Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (free ebook reader txt) 📕

Even though Mami and Abuelita assured me that this won’t be forever, I still worry. Is Papi walking slowly enough that Daniel won’t start coughing? With any luck, they won’t be walking at all if he and Papi managed to catch a ride to the mine on one of the ore trucks. If they did catch a ride, is Daniel even now reporting to Don César and being told the schedule for the day? Is he walking into the main entry tunnel at El Rosario, the big mine, or will he be assigned to a smaller branch? Can he still see daylight or is he lighting the open flame of his acetylene headlamp to fight away the darkness? How is he feeling? Is he scared of what might happen to him? Angry at Papi for making him go? Jealous of me for staying behind even though I’m older and not sick?

As I walk, I pass the used-up mouth of a mine from long ago. I wish I had something with me to sacrifice to beg for Daniel’s safety. And Papi’s too, I guess. But I don’t have anything in my bag other than my notebook and a pencil. I’m not a miner and I will get food at school, so Mami doesn’t let me pack anything from home.

I pause for a moment, staring into the half circle of blackness in front of me. I pull off my bag and rip out a piece of paper, folding it. On one half, I write out the twelve times table, as neatly as I can manage, for Papi. On the other side I write:

We will run away together. Far away from here. Far away from the mountain and the mines. Far away from the rocks and the cold. We’ll run until we find a green valley like Abuelita talks about in her stories, and we’ll sink our toes into the soft black soil and grow so much food that we’ll both die fat. Or we’ll find a city that sparkles with electric lights and good jobs and we’ll both make lots of money and be happy forever.

And then, because it feels like it fits, I add the word Amen.

With Abuelita’s warnings about the jealous Pachamama ringing in my mind, I don’t go near the mouth of the tunnel. Instead, I fold the paper around a rock and throw it as far as I can into the mountain. It lands in the darkness beyond what I can see. Closing my eyes, I say a quick prayer to whoever might be listening that my father and brother will be safe.

With one final whispered, “Please,” I turn away from the darkness and hurry to school.

3

At school, I can’t focus. All day long I’m haunted by thoughts of Daniel and Victor, both on their first day in the mines.

“Where’s Daniel?” Susana asks when we sit down for our morning oatmeal. “Is he sick again?”

That’s usually the answer for why Daniel isn’t with us, and oddly, today I wish it were the reason. I shake my head. “Papi took him to work,” I whisper.

“Oh no,” says Alejandra.

I nod.

Susana pulls me into a one-armed hug and leaves it at that. There really isn’t anything to say. But while we sit there and sip our breakfasts, the twin losses of Victor and Daniel make it impossible to smile. It’s only as I’m getting up to return my cup that I see a notebook tucked under the bench. I pick it up and flip through it. Victor’s messy handwriting covers every centimeter of every page of the first two-thirds, even the margins. When I get to the last page with writing on it, I see the note:

Whoever finds this: it’s yours. I don’t need it anymore.

Fighting back tears, I shove the notebook into my satchel and wait for the school day to start.

During geography, when we work on maps, I wonder how Daniel and Victor are finding their way through the maze of underground tunnels. In science, I remember Papi’s comment about physics, and only barely stop myself from trying to calculate the probability that the mountain will fall in on itself today, crushing my brother and my best friend beneath unknown tons of rock. In language class, a square of sunshine slants across my desk, and no matter how I try to focus on the teacher’s words, they float by me like balloons with cut strings. All I can think about is that Victor and Daniel aren’t seeing the sunshine right now—haven’t seen it for hours, won’t see it for hours more. In handwriting, my letters are all jumbled on top of each other like a pile of rubble; in dance, I’m a landslide. By the time math rolls around, I’m desperate to lose myself in the clean, well-behaved lines of numbers, but not even they occupy my mind enough.

You have to do something, I tell myself. But just as strong as that impulse is the voice that says, You don’t have any good choices. There’s nothing you can do.

And though I spend the rest of the class turning options over in my head while my pencil scribbles its own way through my math, by the time school is over at noon, neither my plans nor my numbers have added up to anything.

At home, I head over to the slag heap to work as a palliri with Mami and Abuelita, like always. Today, though, it feels different than it did yesterday. I don’t comment on the tear tracks through the dust on Mami’s face. Abuelita doesn’t ask me how my day was.

“Mami,” I say, gathering my courage. I’ve spent the day thinking, but the best I’ve been able to come up with is not something better, it’s just a different shade of bad. “Do you think if I left school and worked with you and Abuelita as a palliri, we could