She worked for twenty minutes in the doorway light: a poultice of wormwood and clay, a tight wrapping, a liniment of arnica and camphor rubbed in slow circles until the woman's face unknotted. When she finished, the wife stood, tested her weight, and let out a disbelieving laugh.
"God bless your hands." Then, quieter, glancing toward the loft where Tomás had vanished: "That boy. Whatever you think you saw on his wrist — best not to ask questions about that place on the hill. Mrs. Quill has the reverend and the sheriff both in her pocket, and questions have a way of getting people run out of town."
"I'm not afraid of being run out of town," Tala said. "I've been run out of better ones."
"Maybe." The woman studied her. "But the boy's got nowhere else to go. Remember that before you go digging."
It was a warning and a plea both, and Tala heard them equally. She did what she had done in a hundred towns: she traded. The poultice and the liniment for the knee, and in exchange a corner of the hay barn for herself and Ceniza, and no questions about how long she stayed.
That night the barn smelled of hay and horse and rain coming down from the mountains. Tala rubbed Ceniza down, picketed her with a double handful of the paid-for oats, and unrolled her blanket in the straw. She was nearly asleep when she heard the ladder creak.
Tomás came down from the loft with his blanket around his shoulders like an old man, and sat in the straw a careful six feet from her, and said, "You knew about the numbers."
It wasn't a question. Tala sat up.
"I know a great many things, Tomás. Which numbers?"
"The ones on our wrists. At the Home." He picked at the blanket's edge. "You didn't even blink."
"No," she admitted. "I didn't."
"Are you going to tell the liveryman?"
"What would I tell him? That a boy carries ink under his skin?" She studied him. "Tomás, I mend people for a living. That means I notice things. It doesn't mean I carry tales."
He was quiet a long time. Somewhere out in the dark, a horse stamped. The rain began, soft, on the barn roof.
"They're good to us, mostly," he said at last, in the tone of a boy reciting a lesson. "Mrs. Quill says we're fortunate. We get fed. We learn letters. At night we get the medicine so we sleep good and don't cough."
"The sleeping medicine," Tala said.
"Yes'm." Another silence. Then, smaller: "There's a girl there. She sings when everybody's asleep. Real soft, like — like she's singing to somebody far away."
Tala's heart was suddenly beating in her throat. "Sings what, Tomás?"
"A song about a bird." He frowned at the straw. "Like the bird's flying home. I don't remember all the words. Just the tune, kind of." And he hummed — halting, tuneless at first, then finding it: a simple falling melody, five notes down and three notes up, the shape of a small bird banking toward evening.
Tala stopped breathing.
She knew every note. She had made it up fourteen years ago, rocking a feverish four-year-old through a desert night, desperate for anything that would keep the child's eyes open until morning — a nonsense song about a dove flying home at dusk, because the child loved the doves that nested in their courtyard wall. She had never written it down. She had never sung it for anyone but Paloma.
"Again," she whispered. "Hum it again."
He did. And halfway through, Tala joined him — her voice cracked and low, finding the words out of the dark where she had kept them buried for six years:
*"Paloma, paloma, the sun's going low,
The doves are all flying where the soft winds blow.
Close your eyes, little bird, the night is your nest —
Mama's right here, love. Mama knows best."*
The rain filled the silence after. Tomás stared at her, the blanket slipping off his shoulders.
"How do you know it?"
"I made it." Her voice would not come out steady and she stopped trying to make it. "A long time ago. For my little girl."
"Is she —" He glanced toward the town, toward the white house on the hill he had not named. "Is she at the Home?"
"I don't know." Tala pressed her palms flat against the straw to stop their shaking. "Six years ago, men took her from our village. I've been looking ever since. Tomás — this girl who sings. How old is she?"
"I don't know. Maybe my age. Maybe — she doesn't talk much. Nobody knows her real name. Mrs. Quill calls her Ruth, but —" He shrugged. "She doesn't answer to it."
Fourteen, Tala thought. Paloma would be fourteen now. Her hands had gone numb.
"Tomás, listen to me. This is important, and I need you to be brave the way you've already been brave tonight. If anyone asks — the liveryman, anyone — you never hummed anything. You never told me about the singing. Can you do that?"
He nodded, eyes wide. "Are you going to get in trouble?"
"Probably," she said, and almost smiled. "Go back to the loft now. Sleep. And Tomás — thank you."
He climbed the ladder. Halfway up he stopped. "Señora? If you find her — the girl — will you tell her Tomás says the song's pretty?"
"I will," Tala said. "I promise."
When the barn was quiet again, she took the lantern from its hook and set it low, and drew from the bottom of her medicine bag the thing she never let out of her sight: a book bound in soft, worn leather, the size of a man's hand. Her birthing book. On the first page, in the round young handwriting of a twenty-year-old midwife, it said:
*Paloma — born on the night of the new moon. Cried loud as a church bell. Ten fingers, ten toes, one furious heart.*