COMPLEMENTARY [GxG]

Chapter 20 | Deadly Orbits

▴ Act Three | Tristesse et Joie ▴

When Montoya sees our painting, she gasps as if she's unveiled some ancient artifact. She leans in close to inspect the canvas, steps back, and stares at it speechless for another minute, her eyes gleaming.

"Girls... this is... this is beyond anything I expected... this is..."

Eris smiles cheekily.

"I knew this was the right decision!" Montoya chirps. "This is profound—it should be on display in a cathedral! This is far more than what I envisioned... you see now why I needed you two to work together! The judges will love it, I am sure of it—this is so, so wonderful!"

"When will we know if we passed?" I ask.

"Oh, it should be another week."

Another week of Eris ignoring me. She's already mentally checked out, scrolling through her phone again, barely saying a word. I'll approach her again once I get ahead in my research for the final round. There are so many different deities we could paint. From the Yoruba Orisha to their Brazilian reinventions to the Akom in Ghana, but I want to find the spirit, goddess, or saint that supposedly used to protect my family. Once I find her, I'll know. I'll have to. I wish there was someone I could ask, but there's no one alive that can answer my questions.

▴ ▴ ▴

Dad is doing better than he has in a long time. William has a friend who's been bringing anti-depressants from Mexico for cheap, since it's not as if we have health insurance here. Who would've thought smuggling could actually be constructive. With his new job as an art teacher, I'm finally seeing him paint again.

William says the leads dried up for the Ximena Leyva story. Anyone who might've been working on it before has gone radio silent, shifting their focus elsewhere. Her name is absent from the new headlines. Her picture now only shows up in a few search results. If she's trying to erase herself off the face of the earth and disappear, she's doing a rather good job.

But she's not doing it alone.

William tells me Iker approached not only him, but Dad as well. In a deal that was more a thinly-veiled threat, he said he would clear my dad's debt—as long as William, as a journalist, stays on the side of the Sinaloa Cartel. That means no sticking his nose in their business. He, and everyone else at his press, will have to focus on their Jalisco enemies instead. Make them look bad and present Sinaloa as the lesser of two evils.

And why does Iker, who wasn't even originally working with them, suddenly care about protecting their image? There's only one explanation. He's abandoning the sinking ship that was the Tijuana Cartel and officially switching sides, and I'm sure Ximena is right there with him.

In the following days, just as Fitz was mopey and low-energy after his song didn't reach a million views overnight—it's currently sitting at about 50k—William is definitely not his usual self. The main tenet of ethical journalism is impartiality, a commitment to objective truth rather than cherry-picked realities. But if he doesn't want to end up like the dozens of journalists murdered for covering crime in Latin America, he has to pick a side. No cartel will protect him for his commitment to exposing the truth. If he wants to make it far, he'll need to sacrifice his ethics.

And I get why that would make him feel defeated. He leaves dirty dishes in the sink, forgets to take the trash out, and doesn't make his bed. Dad is the one that tries to cheer him up, talking in the living room for hours over beers, sharing cigarettes in the backyard, and never leaving him alone for too long.