"We're a long way off from goodbyes. We still have to get down the river to the crossing."
"You. Not we." Ayala turned and, even against the obnoxious yellow of his Hawaiian pineapples peeking their way out from behind his fishing vest, looked blue. His sad aura was conveyed in the deep brown of his eyes. "I will not be making the rest of the journey with you."
"I don't understand."
Angela offered no response, verbal or otherwise, at Ayala's declaration. Hatch saw the lack of surprise in the teen. She assessed that Ayala must've already explained this to her in the interim while Hatch was having her less-than-pleasurable chat with Moreno.
"I should have told you my story when you so bravely shared yours. It's something I regret and something I hope to reconcile someday. Now, however, is not that day. All I'll say for brevity's sake, is that my mother died in that water many years ago. I've never set foot in it since. Look at me." Ayala held his hands out in front him. "Look at how I'm shaking just being around it."
Hatch did look and could see the tremors shaking his body as if a giant plow pushed along his entire body, spreading seeds which bore the fruit of its labor in the goosebumps popping up along his outstretched arms.
"I understand."
Ayala stopped shaking almost immediately. "I thought you were going to give me another pep talk. Like the one you gave me on the rooftop."
"The time for pep talks has long passed. Aside from that, I understand because I know the debilitating effects of fear."
"I don't see it. That's because the worst scars, the ones that never truly heal, are always the invisible ones." Ayala's eyes drifted to Hatch's right arm and the damage it spoke of, written in the pale twisted vine extending the entirety of it. "If what you say is true, I can't imagine the ones I can't see."
"You don't want to." Upstream, the red nose of a raft appeared.
In the rear of the sun-faded raft sat a ruggedly handsome man. His bronzed nut-brown skin shimmered in the late afternoon light. The setting sun's beams played with the water droplets in the air, casting him in a hazy glow, making Arturo Sanchez appear as though Hatch was looking at him through the smudged lens of an 80's Glamour Shot camera.
He navigated the raft to the rocky riverbank with a look of confidence matching the resume Ayala had heralded during their race to the river. The race now over, and Ayala's task of getting them there complete, it was time for Hatch to say goodbye.
"I'd like to see your smiling face walk through my doors at Cafe Rosa someday, and you and I can reminisce on the good we've done. And talk of the crack that we put in that boulder."
"Next time we talk again, I hope we don't just put a crack in it, I hope we've split the damn thing in half."
"I'd like that."
"Me too." Hatch hugged the man, favoring her damaged left hand while doing so.
Ayala faced his fear, or at least a portion of it, by walking between the two women he'd saved, as they made their way the last few feet.
The reporter turned human rights activist stopped dead in his tracks at the first wet rock, as if the water soaking its smooth surface was a forcefield barring further passage. And that is where he stood as Hatch looked upon the man who had risked everything to help a woman he didn't know find a girl he'd never met. A purity resonated in the kindness this man had shown.
In that moment, just as it did with Sanchez, the mist in the air combined with the sun to give him a glow. Hatch thought of Ayala's story, the one about seeing a glow around Maria that tragic day. Then she thought about the old woman who’d claimed to have seen a similar glow around Hatch before letting them into her home, knowingly sacrificing herself for people she did not know and had never met. She looked at the Peacock Man standing before her in the shimmering water’s glow and wondered to herself, was he glowing?
The brightness surrounding Ayala, regardless of its significance, real or imagined, vanished into shadow as the man casting it fell into the water lapping at the rocky shore.
Miguel Ayala lay face down in the riverbank, exchanging a blood payment for crossing through its invisible forcefield. Hatch pulled Ayala from the water and into the raft as the second shot missed Angela, sailing by the teen’s head with only a gnat's ass separating her from an instant death.
Without Angela's body to stop the shot, it continued its path to the rubber floorboard of the raft while nicking the thwart, a long inflatable cross tube used to keep the raft rigid.
That second shot did something else, maybe not for Ayala or Angela, but definitely for Hatch and most likely Sanchez. This bullet told of its origin. When the first shot rang out and Ayala dropped, Hatch had immediately scanned the jagged horizon for sign of the shooter. The second shot gave her that.
A black, wide-brimmed hat loomed above the scope of the rifle.
Sanchez shoved the raft from shore. Hatch didn't ask the why. When she had found the shooter, so had Sanchez. A good operator is a good operator, regardless of the team they play on.
And although Hatch and Sanchez had never before worked together, the training that molded them and the battlefields they were tested on were the same. And so, they too were the same. The bond of brotherhood, of sisterhood, occurring in those briefest of shared seconds, was established in a way few could achieve in a lifetime of friendship.
The battle cry of warfare instantaneously bridges years in minutes, forging while at the same time sealing a bond rarely broken. That happened in the millisecond both realized they were thinking the same thing at the exact same time.
The car can't be reached. The only way out is through.