of Léon Bellamy.
Léon, the boy who made me laugh when he tripped over rolling his r’s. Léon, who had startled the village with his eyes, so pale gray that at night they looked silver, and his hair, light as bleached linen. Léon, who had won them over with his wonder about armadillos, how the animal rolled itself into a ball of plate armor.
Léon, the boy who had put his mouth to my ear and told me the brown of my skin made him think of wild deer roaming the woods where he was born.
Even in this moment, opening under me like a break in the earth, Abuela would have told me to find some small thing to thank God for. There was one, just one, I could get my fingers around.
No one, not la Légion, not Oropeza, ever knew Léon as anything but a boy. They did not know that his mother had christened him with a girl’s name. They did not know that he had joined la Légion less out of patriotism and more for the chance to live as who he was. If they had, Oropeza would have thrown it at me, mocked me for it. He would have made clear what he thought of us, Léon living among the other soldiers with his bound-down chest, me lifting my chin in the street as though I were the equal of the powder-pale women in their escaramuza dresses.
But even this small mercy broke in me. All of it broke.
First I had lost my grandmother, made sick from her rage over what this war had taken. She always warned me not to let my rage kill me, but in the end her own had spread its venom through her.
They said this war was over, even as women wept over their stoves and into their sewing. Even now when an Alsatian boy had just been blindfolded and shot.
My rage felt so hot it would singe away my smallest veins. There were so many empty places where everything I had lost once fit. Now there were only the dustless, unfaded patches where all I loved had been.
There was nothing left. Yes, there were the women who had loved me and my abuela; my abuela had fed them when they were sick and prayed over them when they bore children. There were even the ones who had taken to Léon like he was a stray. But now they only reminded me of those empty places.
I found the few clothes of my grandfather’s that Abuela had kept, the ones he’d left behind. He had dared to hit her once, and her rage had struck him back so quickly, felling him, he called her a witch, yelling, “Bruja,” as he fled our village.
I hemmed his trousers with quick, rough stitches. I stuffed his boots with scrap cloth so they would fit. I had the small, wide feet of my grandmother, the edges rough from years of running without shoes.
Like a silent prayer, I gave her my gratitude. Abuela had wanted me to play outside barefoot as much as I could stand, so that if ever I could not afford shoes, my feet could go without them. Now I understood what my grandmother had wanted, for me to keep my heart soft but the edges of me hard enough to survive the world as it was.
My grandfather’s poncho, I plunged into red dye, the rough agave taking it fast.
At night, the color wouldn’t show. But I would feel it against my skin.
I would not let this rage kill me. By using it, I would drive it from my body. I would turn it against the last man who would not save Léon. The man, who, by dawn, would be robbed of his finest things.
Oropeza’s guards, I took first.
I neared the hacienda with my head lowered. My hat hid the red of my hair. The brim shaded my face. I left the guards no chance to wonder if I was some messenger boy bearing midnight news, or whether they should draw their brass-throated pistols. I let my rage stream into them. I let it become liquid and alive.
They fell, one gripping his side, another holding his chest as though the venom clutched his heart.
Anything I could carry, I stole. Fine cigars. Money and papers from the desk drawers. Jewels that had once belonged to Oropeza’s wife; Abuela was sure he had killed her with his cold heart as well as we could with our poison.
I slipped through the house, the moon casting clean squares of light through the vestíbulo windows. The strap of my woven bag cut into my shoulder, heavy with all I had taken.
The rustling of grape leaves outside and the tangle of voices stilled me.
Oropeza and his friends stumbled drunk through the dark grapevines. Calvo and Acevedo and other men with more power than sense and more money than mercy.
They laughed. They swapped echoes of the same questions.
“How much are los franceses giving you for the traitor?” Calvo asked.
“How did you even manage this?” Acevedo asked. “I thought the only Frenchmen you knew were the ones you’d had shot.”
“Why didn’t I think of this?” another man asked.
“Because you’re not as smart as I am,” Oropeza said.
A question had just formed in me when I saw the figure held between them, being shoved forward and made to walk. Blindfolded, his wrists bound behind his back.
Because he could not see, he stumbled, drawing their laughter. The long points of their boots needled his shins.
They were forcing him toward the road that ran behind Oropeza’s estate.
My gasp was sharp as the first breath waking from a nightmare, the moment of wondering if, as in those dreams, my fingers were made of lightning or the sky was truly a wide blue blanket woven by my abuela’s hands.
Léon.
They hadn’t let the firing squad take him.
Hope bubbled up under my rage, but with it my anger thickened.
They hadn’t killed him, not yet. Instead, Oropeza was trading him to the country that now considered him an enemy. Trading him for money, for favors, for the currencies of men who owned so much ground but never bent down enough to touch it.
He was surrendering El Lobo to the country that called him Le Loup, the country Oropeza declared his enemy but still bargained with in secret.
My hope lifted my rage higher, driving it into a swirling cloud that flew out the windows and rushed at the men. It caught them, striking them down like el Espíritu Santo had slain them.
But this was not God’s work. This was not the Holy Spirit filling these men. This was the work of una Roja. A poison girl, veiled in men’s clothing.
The men fell to the ground, holding their throats and chests and sides. The richest ones, the ones whose boots had the longest tapered points, twisted to keep from stabbing themselves with their own shoes. Oropeza jerked as though demons poured through him. My vengeance, a vengeance I shared with my grandmother and all Las Rojas, was toxic as thorn apple and lantana. It was poison as strong as moonflower and oleander.
I threw open the glass-inlaid doors to the back gardens. I stepped between writhing men and grabbed Léon’s arm, pulling him with me. I caught the smell of his hair. Even now, it held the scent I’d come to think of as the countryside in Alsace. Dust and rain on hills. Fields covered in the blue of flax flowers and the gold brush of oats. He’d brought it with him on his skin. And when he told me the brown of my naked back reminded him of the deer that roamed that land, he gave me a place in his country.
Even through my rage and my fear, my lips felt hot with wanting to touch his skin. They trembled with wanting to give him my name.
Oropeza gazed up at me. His face showed no recognition, only the fear that I was a boy born of robbers and devils.
Through the open doors, Oropeza yelled into the house for his servants. He called them stupid and slow. He called them fools.
They ran across the tile. But when they saw the scene, when they saw the writhing men, and me, and the blindfolded man I had stolen from their patrono, they sank to the floor. They clutched their stomachs as though they, too, had been poisoned.
My breath stilled with worry that I had made them ill, that my venom was in them even though