Earlier that afternoon, the first shuttle from Arrow Rock had come and gone. It left behind Lola Rhea, a handful of other early guests, and an embarrassing amount of cargo: crates of Duke’s bourbon and other bottles, kegs of Dr Pepper from Matt’s own bottling plant, and tubs of giant river prawns from his aquaculture ponds already chilling in the kitchen. Then it lifted again and headed south, taking the advance team on to the Yucatán to help with the malaria outbreak.
Now, as evening settled in, the shuttles came in low over the terraced fields, quiet in the thin mountain air.
From the courtyard, Matt watched the first one of the night flare and settle in the lower pasture below the hacienda, navigation lights washing the stone walls in pale blue and white. The old house did not seem impressed. It had sat on the slopes of Xinantécatl for seven centuries and had seen worse things than visiting aircraft.
A second shuttle followed an hour after his own, swinging wider to avoid the line of cypress trees before dropping into the same field. Kids ran to the edge of the wall to watch, only to be snapped back by three different tías at once.
“No más,” one of them scolded, catching a little boy by the collar. “You want the Freeholder to land on your head, hmm?”
Matt smiled at that and did not correct her. It was nice to know not everyone in the world recognized him on sight. Tonight he was not the Freeholder. Tonight he was the guy who had brought forty extra mouths to feed to a family party. Sure, they owned a dozen restaurants and catering companies, but that was still a lot of extra people to bring, even if he had walked in with a quarter million Fiat Dollars worth of eighty year old bourbon on a whim.
Angelina stepped through the arched gate from the lane a few minutes later, Floyd at her side, their kids in a loose cluster behind them. Beks came with them, and Mall, and a few others from the homestead who had been given the choice to stay in Missouri or go to a quince on a Mexican mountainside and had chosen correctly. The three Chakrobarty girls and Kinzie Hart were in that knot too, already half a step ahead in scanning for cousins their own age.
“Nice place,” Floyd said quietly, looking up at the whitewashed walls and red tile roofs, the rows of windows with their wrought iron balconies. Bougainvillea climbed in purple sheets along one wing. A small chapel sat at one corner of the courtyard, bell already tied off for the evening. “We are not the only ones in pointy boots, are we?”
“Thankfully no,” Matt chuckled.
He continued with his own receiving line.
“Rita,” he said, smiling at the young British born Anglo-Indian cadet. “Girl, you look great.”
He laughed and passed her on to the next in line while eyeing the next trio.
“Girls, you look lovely. Mall, Kevin will be here in a bit. He is flying in with T’mari.”
Matt watched one boy on the far side of the courtyard and was quietly pleased to see he was looking directly at Alexandra Wood instead of at the green aliens. Pretty enough now, she would eventually be outshined by her happier and, in time, even prettier younger sister, Polly. He knew he was playing favorites and did not care.
“Be careful, Pedro,” Kinzie said, following his gaze. “She is the daughter of a general and a favorite of Tía Angelina.”
“We are not going to have any fun if he keeps that up,” one of the Chakrobarty girls laughed. “Come on, let us go find Theresa.”
“How are things at home?” Matt asked Angelina as she and Floyd took their first drinks.
“You are actually missed by those damned cats. I still cannot believe you bought my daughters ocelots.”
“I do not know why you find that hard to believe, honey. We are talking about my short friend here,” Floyd said, raising the tankard that had been brought to him. “Harvest is going well and the new hands are learning quickly, but we are going to have a bear of a time getting all that small grain in during the fall harvest. I trust you will be helping with that?”
“You know me,” Matt said.
“We do, and it is time you act like a statesman,” Angelina said, giving him a look over the rim of her glass.
“Not tonight, honey. I am at a party with pretty women and it looks like mine is on final approach,” he said, glancing toward the dark beyond the fields where another shuttle’s running lights were just coming in low over the lower Toluca Valley.
They stepped into the main courtyard together. Strings of warm lights crisscrossed above them, hung from the balconies and a couple of tall poles that had probably once held something more practical. At one end of the courtyard, a raised platform had been set for the band. At the other, a long table waited for the quinceañera and her closest family, covered in white cloth and flowers in gold and cream.
The air smelled of pine from the hills, roasted meat from the asador set up near the outer wall, and something floral and sharp from the gardens. It was cooler here than in the city, cool enough that most people had brought shawls or jackets. The younger kids did not seem to notice, already evaporating into the maze of cousins and friends they had not seen in too long.
Matt did a quick head count out of habit.
Travel team, check. Security, blended into the hired staff and Rodriguez cousins with impressive ease. Youth crew, plus the three Chakrobarty girls and Kinzie, already being mobbed by Theresa’s teenage cousins. V’ren, quiet and watchful at the edges. Homestead family, present and accounted for, eyes wide but not overwhelmed.
Tías in every direction. The titos were undoubtedly still watching the Mexico–Columbia match. He wondered how much of the eighty year old they had gone through and if anyone had thought to maybe only bring them the twenty year old instead.
He signaled Mall to join them.
“T’mari says Kevin might be delayed,” Matt told her when she reached his side. “She told him he had to wash and wax the shuttle before he could come to the party.”
“Matthew, behave. She is as excited to see him as I was you.”
“I should hope more so, since we were naked in the back of a shuttle together barely eight hours ago.”
“And I was surprised you passed on the opportunity, saying something about conference schedules not running on Filipino time, and bad mouthing them for such ridiculous notions like punctuality.”
“Where is he really?” Matt asked.
“Juana and Marcus came into town this morning to help him shop. Turns out he knows both of them. They are friends of Alexandra’s, having spent last year in Boston on an exchange semester,” Angelina said.
He spotted Pat near the band, headset around her neck despite this not being her event, red hair bright under the lights. Pinky Rodriguez-Marmaduke, Marshall High and Mizzou, was clearly in her element, hands already moving glasses and chairs a few centimeters at a time until everything lined up with how it felt in her head.
Paul’s sister, Sofia, spotted Matt’s group and crossed the courtyard like a fast moving storm front. Her dress was bright green this time, skirts brushing the tiles. She kissed Matt’s cheeks, then Angelina’s, then Floyd’s, after forcing the six foot seven giant to kneel to her five nothing, talking before she was fully stopped.
“You brought everyone, perfect,” she said. “My mother has already told the neighbors she is hosting an interstellar delegation.”
“Then we should try not to embarrass her,” Matt said. “Too much.”
Sofia laughed.
“No, no, embarrass her a little. She will enjoy it. Sing her a little Ricky Martin tonight after she and Lola Rhea finish a few bottles of Rioja.”
She looped her arm through his and steered him toward the far end of the courtyard where the family line was forming. Near a carved wooden door whose panels had been worn smooth generations before anyone ever signed the Confederated Corporations Agreement, Senator Ramon Rodriguez was already posted up with a glass in hand, greeting people in that unhurried way of men who have been doing it all their lives. A little further back, his cousin the retired governor held court with Lola Rhea, hands sketching old stories in the air, the oldest living Filipina in the world flattering the young man in a way only women over one hundred thirty five could do to a man approaching eighty.
In front of them, centered on the door, stood Theresa.
Her dress was a soft rose gold, full skirt layered and floating just above the tiles, bodice embroidered with tiny beads that caught the light every time she turned. The tiara sat in her dark hair like it belonged there. She looked both older and very young, which is how fifteen is supposed to look.
Theresa was talking to MJ and Beks when Matt approached. MJ had gone with a blue dress simple enough to pack in a shuttle, hair braided back. Beks wore a black jumpsuit with a glittery belt that one of the tías had already complimented twice. Mall hovered a little back, white dress with brown trim, sandals in her hand because the stones were slick and she trusted her bare feet more than Kevin’s brand new pointy boots, which Matt was pleased to see were not overly long. He nodded to Marcus with a we can talk later look. The Chakrobarty girls and Kinzie had already melted into a cluster of cousins nearby, trading rapid-fire introductions.
Theresa saw him before Sofia could say anything. Her face lit the way it did when he made her birthday pancakes.
“You are late, Tío Matt,” she said, sliding straight into the soft Freehold accent she had picked up in his kitchen. “We were about to start without you and tell everyone immigration stopped you for smuggling Romulan Ale into the country.”
“I like this one,” T’mari laughed. Her preference for Vulcans over Wookies was well known by this point.
He opened his arms and Theresa hugged him hard, careful of the beads, tiara bumping his chin.
“You got tall,” he said. “Again. I leave you alone for a couple summers and this is what happens.”
“I spent one summer here and one at your place,” she said. “You saw me grow. You are just getting old. Are you going to introduce me to my new tía or do I just have to live with watching her on Miguel’s show this afternoon?”
“Rude,” he said. “On your birthday, even. This is my main squeeze, T’mari. You might recognize her from recent appearances on the Doug Meyers Show and Rodriguez en Vivo.”
Sofia threw her hands up like a stage manager whose cue had been stolen.
“See?” she said. “I try to prepare a nice formal introduction and my niece ignores all my work. Theresa, mi amor, be nice to him for a moment. He is basically a king now.”
Theresa rolled her eyes at his Elvis sneer and hip wiggle.
“He is still the man who made me jalapeño pancakes,” she said. “Titles do not change that.”
“You said you wanted something different,” he said, realizing a cousin with a camera was coming their way. He kissed Theresa’s knuckles, more uncle than Freeholder.
“Happy birthday, señorita,” he said. “Thank you for letting us join your night.”
“It is not letting,” Theresa said. “If my mamá and abuela both invite you, you had best come yourself. You might have even brought enough plus ones to make her happy.”
Angelina snorted.
“She has you there,” she murmured. “Family law overrules everything. They could teach us some things.”
“I have seen the list of House Rules, Tía Lina,” Theresa said, hugging her. “You are not innocent in this.”
The band on the platform at the far end of the courtyard started tuning in earnest. Horns, guitars, a keyboard. Someone tested a bass line that made the empty glasses on the nearest table shiver. The sky above the hacienda had gone from deep blue to almost black, the outlines of the volcano ridge just visible against it.
The formal parts began. The priest from the village chapel said a short blessing in Spanish. The band shifted to a slower piece. Theresa walked in on Paul’s arm, everyone else forming a corridor for her, candles in hand. The old stones echoed with the music and the shuffle of shoes. Someone’s little cousin tripped and recovered, giggling, and was shushed gently.
Matt watched from his table, flanked by Angelina and Floyd. Their younger kids were at the front with the cousins, eyes big. The teens from his team, including MJ, Kevin, Y’kem, Rita Ashbury-Singh, Maja Zhang, the three Chakrobarty sisters, and Kinzie Hart, had been folded into the wider youth cluster, making sure the young V’ren did not feel left out.
The changing of the shoes came next, the little ritual that said, you are not a child anymore, even if you still looked like one when you rolled your eyes at your cousins. Theresa stepped carefully from flats into heels, Paul steady at her elbow. The courtyard was quiet except for the murmured prayers and the rustle of dresses.
The first father and daughter dance began. Paul led her out, proud in a way that did not need translation. The band held the moment up and carried it gently through to the last note.
When the applause faded and people began drifting back toward their seats, Sofia stepped up to the mic before the band could launch into the next fast number. She gave the bandleader a look, then turned toward the courtyard with her stage-manager smile.
“Antes de que sigamos,” she said, switching smoothly into English halfway through, “before we continue, my mother has requested something. And by requested, I mean she told me I would be disinherited if I did not do it.”
Laughter rolled across the tables.
“She says it is not a real family party until Matt has been bullied into singing at least one song, preferably two,” Sofia went on. “So, Tío Matt, bring that guitar over here. You have been hiding it long enough.”
There was a small cheer from the younger cousins who had seen his deck concert all over the feeds. Mall whistled. MJ clapped over her head. Matt shook his head like a man accepting an inevitable fate and stood.
“I was told there would be no speeches,” he said as he threaded through the tables, twelve string already slung from its stand by the band.
“This is not a speech,” Sofia said. “This is a warning. If you sing badly, the tías will tell you for the next twenty years.”
“That is not a warning,” he said, taking the guitar. “That is the existing situation.”
The mariachi guitarist handed over his stool with a grin and stepped back to Matt’s left, adjusting his own strap. The rest of the band fell quiet except for a low, steady pulse from the bass and a brushed snare, giving him room.
Matt plucked a few test chords, fingers settling into a pattern his body remembered better than his head. The twelve string shimmered against the stone and air, bright and full.
He looked toward the family table where Theresa sat between her parents, tiara still miraculously in place, shoes back off, bare feet curled under her skirt.
“This one,” he said, voice carrying easily without much effort, “is a song my great-great-grandfather Morgan Kai Marmaduke played for his people when the world seemed like it was falling apart. He wrote in his journal it was a reminder that none of us get through it alone. Theresa, your mamá and abuelo have shared you with us for a lot of years now. You have been family in my kitchen, in my fields, and in my life. So tonight, this one is for you, but it is also for everybody who ever dragged a cousin onto a dance floor and made them feel like they belonged.”
He nodded to the band. The keyboard found the opening figure, simple and familiar. Matt picked up the progression on the twelve string, rhythm steady and unshowy. The melody slipped into place like an old tool in a calloused hand.
He started “Lean on Me” low and plain, no flourishes, his voice more Missouri back porch than studio, which it should have after the mezcal. The first verse was just him and the guitar and that soft bed of chords. People stilled as they recognized it. A couple of the older tías blinked, then smiled. Ramon’s mouth curved around something that might have been memory.
By the time he reached the first chorus, half the courtyard was singing with him. The cousins near the front picked it up first, then the youth crew, then the tías and titos at the back. The horns came in on the second pass, soft harmonies under the lines where the original would have had keys, giving it a brass warmth that felt like it had always been written that way.
Theresa had a hand over her mouth by the second chorus. Lola Rhea, sitting one seat over, patted her knee and sang along in a cracked but unwavering alto.
On the last repetition, Matt stepped back from the mic a little and let the crowd carry it. He played under them, twelve string ringing while the courtyard turned the old song into a call answered in two languages. Some sang the English words, some hummed, some just swayed.
He let the last chord hang, then damped the strings with his palm. The courtyard applauded, whistles and shouts echoing off the walls. Theresa scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, unbothered by the fact that three different cousins were photographing her from three different angles.
Matt leaned back into the mic.
“Thank you,” he said. “We recorded that, because our media people are sneaky, and tomorrow Freehold Media will put a clean version up. Every credit that comes in from downloads or streams is going straight to the charity Theresa picked for her birthday. So if you want to hear yourselves singing out of tune in the background, you will be doing some good while you do it.”
There was another round of laughter and applause. Pat, by the band, raised her headset in a little salute. She had already been tracking audio levels the whole time, of course.
Theresa stood up, still barefoot, and bowed in Matt’s direction with exaggerated formality.
“Gracias, Tío,” she said. “Now you have to do one for the other girls.”
Sofia pounced on that.
“Yes,” she said. “Because some of us did not grow up with a rich uncle who shows up in a spaceship. There is a group in Toluca that helps families who cannot afford all this,” she swept a hand to take in the lights, the dress, the band, “give their daughters something anyway. My mother and I have been helping them for years. We thought maybe you would like to help too, since you already brought enough bourbon to fund half their budget.”
The courtyard laughed again. Matt glanced at Lola, who smiled with a very particular sharpness.
“You see how they do me,” he told the audience. “They feed me and then hold me hostage in public.”
“You like it,” Lola said. “Sing, niño.”
He sighed in a way that fooled absolutely nobody and adjusted his grip on the guitar.
“All right,” he said. “One more. This one is for every girl whose parents are trying to give her a future that is better than the world they got handed. I am going to do this one solo. Take five, guys, and enjoy some bourbon.”
The band shifted. You did not have to tell these men to have five-thousand-a-bottle bourbon more than once. A couple of them were already accepting glasses being pressed into their hands by grinning cousins as they stepped back from the mics.
Matt sat for a moment with his fingers resting on the strings, looking out at the courtyard. The Rodriguez nieces and cousins at the front, the Chakrobarty sisters, MJ and Mall and Kinzie, the young V’ren in borrowed dresses at the edges, still getting used to human shoes and human parties.
“I was going to do a country ballad for this,” he said, almost to himself, close enough to the mic that it carried anyway. “But looking at you all, I think the world needs a different message tonight.”
He shifted his hands and found a brighter pattern, the opening figure light and familiar. It took a bar or two for people to place it. He saw Lola Rhea’s face move from pleasant to smiling eyes as recognition hit her first. Then the cousins caught it. A ripple went through the courtyard as the melody of “Here Comes the Sun” finally clicked into place.
He did not push his range. He did not try to imitate the original. He just sang it straight, letting the simple lines do the work, voice and twelve string carrying that small, stubborn promise that winters end and light comes back. When he hit “little darling, the smiles returning to the faces,” it landed exactly where it needed to, on girls who had grown up in a world that had spent most of their lives teetering between collapse and rebuild.
People did not sing along as loudly as they had with the first song. They did not need to. Some hummed under their breath. Most just listened.
The camera flashes were fewer now. Phones were down. Even the little cousins were quiet, some of them leaning sleep-heavy against older siblings’ shoulders.
Theresa watched him with the look of someone seeing not just the man in front of her but all the versions of him she had known, from the one who let her stir jalapeños into pancake batter to the one who brought alien kids to her party and made sure they were treated like cousins too.
When he reached the last lines, he glanced at her and at the cluster of girls near the front. The Rodriguez nieces and cousins, the Chakrobarty sisters, MJ and Mall and Kinzie, the young V’ren in borrowed dresses, all of them standing under the strings of lights with the dark line of the volcano behind them. He let the final “it is all right” sit on them like a benediction, then let the guitar ring out one more time before muting it.
The applause this time was softer, more sustained than explosive. Some people stayed seated. Some stood up because that is what you do when an older generation blesses the younger in public.
Matt cleared his throat.
“Same deal,” he said. “Freehold Media will put this one out too, along with all the blackmail photos Sofia and the cousins are collecting. Every bit of money that comes from it is going to the Toluca quince fund she mentioned. So if you know somebody who thinks the world is ending and nothing good ever happens anymore, you can send them a link to a bunch of girls in a mountain courtyard proving them wrong.”
Ramon raised his glass at that. Lola did too.
Theresa stepped forward, took the mic for a second, and looked out at the courtyard full of family and almost-family and people who might be either by the time this was all done.
“On behalf of every girl who will ever get to dance in borrowed shoes under lights like this,” she said, “thank you. And on behalf of me, I will forgive you for the jalapeños in my pancakes if you play something we can dance to now.”
“Let us not pretend you did not like them and ask for seconds with double bacon bits,” Matt said. “This one pays the band’s tip, so please remember we clap on two and four for ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams.”
The band roared with laughter. The trumpets came in bright as the musicians scrambled back to their places, bourbon safely set down on the nearest ledge. Someone called out the name of the song again as if there were any doubt. Matt slid off the stool, handed the twelve string back to its stand, and was immediately seized by two tías and a little cousin who all wanted the first dance with him now that he had run out of excuses.
The music shifted from the blessing and ballads into something that sounded like half the valley had voted on it already. Horns bright, drums sharp, the bass line like a second heartbeat under the tiles.
Theresa barely got through the opening stretch of relatives before her cousins descended. Aunts steered people into place, took pictures, adjusted skirts, and then the structure loosened. Chairs scraped. Someone’s uncle shouted for cumbia. Somebody else shouted louder. The band laughed and obliged.
MJ and Beks had been parked politely near the family table for the serious parts. As soon as the tempo picked up, they were dragged by a pack of Rodriguez cousins into the swirling mess of skirts and boots. Mall went with them without waiting, sandals still in her hand, bare feet sure on the damp stone.
“Come on,” she called to the others over her shoulder. “We are not here to stand in a clump like sad decorative aliens.”
Y’kem blinked at her, then at the dance floor.
“This is not a pattern I know,” he said.
“That is the point,” Kinzie grinned. “Watch their feet. Nobody here knew it once either.”
She tugged at his sleeve. In another thirty seconds he was in the outer ring, tall and green and concentrating so hard on not stepping on anyone that one of the older cousins took pity on him and started counting the rhythm out loud in Spanish. Y’kem had the steps by the second song. By the third he was laughing.
Rita hung back at first, at the edge of the youth cluster, one hand resting lightly on the back of a chair. The Ganesh charm was a warm circle against her collarbone, hidden under the sheer layer of her dress. Her braid was still perfect. The rest of her looked like she had been dropped into somebody else’s family movie.
Theresa noticed.
“Spitfire,” she called, cutting through a drifting line of dancers. “Do not pretend you cannot count to four.”
Rita’s mouth twitched.
“I can count to four. I am less confident about spinning on it in heels,” she said.
Theresa laughed, already reaching for her hand.
“That is all a quince is. Counting to four, trying not to fall, and hoping your cousins forgive you if you do. Come on. My Tío brought you. That makes you ours for the night.”
Rita let herself be pulled into the circle. A cousin took her other hand. Someone who might have been a second cousin shouted the steps for her in a mix of English and Spanish. She missed a turn, laughed, caught the next one. The braid stayed sharp. Her composure did not.
Kevin arrived just in time to see Y’kem almost collide with one of the little cousins and twist sideways in a save that would have gotten him a commendation in shuttle simulators.
“Feet, lieutenant,” Kevin called, skirting the edge of the crowd. His own boots were new enough to still squeak.
“Gravity is inconsistent in this environment,” Y’kem shot back. His accent flattened the English in a way that made the nearby cousins laugh for the right reason.
Kevin grinned, then saw MJ across the way, spinning in a tight pattern with a boy Matt did not recognize yet. The sight of her laughing, hair loose, cut across something in him that felt like a muscle stretching for the first time since the bear incident.
“So are you leaving me for her now?” Mall asked with a laugh, hoping the answer was no and not entirely sure, not with the way he was looking at MJ.
“Not at all,” Kevin said. “I wish you could have been there to see her take down a murder bear with a shuttle.”
“Murder bears?”
“The sort of nightmares that make tigers run in fear. One attacked her shuttle the other morning while it was still on the ground. It jumped on and she was like, oh hell no, and took the shuttle vertical and threw the bear off like a dog shaking off water. I was just wondering if she was going to do the same thing with the boys that keep sniffing around her.”
“She is pretty.”
“But it is you that makes me smile and my heart skip a beat when I get your messages,” Kevin said, offering her a hand. “I have to get my money out of these dancing boots, and I would prefer not to be one of those men who already look like they have had too much so are dancing with themselves up against the far wall.”
On the far side of the courtyard, MJ and Theresa caught a breather near one of the stone pillars. Sweat had loosened MJ’s braid at the nape of her neck. Theresa’s tiara was holding up better than expected, which seemed unfair.
“My tías are going to kidnap you,” Theresa said, fanning herself with one hand. “Just know that. They see the way you eat and the way you dance. You will not be allowed to leave Mexico without at least three godmothers you did not have this morning.”
“I already have those,” MJ said. “We collect them like stray cats at the homestead.”
“Yes, but now you will have Mexican ones,” Theresa said. “We weaponize guilt at a different frequency.”
MJ snorted.
“You should meet my father’s sisters, to say nothing of my own abuela,” she said.
“That is Tex-Mex guilt,” Theresa laughed, waving off the comment. “Louder, but less authentic. So what are the V’ren like? Found one that plays the same games as you?”
“Sadly, no. They seem to be wildly cis-het. Want me to find you one as a birthday present?” MJ laughed, snagging the pair of them cans of ice cold Dr Peppers out of an ice filled half barrel that looked so ancient it might actually have been.
“That is phase one,” Theresa said. Her face softened, the way it did in Matt’s kitchen when she was still half asleep over a mug of chocolate. “Phase two is when they start asking when you are coming back.”
MJ looked past her for a moment, at the ring of cousins, at Mall hauling Kevin into the tide, at Y’kem concentrating on his feet while Kinzie laughed beside him, at Rita almost smiling for real.
“It is a good problem to have,” MJ said. “People wanting you to come back.”
Theresa followed her gaze, then bumped her shoulder.
“You have that already,” she said. “I have seen your house. You have people who look at you like you hung the moon.”
“They mostly look at my dad like that,” MJ said.
“Yes,” Theresa agreed. “But he looks at you like you did. It counts.”
They danced again. The band slid into something older that pulled even the grandparents to their feet. Maja ended up in a loose line dance between Beks and one of the Chakrobarty sisters, copying steps half a beat late and laughing at herself when she got it wrong. The young V’ren, seeing that even the most put together humans were stumbling a little, relaxed. None of them were wildly confident about the boot scoot boogie, and none looked more ridiculous doing it than those with pointy boots.
By the time the cake was cut, the youth cluster had their own small gravity. Cousins moved in and out of it, tested it, stayed.
Later, when the last official photographs were taken and Theresa had been pried out of her heels by her mother and Tía Sofia, the teens drifted toward the outer edge of the courtyard near a low stone balustrade that looked out over the valley.
The volcano ridge was a black shape against a field of stars. Far below, the lower slopes were salted with the warm, steady lights of farms and villages. A shuttle climbed in the far distance, little more than a moving star.
“My brothers are going to be insufferable after this,” one of Theresa’s cousins said. “They will tell everyone they danced with aliens.”
“You did too,” Y’kem said mildly.
The cousin blinked, then laughed, then clapped him on the shoulder like he had been doing that all his life.
Rita rested her elbows on the stone, fingers linked, signet ring catching the light. For the first time all evening, she was not braced. MJ edged closer.
“You all right?” MJ asked quietly.
“Yes,” Rita said. She took a breath of pine and distant smoke. “I am thinking about how this will look on the news tomorrow.”
“Probably like a tourism advertisement,” Maja said from the other side. “Come to Mexico, there are aliens at your niece’s quince.”
“Do you mind?” Rita asked Theresa. “The cameras. The way they will use this.”
Theresa shrugged one bare shoulder.
“They have been using my birthday for other people’s stories since I turned one,” she said. “If this year it is about the world not ending, I can live with it.”
Rita considered that, then nodded once.
“Fair,” she said.
Kevin leaned his forearms on the stone beside them, looking out at the dark.
“You know what my mom is going to say?” he asked nobody in particular.
“Something about posture,” Mall said.
“That too,” Kevin admitted. “But she is going to say this is what the world is supposed to feel like. People dancing, kids running around, nobody bombing anybody. She will then give me twenty reasons it will not last if we do not work at it.”
“You should listen to her,” Theresa said. “We are going to need people like her when everything goes weird again.”
“Pilots too,” Y’kem added, sipping a Dr Pepper.
“Translators,” Rita murmured.
“Cousins,” MJ said.
They all looked at her. She shrugged, a little embarrassed.
“What,” she said. “We are at a family party. It seems rude not to admit that is what we are trying to build.”
Theresa smiled at that, soft and sharp at once.
“If you keep talking like that,” she said, “they are going to start inviting you for Christmas too.”
MJ did not say yes. She did not have to.
The band started another fast song. The tías began rounding them up again like stray chickens. They went, all of them, without much protest.
For a while, it was just kids and music and layers of language caught in the lights.
Later, after midnight, when the younger cousins had been herded toward beds and the teens had been absorbed into a late game of cards in one of the side rooms, the courtyard quieted. The band had wound down to background volume. The asador coals were a deep red glow. A few last glasses of wine and bourbon moved in slow arcs between tables.
Matt sat with Ramon Rodriguez, the retired governor cousin, Lola Rhea, Angelina, Floyd, and T’mari at a long table that had once held half the food in the valley. Sofia came and went, carrying stray plates to the kitchen, hovering like a small, efficient storm.
The night had gone cold enough that even Matt had pulled on a jacket. The stars felt closer here.
Ramon poured a little more of the eighty year old into Matt’s glass, then into his own.
“You are spoiling my family,” he said. “They are going to expect this every time we see you.”
“You have your own distilleries,” Matt said. “You will be fine.”
“Yes,” Ramon said. “But theirs is not from the farm where the aliens landed.”
Lola snorted, the sound dry and amused.
“They would drink lighter fluid if you labeled it properly,” she said. “Do not let him flatter you too much, ‘nak.”
Matt raised his glass to her.
“Duly noted, Lola,” he said.
For a few minutes they let the silence breathe. The laughter from the card room drifted out in bursts. Somewhere a tía sang softly as she wiped down a table.
T’mari was watching the doorway where the youth had disappeared. Her expression was unreadable to most people. Matt had spent enough time beside her to tell the difference between alarm and thought. This was the latter.
“Say it,” Angelina told her quietly.
T’mari looked back to the table.
“I am just thinking,” she said, “about how many people on this planet did not grow up with this. Aunts who drag you to dance. Uncles who complain about their feet and still dance anyway. Cousins who know all your stories and tell them out of order.”
“That is why we invite them,” Ramon said. “So they learn.”
“So they remember it is possible,” Lola added.
Floyd shifted his chair back enough to stretch his long legs and decided not to think too hard about what his own feet would feel like in the morning.
“Half my family on my mom’s side is scattered from Houston to Denver,” he said. “We did not have big things like this growing up. We had barbecue in the backyard and one uncle who always showed up late. This feels like a different species of thing.”
“It is,” the retired governor said. “It is what we managed to hold onto when the corporations were buying everything else. We could not stop them from pricing out our neighborhoods, but we could still cook for our own and tell them who they were.”
He looked at Matt.
“That is what scares your enemies,” he said. “Not the ships. Not the grain. The fact you are building that again, north of the Grande, with aliens and farm kids in the same kitchen.”
Matt rolled the glass between his hands.
“My enemies think I want to be an empire,” he said. “Sometimes my friends worry I already am.”
“Are you?” Ramon asked.
Matt shook his head.
“I am a logistics problem,” he said. “I have more grain than I can move and more people who need to eat than ports that want to deal with me. Mexico does not need my wheat. You will be happy to see more of it, but you have your own. What you need is a way to ship your own goods without parking everything in Memphis and paying a pound of flesh for the privilege.”
Ramon nodded once.
“That we can agree on,” he said. “Our factories in Monterrey, our farms down on the coastal plain, they are hungry for routes that do not run through men who think they own the river.”
“I will not invade anyone to get you a port,” Matt said. “I am getting enough free lectures from university people about sovereignty these days. They are not wrong. I have put in a lot of work not to be the man they keep accusing me of being.”
“And yet,” the governor said, “you keep expanding.”
Matt smiled, thin and tired.
“What choice do I have? I am not the messiah, but I still have to be the good shepherd,” he said.
Lola lifted her glass. She had taught him that one as a little boy.
Angelina nodded.
“My daughters,” she said, “have already decided they are not living in a world where the South Asian Confederacy and Evergreen and Memphis get to hoard everything. They do not care what flags people fly if their cousins are hungry. They will hold you to that standard too, Matt.”
“They should, and damned be me and my entire line if I should fail them.”
“That is the part that gives me hope,” Ramon said. “Not that we have new ships in the sky, but that the kids inside my sister’s house and your house can sit at the same table and argue about music instead of borders.”
He turned to T’mari.
“And you,” he said. “What do your elders think about all this?”
T’mari considered her answer.
“Some of our elders think Matt is dangerous,” she said. “They are not wrong. Some think he is a necessary danger. They are also not wrong. I think he is a man who refuses to pretend the old world has not changed in ways you cannot even begin to predict.”
She glanced at Matt, then at the dark line of the volcano.
“We were exiles long before we landed,” she said. “We know what it is to lose a home because men like the ones your niece’s grandmother warned about were too busy fighting over who owned the sky. We are not going to let that happen here if we can help it.”
“Big words,” Lola said. “Big work, too.”
“We have big children,” T’mari replied. “Did you see them tonight? They did not look afraid to me.”
“They did not look impressed either,” Floyd said, smiling. “They treated the whole thing like a project. Dance, eat, make sure the V’ren kids are not left out, do not let Matt start a speech.”
“I would not start a speech,” Matt said.
Angelina gave him a look.
“On your own, no,” she said. “But put you near a microphone and you might just start a revolution.”
The table laughed.
The asador coals cracked softly. Somewhere down in the valley, a dog barked at nothing in particular. The band slid into one last slow song for the couples who were not ready to let the night end.
Ramon topped off his own glass, then pushed the bottle toward Matt, who poured for Lola Rhea and Angelina, polishing off the bottle.
“So,” he said. “Tell me what you need from us, besides our daughters teaching your people to dance.”
Matt stared at the dark liquid for a moment, then at the doorway where a burst of teen laughter spilled out and faded again.
“Patience and time,” he said finally. “Denver is going to decline to work with me, so if you have any influence with the Ten Tribes up north I will need right of way. I would even build them their very own freight yard. They just are not hearing me when I tell them that. Get me that and I will bankroll your cousin the senator here from senate to president.”
Ramon lifted his glass.
