I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Four

El Día de Fuego—the day the world burned—was four generations back in Grillo Negro's history. Drawn north by a promise of work, the men and women who would become the village founders found themselves underground, in an experimental farm growing crops in soil that was little more than gravel. With the land above wracked by drought, it was posited as a revolution in the making. Initially, it seemed to be. The workers were housed, fed and paid well. The plants grew quickly: the kind of growth that could feed a hungry world. There was little indication of anything wrong until the day the fire doors slammed shut.

The workers ran to the doors, only to have the path to the fields behind them seal off, too. A white computer technician among them got hold of an information stream on a device he carried. Mexico was burning, it said. First Mexico City, then Toluca and Calpulalpan exploded in flames. It spread like wildfire. There were videos that ended in blackness as the machines that took them died, and those images revealed a horror that remained imprinted on Grillo Negro today.

People were the source of the flames.

People writhed as if in seizures, then threw out their hands. From their hands came fire. Fire that burned everything it touched, consuming glass, charring concrete, and seething along pavement like it was paper, leaving it bubbled and smoking. Then those people gave a last twist and went up like kindling themselves. To this day, we had never found bones.

The burning spread around the world in a day. In Grillo Negro's stories, the founders took turns at the device, watching, until the information stream went out. They were left in silence. They had lost their families. They had watched their homes burn. Their workplace, somehow, had been spared. Lengths of natural caves separated it from the surface, and the flames only seemed to spread through things people had made.

The workers turned on the technician. He was an employee of Petram Radix, the company, and faced with sixty angry people, he confessed. Petram Radix was not leading a revolution. It was an illegal operation, tampering with plants in ways disallowed around the world. He had joined them as a younger man, then lost faith over time. But when he asked to go, he was told he knew too much. The company, likewise, had supported their workers only to prolong the inevitable realization: Petram Radix had never intended to let them leave.

Andrew said he could open the fire doors if he could reach the fields. The grandfather of my grandfather, a clever mechanic named José Manuel, cracked the lock on the smaller door to get him there. Andrew pushed buttons and pulled wires, and after more than a day, the fire doors rumbled open.

José Manuel took leadership of the founders, and the grandfather of Jem's grandfather, Lorenzo, was the brave soul who ventured up to scout the land. He returned safely. The others emerged to find the facility aboveground reduced to a pile of scorched rubble and melted pipe. The sky was a sooty black. The founders traveled to the nearest city to find it reduced to a husk. They named the burning disease Fuego, for wherever it spread, all it left was the aftermath of fire.

The founders and Andrew brought the plants of the farms up to the surface. The sky faded to light grey over the coming weeks, but the clouds cooled the land until half the plants died. The other half were enough to live on while the founders searched for other food. Some looked for the brown house crickets they had eaten back home. They found wild black crickets instead. The women invented the cricket baskets that gave the village its name. With a portable food source, and frosty weather bearing down on them from the north, Grillo Negro set out down the Mexican plateau. They had been searching for warmth, food, and other people ever since.