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

changed the words around to mean something different, like he always does.

“Gah!” I take three steps off the path and aim a kick at another, much smaller rock. Satisfyingly, this one goes flying.

“Take that!” I shout after it.

“Good work, Ana.” Daniel is gasping for breath again, but this time it’s from laughing so hard. “That rock definitely had it coming.”

And I want to stay angry, I really do, but no matter how annoying he can be, Daniel has always known how to find the words that poke my mad feelings in the sides until they giggle. I stare at the offending rock, now a good two meters off the path, and can’t help but smile.

“It did, didn’t it?”

“Mmm-hmm,” he says, face completely straight even though his eyes are sparkling. “Definitely. That was one bad rock. Good thing it’s gone now. Would have been a disaster if it stayed there.”

I shuffle my feet in the scree, my bad mood settling onto my shoulders again like a condor perching on a carcass.

“Yeah,” I grumble.

Daniel tries to catch my eye. “What’s wrong, Ana?”

I can’t admit that I wish I could get him better air to breathe, so I say the other thing that’s been weighing on me all day.

“You heard Victor. He’s not coming back to school.”

Daniel grimaces. Kids work. Unless you’re rich or something, families can’t get by on what the parents make. In the city you see kids doing lots of jobs. They sit beside kiosks or mantas laid out on the ground with things to sell: coca leaves, hats, used shoes. Some get jobs washing the sidewalks or collecting trash. Kids shine tombstones and shape bricks and carry loads. They wash windshields and collect scrap metal for smelters. They sell their size, their energy, and their time. Crippled or disabled kids beg. Boys and young men dig trenches, work the ore refineries, or shine shoes. Girls work as maids for fancy families or help out in shops and restaurants. Up here, though, there aren’t that many jobs. Boys mine. Girls break rocks.

“That stinks,” he says.

“Yeah. I don’t think he wants to work in the mines.”

“No one wants to work in the mines,” Daniel says flatly.

There’s no arguing with that, so I don’t. For a few minutes we sit in silence, each leaning against the big red boulder, lost in our own thoughts.

“Luís and Araceli are gone too,” I muse.

Daniel quirks a brow at me, but I know he can see where I’m going.

“And remember? Óscar said that he might need to start working soon too. Alejandra told me later that her parents were starting to talk the same way.”

“So?” Daniel asks, but he’s not meeting my eyes anymore and his face has smoothed out like a bedsheet, the way it does when he wants to hide the lumps in his feelings from me.

“So”—my voice roughens without my permission—“that means, in the whole school, there are only going to be four kids still older than us. And now even our friends are starting to leave.” I scuff my poor abused sneakers into the path, digging through the centimeters of brick-colored dust that cover everything on the Cerro Rico, exposing the hard, cold mountain beneath. I find the courage to say my fear aloud, but even so, it comes out as a whisper. “I think I’m running out of time, Daniel. I’m getting too old. Any day now, I’ll be next.”

We both know there’s no way that Daniel could ever be a miner, not with how often he’s sick and how weak his lungs are. Since we were little, Mami has always talked about how Daniel will need to finish secondary school down in the city and get a job there. We’ve all known he was too special, too fragile, to stay up here. But me . . . I almost never get sick. They’ve never had those conversations about me. Never mind that I’d like to leave the mountain too—go to the city, maybe even attend university—I’ve always known that my job is to help out my family in whatever way they need. That means that every day I get to go to school feels stolen from an ugly future. One day, though, we all know that I’ll be asked to stop going to school and work full-time as a palliri with Mami and Abuelita. Girls like me don’t get choices like the ones I dream about. All our choices are bad ones: like whether we want to waste a day walking down the mountain and back up carrying heavy cans of clean water, or whether we want to drink the runoff from the mines, which we know will make us sick.

For a long moment Daniel just sits beside me, face outlined in the harsh afternoon light, staring at the empty sky. Then, like flipping the switch on an air compressor, Daniel turns on a smile.

“So we’ll run away together,” he says. “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 both die fat.”

The words are musical and familiar. It’s something we’ve repeated back and forth to each other so many times since we were little that I could recite it in my sleep. I finish it. “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?”

Daniel nods. “It’s what we’ve always dreamed, right?”

“It’s what we’ve always dreamed,” I agree. But with my friends dropping out of school one after the other, the words feel hollow today.

I pick up his backpack from the ground and loosen the straps so I can wear it over mine.

“Come on,” I say. “If you’ve caught your breath, let’s get going again. Mami needs us home sometime before next week.”

Daniel heaves himself