"You should have taken the money," he said at one point, thick through the split lip.
"Be quiet."
"You should have —"
"Jonah Mercer, if you tell me one more time what I should have done, I will put the bitterest herbs I own in your tea and you will beg me for mercy." She pressed a cool cloth to his swollen eye. "Nobody touches what's mine. Not Caul. Not Ashford. Not the whole of the territory."
He was quiet for a while. Then: "Your notebook. He wanted your notebook."
"I know."
"He'll come back for it."
"Let him come." Her voice was steel wrapped in cotton. "He'll have to go through me, and I am harder to beat than you are, wheelwright. I don't fall down as easy."
That got a sound out of him that might have been a laugh, or might have been a rib shifting. She held his shoulders until it passed.
Night came. The fever came with it.
It started as a chill, then a heat in his skin that her palm could feel from an inch away. Tala had seen wound-fever before; she knew its shape. She sat beside the cot with her bag open and a lamp turned low, and she sponged his forehead, and she dripped cooled tea between his lips, and she waited, because fever is a tide and you cannot push it — you can only keep the boat from breaking up while it runs.
At midnight, in the grip of it, Jonah began to talk.
It came out broken, out of order, the way truth comes when the guard is down. Names. Times. A wagon route. A signal — two lanterns swung crosswise at the water stop, meaning the track was clear. A schedule: the Home's wagon left at dusk on transfer nights, reached the Cima Seca siding by full dark, loaded the children into the boxcar under the pretense of freight. And always, always, the private car — Mrs. Ashford's private car, coupled at the rear, because she liked to oversee the valuable shipments herself.
"Valuable," Jonah whispered, his eyes open but seeing somewhere else. "That's what she called them. In the reports. Valuable shipments. I wrote it. I wrote those words." His good hand clutched at the blanket. "The girl — the ten-year-old — she had a name. I never wrote it down. In the report she was 'recovered property, female, approximately ten years.' I never wrote her name down, Tala. I don't — I can't —"
"Shh." Tala took his clutching hand in both of hers. "It's all right. The fever's talking now. Rest."
But he didn't rest. He turned his burning face toward her, and his voice dropped to something raw and small.
"Her name was Lucy," he said. "I remember. Her name was Lucy, and she had a chipped front tooth, and she told me the Home wasn't a home, and I brought her back anyway. I brought her back, Tala."
The lamp guttered. Tala held his hand, and she did not let go, and she thought of all the names in her own notebook — six years of names, every one of them written down, every one of them remembered — and she understood, suddenly and completely, what this man's punishment had been. Not the trembling hand. Not the lost badge. This: remembering the one name he had refused to write.
"Then we find her too," Tala said quietly. "Lucy. We put her name in the book. Every name, Jonah. That's how we beat them — we remember every single one."
He slept after that — real sleep, the fever breaking near dawn in a sweat that soaked the blanket through. Tala changed it, and changed his bandages, and when the gray light came through the shop's broken window, Jonah Mercer opened his eyes, and they were clear.
He sat up slowly, testing the ribs. He looked at the wreckage of his shop — the overturned bench, the snapped drawknife, the broken spokes scattered like bones. He looked at the coins still lying on the floor, winking dully in the dawn light. He didn't touch them.
Then he swung his legs off the cot, stood up — swaying once, catching himself on the cot's frame — and walked to the pile of broken spokes.
"What are you doing?" Tala asked. "You should be lying down."
"I ran from this once," Jonah said. He picked up a broken spoke in his good hand and looked at it the way a man looks at a thing he intends to fix. "Four years ago, I ran. I quit, I hid in this shop, I told myself the past was buried." He set the spoke down and picked up another. "Caul came yesterday to offer me the shovel. To bury it deeper." He looked at her, his split lip, his blackened eye, his trembling hand — and his gaze was steadier than she had ever seen it. "I'm done running, Tala. I'm done being buried."
He began, slowly, painfully, to rebuild the wheel — fitting the good spokes back into the hub one at a time, his bad hand braced against the work, his jaw set against the pull of the cracked ribs. It was the slowest work she had ever watched a man do, and the most deliberate. Each spoke seated with a soft, final click. Each one a choice.
Tala watched him for a long moment. Then she opened her medicine bag, and from the very bottom — beneath the folded cloths, beneath the packets of herbs — she drew out her notebook. Six years of names. Paloma's birth entry on the first page. H-17, Río Verde. Lucy — she would add Lucy today.
She held it for a moment, feeling its weight. Then she took her sewing kit from the bag, and with quick, practiced stitches, she sewed a false bottom into the bag — a double lining, deep and invisible — and she slid the notebook inside, and sewed it shut.
Caul could come back. Ashford could send ten men. They could tear the shop apart, they could tear the town apart.
"They want to burn names," Tala said, tying off the thread with her teeth. "Let them try."
She looked up at Jonah, fitting the last spoke into the wheel, his face pale with pain and something else — something like peace.