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Feeling an overwheliddiness of attraction to Halev, nervousness, and fear—butup—she shakes Halev’s hand chastely and self-consciously, and slides into the backseat of the Plymouth

6

RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“You Cole?”

It is four o’clock in theis an MP corporal He is behind the wheel of a jeep pulling a wooden cart on bald autoement that has never appeared in an army field manual But then the aro

Sergeant Cole rubs sleep from his eyes and looks at the MP, then at the bodies piled and intertwined in the cart Eight of his soldiers—the new guy Beebee, plus Suarez, Stick, Stafford, Castain, Preeling, Magraff, and Richlin—are in various states of consciousness They are bleeding, bruised, groaning, and trying unsuccessfully, in the case of the inally conscious ones, to climb out

“I’ust in both syllables

“I think these belong to you” The driver jerks a thumb over his shoulder

“You can drive ’eht on back to the stockade,” Cole snaps

The corporal laughs “No can do, Sarge, stockade is full So’s the city jail And anyway, the dark-haired one there slippedYour bunch were in a fight with so colonials Then, best as we can tell, they went on to get into a second round with a Texas outfit”

“Daets unless there’s shooting going on

Rio rolls off of Cat, tumbles, and slams hard into the dirt She lies there, facedown, for quite a while, arht just as well have fallen out of a passing plane

How did I get here?

The ground does not feel quite solid to Rio, in fact it is spinning, spinning, and sort of falling away, like one of those boards they use to ride the waves at Stinson Beach Oh, she wishes she were there right noishes she were far away, lying on so hard that she had not started drinking that ouzo they gotsomewhere

Her tongue is a dead rat coated in tar; her muscles are both limp and sore; her stomachoh, she doesn’t even want to think about that because she’s got nothing left to puke up unless she’s going to start puking up her liver