"No," Jonah said. "Four guns on open road, children in the wagon — somebody gets shot, and it won't be Caul. At the railhead there's confusion. Porters, the water stop, the telegraph operator. And there's something else." He glanced at her. "The Friday inspection car. Federal man, rides through Cima Seca at dawn on the eastbound, auditing the new spur's labor contracts. Government paper, government eyes. Ashford can't buy him the way she buys Boone — he's not hers to buy."
"You're certain he comes tomorrow?"
"I wrote schedules like that one for four years," Jonah said quietly. "I know the railroad the way you know a fever. It runs on time."
Rosa made a small sound. "There is something I have not told you," she said. "About the wagon. About what rides in it besides the children."
Tala turned in her saddle.
"Two nights ago I carried linens past Mrs. Quill's office, and the door was open a crack, and she was speaking to Caul." Rosa's voice dropped, though there was no one to hear but the night. "She said, 'The books travel with the goods. The mistress trusts no one to keep them.' And Caul laughed and said the iron box was heavier than any child he'd ever lifted."
"The books," Jonah said slowly.
"The placement ledgers," Tala said. Her mouth had gone dry. "Names. Numbers. Prices. The signatures of the men who paid."
Rosa nodded. "Under the wagon bed. Where the water barrels used to ride. There's a compartment — Tomás knows. He used to ride in the wagon, before."
All eyes went to the boy. Tomás looked at the road ahead, at the thin moon, at anywhere but their faces, and said, "There's a hatch under the middle bench. Iron box, banded, locked. Mrs. Quill keeps the key on a chain around her neck, but the hatch latch is just a pin. I used to — " He swallowed. "When they moved me, I used to hide my hands in there where they couldn't see them shake."
Silence rode with them for a while.
Then Jonah said, "That changes the plan."
"It completes the plan," Tala corrected. "We were going to steal back children. Now we can steal back the reason anyone steals children."
Jonah was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "The box goes onto the inspector's train. Not into our hands — into his. Federal evidence, federal chain. Ashford's lawyers can't make it disappear if a United States inspector signs for it at dawn in front of witnesses."
"And the children?" Rosa asked.
"We get them off the wagon in the confusion and walk them into the dark," Jonah said. "Tomás knows the arroyo cuts. There's a line shack two miles west — abandoned since the spur went in. We hold there till daylight."
It was a good plan. It was also, Tala knew, the kind of plan that looked clean on butcher paper and bled real blood in the living of it. She looked at Tomás, riding small and straight on his borrowed mare, and she thought of Paloma at fourteen — the girl in the Home's white hallway who had looked at her one heartbeat too long. The girl who had pressed a folded paper into her hand in the sick room. The girl who had whispered, *They take us Thursday. The train.*
*I am coming, little dove,* Tala thought. *Hold on until dawn.*
---
They caught sight of the wagon's lanterns two miles short of Cima Seca — two swaying points of yellow light, moving slow, with a third light riding alongside: Caul's horse, and the darker shapes of his men strung out fore and aft.
"There," Jonah breathed. "Just like I wrote it."
They shadowed at a distance, keeping to the broken ground east of the road, and Tala watched the wagon the way she had once watched fevers — for the pattern, for the moment it would break. It moved with the terrible ordinariness of evil that has been routinized: no haste, no secrecy now, just a wagon on a road, carrying its cargo the way it carried it every time.
Tomás rode up beside her, his mare picking its way through the scrub. "Señora," he said quietly. "When we get to the yard — the box. Let me be the one."
"Tomás — "
"I know where it rides. I know the pin. I know how the bench lifts." The boy's voice was steady, and that steadiness cost him something; she could see it in the set of his jaw. "I was a number once too. H-17. You wrote it in your book." He looked at her then, and his eyes were older than fourteen. "I want to write my own name."
Tala reached across the space between their horses and put her hand over his on the rein. "Then we will make sure you have something to write it with," she said.
Ahead, the lights of Cima Seca came up out of the dark — not many, but definite: the tall lamps of the water tank, the yellow windows of the company office, the long platform lanterns strung like beads along the siding. And there, on the far track, gleaming faintly under the lamps, a private car — long, dark green, with brass fittings and curtained windows and a name painted in gold leaf on its side.
Jonah went very still.
"What is it?" Tala whispered.
"That's her car," Jonah said. "Ashford's private car. She never comes to the transfers. In four years, she never once came herself."
Rosa crossed herself.
Tala looked at the green car with its gold lettering, and she felt something cold and certain settle in her chest, like a stone dropping to the bottom of a well. *She's here,* Tala thought. *The woman who took my daughter is here, behind those curtains, perhaps looking out at the same lamps I am looking at.*
"Good," Tala said aloud, and her voice surprised her with its steadiness. "Let her watch."
They tied the horses in a dry wash behind a stack of railroad lumber, and went forward on foot through the dark toward the lights.