The Pulse in the Pines

She awoke under the cover of trees, blanketed in soft dew, their dark green colors not yet exchanged for crimson. She opened her eyes and was met with the harshness of the morning breeze, brushing against her exposed skin and pulling small strands of hair from behind her ears.

“You shouldn’t pull your hair back too much,” she heard her mother’s voice ringing through the trees. “People will think you’re a boy.”

It appeared her mother and the wind had made some sort of deal that day...to expose Eliza as the woman she was. But neither the wind nor her mother’s memory could remove the days of soot and dirt caked to her skin and under her nails. Her black leggings and sweatshirt were so filthy they had almost taken on a new color, partly blood, partly mud, from days of sleeping outside and learning how to hunt for her dinner.

“I should get moving,” she thought, patting around the pine straw to find her glasses. When she slid them on, the world came into focus...the surrounding world, that is. The one she could see clearly now: tall pines, maples, squirrels darting through branches as if nothing had happened. Not the state of the world itself; that part was entirely unclear.

The last thing she’d heard, the reason she was in the woods to begin with, was that the hunters were out. And that she was not safe.

She wished she had been able to grab her radio on the way out to hear what was happening in the surrounding areas. But she knew something like that, a confiscated and banned device, would paint a bright, traceable target on her back.

She looked down at her forearm, still unhealed, scabbing and bleeding for four days straight. She wasn’t sure if the infection or the hunger would kill her first. When she touched it lightly, pain shot through her. “Ah” she flinched, watching it throb beneath her fingertips. The thick red lines were inflamed and angry, encircling the jagged hole she’d cut herself, with the only thing she had on her - the keys to her Jetta, to dig out the tracker.

The scar pulled her backward, hard, to that moment in Dr. Pilozzie’s office. Fluorescent lights buzzing like hornets, a refrigerator humming in the corner, the chemical bite of antiseptic and the metallic taste it left in her mouth. She remembered the waiting room had been crowded that day. Women with babies, two old men arguing softly in Spanish about baseball, a nurse calling names quickly. On the wall, a poster showed a smiling family with the caption, YOUR SAFETY IS OUR PRIORITY. The father in the picture had a finger gently pressed to his daughter’s wrist, as if taking her pulse.

“Eliza?” the nurse had called. “Eliza de la Cruz?” The way she said it, flattening the vowels, making de la into a hiccup...made Eliza stand up a little straighter, chin lifted, like her mother had taught her. Mi nombre no es difícil. But she didn’t correct the nurse. Tt had become a tired habit not to.

Inside the exam room, Dr. Pilozzie rolled in on his wheeled stool, white coat unwrinkled, name stitched in navy thread. He did not ask how she was, only confirmed her date of birth and tapped on a tablet. “Standard procedure,” he said, smiling without his eyes. “Given your…background, we’ll be administering the enhanced dose. For your safety.”

“My background?” she had asked.

“Mexican-American patients have a higher incidence of the G-variant response,” he replied. He said it gently, like a teacher explaining a fact to a child.

She thought of the forms her mother used to fill out, the bubbles that didn’t fit. Hispanic/Latino, check here. Not a race, check there. She thought of the way her mother would write their last name in careful block letters, as if it might protect them somehow. In that room, Eliza tried to lift her own questions to her mouth and found them too heavy to move.

“What happens if I say no?” she asked.

He didn’t answer the question; his smile did. “It’s standard,” he repeated. “For your safety.”

He hadn’t looked her in the eyes when he pressed the needle in.

A lie wrapped around his lips but hidden beneath a clinical mask.

Afterward, for weeks, she dreamed in static. They said there would be side effects and not to worry... but when she’d sleep...she'd always wake with the sense of being watched. There was a constant buzz under her skin. At first she thought it was anxiety, then she felt the pulse - faint and not hers.

Her mother noticed things. Estás pálida, mija. Have you eaten? Have you prayed? Her mother rubbed oil on her temples and told her not to pull her hair back so tight. It made her look “tensa,” too severe. Eliza listened and didn’t say anything about the humming under her skin.

Then the announcements began. Radios - banned. Certain roads in certain neighborhoods closed “for safety". Curfews imposed. Checkpoints erected. And rumors, what turned into truths, about the hunters. The people who went missing were described as “relocated.”

A month later, her mom didn't return from the grocery store. She went out looking for her on foot and neighbors yelled from behind closed doors and windows to go home. As quickly as possible. She couldn't leave her mother. She needed to find her.

She left that night. She grabbed what she could carry and ran into the woods. Where she knew they couldn't find her.

Now weeks had past and she was taken away from her memory and back into her boots. The forest was quiet. Too quiet. Even the squirrels had vanished.

The breeze carried something else. Not her mother’s voice, not memory…but something low. Mechanical. A sound that didn’t belong to the woods.

She crouched, pressing her palm into the damp soil. The sound grew louder. A faint red light flickered between the trees ahead. Steady, pulsing. Like a heartbeat.

Her heartbeat.

Eliza froze. Warmth spread beneath her sleeve. The scar on her arm darkened, sticky and wet. The light flickered faster.

She took a step back, breath catching in her throat. Then another.

Behind her, a twig snapped.

“Eliza.”

Her name. Clear. Human. Close.

She turned. Nothing but trees.

“Eliza,” the voice said again....only this time, it came from inside her head.

Her vision blurred. Colors pulsed. She stumbled forward, gripping her temples. Beneath her palms, she could feel something moving.

When she looked down, she saw it. Under the skin of her arm, just below the cut. A small red light blinking back to life.

The hum deepened, tilting the air. Then another light to her left. A third behind her. Red beads blooming in the underbrush.

She tightened the strap of her pack and forced herself to breathe. She needed to think. If the chip was dead, removed from her body, then what was blinking? She remembered the doctor’s hands...and the nurse peeling back a small square of adhesive she hadn’t thought much about. A “topical,” they’d said. She’d felt only the sting of the injection, not the press of something else against her skin.

She dug her fingers into the fresh scab. Blood slick on her fingers. Beneath the mess of what the skin had knitted in a broken pattern, blood. Embedded inside that uneven seam, the red blinked steady. Not in the place she’d cut, but beside it, nestled under a ridge of tissue. Smaller than a pea, but burning like an fire. Her stomach turned.

“Eliza,” the voice said again, almost gentle now. “Stop.”

She didn’t. She ran.

Branches whipped her face. Needles bit her ankles. The forest sloped, fell away, rose again. She aimed for the sound of water, convinced that somehow a stream might confuse the signal, might drown it. The red lights moved with her. Twice she tripped and went to her knees, palms grinding into grit. Twice she got up.

She burst into a clearing. A narrow creek sliced the earth in two, water chuckling over stone. She waded in, gasping as the cold seized her calves. “Come on,” she hissed at herself. “Come on.” She plunged her arm into the current and held it there. The red light bled into the water as a soft, pulsing smear.

The voice, closer: “Eliza. Do not damage the device.”

“Go to hell,” she said, but her mouth felt numb around the words.

She kept her arm under until her skin burned with cold and the pulse in her wrist turned numb. When she pulled it free, the light still blinked. Slower, then strong again. As if it had taken a breath with her.

She thought of her mother’s voice: Your name and your body are your only true belongings. She looked at her arm and felt, really felt, that neither belonged to her anymore.

Footsteps entered the clearing. Not one set. Many.

Eliza backed deeper into the creek, water tugging at her knees. She scanned the tree line and saw them. Figures in matte gray, faces mirrored, shoulders broad. Hunters, or the shape of them. The red lights on their chests flickered in time with the one beneath her skin, like a shared pulse. A drone nosed into view above their shoulders. No bigger than a hawk, rotors whispering. Its belly glowed red.

“Eliza de la Cruz,” the a figure said. Not a question.

She thought of her mother writing their last name carefully on forms. She thought of the G-variant. She thought of the chip that quit blinking and her own stupid faith that that had been enough.

“This is a retrieval,” the voice replied. It came from the figure, and from the drone, and inside her head, all at once. “For your safety.”

She felt something tug in her arm then, a tiny cramp, like a muscle knitting. The light brightened. A warmth crawled outward from it, slow, almost soothing. Her fingers went slack. The pack slid from her shoulder and splashed into the creek.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

The warmth deepened. For a strange second she wanted to sleep. Her knees felt heavy.

Then another voice cut across the clearing, low and hard as stone. Not the hunters. Not the drone. It came from the trees behind them.

“Move,” it said.

The gray figures pivoted in a single, fluid motion. The drone rose, angling toward the new voice. Eliza blinked, swayed, felt the warmth in her arm falter, then surge. The red lights beat faster, blurring into a single, furious glow.

A branch snapped. A shape detached from the shadows. Someone else was here. Carrying something that flashed darkly in their hands. For one wild second, Eliza thought of her mother’s rosary, the way the beads looked in low light.

The drone screamed. The figures advanced.

The light beneath Eliza’s skin flared so bright she saw the bones of her hand lit from within.

And in that electric white, she understood. The thing in her arm wasn’t just a tracker. It was a door. It had been waiting for a signal. It had been waiting for them.

The creek rushed louder, rushing nowhere.

“Eliza,” the inside-voice said one last time, almost tender. “Welcome back.”

The world narrowed to red, to the thud of boots, to a heat blooming in her blood like a second sun.

She did not know who the new voice belonged to. She did not know if the hunters were people anymore or if they had ever been. She only knew the device had decided to open.

She saw the first gray figure step into the water toward her. She saw the drone tilt, a dark pupil dilating.

She opened her mouth to scream.

The light stopped.