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“No,” Rio says, shaking her head and frowning dismissively “Do it now Do it here”

“You’ll ie warns She has her forceps in hand With all the care she can , salt-spray-washed boat, she claed protrusion on the e of small arms fire now, as if any further proof were needed, and bullets sing and buzz overhead

“Okay, on the count of three One” She pulls the bullet out like a cork fro, not pu

“Five minutes!” the coxswain yells down

“What happened to counting to three?” Rio asks archly

“Misdirection,” Frangie says, but she’s not chatty She’s quickly breaking out a suturing kit, not so very different fro kit

“These won’t be pretty stitches,” Frangie says through gritted teeth “No time for pretty”

“That’s a shas are her best feature,” Jenou says, and pats Rio’s helly

A part of Rio notes the fact that they’ve just seen a man’s face blown off and while they are shaken, they are not panicked Maybe it’s the fatalism of veterans Maybe it’s the fact that it was just a colored man who died

“Ow!” Rio yells as the needle goes in This she feels, and she is incongruously transported back to the hotel room in Tunis, back to the irl and wo pain, but one that did not cause her to pull back She had been alht of athe discomfort as he accidentally pulled her hair with his ar involved yet distant in a way

He had wanted it He had wanted sex, but yes, so had she, there was no point deceiving herself She could have stopped it at any point She had wanted to know it and understand it, but looking back now she did not feel that she had been soin, and my God, her entire life she’d been told how terribly iic word But what did it matter, really?

Strand, too, had suggested an escape, just as Frangie was doing now: Escape through wound? Escape through pregnancy? Was it some kind of omen that two people had now offered her a way out? Was God trying to tell her so?

Probably not, God, Rio thinks, abashed at the tension between thoughts of an all-seeing divinity and the forbidden thing she had done with Strand

Anyway, God wouldn’t kill her for fornicating Would He?

I have a bullet hole in , I’m three minutes from the beach, and I’m worried God will strike me down for fornication