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They are past the tohen at last Rio feels ground under her feet and drags herself up the far bank

She looks around She is alone

A voice barks an order in Gerray uniforms and two leveled rifles

Rio raises her hands One of the Germans rushes off upstrea Rio under the puzzled eyes of just one soldier She is exhausted beyond all caring and sits straight down in thesideways so her right leg is hidden froers and holds then of submission

The German seems quite unconcerned, not at all the attitude of a soldier who believes he is in danger He’s a h wet, and his boots only slightly marred by mud

The river rushes by, and Rio sees the debris of failure: boats, half-constructed sege, and American bodies float past No wonder the German is relaxed; it must have all seemed a pitiful effort to them

The full weight of it descends on Rio The assault has failed GIs are dead and all for nothing And she is a prisoner

“Zigarette?” the Ger toward her, lulled by her passivity and no doubt by her gender

Rio nods wearily The German taps one out of his pack, hands it to her, and leans close with a lighter

The kouht into his belly

“Ah! Ah!” the Ger his unifors his rifle up to aith, pushes herself up, throws a stiff left arain

This time the blade stops short on ribs, so she twists it and leans into it, using her weight to force the point through cartilage and into the vulnerable organs beyond Too close, too close to avoid seeing his face, the surprise, the hurt as if she’s betrayed him, the incomprehension, thatfear as he begins to understand that he is dying, dying right here, right now

Rio cannot twist the koummya, trapped as it is between ribs, but she saws it back and forth as his blood pours over her hand She sees the light in his eyes go out

He falls, and she has to put a boot on his chest and pull hard and work the handle back and forth to get the knife out of him

When she looks up she sees Jack watching her She , and wipes the blood on the Gerh the dead ress, unfinished A photo of a wife and child, a girl Rio thinks, a daughter, though it’s a very forns of gender