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“How long?” she asks in a hoarse voice

“They pulled us off the line three days ago,” Jack says “Since then we’ve all been sleeping, eating, and sleeping soh not all at the same time I’m told I was medically dead for twenty-four hours”

He still has the red hair and the freckles, but the boyish hed down His eyes are deep, sunken into his skull There’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth, a tic in his cheek that nervously simulates a mirthless smile He’s still Jack, but a different Jack, older, sadder perhaps, but enough of Jack that he still bothers with a wisecrack

Rio wonders what she herself looks like How h? There’s a blank deadness to her emotions, a distance fro on the other side of a sheet of frosted glass and can see people only dimly, hear them as if from a distance, touch them not at all

“When are we going back up?” she asks

Jack shakes his head “The 119th took forty percent casualties, half of those KIA Ru to ship us out”

“Out? Where?”

Jack shrugs “Holand But it’s just scuttlebutt”

“What happened?” She jerks her chin toward the tent opening, but Jack understands herShe means the massif She means the monastery

She means Monte Cassino

“Attack failed We hold sos on our flank, and well, you knohat happened to us”

“Then they’ll send us back”

He shakes his head “I don’t think so Anyway, not you” There’s a ghost of his old seneral wants to see you”

Rio’s feeling nuh and ht is that she is in trouble—very serious trouble, unprecedented trouble, if a one-star general is asking for her

Jack shrugs He clearly knows soo see the general as soon as you wake up”