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

purse out of my pocket and place it on top of the pile. Then, finally, I look up. Yenni is considering me, the coins cradled in front of her.

“I thought I’d lost the grocery money,” she says. Then, after a pause: “They took it out of my wages.” She considers me. “I wondered why you never came by for breakfast.” After another moment, she nods and tucks the money into the purse, putting it in her pocket. “Well, thank you for bringing it back. It’s good to have an honest friend . . . even if it’s honest with a delay.”

“You still want to be my friend?” I ask, hardly daring to hope.

Yenni smiles.

“Silly,” she says, and pulls me in for a hug.

I leave the posada happily because that too is a door I know will open again for me in the future.

I get to the entry lot of El Rosario right at six.

I stand to one side and watch the miners as they tidy up for the night. I’m starting to know more of them, and as they pack up and head home, they greet me by name, wishing me a quiet Friday night.

“Don’t worry,” I call after them. “Everything’ll still be here in the morning.”

They laugh good-naturedly. I’ve developed a reputation with dynamite.

The last one out, lagging far behind the others, is César. Though I hate how slowly and painfully he moves, after a week of being bedridden, I am so glad to see him on his feet again.

He straightens as he leaves the mine, checking around to make sure everything is where it should be. When he notices me, he comes over.

“Ana,” he says.

“Hi, Papi,” I say.

The smile that breaks across César’s dirty face is like a ray of sunlight through a cloud bank.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. “Now that I’m back, you don’t have to work nights anymore.”

“I’ve decided I’m going to keep working as a guarda,” I say, holding up my books. “It will let me help the family and still continue with school.”

César considers me silently for a moment. I play my best card.

“Mami already said yes . . .”

A laugh bursts out of him.

“Daughters!” he says, throwing up his hands. “Who knew they were so much trouble?”

I only notice after he reaches out to playfully tug my braid that it didn’t even occur to me to flinch.

I wait until everyone is long gone and it’s full night before I strap the acetylene tank to my hip, put the helmet on, and head into the mine. The trip down the main entrance tunnel feels shorter than it did last time, and before I know it, I’m standing in front of the Tío.

I consider him in the flickering glow of my headlamp. Then I take a pencil out of my pocket and hold it in front of his face.

“This is not an offering,” I tell him. “It’s a promise. A promise that I am going to work hard. I am going to study, and save my money, and find a job that is not guarding your mines or sorting your rubble. I am going to get my family off your mountain. You can’t have them. And you can’t have me.”

I stand there a moment longer, waiting to see if the devil will say anything. But he is nothing more than a statue made of clay, and the only breathing I hear in the tunnel is my own.

I put the pencil at the devil’s feet and walk out of the mines.

Later, triple wrapped in blankets on my perch beside the newly cleared entrance to El Rosario, I allow myself a moment before opening my math book. I look down at the city, once the envy of kings, spread below me. Then I tip my head and consider the hill looming above me, and the constellation-spangled sky above it. The Mountain That Eats Men has taken so much: my father’s life, my brother’s health, my childhood.

But it can only take my hope if I let it.

I choose not to let it.

I will find a path off this mountain that is not bought with the pain of others.

It will be difficult, but I will use the currency of work to buy a new future for myself and those I love.

Girls like me don’t get choices handed to us. We have to make them for ourselves.

Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you can’t do it, I tell myself as I open the book and settle down to my first math problem by the light of my brother’s old headlamp. It just means it might take you a long time.

Epilogue

A long time later.

I set my foot on the mud-spattered running board of the beat-up pickup truck and haul myself into the cab. I wedge the bulging bag of notebooks and colored pens between my feet and wait. For a few moments I sit there alone, wound tight as a spring, drumming my fingers on my knees.

When the driver arrives, he pulls himself into the cab in one smooth motion and turns the key in the ignition. The pickup coughs and hacks like an old miner, but eventually shudders sullenly to life. He shoots a look at me.

“Ready?”

I relax my grip on my knees. I’ve worked long hours and studied hard to get to where I am. I hope I’m ready.

I remember the expressions on their faces yesterday when I told Mami and Belén that I was going to take a job working as a teacher at the little school up on the Cerro Rico.

You what? Belén had shrieked. She’s been shrieking a lot now that her final exams are right around the corner. The quiet, shy girl who hid behind César’s legs outside church ten years ago has been replaced by a confident young woman, eager to make her mark on the world. César would be so proud if he could