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At last comes the word

Stick pulls back a corner of the tattered shelter half over the hole Rio is sharing with Jenou and Jack and says, “They’re taking us off the line Move out in five”

It should be time for relief, even exultation But eear and clae downhill, downhill for the first time inin forever

Rio walks asleep, or very near to it One foot ularity and mindlessness of a machine She walks past rows of bodies laid by the side of the road, bloated, decayed, gruesomely torn bodies that have lost their power to move her

Off the road, in ditches, on the stony sides of ridges, lie the German dead All have been stripped of souvenirs, so their uniforms lie unbuttoned and askew Here and there a dead Kraut has been propped against a tree or a rock so soarette in hisit around hi

s neck

One Gerainst a blasted Ger of Adolf Hitler has been propped on the stuest a dead Führer

After an eternity they stu trucks and are hauled like cattle to the rear staging area a e of a town that is now little more than a rock quarry

And suddenly, there is hot food There are proper tents with channels dug around them like moats to keep out the water

Rio makes it no farther She falls face-first onto a cot and is asleep before her body hits the canvas No drea She is destroyed, finished, drained of every last ounce of energy, a body without a mind

When she wakes it is to the sound of hail pelting the roof of the tent She is still in her vile uniforhed doith dried mud rather than wet

Her body is a single, unified mass of aches and bruises as she sits up, blinks owlishly in the gray half-light, and sees Jenou in the next bunk, writing in the back of Magraff’s sketch pad That fact should surprise Rio, but what draws her attention with far greater force is that Jenou is wearing a clean uniform A damp uniform, but a clean one

“D’jget that?” Rio ue woolly

“Well, hello, sleeping beauty,” Jenou says

“Fresh gear?”