On a hazy afternoon last week, an odd threesome headed toward a National Guard roadblock in southern Oregon: Libby Dimick, a 65-year-old nurse, clutching three flower bouquets; Logan Vaughn, a local handyman; and Logan’s 15-month-old son Trace, being pushed in a stroller alongside a shovel and a metal detector. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke and burnt plastic, the kind that sticks to your hair and clothes.

For 14 years, a human skeleton known as 317-38-10 sat in a cardboard box stored in a metal shipping container on the rooftop of a building in Guatemala’s capital, Guatemala City. The number was a code.

Site 317 had been a military base during the civil war that ravaged Guatemala from 1960 to 1996. In 2003, when forensic archaeologists dug a few feet into the ground, they found piles of bones. Whose were they? No one seemed to know—or at least no one was saying.

When Simon Coronel—a jigsaw puzzle designer and former IT consultant—stepped on stage to perform his magic trick, he looked out onto the most intimidating audience a magician can face: hundreds of other magicians. For five days, the crowd had sat through dozens of magic acts, one after another. The stage where Coronel stood could launch a career or kill it. “This is like going into the Colosseum with the gladiators,” said one magician in the audience.

It’s the first frosty day in November and a young Afghan father named Shirzad is sitting in the living room of a rented row house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Three former members of the Afghan National Army sit with him, fiddling with their phones and drinking tea. In Afghanistan, they guarded U.S. bases, gathered military intelligence, and interpreted for U.S. troops. Now they’ve been dropped into the heart of Dutch Country.

Ashley Esquivel’s alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m. in Juárez, Mexico. It’s a Friday in November, and she’s heading to high school in Texas, which means football. She pulls on blue sweats branded with the frowning bear mascot of her high school, stuffs her cheerleading skirt into her backpack, and gets in the car. Her dad drops her at the U.S. border on his way to work.

Patience Bulus and Esther Joshua held hands as they were marched out of their dorm room at gunpoint that April night. Herded into the back of an open-bed truck, they lost their grip on each other. Amid the mass of frightened students, Patience heard Esther’s soft voice ask, “What will happen?” Then someone jumped off the side.

Zachary Stocks is part of a movement of Black Oregonians who have something to say about how the racist history of their state has been glossed over, and who are taking it upon themselves to make the real story known. And as Stocks tells it, that story starts with the tale of a shipwrecked sailor.

Eduardo Segovia was eating at a restaurant in a small coastal town in Guatemala when he met Telma Nineth Segura Coronada. He thought she moved like an angel. He told her so, and invited her to leave her waitressing job and join his traveling show, the Segovia Brothers Circus. She knew instantly that it was her destiny. She was only 18 that day in the late 1980s, but she wanted more from life than working and dying in Puerto San José.

They met on WhatsApp and decided to walk 2,000 miles together. In mid-October Jackelin Martinez joined one of the dozen messenger groups forming after Salvadorans watched as thousands of migrants from neighboring Honduras trekking toward the United States. The conversation on WhatsApp was a constant churn of information, sometimes dozens of messages a minute with prayers, packing lists, and meeting points.