her vacation, but it’s your life. Don’t be so blind you do something you’ll regret.”
The only thing Jago regrets is joining his friends today, imagining that they could be happy for him, that they could accept that he’s no longer the person he used to be. He’s different now.
Or at least he wants to be.
He takes her to the desert.
He takes her to see the Nazca lines, those ancient glyphs that, for more than a thousand years, have spoken their ancient truth to the sky. He shows her the lines from above, hovering in a Tlaloc helicopter that he pilots himself; then they land and hike to the lines themselves, so she can feel the ancient dirt beneath her feet.
He doesn’t tell her that the lines scraped into the earth are messages from the Sky, that they symbolize an oath between an ancient people and their gods.
He doesn’t tell her that he once stood on this sacred ground and pledged his life to his line, and to a game that might end the world. That he slipped a knife across his palm, let the blood drip into the ancient lines, became one with his past and his future.
These things are forbidden.
Bringing her here now, when the tourists have faded away and they can breathe in the silence of a starry night, is the closest he can come to revealing his secret. He says it without words: This place is my heart. This ground beneath us, this sky above us, these messages from the dead—this place is my soul.
They lie on a blanket side by side, their hands linked, their eyes on the stars.
“Do you think there’s anyone up there?” she asks him.
“Do you?”
“Are we talking about God or little green men?”
“It was your question,” he points out.
She sighs. “I think … all those millions of stars, all those planets, we probably can’t be alone. But I kind of hope we are.”
This isn’t the answer he expected. “Why?”
She turns onto her side to face him, and he rolls toward her.
“I don’t like the idea of someone up there watching,” she says. “Judging, or whatever. I like the idea that we get to choose for ourselves what it all means. Who we’re going to be. And I guess …”
“What?”
“I … I don’t really know how to say it. I never talk like this. Or I never did before.” She touches his face, so gently. “You turn me into someone new, Jago. Every day, you make me a stranger to myself.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”
“It’s the best thing,” she tells him, and then, for a time, there’s silence, as her lips meet his and they find a wordless way to speak.
It’s not until they’re nodding off to sleep beneath the stars, her delicate body folded into his sturdy arms, that she finishes her earlier thought. “I guess I don’t want to believe in UFOs or in, you know, some kind of higher power, because I think it’s beautiful that we’re the only ones. Billions of stars, and only us to see them. Like a single spark in the darkness, you know?”
He squeezes her, gently but tightly, to say, yes, he does know. And he wishes she were right.
“You never answered. What do you think?” she asks. Her breath is warm on his neck. Her head lies on his chest, and he wonders if she can hear his heart beat.
It’s strange—this is the place where he became the Player. It’s saturated with memories and blood. But he’s never felt less like Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec line. He feels like just a boy, lying beside a girl. He feels like nothing matters here but the two of them, their even breathing, their beating hearts, their warm bodies, their dreams, and their love.
She asks him questions no one has ever bothered to ask.
She trusts him to be gentle, to be kind, to be so many things he never knew he could be.
She thinks him beautiful, and here in the dark, he can almost believe it’s possible.
“I don’t know if we really are alone,” he lies. Then he says something true, the kind of thing Jago Tlaloc, Player of the Olmec, would never admit. “But that’s how being with you makes me feel. Alone in the universe. Only the two of us.”
“A spark in the night,” she whispers.
“A bonfire.”
Jago takes his friends’ advice about one thing: He tells his mother about Alicia. She pretends to be surprised.
“Invite the girl over for dinner,” she says, and it is not a request.
He obeys.
He always obeys his mother.
Jago picks her up in one of the family’s bulletproof Blazers. Alicia draws in a sharp breath as they approach the first of the guard towers, then seems to hold it for the entire long, winding drive up to the hacienda. He tries to see it through her eyes, this castle on a hill, and wonders if she’s judging him for living like a king despite the teeming swarm of poverty below. The Tlalocs do a great deal for the poor of Juliaca, but they could do more—they could always do more.
“This is amazing,” Alicia breathes, as they pull up in front of the beautifully manicured grounds and he opens her door. There’s something new in her eyes when she looks at him, and he realizes she never thought of him growing up in a place like this. He’s told her so much about the Tlaloc power—less so about the money that enables and derives from it. Other than that disastrous first date, he’s refrained from giving her lavish gifts or taking her out for expensive meals. Alicia isn’t that kind of girl.
But there’s a radiant smile on her face that he hasn’t seen before. “What?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “I just … I didn’t know.”
Dinner is exactly the disaster he expects it to be, although Alicia has no idea. Jago’s mother, Hayu Marca, is expert at appearing sweet and nurturing—but beneath these layers of maternal fluff is impenetrable steel. This is what strangers never seem to see.
Alicia is intimidated by his father, Guitarrero Tlaloc, who she assumes is the head of the family. Jago’s mother, on the other hand, greets her at the edge of the property and immediately envelops her in a warm hug, and afterward Alicia whispers to Jago, “I don’t know what you were so worried about; she’s lovely.”
Jago murmurs a noncommittal response.
The kitchen staff has gone all out, preparing an opulent spread of lomo saltado, aji de gallina, pollo a la brasa—the best Peru has to offer. Alicia eats heartily, and doesn’t bat an eye at the roasted guinea pig served whole, on a spit. She takes a small bite and pronounces it “interesting.” This is her highest compliment.
“Jago says you’re a dancer.” His mother’s English is flawless. Like Alicia, she refuses to call him Feo, but not because she thinks the
