Arriaga

Isabella, where she found her rank. The sixth of Eyes Open.

By Arriaga we were not riding anymore. We were freight. They moved us the way you move anything that has stopped being a passenger and started being a shipment, packed in close, counted at both ends, nobody asking anybody's name because names are for people and we had been reclassified. And a strange thing happens when you put a lot of frightened girls in a dark space with no men watching close. A second world starts up inside the first one. A little country, with its own king.

I want to be honest about what I did with that, because it is not the part that makes me look good and it is the part that made me what I became. I took it over. Inside a night. Not by being kind, not at first. By being the one nobody could read and everybody could feel. There was a girl in there who had decided the way to survive was to be meaner than the fear, who took the little anybody had and made the smaller ones smaller, the way it always goes in a cage. I watched her work one night. Then I took her apart in front of everyone, quiet, no hands, just words, found the soft scared thing under the mean and named it out loud until she could not be the king anymore. She cried. I did not enjoy it as much as I expected to, and I have thought about that since.

Because then I did the other thing, the thing I did not plan and could not explain at the time. There was a little one, maybe fifteen, who shook so hard she could not keep food down, the kind the cage eats first. And instead of letting it happen I put her behind me. Gave her my corner, the one with the wall at my back. Told the others she was mine now, and mine meant do not. I did not get anything out of it. She had nothing to give. I just could not watch it and not move, and I did not have a word for why, so I called it strategy and let the others think I was collecting her for later. I was not collecting her. I just could not let the cage have her.

That was the first time I was anybody's. Not owned. The other thing, the thing I did not have a name for yet. I had spent my whole life being the thing men kept. In a boxcar outside Arriaga I found out I was also the thing the weak ones could stand behind, and that the two were not the same, and that the second one cost me and got me nothing and I did it anyway. You want to know where the woman I became got started, the one who runs a houseful of dangerous girls and dares the world to touch them. Not at sanctuary. Not after. Here. In the dark, on a shipment, ranking a cage full of cargo, learning that I would put my body between a man and a girl who was nothing to me, and that I was good at being the king, and that being the king of a boxcar does not stop the boxcar.

Because that is the other half, and I will not let you have the warm one without it. I ruled that car. I protected who I chose and I broke who needed breaking and they all fell in line, and the train rolled north the whole time, indifferent, on time, carrying its little kingdom and its little king to exactly the place it had always been going. I was learning to lead. I just had not learned yet that you can be the best of the cargo and still be the cargo. That one came later, mija. That one came with dirt in my mouth.