Once within a time, outside the great city Tenochtitlan, lives a girl who speaks to a lake called Memory.
The lake remembers everything that wasn’t.
Says the girl:
“I think I do not know myself.”
“To know yourself is to know all which you are not,” says the lake, “and all which you are not, you are: in other timelines. You-present is you-all less you-others. Do you understand?”
“Perhaps,” says the girl.
Later, “Tell me about another timeline, about another me,” she says.
The lake does.
When it has finished, the girl dips a finger into the lake; gently disturbing its surface, she sees—
Men riding beasts Men masked Men killing Men raping Men snarling, saliva dripping silver-tongued from a precipice of Boatsand Beardsand Explosions in Explosions in red, white, and green, flying in a violent wind like breath
—exhaling, she asks, “But what were the Spaniards?”