“She was inside with the windows shuttered when that dust storm hit. So why did she…?”
“I don’t know,” Nurse Ada said. “None of us know how the dust is getting to people. None of us know how to cure it. All we know how to do is treat the symptoms.”
It was strange. Dust Sickness seemed to swoop down and take some people, like Aunt Lucretia and Sal’s mother, and leave others hanging on, growing thinner and paler and less of themselves by the day. Personally, Lucy thought the hanging on was worse.
Just then, the door swung open, and a white man rushed in carrying his wife. She hung limp in his arms, her breath coming in a high, thin wheeze. Lucy recognized him from the food ration counter: Mr. Walker, who always slipped an extra ration to families with kids.
“Help!” Mr. Walker cried. “My wife! She’s collapsed! I think she has Dust Sickness!”
Nurse Ada rang a bell under the desk, and three nurses rushed out and took them back to the operating room. Lucy heard someone asking about a tracheotomy and someone else asking about chest compressions; then a door slammed and it was quiet again.
“That’s the fifth one today,” Nurse Ada murmured.
CHAPTER 16
2 MONTHS
AND
23 DAYS
REMAIN.
When I woke, the smell of food was in the air: bread, meat, coffee. My stomach growled painfully. It had only been five days since I’d had a proper meal, but it felt like an eternity.
I thought of Asa out there in the desert, and a pang of guilt went through me. Was it something I did? Something I said that made him leave? Maybe Asa is okay, I thought. Maybe he’s out there biting the head off a rabbit or something, I thought, surprised by how easily that visual came to mind. He said he’d be all right, so I’m sure he will. Besides, it was his idea. I told myself this, but even so, I was worried about him. More than that, I was worried about what I was doing here. The penny had pointed in this direction, had buzzed when we arrived as though to say, Here we are! But what was it that I was looking for? What was I supposed to find?
My stomach growled again, twisted itself in a knot. Whatever I was looking for, I needed to eat first. I dressed and made my way outside, letting the smell of food lead me onward.
The first car of the train, the engine room, seemed to be the kitchen—that was where the smell was coming from at any rate. Timidly, I opened the door and stepped inside. It was surprisingly homey in a threadbare, modified sort of way. Desert plants grew in tin cans along the slim windows. In the front of the train, behind the windshield, an array of jars and bags and canisters were spread like they might have been on a kitchen counter in a house. There was an old table with no chairs (they probably ate standing up, like Mama had always discouraged) set with eight rag-covered plates. The firebox had been modified into a stove, it looked like, and on it a frying pan simmered on a rack, smelling so good that my stomach growled loudly.
The girl I had healed, Susanah, was making breakfast. She had sliced some homemade bread and was putting it into an odd woven wire contraption. Then she put the bread in its wire cage and hung it from a hook in the oven, close to the pan. She gave the pan a good stirring with a hand-carved wooden spoon and wiped her forehead. The little girl, Mowse, was in a nightgown—no, a man’s shirt that fit her like a nightgown—and was putting a bunch of rocks on the floor in a circle. Beside her was a tattered, well-worn book called Ways of the Comanche.
“What is ‘black’ in Comanche?” Susanah asked the little girl.
“Tuhubitu,” the girl said dutifully.
“What about ‘sun’?”
“Taabe.”
“And ‘water’?” Susanah opened the oven and checked the food again.
“Uhhhhh…”
“Paa,” said Susanah. “Paa is water. Remember that.”
Mowse saw me then, and said, “The girl is here! The girl who saved you!” Susanah looked up at me, pushing her glasses up.
“Hello,” said Susanah. Mowse stared at me from the floor.
“Don’t be rude, Mowse,” said Susanah. “Say hello to her—in Comanche.”
“Maruawe,” said Mowse with a little wave.
“Mar-ua…?” I attempted. Then I gave up and just said, “Hello,” back.
“A good try,” said Susanah. “Come in. It’s going to be dried beef gravy over toast.”
“When’s it