He told himself it didn't matter. He had been alone before. He was good at alone.
But that night, he oiled his old railway detective's badge — the one he'd kept in a drawer for four years, the one Caul would come asking about soon enough — and he thought about the girl he had dragged back to the Home at ten years old, and he wondered if alone was a thing you chose or a thing you earned.
---
Tala's clinic stood empty for three days.
She swept it anyway. She changed the water in the basin. She hung fresh sage over the door and burned a bundle of it at dawn, the smoke curling up through the stable rafters, carrying her prayers to whoever was listening. She sat on the stool by the cot and waited, her medicine bag open beside her, and no one came.
On the fourth evening, Tomás slipped through the stable door like a shadow.
"They're saying you killed her," he said without preamble. He was thinner than he'd been a month ago, and there were dark circles under his eyes. "The Abernathy girl."
"They're saying many things." Tala studied him. "Are you eating?"
"Enough." He glanced at the door. "I can't stay. Mrs. Quill counts us at supper now. But — " He pulled a folded paper from his shirt. "Three more in the sick room. Same as the girl. Sweating, breathing wrong. She says it's fever. It isn't fever."
Tala took the paper. On it, in a child's clumsy hand, were three numbers: H-31, H-22, H-08.
H-31. The boy with the sprained wrist. H-22 — the girl with the broom, the one who had looked at her one beat too long.
"They're dosing them," Tomás whispered. "More than before. Rosa says there's a — a moving. Soon. They want them quiet for it."
"A moving," Tala repeated. Her blood went cold and then hot. "Tomás. Listen to me. Can you get medicine to them? Just to ease the dosing — not to fight it, do you understand? If they wake up wrong, they'll know."
"I know." The boy's jaw was set in a way no fourteen-year-old's jaw should be. "I've been watering their cups when Quill isn't looking. It helps a little."
Tala packed small paper twists — valerian root, skullcap, nothing that would fight the opium, just enough to soften its edges. "If anyone asks, you stole these."
"I know how to steal," Tomás said, and tried to smile, and failed. At the door he stopped. "The quiet one — H-22. She's been asking the little ones if anyone remembers a song. About a bird."
Tala's hands went still on the medicine bag.
"What kind of bird?"
"A dove, I think. She hums it when she thinks no one's listening." Tomás looked at her, and his eyes were suddenly very old. "It's a pretty song. Sad, though."
After he left, Tala sat in the empty clinic for a long time, holding a twist of valerian root that had gone soft in her fist.
---
The rain came that night — the first real rain of the season, hammering the stable roof like it was trying to get in.
Tala barred the clinic door and took down the bundle she kept at the bottom of her trunk, wrapped in oilcloth. Six years she had carried it. Through mining camps and cholera towns, through desert and mountain, it had ridden in her saddlebag and never once been opened except in the dark, alone.
Paloma's blanket. The one she had sewn the border onto by lamplight. The blanket her daughter had been holding when they took her — and the one thing, Tala had told herself for six years, that proved any of it was real.
She unwrapped it now, in the lamplight, and pressed it to her face. It smelled of dust and time and nothing else. Six years had washed the child-smell out of it. That was the cruelest thing the years had done — not the searching, not the loneliness, but the slow erasing of the smell.
She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and sang.
It was the lullaby she had made up when Paloma was a baby, sung to the rhythm of a rocking chair that no longer existed:
*"Paloma, paloma, white dove of the morning,
Fold your wings now, the night is coming.
The coyote sleeps, the river is still,
And my heart keeps watch on the windowsill.
Paloma, paloma, when the morning comes,
You'll wake to find the world still hums —
And I will be here, I will be here,
My dove, my heart, my dear."*
Her voice cracked on the last line. She sang it again, softer, to the empty room, to the rain, to herself — a mother singing her child to sleep six years too late, with no child to hear it.
Outside, in the rain, Jonah Mercer stood with his hat in his hands and water running off his shoulders, listening to every word through the thin stable wall.
He had come to tell her that Dale Freeman's cancellation didn't matter. He had come to tell her he'd started sleeping with his old badge under his pillow again, in case. He had come to tell her a dozen practical things.
Instead he stood in the rain and listened to a woman sing a lullaby to a blanket, and something broke open in his chest — not the clean break of a bone, but the slow splitting of wood along the grain, the way a wheel gives way after years of strain.
He had wept for himself many times. In Santa Fe, drunk, over the girl with the un-crying eyes. In his shop, sober, over the tremor in his hand. He knew the taste of his own tears the way he knew the taste of sawdust.
These tears were different. They were not for him at all. They were for the woman on the other side of the wall, and for the girl with the broom, and for every number in every ledger he had ever written — and he stood in the rain and let them come, and did not knock, because some griefs are too private to witness and too large to leave alone, and all he could do was stand guard over hers.