Featured in The Copper Press, 14 June, 2158 A.M.

Panama smells like a half-drowned cigar. The east wind drags jungle rot up from the Chagres estuary, the west wind pushes coal-smoke down from the Canal engines, and where they meet—on the mudbrick streets of Las Cruces—you get a perfume that could pickle steel. That scent is home to me.

Name’s Calix Vargas, chartered bounty-man under the Western Crown and owner of one battered steam skiff, the *Prudence*. I track debt-jumpers, mutineers, and the occasional rogue wizard who thinks Shard-smuggling is safer than paying canal tolls. But last fortnight a contract crossed my slate that read simply:

Bring the Wailing Woman alive. Ten thousand silver pesos. Proof of death: five.

No signature. Just the seal of Panama Waterworks & Enchantments, a crown company that runs the lock-gates and claims every raindrop between the Pacific ramparts and the Sea of Ghosts. I do not like faceless clients, but I like empty purses less.

Besides, I’d heard the rumors—how fishermen were finding canoes adrift, gut-ropes cut, the crews gone but tears crystallized on the gunwales like pale sapphires. Locals called the culprit La Llorona, old folk legend given fresh lungs by Shardisite mutation. Every culture south of the Equator has some version of her: a mother who drowned her brood and must wander the waterways until the sky breaks.

But in the Age of Conquest tales walk on iron legs, and angels or demons sometimes drive.

Ten thousand would buy me a new boiler, maybe even a berth in New Cartagena where the rain doesn’t taste like rust. So I took the job.

First stop was the Canal Authority morgue—whitewash, marble, and a perfume far worse than the streets. Chief coroner Maya Serrano greeted me with pinched lips and a ledger thicker than a hymn-book.

“Thirty-one disappearances in three months,” she said, tapping pages inked with names. “Dockhands, travelers, two Viroc surveyors, and eight children. None found. Except these.”

She drew back a linen cloth. Underneath lay what looked like river stones polished to moon-glass, each the size of a thumbnail. They glowed faint aqua.

“Tear beads,” I muttered.

“Shard-concentrate fused with calcium,” Serrano confirmed. “The tears of whoever took them—distilled into crystal. They’re warm to the touch, as though still grieving.”

She let me keep one. It thrummed in my palm like a caged heartbeat—angelic or demonic, I couldn’t tell. But the resonance matched stories of emotion-locked Shard formations cataloged in Europa. Meaning La Llorona might be less ghost, more living conduit of collective sorrow.

Back at the *Prudence* I charted a search grid. Most vanishings happened along the old course of the Chagres where mangroves overhang like rib bones. Night after night I poled those waters, shotgun loaded with salt and silver. I played recordings of lullabies on a wind-up phonograph, hoping to lure the specter.

All I netted were mosquitoes thicker than printer’s ink.

On the seventh night the river went glassy calm. A silver moon hung amid thunderclouds like a galleon’s lantern.

That was when I heard her: a solitary sob drifting across the water, too thin for human lungs yet too full for animal throats.

I cut the engine and drifted. The sob became a lullaby in broken Spanish—lyrics about roses and shallow graves. My tear bead warmed, casting sea-green light over the deck.

Then I saw her.

She floated a handspan above the water, white dress trailing like smoke, hair plastered to a face carved from moonlight and misery. But moonlight does not drip; her skin wept streams that hardened mid-air into crystal threads, falling into the river with soft tings.

Legend says La Llorona begs boatmen for her children before dragging them to watery tombs. This one just watched me with eyes like wet mirrors.

I leveled the shotgun. Salt rounds can banish lesser specters. She didn’t flinch.

Instead she spoke—voice layered, as if two women pleaded at once:

“¿Dónde están? Where are they? Trade me your heartbeat, hunter, and I will spare the others.”

Her words rippled the water in glyphs. Each ripple carried the sigil of Nadine, Angel of Solace—twisted into something hungry. That meant a demonic echo pulling comfort inside out—weaponizing grief.

I needed leverage. So I offered a trade of my own.

I drew from my satchel a Shard-core lantern—sourced from a wrecked dredger—filament still humming. I cracked its housing, exposing raw crystal bright as noon. The light stabbed through mist; La Llorona shrieked, veil of tears boiling off her form.

Beneath she wasn’t a woman at all but a lattice of condensed sorrow, shaped like bones sculpted from quartz. The scream pushed wakes that slammed the *Prudence*. Hull rivets groaned.

I fired one salt round. It dispersed through her like chaff, buying seconds.

Then I hurled a containment lasso—copper chain inscribed with Angel Hara’s ward—around the apparition. Glyphs flared, cinching her to the lantern mast. She writhed, tears sparking off links. Each spark {ting} added another crystal to the deck.

“Tell me who commands you,” I barked. “A cult? A demon of the Legion?”

Her face shifted, showing three overlapping visages: a mother, a drowned child, and a slick-scaled serpent with too many eyes.

The serpent spoke.

“Remorso.”

Demon of regret—one of the Legion, lower court but vicious. That checked out: regret is twin to sorrow, and both taste like wine to Remorso’s kind.

The demon had likely bound an already tragic spirit to harvest tear-shards for illicit enchantments—shards that amplify guilt in victims, perfect for interrogation drugs or crowd-control sirens. Panama Waterworks must have noticed inventory disappearing and wanted the creature contained before crown auditors caught wind.

Contract didn’t say kill or banish, only bring alive.

But the thing in my lasso wasn’t alive in any sense a priest would bless. It was a pipeline of pain.

And yet I saw the mother’s face flicker—eyes begging for release.

I steered the *Prudence* upriver where an abandoned sluice-station rots—the locals call it *Rio Muerto*. Its spillway stones are riddled with Shard veins from an old meteor splinter. Raw, unstable—deadly, but powerful. I anchored beneath a sluice arch and rigged a binding circle using the veins as conductors.

La Llorona struggled, but ward-iron held.

There I rolled dice with theology.

I invoked Amandine, Archangel of Compassion, reciting a half-remembered litany I’d learned as a child. Compassion can cauterize grief, the scrolls say, if the subject accepts mercy. Demon-bound spirits rarely do—they cling to pain like breath.

I placed Serrano’s tear bead in the circle’s center.

Blue-white fire blossomed. The demon visage shrieked, claws scraping at unseen bars. The mother’s face looked at me, mouthed *gracias*—then dissolved to rain. The serpent form imploded, sucked into a fissure in the Shard vein, sealing like molten glass.

A new crystal formed—smooth, clear, no longer aquamarine but soft rose.

Sorrow transmuted to compassion.

The circle faded.

I found myself alone. No ghost. No tears—save the single rose crystal and my own, which I pretend were sweat.

Contract required a living capture. What I had was a cured spirit condensed into gem.

Would Waterworks pay? Probably not.

Would they silence me for seeing too much? Absolutely.

So I made another choice.

I motored to Serrano’s morgue before dawn, left the rose crystal on her desk with a note:

“Bury this at river’s mouth. Let the tide take her home.”

Then I wired my faceless client:

TARGET DESTROYED. INVOICE PER DEAD RATE.

Five thousand pesos arrived two hours later—hush money, fast and clean.

I fueled the *Prudence* and pointed her bow toward New Cartagena.

They say no cries haunt the Chagres now, only the rumble of lock-gates and the lowing of freighters. But some nights, when diesel smoke hangs low, dockhands swear they hear a woman humming over the water—soft, content, as if rocking a child to sleep.

Maybe that’s just the jungle playing tricks.

Maybe it’s the sound of regret finally resting.

Either way, Panama paid me to erase a problem.

I like to think I did one better: I balanced a ledger older than any crown company.

And if Remorso grows hungry again?

I kept Serrano’s ledger—and I’ve got salt, silver, and a steam skiff that knows these waters better than most ghosts.