Two hundred and eighty-one nights I've been counting, and for half of them she's been in the ground.
They cleaned it out and put a child in it, because a room has to earn, and the machine doesn't stop for one dead woman any more than it stopped for me.
My eyes go and I don't have a hand free to do anything about it.
"Hey." The girl's voice, small, from inside the room. "Are you okay?"
A fifteen-year-old in a bunker is asking me if I'm okay.
I get down on my knees on that concrete so I'm not standing over her.
"What's your name?" I put my hand out, palm up, and leave it there where she can take it or not.
"Yoli."
"Yoli." I hold the hand steady. "I was in room three. I was there for nine years. I got out last spring, and I told them I'd come back, and it took me too long." My voice goes to pieces. "I'm sorry it took me this long."
She looks at my hand for what feels like a year, then she puts hers in it.
***
We're forty feet from the trucks when the desert lights up.
Headlights. Six sets, eight, more, all at once, from behind the house and the pole barn and out past the equipment shed.
The whole property goes white and I can see everything.
The women in a line. The club spread around them.
And men coming out from between the buildings.
Not five. Not ten.
They come out of the dark in a wave, and the yard hangs there for one whole second with nobody moving, and I have time for exactly one clear thought.
He was waiting.
Then the shooting starts.
I can't describe the next ninety seconds.
It's noise. Noise past anything I've ever heard, flat cracking noise coming from everywhere at once that hits you in the chest like a hand.
The light's all wrong. People are moving and I can't tell which ones are ours.
Somebody grabs the back of my jacket and throws me down.
I hit gravel on my hip and there's a woman under me and a woman half on top of me, and I'm screaming at them in Spanish to stay flat, stay down, don't get up, and I can't hear my own voice coming out.
Boulder's on one knee eight feet away, firing, his mouth moving around words I can't hear.
Amara's got a woman by the collar, dragging her behind the engine block of the second truck.
Doom's out past the edge of the light and I don't see him, and then I do, for half a second, moving between two men, and then I don't see him again.
I get up on my elbows and I count.
Because counting is what I do. Because it's the only thing I've ever had.
