Torchwood: Exodus Code

Mexico, Isela figured.
    For a few seconds, Isela kept her eye on a couple of men and two women she’d never seen before who were struggling to steady their carts on the cobbled stones.
    Isela picked up her rifle. She sighted at a cart layered with T-shirts stamped with everything from the pop image of Che Guevara to the silhouetted outline of Zorro. Tourists were such dicks, she thought.
    Staring at those two men and women for a few beats, she guessed they must have been running the carts for a family member, someone who’d been taken ill perhaps. Then Isela mouthed the sound of a shot, letting her imagination invent the chaos she could cause in the piazza if she fired at them.
    All hell would break loose. She couldn’t wait.
    Despite the early hour, the businesses around the square bustled with life. Each corner housed a bar or a café with barrels of the region’s famous pisco brandy sweating on stone slabs outside every establishment. Most of the umbrella tables were already occupied with the wealthy tourists staying at the hacienda’s luxury spa hotel, which sat at the opposite side of the colonial piazza.
    From her angle, Isela didn’t have a clear view of the chapel’s steps directly beneath her, but she knew they’d be filling with Indian women wrapped in multicoloured shawls with baskets balanced on their heads. She could, though, see a group of four or five boys beginning a football game on the airstrip, a dusty field with a prefabricated concrete shed built just outside the hacienda’s walls. Two mangy llamas were munching sagebrush near the makeshift goal, the boys’ kicks erupting in clouds of dirt.
    Before she set her gun down, Isela spotted two of the food vendors rolling their steaming carts to either side of the hotel ’s carved wooden gates.
    Where had they come from?
    Her father would not be happy with their position directly in front of his expensive but incredibly garish entrance and that made Isela smile. Perhaps the day held more promise than she’d first thought.
    Lifting her binoculars, Isela scanned the canyon road running north to the highway and beyond that to Lima. Paradise.
    God, she couldn’t wait to escape this place. She searched the far horizon, noting the clear line where the brush of the desert became the lush green rows of olive trees. To her left, the ocean swelled in waves of cobalt blue, a fishing trawler bouncing on the horizon.
    She squinted against the sun, and then with a raised fist she signalled down to Antonio. Her stepbrother was slouching across a massive white limb of the huarango tree, his cigarette smoke pluming through its broad canopy, his spurred boots cutting into its thick bark.
    Inside the walls of the hacienda, the huarango tree dominated the apron of the chapel, its roots creating a fault line that ran unevenly under the entire church, some thought for fifty kilometres beyond the adobe walls.
    Isela’s
abuela
used to tell her stories about how the tree gave life to the region, its leaves absorbing the fog and the dew from the ocean drawing water to the aquifer beneath them, its yellow bean pods nourishing the landscape and its canopy sheltering the goddess who lived far beneath it deciding the fate of mankind.
    According to the story, when the world came to an end the tree would stretch its limbs, crack open the earth, and walk into the mountain.
    Glancing over the wall of the belfry, Isela stared at Antonio and the tree. Every story her
abuela
and her mother told about her ancestors involved the tree and the mountain in some way, which was one of the reasons why, her mother explained, the Inca terraced their dwellings into the rock face of la Madre Montâna so as not to disturb the tree’s far-reaching roots and yet still be close enough to the mother of all things.
    Antonio nudged his cowboy hat off his forehead and stretched across the tree’s limb. Four years her senior, Antonio was well practised in the art of machismo, his olive skin, slim muscular frame and the thick blond hair he had inherited from his California surfer mother simply reinforced his beliefs about the world and his place in it, including the notion that running this godforsaken region was a right he had earned, instead of the fact that he was the spoiled bastard son of a spoiled bastard son.
    He caught a glimpse of Isela staring down at him from the belfry. He cocked his finger at her. She raised her middle one at him.
    ¡Que huevón!
What a dick.
    Reaching into the