**Chapter 14: Crosswinds of Escape (Part 1)**
📍 Peru – From Lima to Tumbes
📅 February 7–15, 2000
Joseph's POV
They say leaving the Amazon was the hardest part. They were wrong.
The hardest part was what came next—running from country to country, border to border, guided not by maps, but by whispers. The jungles had tested our survival. Now, it was the world of men that would test our souls.
Peru was the starting line. We entered through Lima, tired, dehydrated, but still breathing. The city was loud—chaotic, really. Its markets bustled like nothing had happened in the rest of the world. It felt almost offensive to see so many people laughing and living, while we dragged trauma like it was part of our skin.
Lola clung to me tighter in crowds, her belly slightly more rounded now. She was five months in. Each step on concrete reminded her body it wasn't made for this. But there was no stopping now.
We met Luis at a decaying café in Piura. A middleman. Slick smile, eyes like a coin flip—either side could be death. He didn't say much, only gave instructions.
"You want to reach Mexico? Then you move when I say, where I say, how I say."
Lola looked at me. I looked back. We nodded. We'd lost too many to stop trusting in strangers now.
The first leg was a cargo truck—filthy, iron-sided, full of smuggled electronics and five other migrants who barely spoke. They didn't need to. We were all shadows in that truck, passing through Tumbes, just shy of the Ecuadorian border.
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Lola's POV
The scent of oil, rust, and sweat filled my nostrils in that truck. I pressed my hand to my stomach, whispering to the child who hadn't yet seen daylight, "We're almost there."
Almost.
That word was poison and medicine. It kept me sane, but it lied, too.
We crossed into Ecuador at night. The border was a joke. No fence. No guards. Just a muddy footpath behind a banana plantation. Luis's contact led the way—an old woman named Sofia who wore a red scarf and a pistol on her hip like a preacher's cross.
In Guayaquil, we swapped trucks for a boat—wide, wooden, leaking—but it moved.
That's all that mattered.
I looked at Joseph in the half-light of the boat cabin. He was different now. Hardened. His jaw was set like stone. His eyes barely blinked. He watched every shadow, every creak in the hull. I missed the softness in him. But I understood.
Softness doesn't get you to freedom.
Survival does.
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Narrator (Omniscient Interlude)
From Guayaquil to Quito, their journey twisted through illegal backroads, back-alley hostels, and narrow getaways. Each border crossing was another gamble. Each checkpoint a whispered bribe. Each rest stop a haunted chapel of silence.
They weren't tourists. They were ghosts moving through nations that didn't want them. And behind them? The jungle. Ahead of them? Mexico—and the last real chance at a future.
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