Tali didn’t participate in the final rituals. She ran, her dark hair loose and her white dress spattered with blood, toward the candlelit path and toward Juan. She missed Rosario more than ever, missed her fortitude and clear thinking.

He was taking so long to regain consciousness that Tali didn’t dare get her hopes up at a tremor in his fingers or a change in his breathing. They had no choice but to wait. Bradford sounded optimistic. Dr. Biedma, his disciple, seemed worried. Juan had blacked out, but his heart hadn’t stopped. It had been years since that hadn’t happened, thought Tali.

After ten hours, Stephen left the room. I need to sleep, he said. Tali put a hand on his back; she knew he was exhausted, and she understood why he didn’t want to sleep in that sad room, with its bright light, the noisy monitor recording Juan’s erratic heartbeat, his labored breathing. Even Rosario had avoided it while Juan lay unconscious.

Tali wasn’t tired. Bradford treated her with contempt, as always. To him, she was just the product of Adolfo’s indiscretion with a village witch. Tali had mentally prepared a potent combination that would at least disturb Dr. Bradford’s sleep for a few weeks. As soon as she went home she’d do a little work on him, something brief but effective. Juan and Stephen couldn’t know about it because they both always warned her about performing magic out of mere anger or annoyance. But who were they to judge her? It took some nerve, given the things they had done—and still did!

Tali looked sideways at her reflection in the windowpane. She had turned thirty years old. When people told her she was beautiful, they were referring to her heavy hair, her body that was no stranger to long walks, and the shine in her dark eyes. But she never wore makeup, didn’t worry about her skin, didn’t go in for rings or bracelets; when people praised her, there were always ellipses: “but you’d be so much prettier if . . .” She felt she was getting old, that she needed to do something about the expression lines around her mouth and the stretch marks on her hips—the result of summers spent biking that had slimmed her legs. She approached the bed where Juan was still unconscious. She caressed his left hand, the wound that wouldn’t scar over, but received no response. He’d been like that for a full day. Even so, this couldn’t compare with the desperate hours of the year before, which she hadn’t been able to stand: she’d ended up locked in a hospital bathroom, praying crazily to the saint, but above all terrified. It was Rosario who had found her and asked that she replace her beside Juan, because she needed to be with Gaspar: the boy, in a not-so-strange coincidence, was burning up with fever and they couldn’t get his temperature down. She remembered her exhausted sister, her hair pulled back in a bun, her enviable determination. Looking at her, Tali had known Rosario was destined to be the leader of the Order. What if she been killed because of that? Juan couldn’t and didn’t want to understand the politics of the Order, nor the extent of Rosario’s ambitions. That was what he had Stephen for.