Whispers of a former life: Episode 44

Charity’s mouth opened, but nothing came out except a dry squeak that barely made it past her own ears. The air in Alejandra’s tiny living room felt too thin, too stale, as if the battered drywall itself was closing in around her, pressing down on her like the heavy folds of the hoodie she’d hidden in just hours ago. 

She had rights. That thought sputtered across her mind like a dying bulb flickering before it goes dark. She’d grown up knowing it,  her family’s money, their network, their lawyers,  they were her shield against every scandal, every whisper. No teacher ever really punished her. No gossip ever stuck for long. And now? 

She glanced at Alejandra’s phone again, the cracked screen grinning up at her with its alien Spanish words and the final insult that made her want to scream until her throat bled: 

Nombre Común Registrado: Patrona 
Nombre Legal CER: Charity Jiménez 

Not Stevens. Not Miss Stevens. Not Charity Stevens, daughter of James and Claudia Stevens, heir to a Steven’s Telecommunications empire. Just Charity Jiménez. A domestic animal for a girl who scrubbed her bathroom floors. 

Her chest heaved, a tiny, trembling rise and fall that would have been invisible once, back when her presence filled a room simply by walking into it. Now, her voice didn’t even fill the air between her and Alejandra’s thigh. 

She scraped her tongue against her teeth, desperate to spit out words that would make this unreal. This isn’t happening. This can’t be how it works. But the words refused to obey her. They stuck in her throat like stones. 

“You can’t… you can’t do this, Alejandra,” she croaked finally. Her own voice startled her: thin, delicate, trembling at the edges. It didn’t sound like the voice that once sneered insults down high school halls. It didn’t sound like her at all. 

Alejandra, the immigrant they’d kept because she worked hard and asked for nothing, the girl her father once praised as reliable because she knows she can’t complain, only tilted her head, amused and gently dismissive all at once. 

Charity’s knees wobbled under her as she tried to breathe, but it felt like all the oxygen belonged to Alejandra now too. 

“How… how did you… you can’t be a guardian, there’s no way, you’re not even,” she choked, her voice so thin and reedy it sounded like an apology for existing. She hated it. Hated how small it was, how it trembled with every syllable. 

Alejandra didn’t even flinch at her stammering. Instead she stretched lazily, spine arching, a cat on her borrowed throne. When she spoke, her voice wrapped around Charity like a snake coiling tight: calm, familiar, but unyielding. 

“Es parte de la escuela allá, Patrona.” She said it so casually, rolling her accent over each word. Then, switching just enough to English so the meaning would crush her properly: “You take guardian class every day from 1st grade until 7th. If you wanna graduate from 7th grade, you pass your guardian classes. Everyone does or they repeat.” 

Charity’s stomach churned so violently she thought she might be sick right there on Alejandra’s table.. Everyone. Everyone. A simple fact she’d never cared to know. A fact that now shackled her tighter than iron. 

She knew bits and pieces about Mexico’s Smallara outbreaks. Everybody did,  but nobody like her bothered to learn the real story. It was always a distant, ugly problem on the news, then forgotten under gossip about who wore what to Winter Formal. 

She remembered the headlines from years ago, half-listened to at family dinners: Violence and political unrest in Mexican states… border closures… panic about a new variant. Then came the leaks: it wasn’t riots, it was the first Smallara clusters exploding before anyone could stop it. 

She forced herself to swallow, mind spinning back to old flashes of fact: when Mexico realized the horror that Smallara unleashed, they didn’t debate. They didn’t argue about civil rights. They injected every citizen, a “vaccine,” they called it at first , but the truth came out later. It was the virus injected into every person. Every man, Every woman, every grandparent. The children as they arrived at school or daycare. It was a quiet culling by syringe. No unclaimed, wandering infected. No freedom. No chance. 

When new babies were born? They were injected immediately. If they were immune, taken to their parents as if nothing was wrong. A fine normal childhood. If not? Taken before they even saw their parents. Raised never knowing anything but the collar and leash before being sold off to one of a few contracted companies. PreemaTech, Generitech, or korean rival MiraeTech (미래테크) All had a presence in Mexico with stores, with outlets, with reserch facilities. All regulated by the Mexican government. 

It kept the country neat. Efficient. A place where littles didn’t run free, didn’t hide, didn’t defy their new order. You were owned from the cradle, or you were immune. No messy in-betweens. In current times it was almost unheard of to find a wild little unclaimed or unregistered outside of the occasional unlucky tourist which would quickly learn about what life in mexico was like. There was no extradition for littles. Just the collar like any other little and the knowledge you were mexican property and woudl never leave.   

And now, because Alejandra still had her Mexican papers, because she was a mexican national, a mexican citzen, she had plugged Charity right back into that same brutal simplicity. No fancy American loopholes. No high-paid lawyer  to twist the rules. Just Patrona. An entry in a shared database that no American judge could undo. As the accords unified the entries and recognized jurisdictional control. It meant littles in Mexico and America were there owners for life. Other countries, allys and friends to America were seeing the success and were clamoring to join. 

She looked up at Alejandra again, this girl she’d dismissed as cheap help, half invisible behind a broom and polite silence. Now Alejandra was a licensed guardian, had been since she was barely older than Charity was when she posted her first designer handbag haul. It hit her like a punch to the gut: She had been surrounded by people like Alejandra her whole life, people who knew exactly what to do with a little if they found one alone. 

“You can’t…” Her voice broke. She tried again. “You can’t just keep me. There has to be, there has to be some way, my father will, he’ll,” 

Charity’s mouth quivered. She wanted to spit curses at her, scream how she’d pay for this, how her father would fix it, but she remembered. Her father was somewhere in a cousin’s pool house now, waiting for permission to use the bathroom. Her mother, last she’d heard, wore a collar that beeped if she crossed the garden fence. She was truly alone. 

Charity’s legs gave a small buckling shake; she caught herself on her palms, gasping at the gritty table surface scraping her skin. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt splinters or grime under her manicured nails, but now even her nails were useless: tiny, soft, fragile. Like every part of her. 

Her tiny hands clenched uselessly at her sides. She tried to look Alejandra in the eye, and immediately regretted it. Alejandra’s eyes weren’t mocking, not exactly. They were patient. Patient the way a cat is patient with a cornered mouse. 

“Please…” she whispered, the last of her pride bleeding into the dusty air between them. “Just… call Kira. She can pay you. She’ll… I’ll be good for her, she’s trained,” 

Alejandra only smiled, slow, warm, terrifying. 

“No, Patrona. You’re mine. And you won’t leave this house unless I say so.” 

It wasn’t cruelly said. It was just a fact, spoken with the same quiet certainty Alejandra might use to say the sky is blue or the floor is dirty. A fact that settled around Charity’s shoulders like a net. 

She staggered back a step, nearly tripping over herself. The little patch of table beneath her felt colder suddenly, too wide, too exposed. She wanted to scream at her parents, at Kira, at anyone. But there was no one left. No one but Alejandra. 

Her eyes darted to the phone again, desperate for some mistake in the letters. Some loophole. But the screen only stared back, patient and final: 

Patrona. 
Charity Jiménez. 
Guardian: Alejandra Jiménez. 

No exit. No appeal. 

Charity wrapped her arms tight around her tiny ribs. She didn’t even notice she was trembling until Alejandra’s shadow fell over her again, blocking out the last sliver of dusty morning light. 
 
There is no one left to save me. 

Alejandra leaned forward, elbow on her knee, eyes soft but final. “Let it sink in, Patrona. In Mexico, you would’ve never had a chance to run. Here? You thought you could hide. You lived in a illusionary palace. Not anymore. Now you live like how you were born to live. This is your Birthright, Patrona.” 

Charity couldn’t breathe. Her vision blurred. The dusty air felt like it was pressing her down, pressing her in. 

Related Images: