Corre Cimarron (Abi y Diana)

I don't remember." Abi looked down into the short Guardia's eyes. The Guardia looked up at the tall, black skinned young man.
Minutes before there had been a pounding on the door. The room was dark. He and Diana had been lying on her bed. "How did the Guardias know you were here?" Diana pulled the covers to her neck. Her strong brown body was naked underneath. The Guardias kept pounding. They kicked the door open.
Diana shoved Abi out the back door and watched his long, dark, naked body running into the black night. He turned to see if she was behind him and that was when he saw them shoot her. Her last thought was, "Corre, corre cimarron." The moment stopped. Abi froze. He saw the slender, dark brown body of his beloved novia falling, her long black undone braids covered her face. "Mi cacica," he thought. When he moved again after infinite time but probably just seconds later, he ran back to her, toward the Guardias. He bent down beside her. She was bleeding from her chest, a spring of blood like that spring in El Pico where he and Diana had been camping. He raised her to his chest and sobbed. They caught him. But he knew too much to kill him, at least not right away.

They rolled Abi on thumbtacks. "This is what your people like to toss on the roads. Gozate."
"So far they haven't gone for my eyes." Abi thought of Diana, the spring of her blood, he thought of the glorious spring gushing clean water deep inside a weave of green leaves. They would not break him. He fainted. His bowels released.
He would never forgive them for killing Diana. They had just turned him from a passive resister into a killer. He would die before he said a word.
"Don't let them cut out my thumbnails." He thought again of his sweet novia, his cacica, of her oval face, and deep brown eyes. If he lived, how would he live?
Abi came to. An officer with medals and stripes looked him over. He was tall, light skinned, blue eyed, a city officer from the Base.

The City officer escorted him to a cell. Now Abi lay on a narrow cot, inside a hive of cells. He guessed this was the Base, Beachside, because there was a grit of sand on everything, the narrow cot, the bucket. Sometimes he thought he heard the surf breathing in and breathing out. Sometimes through the streaks in the black paint on the small window he saw a quick flicker of light and he imagined the Base searchlights sweeping. It took him a long time to decipher one of the tapping codes of his fellow invisible inmates, or maybe it had been a short time because in the constant darkness he had no idea what time it was, or if when he slept it was day or night, or how long he slept. They fed him once a day, a kind of kibble. He had no idea what time they brought the food and water, or if it was always the same time. They were slowly erasing every single point of reference. The only reference point he had was the gushing stream of Diana's blood. The code he figured out was this. Three taps meant a Guardia was approaching.

He was out in the yard. He and three others were walking in circles. The Guardia who'd crossed the river was on duty. They enacted the pantomime. The three inmates pretended to seize the guardia and steal his keys. The guardia told them where the fencing had been breached. They set themselves free and ran along the sea grapes to the mangles. Three of the pescadores waited in the mangroves in small boats. They floated smoothly into the cupola of mangrove branches. Abi's rescuer Silvio was a tall, dark, burly man with long black hair tied at the nape of his neck. Their small boat made glowing streaks in the bioluminescent waters that had made the Tainos name their island Karaya, which means moon.