"Names don't burn," she said.
Thursday came down over Río Verde like a held breath.
Tala felt it in the air before she saw it in the sky — the particular stillness that settles on a town when everyone has agreed, without saying so, to look the other way. The livery was quiet. The assay office had closed early. Even the dogs seemed to have been told to keep their opinions to themselves. From the doorway of the little room she rented behind the dry-goods store, Tala watched the light go thin and copper-colored over the mesa, and she checked her medicine bag for the third time.
Everything was where it should be. The folded cloths. The willow bark and the feverfew. The small brown bottle, corked tight, that could put a grown man to sleep or stop his heart, depending on the measure. And sewn into the bottom of the bag, between two layers of canvas, the birthing book — six years of names that had not burned, because she had not let them.
A knock came, soft and coded: two, then one. Jonah's knock.
He stood in the alley with his hat in his hands, which was how she knew he was frightened. Jonah Mercer never took his hat off for weather or for company. He took it off now, and his right hand shook against the brim, and he said, "They're hitching the wagon at the Home. Rosa just came by the shop. It leaves within the hour."
"How many men?" Tala asked.
"Caul rides with it. Four guns besides him." Jonah put his hat back on, as if the news required covering. "Same as always. Same as the nights I used to — " He stopped. He did not finish sentences about those nights anymore. That was one of the small mercies Tala had taught him: you do not have to say the whole of a thing every time you touch it.
"Tomás and Rosa?" she asked.
"Waiting at the arroyo with the horses." He hesitated. "Tala. Four guns and Caul. I want you to understand what we're riding into."
"I understand," she said. "I have understood for six years. Tonight I am done understanding from a distance."
She slung the medicine bag across her body, and they went out into the copper light.
---
The arroyo ran like a dark seam along the western edge of town, and in its shadow the horses stamped softly, smelling rain that wasn't coming. Tomás sat his borrowed mare the way a boy sits a horse he has been lent but already loves, straight-backed and trying not to show his hands shaking. Rosa stood beside a rawboned gelding, her shawl pulled tight, her face set in the particular expression of a woman who has decided that fear is a luxury she will indulge later, if at all.
"You came," Tala said to Rosa.
"I clean their floors," Rosa said. "I wash their sheets. I have washed the sheets of children who did not wake up, and I told myself the fever took them, and I am done telling myself things." She swung up into the saddle with the ease of a woman who had ridden before she had learned to lie to herself. "Besides. Somebody has to tell you which of those devils is which in the dark."
Jonah checked the girth on Tala's mule — the same patient old mule that had carried her into Río Verde weeks ago, though it felt like years — and his shaking hand made the work slow. Tomás watched him, then slid down from his mare and went to help, his small fingers quick and sure on the buckle.
"I can do it," Jonah said, too sharply.
"I know," Tomás said. "Two hands are faster than one that argues with itself."
Jonah stared at the boy. Then, to Tala's astonishment, he laughed — a short, rusted sound, like a hinge moving for the first time in years. "Where did you learn to talk like that?"
"From watching you not talk," Tomás said, and swung back up onto his mare.
They rode out single file along the arroyo bed, where the sand would hold no tracks, and swung north onto the freight road only when the town's last lamp had dropped behind them. Ahead, the road ran straight as a ruled line toward the railhead at Cima Seca, twenty miles through country that offered no cover but darkness. The moon was a thin paring, and Tala was glad of it.
For the first hour nobody spoke. The horses' hooves made soft, even sounds in the dust, and the night filled in around them with its small noises — a nightjar, the tick of cooling stones, the far-off complaint of a coyote that sounded, to Tala, like every warning she had ever ignored. She rode with one hand resting on her medicine bag, feeling through the canvas the rectangular shape of the book sewn inside it, and she thought of all the Thursdays there had been. How many wagons. How many children. How many mothers, somewhere, holding blankets that still smelled faintly of a child who was now a number.
"Tell me about the railhead," she said at last to Jonah. "Exactly."
He rode a little straighter, the way he always did when the subject was something he knew the way a man knows his own trade. "Cima Seca isn't a town. It's a siding, a water tank, a freight platform, and a company office with a telegraph. The Home's wagon gets there an hour or so before dawn. The children are walked from the wagon to a freight car — a boxcar with the windows boarded, second from the engine. There's a manifest, signed by Mrs. Quill, countersigned by Caul. The train takes the spur east at first light."
"And we are not going to stop the wagon on the road," Tala said. It was not a question. They had argued this through twice already, in the back of Jonah's shop, with Rosa drawing the yard in charcoal on butcher paper.