La Ladrona

“Q’elva is just a myth!  She’s not real!” Dr. Ian J. Fielding said exasperatedly. 

 But Lucía wasn't listening. She was too busy making a mess of the library, dragging open drawers, tearing through rolled maps, sending clouds of ancient dust into the stale air.

“Everything’s a myth until someone proves it,” she muttered in Spanish, a clever sleight of hand pocketing a small brass compass with a six pointed star on it.

By the time Fielding turned back, she was studying an open atlas with the wide-eyed innocence of a saint caught in prayer.   It vanished beneath her coat in one practiced motion, so smooth it might have been magic or muscle memory.

Fielding adjusted his spectacles and tried to keep his composure. “You’re talking about a fairy tale. A woman made of vines, a heart of gold sap, a jungle that breathes? You sound like my students when they get into the rum bottle.”

Lucía spun on her heel, cigar between her lips, eyes blazing with the kind of conviction that made men nervous and priests sweat. “Fairy tales don’t leave footnotes, querido.  And anyway she’s simply bound by vines, not made of them.  Who doesn’t love a little kinky fun?

She slammed a leather-bound journal onto the table. The pages were lined with hand-drawn glyphs and notes in both Spanish and Latin — her father’s handwriting.

Fielding stepped closer, squinting. “You can’t be serious. These markings— they’re Acolyte script. The Church burned those records a century ago.”

Lucía smiled faintly. “And yet here they are. Funny how fire never quite reaches the truth, no?”

Fielding hesitated. “Even if this were genuine, the Sixth Choir— the Acolytes of Vine— were wiped out. You’re chasing ghosts.”

She took a long drag from her cigar, exhaled slowly. The smoke curled like vines between them. “Then I’ll find the one that’s still breathing.”

Fielding rubbed his temples. “Lucía, you’ll ruin your reputation—”

She cut him off with a smirk. “Reputation’s for the living. My father’s dying.”

Her tone dropped, the bravado briefly slipping. “If even half of this is true, Q’elva’s vines can bring him back.”

Fielding’s face softened. “Lucía… you can’t bring the dead to life.”

She looked down at the rosary wrapped around her wrist, thumb brushing the worn beads. “Then I’ll just have to steal it.”

Fielding swallowed. “That power simply doesn’t exist.”

Lucía grinned. “Then I will make it exist.”

Lucía quietly slipped into her father’s study turned hospital room.  The doctors weren’t sure what exactly was wrong with him, other than everything seemed to be failing.  He hadn’t been responsive in over a year.

The hospital smelled the same everywhere (even the ones that were previously libraries) — a thin antiseptic dragged over old linens, the coppery tang of iron trays and the faint, unplaceable odor of sickness and (in this case) vellum. Her boots were soft on the dark hard wood floor; beyond the half-closed door the night nurse’s trolley clattered as she readied a glass syringe. The study’s lamps threw long, sepia shadows.

Mateo Navarrete lay as he had lain for a year: half-sunken into pillows, eyelids like shuttered windows. A single glass bottle hung on a metal pole by the bed, its stopper pierced by rubber tubing; the drip was slow and patient. Nearby a brass oxygen regulator hissed in a small, steady whisper beneath the nurse’s hand. 

Lucía sat. The wooden chair groaned; she ignored it. She unpinned a cigar from behind her ear and held the stick between two fingers until she needed it. She didn’t light it, but chewed the end watching her father like a hawk.

She reached for his hand. It was little and warm, the skin paper-thin as old maps. His fingers had thinned into the fine cords she’d seen drawn in his notebooks. Her thumb found the faint pulse and she closed her eyes against the ache that came — not yet grief, but the brittle, urgent ache of someone who knows a person is slipping and dares to try to catch them.

Her father taught her everything she knew.  In his prime Mateo Navarrete had once filled rooms the way an orchestra fills a hall. In his prime he was a bluff, kindly man who could hold court over mugs of Port and reduce a room of stiff colleagues to howls at an off-color quip. His hands, now gossamer with age, had been large and sure, stained with ink and sap from years of tracing root-maps; he taught Lucía to hold a brush and an etching needle the way a priest taught a novice a prayer. The papers on his bedside were not just academic detritus but the remnants of an entire other life: fevered diagrams of knots and roots, Nahuatl couplets underlined in haste, the notation of an Acolyte litany in a hand that had once signed petitions for reluctant bishops. He had left the Choir, whatever else the world said of him, and whatever fire the Church and Management had aimed at those old orders. He kept, hidden in an oilskin wrapper, one small thing he would not surrender — an amber sliver of root like a fossilized heartbeat. It was the thing that had ruined him, and the thing that made Lucía feel at once inheritor and thief.

“Papá,” she said once, and the word fell like a bell. He did not answer in any voice she could hear. For a long breath she counted the small mechanical sounds: the nurse’s compass-like click as she checked Mateo’s pulse, the soft slit of the drip, the distant rumble of a streetcar beyond the hospital wall. Then, like the shudder of a leaf, Mateo’s fingers twitched and the smallest movement ran up his arm. It was so slight she might have imagined it.

She drew closer until the smell of him was a map: old tobacco, fever, the dry dust of libraries. His lips moved, a thin, rasping syllable where there had been only the room’s quiet for months.

“—Lucía—” it was less than a breath, more like a name caught on a thorn. She would have wept if she had time. Instead she pressed her hand to his and felt, impossibly, his fingers close a fraction around hers. Not enough to bargain with fate, but enough.

The rosary on her wrist clicked once against his knuckles — dark beads meeting pale skin. For a heartbeat the crucifix lay warm against his palm and then slid away on the sheet as if some invisible thing preferred distance.

Lucía’s rational mind — Oxford lectures, Fielding’s scolding, the habit of cataloguing evidence — lined up and said spasms, the body’s last random acts, the effect of laudanum or morphine. But the part of her that listened to footnotes and fevered marginalia drew tight as a bowstring.

She opened the satchel he kept at his bedside. It sat on the chair as if waiting. Under a nest of prescription slips and a folded handkerchief, she found it: a cloth bundle wrapped in oilskin. Her fingers burned with the old thrill of theft — that shake she’d once felt climbing a museum window — and fear threaded it now like cold wire.

She unwrapped the oilskin and there, small as a thumb, lay the thing that had haunted his sketches for years: a sliver of root sealed in amber. The resin trapped the thread of root like a tiny fossil, and it smelled faintly of wet earth and something sweeter beneath — sap warmed in sun. The amber was sealed with a strip of red wax stamped with the six-pointed sigil she had already seen in the calfskin scrap. Her father had hidden it like a reliquary. He had never told her where he’d taken it.

Beneath the amber, folded into the oilskin like a secret letter, was a photograph — the edges scalloped, the emulsion faded to cigarette-paper sepia. Lucía smoothed it on her palm. The image had the stiff formality of studio portraits, but the backdrop was unmistakably jungle: a suggestion of palms and a carved lintel half-swallowed by ivy.

Mateo was younger in the picture, chest broad, a grin she had forgotten splitting his face. Beside him stood a woman whose hair was coiled in a plain knot; her dress was simple, almost monastic. What made the photograph catch in her throat were the ropes that ran down both of her forearms — not decorative cords but heavy, knotted lengths, dark with something that might have been sap or age. They fell past her wrists and vanished out of frame, like the ends of some ritual binding. Her expression was unreadable: neither joyful nor angry, but absolute, as if she were steadying the world by sheer will.

On the back, in Mateo’s cramped, sloping hand, a line in Spanish and a date: “Leticia, Colombia — 1910. For those who still listen.” The name slid into Lucía’s memory with a cold click. Madre Izel. It awakened some distant memory but it was like trying to condense fog.  She brushed the thought away for now.

The photo smelled faintly of tobacco and resin. Lucía traced the ropes with a fingertip, half-afraid of smudging the ink. Whoever the woman was, whoever had let those cords lie against her arms, she was not simply a villager; she wore the attitude of someone who kept secrets. The ropes looked less like punishment and more like tools — the hands that’d grown into them, trained to hold and bind and keep.

She folded the photograph with deliberate care and slid it into the inner pocket of her coat, alongside the amber and the compass that would not point north. For the first time the journal’s marginalia, her father’s fevered litanies, and Madre Izel’s warning snapped together into a single, terrible frame. This was not myth and rumor. This was a ledger with names.

Lucía let out the breath she’d been holding and, without meaning to, mouthed the single word scrawled on the back of the scrap: “Listen.”  Now she had a destination, and a name.  She was deadly with less.

The bell on the S.S. Sultania tolled like a blunt accusation as Lucía hopped down the gangplank. The ship itself looked as if it had swallowed two lives: across its flaking white paint and once-gilded railings you could still read the echoes of finery — brass polished in another century, a promenade deck wide enough for evening dresses — but close up the hull wore its new workman’s face: patched plates, coal-streaks, and a funnel that hoisted more smoke than steam. She had been born to an ocean and baptized in a different kind of history.

Once, the Sultania had run the Atlantic as a liner of faint notoriety: launched in 1912 as a ship for passengers who liked their tea with lace and their conversations in a hundred languages. War and profit had a way of changing ships; after a stint carrying stores and soldiers, she’d been sold cheap to a South American consortium, stripped of velvet and gilt, refitted with shallow keels and a reinforced bow, and re-christened for the river. Old sailors liked to tell a story — that she’d twice avoided catastrophe by the skin of her hull and once taken on water in a storm that sank a prideful launch nearby — and that her decks still held the damp ghosts of cocktail parties and prayers. Whatever the truth, the Sultania was perfect for the Amazon: roomy enough for smugglers’ crates and missionaries’ hymnals, elegant enough to keep the governors comfortable, and slow enough that secrets could be passed from rail to rail under the cover of smoke.

Leticia smelt of river mud and diesel and fruit boiled too long; there was a grit to the air that made you keep your guard up whether you’d been born here or were merely passing through. Timber jetties leaned into the brown water like tired hands; on one, soldiers in rumpled uniforms smoked and argued over manifests. Men unloaded crates stamped with foreign names; a customs clerk bored and watchful stamped passports with the rhythm of a man who’d been waiting for trouble all his life.

René Quintero folded himself out of the crowd with a practiced smile. He still wore the clean white linen shirt and fine huaraches of a man who spent more hours in cafés than on riverboats. He touched Lucía’s arm with the familiarity of someone who’d been paid well enough to pretend to be a friend. “City smells like opportunity, señorita,” he said, eyes scanning for opportunity. “And trouble. Which one do you prefer?”

“Both,” she said, letting the answer sit like a promise. She tightened the rosary on her wrist and palmed the compass beneath her coat. The amber pressed against her ribs like a secret.  “But today, just a name.  Madre Izel.”

“You’re looking for trouble,then,” he said, blunt as a club. “Madre Izel? People whisper she’s a witch. People whisper lots of things. You should beware other men hearing you ask about Madre Izel.”

René laughed easy and offered him a cigarette. Lucía kept her smile small. “We’re only scholars,” she allowed — the truth bent like a branch after a hurricane. “Research.”

The municipal man snorted and gestured toward the river. “There’s a launch upriver at dawn. Eustaquia’s men will take you for a price. The jungle keeps its own hours.”

Lucía pocketed the note, adjusted her scarf, and let René argue about hiring a boat. The Sultania’s funnel puffed a last slow breath as she made ready to steam off; its bell rang slantwise in the dusk, and the deckhands hauled in lines with the practiced ritual of men who respect an old ship’s moods. In the market’s muted clamor, the jungle waited like something patient and hungry. Lucía smiled and tasted the ash at the corner of her mouth. The hunt had teeth.

The Sultania’s horn groaned once, low and sorrowful. Somewhere beyond the fray, the jungle began to whisper her name.

Lucía sat near the prow, arms folded, the cigar between her teeth, long and lazy puffs of smoke catching in the breeze. The river breathed mist.

René stood behind her, pretending to be casual, but his eyes never stopped measuring distances—between the crew, the crates, the rifles. “You sure this is worth your neck?” he asked over the engine’s grumble.

Lucía smiled without looking. “Necks are overrated.”

The river widened and curved until the banks became walls of green. Trees leaned toward the current as though listening. Somewhere, parrots screamed and something large splashed unseen. The sun burned silver through haze, and the jungle answered with a chorus of insects like static on a ham radio.

The compass on Lucía’s lap trembled, the needle jerking not north but toward the undergrowth as if magnetized by heartbeat. She tapped the glass. It twitched harder.

“You see that?” she asked quietly.

René frowned. “Compass broken.”

“No,” she said, watching the line of trees bend. “It’s like it can’t make up its mind.”

Hours passed. The crew grew uneasy. The air thickened with a smell like wet copper and flowers left too long in water. When the sun sagged red into the canopy, the helmsman crossed himself and muttered a prayer.

“Something wrong?” Lucía asked.

He spat over the rail. “River runs deep here. Monsters hide in the deep.”

The engines sputtered and died mid-channel. Silence clamped shut around them. Only the sound of water lapping against wood. Then a voice—a woman’s—rose faintly through the fog. It wasn’t singing so much as remembering how to. The syllables were old, heavy, curved like roots.

René turned egg shell white. “Madre Izel.”

Lucía stood, steadying herself as the boat rocked. “Good. Saves me the walk.”

The mist parted as if pushed by unseen hands. A figure stood waist-deep in the shallows, draped in thick ropes that shifted like living things.  Around her neck hung cords knotted in intricate patterns, each knot sealed with wax and sigils that flickered like embers. Her eyes were the color of wet soil, deep and endless and consuming.

“Lucía Navarrete,” the woman said—not asking.

The sound of her name in that voice felt like being seen down to the root. Lucía’s hand tightened on her satchel. “Madre Izel. I’ve come for my father.”

The woman smiled, and it was not kind. “You came for yourself. He only gave you the excuse.”

Lucía stepped off the boat before René could stop her. The water rose cold around her boots. “Then you know what I carry.”

“Of course,” Izel said. “You carry a theft. A promise that was not yours.”

Lucía pulled the amber from her coat, held it up so the fading light caught its honey heart. “He found this. He said it belonged to you.”

Izel’s vines shifted, a slow whispering sound. “It belongs to the Bound Woman herself.”

Lucía hesitated. “You mean—”

“I mean your father took from a god and thought it belonged to him now.”

The vines around Izel’s wrists stirred like serpents. “And now you come to bargain with what he stole. You want the breath he took from you as a child. You want to unbury him. You want to steal life.”

Lucía swallowed. “I want him back.”

The vines stilled. “There is always a cost,” Izel said mournfully. “But you must replace what was taken. The Vine will not suffer imbalance.”

Lucía felt her pulse race. “What does it want?”

Izel smiled again, this time sad. “The same thing all roots crave—something to hold, to curl around.”

“I’m ready, no matter the cost”.

Madre Itzel just nodded slowly, morosely.  

The jungle exhaled, and the mist surged around them. René shouted something from the boat but the words dissolved. Lucía felt the vines brush her skin like a question, cool and patient.

She didn’t pull away.

Unseen vines worked their way quickly from every direction.  They bound Lucia tightly where she stood.  Around her ankles, up her calves and thighs, pinning her arms to her side until she looked like a mummy wrapped in foliage and not funerary wrappings.  Eventually they worked her way up to her face and completely covered her head.  The last thing she saw before the vines obstructed her vision was Madre Itzel walking away slowly and the mist enveloping her yet again.

Downward. Always downward.

The current carried her through tunnels of living wood, roots the size of cathedrals twisting overhead, their surfaces engraved with faces—human, animal, and something older. Every few lengths a pulse ran through the network, a slow luminous beat like the breath of a sleeping god. She realized, dimly, that the pattern matched her own heart until it didn’t. Then hers began to follow it.

She couldn’t explain it, but she knew she was travelling.  As quickly as the vines had wrapped around her they were starting to fall off.  The vines not only blocked her vision but also her breathing.  Luckily for her, the vines make quick work of distance.  

The vine cocoon spat her out onto the ground.  She gasped for breath.  The air was heavy, damp.  It smelled like soil after a harsh rain. 

She stood inside a hollow vast enough to house a city. Pillars of woven roots reached up into a canopy miles high; light filtered through the sap-veins like stained glass. The air hummed with low choral tones—thousands of whispers layered into one endless syllable.

Time no longer moved in Q’elva’s hollow.

The vines pulsed in slow rhythm, the sound of jungle and prayer blending until Lucía couldn’t tell which belonged to her. Every breath came through roots; every heartbeat echoed in the green.

Then she heard it, a heartbeat.  Weak, but steady.  She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew it belonged to her father.  It kept the pace like a metronome for an amateur.  

In the center of it all stood a type of Holy of Holies.  Lucía could make out it was a person, someone wrapped tight in vines.  Everything led from and to this person.  There were eyes, the only thing left uncovered and for now they were closed.  Lucíahalf hoped they would stay that way.

A voice suddenly unfurled around her like a breeze through a courtyard.

“Hello, child.  Why is it you have sought me out?”

Lucíalooked around, puzzled.  The voice seemed to be whispered from every corner of the hollow.  Instinctually she knew it came from this Bound Woman before her.  She righted herself on her knees and looked up at the closed eyes.

“It’s…it’s you!  You’re Q’elva, aren’t you?  The stories were real” she said in awe.

“Yes, I have gone by many names over the aeons.  Q’elva, the Bound Woman.  All names point back to me.  Now tell me, what is it you seek?”

“I came for my father.  He’s dying.  I know you can save him.  Please, he’s all I have.  Help me bring him back” Lucíapleaded.

“Bring him back?  Where has he gone?” the Bound Woman inquired softly.  

“From the edge,” Lucía said, and heard how thin the hope sounded here. “From the hanging-on that is worse than going.”

“Then you do not seek life,” murmured the green, “but possession.”

In the amber light a picture swam up from the floor: Mateo upright in bed, eyes lucid, lips shaping her name. The same moment, Lucía’s fingers went cold—sap pearled along her cuticles like gold dew, a tiny seizure passed through her hands.

Lucía gulped.  She didn’t seek to own her dad!  She just wasn’t ready to let him go.

“What? No, no that’s not what I meant-”

She was cut off, “All who seek me, seek to possess that which they have no right to.  Your father’s time has come, little one.  But if you must persist, I will allow you to cut a snippet of my vine.  It will sustain him.  But only sustain.  Or, you can move on.”

“Move on?  Where?  How?”

“On.  To a time and place that could use you.  It will mean acknowledging your father has gone, though.  Can you do that?  Do you have the strength?  The jungle demands strength such as this.”

Are you strong enough?  The question hung heavily in the air. Lucíathought she couldn’t leave her father behind.  He taught her everything she knew.  She thought of him in his hospital bed, once so powerful and large and now so frail and broken.

The vines lifted—gentle, waiting. For a breath, Lucía let herself imagine it: the stillness that was not death, the endless hymn, her father’s breath counting time in a life she held like a rosary bead. But the bead was not hers. It had never been. She thought of the photograph’s edges soft with age; of Fielding’s clumsy kindness; of a girl climbing a museum window and discovering it wasn’t the owning that thrilled her, it was the knowing where a thing belonged.

Lucía bowed her head. “He’s already gone,” she said, and the words, once said, did not kill her. They steadied her. “Let him rest.”

Nothing moved for a long time. Then a hush like air being pulled from a vacuum tore through the hollow.  Q’elva had finally opened her eyes and they burned bright purple.  They burned hot and bright such that Lucíahad to look away lest she burned away at their sight.

“Walk, thief,” said Q’elva, and her voice was the sound of a hundred leaves agreeing. “The world keeps the receipts.”

To Lucía’s right, the air unzipped. Not forward into light, but sideways: a seam opening in the living wall to reveal something cold and geometric beyond—glass, tile, static in the air like trapped weather. Vines framed the aperture like fingers holding a page.

She took one last breath of rain and resin. “Gracias,” she whispered—to whom, she could not say—and stepped through.

Fluorescent light slapped her eyes.
Her boots hit tile instead of soil. Papers flew like startled birds.

Across the room, a man with a receding hairline and a coffee stain on his tie froze mid-sentence.
“…what we need,” Alphonsus Cain was saying, “is a thief—”

He blinked. “—and apparently the universe heard me.”

Eudora Vale straightened behind him, eyes sharp and assessing. “Security breach?”

Alphonsus looked her up and down. Mud on the floor. Vines clinging to her coat. A faint smell of earth and incense. “Depends. Do security breaches usually wear jungle couture?”

Lucía spun in a slow circle, disoriented. The hum of typewriters. Pneumatic tubes hissing overhead. Rows of cubicles behind frosted glass.
“Where… am I?” she asked in Spanish.

Eudora already had her ID scanner out. “She’s not in the system.”

The device chirped red, twice, and died.

“That’s impossible,” Alphonsus muttered. “Everyone’s in the system.”

“I’m telling you, she’s not in the system!” Vale was getting impatient.

“The only way she could not be is if…” realization started to dawn on Alphonus.  “Miss, could you tell me, what year is it?”

“Year?” Lucía asked quizzically.  “1938 of course.  Why are you asking me the year?”

Eudora and Alphonsus looked at each other.  

Eudora spoke first.  “The desert booth sent her here?  And now?  Why?”

“No, this wasn’t the desert booth.  I think it was an older one…tell me, Miss…?”

Alphonsus stepped closer, careful as if she might shatter. “Tell me, Miss…?”

“Navarrete. Lucía Navarrete.”

“Miss Navarrete,” he said, jotting her name on a pad without realizing his hand was shaking, “where were you before… this?”

“I was in the jungle,” she said slowly. “Trying to procure a vine clipping for my father.”

Silence. Even the pneumatic tubes seemed to hesitate overhead.

Alphonsus’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She sent you here.”

Lucía frowned. “Who did?”

“The Bound Woman,” he said. “Q’elva.”

Lucía’s eyes widened. “You know that name?”

Eudora and Alphonsus didn’t answer. Their lapel pins hummed softly, the same tone as the vines still pulsing faintly at Lucía’s wrists.

Somewhere in the ceiling, a bulb flickered.
“Take a seat,” Alphonsus said, gesturing toward the metal chair across from his desk. “You need to be debriefed.”
Lucía hesitated, then sat. The seat was cold, humming faintly.
Alphonsus clicked his pen. “All right, Miss Navarrete. Let’s start from the beginning.”

She met his eyes. “Which beginning?”

The lights buzzed once, long and low. Somewhere far below, something old listened.