"He let us come." His voice goes somewhere I've never heard it go. "He knew, and he let us walk right in. He was never trying to keep those women. He was trying to get me."
I look up at him from the floor, with a sleeping girl's hand resting on my head.
"Then he made a mistake." My voice comes out of me raw and steady at the same time. "Because he didn't get you. And I've got eleven women in a house in Arizona, and every single one of them is breathing."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rooster
Morning comes up over a rented house outside Elgin and there are eleven women asleep in it.
That's the first thing I do when the sun hits the kitchen window. I count them.
Two on the couch under one blanket. Three in the back bedroom with Yoli. Four more in the front room on cushions Damon's guys pulled off every piece of furniture in the place. One at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee she hasn't touched, watching the door.
And Lucia, asleep sitting up against the wall in the hallway, six feet from the bedroom where Mila is, because that's as far away from her as she'll get.
Eleven.
I stand in a stranger's kitchen with a cold cup in my hand and count them twice, and the wire I've had strung through my chest since a woman walked up to my gate slacks off a turn.
They're out.
Whatever else is coming, at least these women can start healing.
For them, the madness is behind them.
Amara's on the porch with a phone against her ear, and she's been on it since four.
"He's sending three vehicles and two of his own people." She hangs up and pockets it. "They'll be here by two. Documents take a couple of weeks."
"Documents?"
"Mexican identification. Real ones, or real enough that nobody's going to look twice." She drops down heavy onto the step. "For the ones who want to stay south. He's got a woman in Hermosillo who does the paperwork for the families he moves. She's very good and she doesn't ask questions."
"And the rest?"
"Five of them have people in the States." Amara rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. "Nadia's got a mother in Tucson. Belén's got a whole family in San Diego. Two out of Texas, and one who won't say yet." She squints up at me. "Those five don't move until a doctor's cleared them. All of them. I don't care how bad they want to run through a door and see their mama. Some of these women haven't seen the inside of a clinic in six years, and I'm not putting them on a bus and calling it a rescue."
"Imani's not touching the visa angle, then."
"Imani's not touching anything with a federal seal on it for a good long while, and she agrees with me." Amara says it flatly, no hedge in it. "We took sixteen armed people across a border and shot our way off a property in Cochise County last night. There's no world where we walk any of this into a US courthouse and it goes well for those women or for us."
"So, what do we do?"
"We do it the slow way. We put them somewhere safe. We get them well." She looks out at the desert. "And we let their families come to them."
I sit down on the step next to my president.
"That's not justice," I say.
"No." She keeps her eyes on the horizon going gold. "It's just keeping them alive. Justice is a different job and I don't have the paperwork for it."
Razor comes out at eight with news I don't understand at first.
"It's gone." He hands Amara a phone with a satellite feed pulled up on it.
"What's gone?"
