Read Online The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind by Meg Medina - Free Book Online Page A

herself.
    “Pancho!”
    The sharp voice echoed inside the empty bar. At the door was the silhouette of Armando, a younger taxista. He was perspiring and panting.
    “I’ve been crazy looking for you! Good thing I saw your bike outside.”
    “What is it, then?” Pancho asked, racing for the door.
    Armando stared at the swollen mass at the side of Pancho’s head. “What’s wrong with your ear?”
    “Never mind that!”
    Armando shrugged and pointed at the dirty clock over the door. “Señor Pasqual needs you at the mayor’s house in thirty minutes, hands and feet washed. There’s a party.”
    “Forgive me, señora, ” Pancho told Tía Neli. “I must go at once. May I take you home?”
    By the time Tía Neli arrived at her door, her face was crumpled with grief.
    “Stay calm, señora, ” Pancho told her. “You never know what is coming around the bend. Perhaps a solution lies up ahead on our path.”
    Tía Neli shook her head sadly. “Go on, Pancho. You’ll be late, and you shouldn’t keep the mayor waiting. This is in the hands of God now.”
    Moments later he was careening down the mountain, his mind whirling as fast as his wheels.
    In God’s hands? Or would a taxi boy’s hands have to do?

T HE WORLD BEYOND Tres Montes was glorious. How irritating that her parents had tried to keep her — and Rafael — from it. Sonia pressed her nose to the train window, wishing that her brother were by her side to enjoy the view.
    The train had climbed high along rickety tracks and then lumbered into La Fuente, the place the Gypsies called the Haunted Valley. It was a long and deserted stretch between mountain peaks that belched plumes of smoke. No Gypsy ever crossed La Fuente; they claimed it was filled with the restless spirits of all who died there.
    They lurched around perilous turns that opened unexpectedly to dizzying canyon views. Hawks hung outside her window, and far below there were waterfalls cascading into rushing rivers, where rainbows rose in the mist, like bridges to some other world. It seemed like an eternity before they found civilization again, stopping at last in a town that was even smaller than Tres Montes. Mule-drawn carts waited, laden with stews and meat pies for sale along the tracks. Passengers in other cars got out to stretch their legs, but Sonia, remembering Tía Neli’s advice, hung out the window to get air. Soon hands were reaching up. Children, a woman with no teeth, even a young man about Rafael’s age, who walked stooped and with a cane.
    “He must have come through the valley,” Eva whispered to her, when she saw Sonia staring at the beggar. “One of the lucky ones.”
    Sonia, still too nervous to eat, tossed him down all that her mother had packed.
    Silence descended on the train that night as it chugged through yet another pine forest, dark as a wolf’s mouth. The other passengers were sleeping uncomfortably in their seats. Even Marco, who had been making eyes at her all day, had grown pensive and was now far off at the front of the locomotive. Ramona was snoring softly, too.
    Sonia settled in once again to read Pancho’s story. She was grateful for the distraction and had savored it slowly throughout the long ride. The adventure kept her from thoughts of Rafael, which seemed to find her even more frequently after seeing the beggar. Instead of worrying, she could lose herself in Pancho’s world of a beautiful Arabian girl born mute and kept prisoner by her silence and her warlord uncle. She thought of Pancho’s intelligent eyes and the long fingers with which he would have turned each page if they were reading under their shade tree. Would he really be thinking of her every day? She hoped so. If only he could know the truth about why she had left, without hating her for being a fraud, Sonia thought. If only Pancho knew she was trapped in silence, just like the girl in his story.
    Footsteps stopped near her seat.
    “Hungry?” Eva held out a napkin with white cheese and