The girl's fingers twitched. Then, horribly, her small face crumpled and she began to cry in her drugged sleep — the deep, hopeless sobbing of a child who has learned that crying changes nothing. "Mama," she whispered. "Mama, mama, mama."
Tala's hands did not stop moving. They never stopped. But something in her chest cracked open like a dropped pot, because six years ago she had held a different small girl who cried for her mama, and the men with the Ashford badges had pulled that girl out of her arms anyway, and she had never — not once in six years — stopped hearing it.
"She's here, Marta," Tala said fiercely, pressing the wet cloth to the girl's forehead. "Somebody's here. Somebody came. You're not alone in this room."
It was then that she saw the bottle.
It sat on the medicine shelf by the door, half-hidden behind folded bandages — a brown glass laudanum bottle with a paper label, and the label bore a printed name that made Tala's blood go cold and then hot: ASHFORD APOTHECARY — RÍO VERDE. Property of the Ashford Foundling Home. Not a back-alley purchase. Not a mistake. The poison came from Ashford's own shelves, with Ashford's own name on it, as brazen as a signature.
Tala took the bottle down and held it up for Jonah to see. He read the label, and his jaw worked, and he said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the bottle didn't already say.
"Evidence," Tala said, and slipped it into her bag. "Mrs. Quill can explain to a judge why a children's home stocks enough laudanum to fell a horse."
She turned back to the cots — and stopped.
A girl stood in the far corner of the sick room, half in shadow, watching her.
Tala knew her at once. The silent girl from the tour. Fourteen years old. Dark hair pulled back too tight. The girl who had looked at Tala one beat too long in the hallway of the Home, and then looked away.
She was not supposed to be here. The sick room was for the dosed children, the ones being prepared. This girl stood upright, clear-eyed, and in her hand she held something folded small.
"You're not dosed," Tala said softly.
The girl shook her head. A tiny movement. Her eyes flicked to the door, to Jonah, to Rosa — checking, always checking. Then she crossed the room in three quick steps and pressed the folded thing into Tala's hand, and her fingers were cold and her grip was desperate.
Tala unfolded it.
A drawing. A child's drawing, done in charcoal on a scrap of butcher paper — a bird, wings spread, the lines clumsy and urgent. And beneath it, in a hand that shook with the effort of forming letters someone had only half-taught her, a single word:
paloma
Tala stopped breathing.
The girl leaned in close, so close Tala could feel the warmth of her breath on her cheek, and whispered — the first words Tala had ever heard from her, in a voice like a door opening after six years shut:
"They take us Thursday. The train."
Then she was gone — slipped past Jonah in the doorway like smoke, down the back stairs, into the dark of the Home, before Tala could move, before Tala could speak, before Tala could ask the only question that mattered.
Tala stood in the sick room with the drawing in her hand and the laudanum bottle in her bag and six drugged children breathing slow around her, and she looked at the word on the paper until the letters blurred.
Paloma. Dove. The name she had whispered over a cradle on the night of a new moon, while the baby cried loud as a bell. The name she had sung into a lullaby she had made up herself, because her own mother had died before teaching her one, and she had sworn her daughter would never go to sleep without a song.
"Señora?" Rosa whispered. "Are you —"
"She remembers the dove." Tala's voice came out strange, scraped thin. "She drew it. She wrote the word. Do you understand what that means?" She looked up at Jonah, and her eyes were dry and burning. "It means somewhere down deep, under six years of numbers and silence and whatever they did to her — she remembers. The dove means she remembers me."
Jonah crossed the room and put his good hand on her shoulder, heavy and steady. He looked at the drawing. He looked at the six small bodies in their cots, breathing now, all of them breathing — Marta's breath had deepened, the boy's color was coming back.
"Thursday," Jonah said. "The train." He was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Cima Seca. That's the transfer point. The spur line, the old water stop, twenty miles east. I know exactly how they run it — the timing, the wagon route, the signals." His hand tightened on her shoulder. "Because I wrote the plan, Tala. Four years ago, Ashford had me draw up the whole transfer schedule, down to the minute. I know it the way a man knows his own sins."
"Then Thursday," Tala said, folding the drawing with infinite care and tucking it against her heart, inside her dress, where no one could take it, "we go to Cima Seca."
She looked down the row of cots one last time. Marta was sleeping now — real sleep, not the drugged kind, her small face smoothed out, one hand curled under her cheek. In her sleep, she smiled.
Tala bent and kissed her own fingertips and pressed them to the girl's forehead, the way her grandmother had done, the way she had done for Paloma a thousand times.
"Somebody came," she whispered. "Remember that."
Before she left, her eyes went to the seventh cot — the empty one, its blanket folded with terrible neatness. She laid her hand on it and found the ticking still warm. Someone had lain there an hour ago. Someone small enough, quiet enough, to have been moved already — or to have gotten up and walked away on her own two feet, carrying a folded piece of paper.