Free Cracking the Sky by Brenda Cooper

not a conclusion. I know it. She’s scared.”
    “Maybe she was scared of you.”
    “Maybe. But she kept looking over her shoulder. It didn’t seem like a reaction to me.” A bicycle whipped past us and we stepped aside. “How did Bani feel?”
    “Like her mouth was dry and like she was tired and a little sweaty. But it’s not her first time. Hosting is like walking for her.”
    “I’m Valeria’s first.”
    That night, I dreamed I swam naked in that warm sea, and floated out on the low bob of the water past the shallow waves and felt the sun on my belly and breasts.
    The next day, class started at seven in the morning. I sat in my hard chair sipping a latte and feeling anxious. Dark circles under Kay’s eyes suggested she’d slept about like me, but Dr. Peters was already pontificating in front of the class and I couldn’t ask her.
    Had Valeria spent a good night, or a bad one? Had she been scared?
    Her picture was the background for my all-in-one. She looked about twenty-five, with long dark hair that fell to her waist in thick curls that wanted a comb. In the picture, she had on khaki pants and a white shirt with buttons and a pocket over each breast. Thin sandals supported sturdy feet. Something glinted in one ear, but it was impossible to tell if it was silver or gold against her nearly-mahogany skin. Except for shorter and thinner hair, I might look like that if I lived in sun instead of rain. What frightened her? How different were the two of us? I had travelled of course, summer vacations in Europe and Canada and, once, a week on the Cuban beaches. But that had not been intimate, the people curiosities or helpers or simply confusing.
    We’d had transmitters slipped under our scalps. For now, our rides started at the same time, Seattle. Kay would fall into an Indian evening and I would land in Mexico’s late morning. They’d split us later, four classes, but for the first few days the hosts just had to deal with it. Not too bad for Valeria. With a push of a button, Dr. Peters turned on the fields that sent our normal senses to sleep, fading the room we sat in into the very barest back of ourselves and sending a jolt of new senses into our brains.
    It was three hours later in Yucatán, and already hot. Clouds piled on the horizon. The air felt thick with impending rain. Yesterday, I hadn’t been acknowledged at all, but this morning, Valeria spoke out loud. “Hello, Isa.”
    I could not, of course, reply.
    “I will treat you to coffee and we will walk on the beach today. It will be a tourist day for you.” Valeria’s English had the barest accent. She took me down streets where more people were local, although we passed a pair of pale-skinned men in Hawaiian shirts and two fat white women chattering in German, and a skinny man with red hair and a big laugh. Valeria didn’t seem to like any of them much, and kept her distance.
    I had started to adjust to the ways Valeria’s walk was different than mine, with longer strides and less hurry. She stopped for coffee so dark and bitter I wanted cream in my mouth to cut it down.
    “We are in Playa Del Carmen. East of the stinking resorts.” For two hours, she walked and pointed out an old ruin, a shop that had been selling sweet cakes and Coca-Cola on the same corner for fifty years and had kept it up even after Hurricane Mallory, the house of a rich French man with an aviary so close to the crumbling sidewalk that Valeria’s eyes could see brightly colored birds darting through lush plants with green leaves and red stems. Many of the things she pointed out were new, of course, post storm, and post investment. But Playa had not been damaged beyond repair, and old and new mixed with rich and poor.
    Other than the wondrous raw scrape of a stranger’s senses cutting through my brain, I might as well have been wearing museum headphones. Unlike yesterday, she felt more resigned than afraid; cool and distant. So why? Was it part of the class exercise to