Treasure of the World Tara Sullivan (inspirational books for women TXT) 📖

There’s a long pause.

“Victor is taking her home,” he says. “They’ll take care of her. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

He doesn’t sound convinced. My heart twists in my chest. “César?”

“Yes?”

There are so many things I want to say. I want to apologize for being part of what got Belén hurt; apologize for dragging him out in the night wind with his cough. I want to beg him to forgive me for being such a bad daughter so far, and to admit that I think, maybe, I’m happy to be a part of his family.

“I lost my acetylene tank in the tunnel. It might be leaking. Tell the men to be careful as they dig.”

“Okay,” he says. “We’re coming, Ana. Hold tight.”

I rest my forehead against the rough stone of the rubble wall blocking our exit. Lifting my shirt over my nose and mouth, I try to breathe as deeply as I can through the fabric, listening to the slow, clanking, scraping process of the men enlarging the access tunnel. The dust has sifted somewhat out of the air, but it’s still murky and difficult to breathe. I can only imagine how hard it must be for Guillermo, his body seizing up in pain, half a tunnel weighing him down, trapped and having to wait.

The lights from the miners’ helmets bob and flash erratically down the access tunnel. Some moments I can see Guillermo, his narrow face pinched and panicked; other moments I can only hear the labored sound of his breathing in the dark.

“Do your legs hurt very badly?” It’s probably not the best thing to say, but it’s all I can think of.

“Not as badly as when you pulled on them, or when the rocks shifted, but it’s not good,” he admits through gritted teeth. “How long do you think it will take for them to dig us out?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. A while. But they’ll get in here as soon as they can. César’s out there. He’ll make sure they get you out safely.”

In the strobe of light, I see the worried look on his face and realize that being dug out by his old supervisor might not be a comforting thought to Guillermo right now.

“What happened?” he asks finally. “All I remember is getting to the mouth of the mine and then I was flying backward. I woke up in the dark, with my legs buried.”

I chew the inside of my lip. Guillermo and his papi always thought I never belonged in the mine. I’m not sure he’s recognized me yet. If I admit who I am, will he be angry? Then again, I think wryly, what can he do to me with half a mountain holding him down?

“It was the dynamite that I threw,” I admit. “It collapsed the entryway where you were hiding.”

“You threw dynamite at me?”

“Not at you . . . just, well, away from myself . . . which happened to be toward you, but I never meant it to hurt you . . . or anyone . . . I just . . . It’s a long story,” I mumble.

Guillermo gives a bitter laugh. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he’s right about that, so I scoot closer to him and tell him the whole story of taking the job as guarda, Belén joining me, and the mess with the dynamite when he and his father showed up. I hesitate to tell him that Francisco left him here instead of helping to dig him out, but to my surprise, Guillermo doesn’t seem shocked by this.

“That was always the plan, if we got separated,” he says. “He’ll come back for me.”

I stare at Guillermo, wondering if he hit his head harder than we thought. “He left,” I repeat. “He saw that you’d been buried in the mine and he left you here. He didn’t even know if you were okay or dead!”

Guillermo snorts dismissively. “Papi would have trusted me to get out of the way. He knows I know my way around the mine.”

I can’t believe he’s defending this behavior, and it makes me snappish.

“Oh yeah? And how did that work out for you? Do you know your way out from under that pile of rock holding down your lower half?”

There’s a long, sullen silence. I regret my nastiness.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t look where I was throwing it at all. I just knew I had to get it away from myself and my sister. Even if you were trying to rob the mine, no one deserves what you’re suffering.”

“We weren’t robbing the mine,” Guillermo says.

“What?”

For a moment, guilt paralyzes me. What if they were just walking by, minding their own business, and I attacked them? What if this is all my fault and they didn’t do anything wrong?

Then I remember how the two of them were sneaking over the hill, not walking on the road, and I remember the bag Francisco took with him when he ran, and I remember Guillermo saying just a moment ago that splitting up was part of some plan. They were up to something.

“We weren’t,” he insists. “We were just doing extra, after-hours mining.”

“After hours . . .” I trail off, remembering the voices deep in the mountain that shouldn’t have been there the night I came down here looking for Daniel. “How long have you been doing this?” I ask suspiciously.

Guillermo shrugs. “Better part of a month,” he says. I see him clenching and unclenching his hands by his sides like he can’t make up his mind whether to keep talking or not. But talking must be taking his mind off his legs because, finally, he relaxes them and goes on. “We were working off by ourselves one day—César had left us to go deal with some problem or other—and we came across a vein of silver.”

“Silver? No way.” Everyone knows the silver in this mountain is all gone. There are only tiny filaments of it left in some of the rocks.

“Not a big vein,” Guillermo corrects me as if I’m an idiot, “not much thicker than a pencil.