Now we have an even more dire need for it.
Her hand comes up and takes a fistful of my shirt.
She doesn't let go of it for forty minutes.
The house is somewhere outside Elgin and there's a man in the driveway with a bag, and a woman standing beside him.
The doctor's older, gray, and he moves fast and doesn't say a word to anybody.
The woman comes straight to the door of the truck and puts her hands where mine are without asking permission.
"Sakura. I'm a nurse practitioner." She finds the wound with two fingers. "Move your hands on three. Keep the pressure until I say."
Then she looks past me at the girl's face, and everything in her voice changes.
"Hola, mi amor." She gets down low, into Yoli's sightline. "You're okay. You're going to be okay. What's your name, sweetheart?"
"Yoli," I say, because Yoli can't.
"Yoli." Sakura stays right there in front of her, close, the way you do with a kid. "I'm going to take care of you. That man is a doctor and he's very good at this. And I’m not going to leave you alone with him or with anybody else for one second." She waits until the girl's eyes come to hers. "Not one second. Do you understand me?"
Yoli's hand is still knotted in my shirt.
"She wants me to stay," I say.
"Then you stay." Sakura doesn't look up from the wound. "Let’s get you in the house. Both of you. Now."
They take her into a back bedroom via a gurney and throw the light on. The doctor immediately gets to work.
Sakura talks to her the whole time. Low and steady, in two languages, never once stopping.
I sit on the floor by the head of the bed with a fifteen-year-old's fist wrapped up in my shirt.
Around four in the morning the doctor sits back on his heels and says something to Sakura in Spanish.
Sakura closes her eyes for a second before she turns to me.
"Through and through." She wipes her hands. "It went in under the clavicle and out her back, and it missed everything that would have killed her. She's going to hurt for a long time but she’s going to be completely fine."
I put my head down on the edge of the mattress.
Yoli's hand finally lets go of my shirt.
It lands on the top of my head, and it stays there.
***
Finn comes in at dawn.
He's got somebody else's blood dried along his jaw and his hands won't hold still, and he stops in the doorway of a bedroom in a stranger's house outside Elgin, Arizona, and looks at me sitting on the floor.
"Everybody's out." He says it like he's still making himself believe it. "All eleven. Nobody of ours is dead. Boulder's got a hole through his leg and Kade's arm's broken and that's it."
I can't get a word out.
"They were waiting for us." He leans back against the doorframe like it's the only thing holding him up. "Thirty-two men, Mila. On a property that runs five guards."
"I know."
