better out there for you,” she says, whenever he talks about his family and what they do, or what they expect of him. Or, sometimes, “The police really just look the other way? No matter how many laws get broken? How many people get hurt?”
She always phrases it that way. Not “when you break the law.” Not “when you hurt people.” She thinks he’s different from the rest of his family, different from this entire city, perhaps, and he knows he should resent that.
She makes him ashamed of the things he’s always been most proud of, and he should probably resent that too.
But it’s not resentment, the thing that burns in him when he looks in her eyes, when he speaks her name.
It’s a thing that has no name, that’s too big and powerful for words.
But if he had to pick a word, it would be love.
He likes her because she doesn’t want anything from him, because she doesn’t want him for his power or his money or his family name. But the bigger feeling, the one that wakes him up in the middle of the night, sweating and gasping from a nightmare in which he’s lost her—the all-consuming feeling that, as she once put it, has swallowed his life—that’s not because of what she wants. It’s because of what she sees.
She looks at him and sees a person he didn’t know he could be. Not Feo, not the Player, not the heir to the Tlaloc fortune. She sees Jago, the boy she loves, and this boy feels both like a stranger and like the truest version of himself he has ever known. He loves her because she sees not simply what is, but what is possible.
She asks to hear the stories of his scars. She wants to know who’s hurt him, she says.
“You should see the other guy,” he said the first time she asked, but she didn’t laugh, and he knows she understands the meaning behind his words.
“It’s not like I enjoy it,” he added quickly. “I don’t hurt people for fun.”
“I would never think that. It’s just …” She kissed the scar on his face. “I don’t care what you’ve done in the past, Jago. What you’ve done doesn’t have to define you. What your parents want doesn’t have to define you. Who are you now? Who do you want to be?”
“You say that like I get to pick.”
“You think this ugly life is all you can have, Jago, but you’re wrong.”
He wishes he could tell her the truth. That his aunts and uncles train him for more than
