The Reckoning

Even as she glanced down, the image of a fist disappeared. There was the echo of a sensation, a physical resonance. Then it was as if it had never been.

She lifted her foot. A piece of green waterweed led over the road’s rim, limp and flat. Her imagination was in overdrive. She had invented the hand to halt herself.

She peered over the edge to see if a wave had flung up the weed. The wreck might have caused a ripple or runoff from the city. But the water was flat and dimpled by rain. And occupied.

Something was in there. Molly moved her head to one side.

It was the other ACAV. It had sunk to the bottom and was lodged in mud. Weeds floated up from the machine-gun barrels. A goldfish the size of a carp swam from one hatch. Another peered up at her from the depths of the second hatch. She leaned out over the water, angling for a better view. Their eyes weren’t spaced like the eyes of a fish. They were almost human.

“Molly!”

She pulled back from the water. Duncan was standing at the forest’s edge. The machete hung from one hand. The pacifist had armed himself.

“Come back,” he said.

“Kleat’s gone,” she announced. She heard her unnatural calm. “And I found something in the water.”

“Molly, before they start back. Their blood will be up. We have to hide.”

She glanced down the road at the brothers. They were prowling from side to side, searching for any trace of their vehicle or Kleat. “But we didn’t do anything. Kleat betrayed us all, you and me, too.”

“They’ll figure that out eventually. But it will be better if we’re not around when they return. Come back. We’ll take some food and spend the night in the ruins. We’ll go find Vin. That will satisfy them. It will all work out.”

That sounded sensible. Good old Duncan. She turned.

There was a fourth detonation out on the road.

Molly looked in time to see a man flying from the road, like a puppet getting jerked from the stage. There was no ceremony to it, barely a bang.

Abruptly he stopped, in midair.

She thought that it was an illusion, that time had stopped. The arc of his flight would continue in the next moment, it had to.

Then she saw the tree branch quivering. He’d been impaled on its tip. There he hung, like an ornament. Less than that, like a bit of trash caught in the trees.

Fifty yards ahead of Molly, the remaining man froze in place. The brothers were children of the mine fields. They knew them with the same dread and familiarity the Dark Ages had known hell. One step more, forward, backward, or to the side, and the man knew he might be maimed or killed. He stood there as if his very soul was at risk. And for him, it was. Samnang had told her that to die away from home, away from burial rites and family, meant wandering for eternity.

For a full minute, the young man didn’t move. Covered in mud, anonymous to her, he was like a tar baby with a rifle stuck in his hand. Next to him, rising higher than his head, a naga bared its stone fangs.

The man groaned. It wasn’t a word, just a noise escaping his lungs, the start of grief.

“Stay where you are, Molly.”

Duncan started out to her slowly with a stick in his hand, touching gravel and leaves as if reading braille, scanning all around his feet for trip wires or metal buds or any evidence of mines.

He took hours, it seemed. Molly didn’t move. The lone brother didn’t move. She kept her eyes away from the man hanging in the tree.

Molly felt heavy, and yet light, magnificently light. Released. Anointed, in a way. She had been spared, but more important, she had seen. That was the crux of it.

As a photographer and a journalist, she had made a living from catching the meta-moments. In an article on a day in the life of an emergency room, she’d captured birth, suffering, and the still toes of a traffic fatality, and thought she’d seen it all, and in a sense she had, through her glass lens. No glass this time. No mirrors.

She stood obediently. Duncan was coming for her. He was almost here.

Once again, as in the bamboo thicket and when she had descended from the tree, Duncan laid claim to her. He was taking her back from the jaws of this place.

Beyond his shoulder, one of those giant god heads was smiling across the water, eyes closed but aware, deep in his dream of them. That was probably all she needed to know. They were figments of a stone imagination. And yet she wondered at it all. There was Samnang’s cosmic stream, but then there were the day-to-day riddles, like land mines where there had been none before.

“How could this happen?” she asked.

“The soldiers,” said Duncan. “Thirty years ago. They must have laid them.”

“But we drove in this way. And now look.”

“Chance,” he said. “The robots of destiny. Like they say, mines are infinite war.”

“No. Someone placed them here for us.” She was utterly certain about that.

Duncan corrected her. “For someone like us. The soldiers were guarding themselves.”

“It’s like we’re not being allowed to leave,” she said.

“Don’t say that,” said Duncan.

“They were laid to keep us here.”

“Not so loud,” he said.

That frightened her. He wasn’t disagreeing. It came to her. “Luke?” she said.

“Not now, Molly. One thing at a time.”

“What about him?” The tar baby.

“I’ll go for him next.”

35.

It all might have worked as Duncan said. He would have led Molly to the forest and returned for the final brother. But an animal began to cry. It started as a tiny, thin keening, and Molly was sure it was some macabre birdsong.

Then she realized it was coming from the corpse skewered on the tree. The mine had lopped away his lower legs. His arms were broken at the elbows. But even with the spike of the branch punched through his chest, what remained of him was not yet dead. There he hung, above the water.

The cry rose an octave. It was awful. He didn’t seem to take a breath. Like some inelegant jungle bird up there, he rustled his wings weakly, whistling a one-note song. The rain spoiled her make-believe. The mud was being washed away. She could see the red meat underneath.

The man on the road appealed to his brother. He reached up. They were only twenty feet apart, separated by the span of air and water. The dying brother gave no sign of recognition. His cry went on.

Thunder shook the pond. It came up through the mineral vein carved into the shape of the road.

The wind howled and skipped across the canopy’s surface, and the branch moved. The impaled man rocked in space. His brother laid down his rifle and knelt before the carcass in the tree, hands pressed together.

Molly could barely breathe. The man shuffled forward on his knees, unnerved by the death song, drawn to it.

“He’ll never last,” Duncan said. Did he mean that living corpse or his brother?

“Don’t move,” he said to her. “Do you hear me?”

Stay with me, she thought. But he was Duncan, the savior. “Yes,” she said.

Off he went, twig in hand, calling to the young man. The brother had entered a trance. He took no notice of Duncan scolding and commanding him. Duncan advanced by inches, touching the road, testing the fabric.

The part of a man continued singing from the tree, a grotesque siren drawing his brother to wreck himself, too.

Duncan refused to hurry. He tested each fallen leaf on the road, turning them with the tip of his stick. He skirted a patch of dirt and stepped over random pebbles.

There didn’t seem to be any possible place to hide a mine out there. The road was all of a single piece, carved flat from a volcanic extrusion. Olivine, she guessed, keying on the color of the word. What a photo. Like the devil whispering in her ear.

Duncan reached the rifle and stooped to take it. They would need that, she thought. The summer stretched before them, her forest idyll after all. They would subsist on fruit and nuts, and meat brought down from the trees.

The brother was almost to the water’s edge. There his knee touched the mine.

There was nothing flashy or pyrotechnic about the explosion, a sharp blast smaller than the heavy booming that had thrown the truck. Mostly it was a matter of dust. As the air cleared, Molly saw that the brother was gone. He had been pitched into the devouring water, though she hadn’t actually seen that.

Duncan was standing in place, looking off across the pond. He turned to her, and his chest seemed to be smoking, though that could have been the rain driving against him. The rifle was missing from his hands, and his twig was only a few inches long now. He started back to her, more quickly on the return, his path memorized.

Molly saw the wound gradually.

Her T-shirt with the mountain-bike wheels was bleeding.

Oh, Molly, she thought. Amazed, she plucked at the wet cloth and found a small hole through the spokes of one wheel. She lifted her shirt, and the hole went through her bra. She pried it open and looked inside at the top of her white, freckled flesh, and blood welled up where the shrapnel had entered her. The wicked thing was in there somewhere. But suddenly she didn’t want to know more. She let the shirt drop down again. Later.

“Molly?” She heard the anguish in his voice.

She managed to ask him first. “Are you all right?”

Miraculously, the shrapnel had missed him. The gods were protecting one of them anyway. “You need to lie down,” he said.

“No,” she said. “While I’m still on my feet, take me home.” To camp, she meant to say. Suddenly her legs quit on her. She sank to sitting. The red blood blanched to Barbie pink as it fanned lower across her wet shirt. There was no pain, really. She just had a need to sit.

She looked out over the green water. Lily pads the size of doormats floated on the surface. Raindrops pattered the glass. That horrible birdsong had stopped. Thank God.

Duncan materialized behind her. She felt his big hands on her shoulders.

“It’s only a splinter,” she said.

“I need to take a look.”

It wasn’t how she wanted him to see them the first time, clinically, with her on her back in the rain, filling with fear. They were nice breasts, really, one of her best features. She would have liked to make him aware that a woman can blind a man with her body.

He didn’t waste time with the bra hooks. She saw the clasp knife. The elastic released. She watched his eyes. He blinked. At her beauty? At her ruin?

He lifted her breast with the fingertips of both hands, careful beyond need, though she appreciated the tenderness. Now she could feel the splinter of steel. It was lodged deep in the tissue, a metal tumor. “Can you feel it?” she pleaded. She suddenly, intensely, wanted it out of her.

He glanced up with frightened eyes. “I’m trying.” He spider-walked his fingertips across the rest of her body, probing here and there. “Tell me if this hurts,” he kept saying.

“No,” she said. “No.”

He ran his hands down each leg. Nothing broken. Only the splinter.

“Can you sit?” He lowered her shirt and fashioned a sling with his red and white kroma. The scarves were a whole magazine article unto themselves. Someday.

Then she saw over his shoulder. “Oh God,” she whispered.

Monkeys were flocking to the body in the tree. They were playing with it, pulling at the clothes, flopping the head. Looting him the way he had looted their city.

Duncan moved to block her view. “Stick with me, kid,” he said.

They were massing at the body, fighting over it. She’d never seen such a thing. He raised her to her feet. “I can carry you,” he said. “But it will be better if you can follow me. Can you do that?”

“We’ll be fine,” she said.

36.

The wind mounted, but could not penetrate the canopy. It shrieked and beat at the forest, and great whirlpools appeared among the leaves. But the membrane held, and for now they were spared the full brunt of the typhoon.

Her bleeding slowed.

Here in camp, with the terminus walls at their back, Molly felt almost sheltered. The rain didn’t drive so hard. It spilled from the canopy in long, thick, silver shafts, and funneled through the barrel of the ACAV’s machine gun like a cherub peeing. Night seemed near, but she was learning that this was a constant in the permanent twilight of day.

She lay propped on her side in the thatch hut in front of the fire that Duncan had revived with gasoline and a car flare. He was reviving it all, the whole camp, and their appearance of settling in. In fact, the fire and camp were his illusion. He intended for them to escape once darkness fell.

There were two possibilities. Either Luke had rigged the mines on his way out, trapping them inside his shell, or he was still nearby, armed with a Vietnam-vintage arsenal, playing cat and mouse with them.

“He thinks he’s God,” Duncan said to her. “Whether he’s watching or not, he thinks the walls contain us now. We’re like animals in his zoo. But even zookeepers sleep.”

But God does not, she thought to herself. From the hut, she could see the half-closed Buddha eyes looming in the forest, and they seemed menacing with their wakeful dreams.

Duncan stayed as busy as a beaver. She watched through the flames and the plumes of rain steam as he came and went, stripping the truck like a castaway. The brothers’ pit, dug to free the truck, brimmed with water now. The prow tipped higher as the truck slid backward into the earth in slow motion. With the machete, Duncan knifed open the canvas covering the truck bed, looting it from the side, lifting out whatever remained.

He brought whatever he could carry, waxy boxes full of MREs, jerry cans of fuel, shovels, axes, burlap sacks, pieces of plastic and canvas, a screen for sifting relics from dirt, even a pair of sunglasses and a set of keys from the ignition. He stockpiled it at one end of the hut or cut big leathery wild banana leaves to cover it, more stuff than two people could use in a month, much less what was left of the afternoon. She drifted in and out of sleep.

The wires of the truck spilled from one open door like colorful entrails, tangled by creeper vines tugging at them. The forest had disemboweled the beast.

“You should fix the wires,” she told him. “You can make it run.”

He bent to look at her eyes. She was cold again. Shock this time, or her fever? He wrapped a strip of canvas around her shoulders. It was hard and rough and reeked of fuel.

“The truck’s gone,” he said. “We don’t want it anyway. The road’s a mantrap. Our only way out is through the ruins and over the wall.”

Up the hundred and four stairs, through the labyrinth at night? “Are you sure?” she said.

“Up and over the mountain. While the storm’s still raging. He’ll never expect that.”

She wished he would just take her in his arms. She remembered that morning. It seemed so long ago.

He made a steeple of wood above the fire so the wet branches would dry and burn. Kleat would have been proud. Another few hours and they would have themselves an Aggie-size bonfire. He brought her a tin cup filled with hot water sprinkled with ashes. He stirred in instant coffee from an MRE.

“Rest,” he said. “Eat. Drink. Gather your strength. If I could just find the med kit. And a rifle. Just in case.”

“I know where there’s a gun.” She gave him a secret smile.

He glanced at her doubtfully. “Is that so?”

“Go to the tree,” she said. “Pull the rope to the side, toward the tree. Pull it hard.”

He wagged a finger at her, delighted by the trick. “Kleat’s gun? You said you left it in the ACAV.”

“I did. But it should slide down to you. Unless the monkeys took it.” The wicked monkeys.

“After dark,” he decided, “in case he’s watching. For now, keep up the charade. I’ll keep salvaging and gathering firewood. And you…you keep bleeding. I want him to think we’re on our last legs.”

He went back into the rain. The truck had sunk to the windshield. Duncan balanced on the hood and hit the glass with a pry bar. The windshield crazed and pouched in, and he hooked it out like a carcass. Then he lowered himself inside.

She didn’t like his disappearing into the earth this way. Minutes passed. At last some packages heaved into sight. She recognized his steel briefcase, and then came more boxes of gear and food.

He emerged through the windshield muddy and with his face beaming. He held aloft the med kit like it was the greatest treasure.

Her wound became the first order of business. He untied the sling and opened the med kit, and it even had a pair of latex gloves for him.

It was different this time. Out on the bridge, they had both been frightened. Here the moment was more considered. She watched him trying to confront her breast, and it amused her. He blinked diligently. He cleared his throat.

Part of his dismay was the forbidden fruit itself. Her areola was wide and brown, and though she was thirty-something there was still no southern drift, no stretch marks, no erosion of her supremacy.

But also he was perplexed, and she was, too. A broken bone you straightened. A cut you stitched, a burn you bandaged. But a soft breast with a tiny wound? He clenched his gloved hands.

The shrapnel seemed to have migrated deeper. Again she felt panic and loathing, and again she made herself remote from it. “It’s in there,” she said. “It’s hard to describe. I can feel the sense of it.”

He tore open a Betadine swab and painted the area orange. She feared he would make himself brusque and surgical and go digging into her flesh. Instead, he confessed.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “It will get infected if we leave it in there, but I’d probably infect you trying to get it out.”

In the end, he simply placed a Band-Aid over the hole and lowered her shirt and retied the sling. He rummaged through the med kit, picking up vials and packets and reading their contents. “I haven’t heard of half this stuff.”

“Let me look,” she said. She found a bottle of Cipro. It wasn’t penicillin, but she figured something was better than nothing. She downed a capsule with some coffee and pocketed the bottle.

“We’ll get you to a doctor,” he declared. He covered her with the canvas again and built the fire higher. The flames licked close enough to curl the edges of the green thatch. But she couldn’t seem to get warm.

“Eat,” he urged. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

“Tomorrow morning,” she bargained. “I’ll be better then.”

“You’ll only stiffen up,” he said. “Besides, we need the storm. It will give us wings.”

He went back into the clearing to haul gear and further their illusion of staying. He positioned jerry cans of gas and diesel along the walls inside the hut, which worried her. With the fire so close, they seemed like bombs waiting to go off. But she trusted his judgment.

When everything that could be pulled from the vehicles had been collected, he started making rounds of the clearing, pulling up rotten stumps and hauling more firewood. His ruse even fooled her. Coming in from one of his forays, he dumped an armful of wood on the pile, and slipped the gun to her.

“You are so clever,” he said. That cheered her.

The hurricane roar rotated in Dolby surround sound from one side to the other. Logs fell into the fire, setting off explosions of sparks. The rain hissed and vaporized in bursts of haze.

“How can I help?” she asked.

“We’re going to need your camera bag, but without the camera. It’s got to stay. I’m sorry. My stuff stays, too. We can’t afford the weight, and we have no backpacks. I’ll need your bag to carry food and meds. We have a long trek ahead of us.”

She wanted to argue. But they were running for their lives.

“Don’t make a big show of it,” he said. “Just take the camera and lenses out. Line them up. Polish the glass. Remember, he could be watching.”

37.

Duncan left again, carrying on with his charade of inhabiting this island. It was getting dark beyond the flames. Molly wondered when he meant for them to make their move.

She emptied the camera bag, polishing the lenses, drying the camera, and setting the lenses in a neat row. Ten grand in glass and mirrors. Let the forest and the monkeys have them. The real treasures were her images. Those she could still keep.

It took a few minutes to transfer the last of her images to her digital wallet. Little bigger than a hand calculator, it held close to a thousand of her best shots. Wrapped in a plastic bag, it would fit into her pants pocket. Duncan would never know. If she couldn’t manage to carry the extra few ounces, she wasn’t going to make it anyway.

While she was at it, she decided to surprise Duncan with some of his own treasures. Just because he was sacrificing his briefcase didn’t mean losing everything in it. Once they reached Phnom Penh and their escape was just a memory, she would present him with a few of his most precious mementos.

She reached for the briefcase. From the first day she’d met him, Molly had wondered what it held. The stainless steel was dented and raked with scratch marks. The hinges on the bottom and the lock combination were rusted. She’d never once seen him clean the mud or dust from it. In a way, his neglect made the contents that much more mysterious, because the case was nothing to him, only a shell.

She raised the lid and the smell of mildew poured out. Inside lay a clutter of papers, photos, news clippings, postcards, and letters mixed with rotted rubber bands and rusty paper clips. At first she only registered the strata of his accumulating. There were decades of stuff in here. The bottom layers were mottled with fungus and yellowed with time. On top, his most recent acquisitions were still unspoiled by the tropics.

Only then did she see what his newest artifacts actually were, the memorabilia he’d stolen from RE-1.

Duncan was their camp thief.

Here was the stolen Hustler the two marines had fought over. Here were the snapshots and mail that men had reported missing.

She was dumbfounded.

Here was a page of the Wall Street Journal dated six years earlier, and on it the bygone dot.coms and their stock earnings that he’d talked about with such freshness and authority.

Here was a monograph on Cambodian flora and fauna written in French in 1903.

Here was his sketchbook, and it was filled from end to end with mindless squiggles and scrawl.

Here was a chapter torn from a British text on pre-Angkor archaeology, word for word the lectures he’d given them.

Here was an article from the New York Times, “Giant Trees Hold Ancient Temples in a Deadly Embrace,’ complete with spong and its scientific name, Tetrameles nudiflora.

Here was the kitchen he had built by hand, the zebrawood cabinets, the butcher-block table, and the panel of green and brown and blue bottle bottoms leaded together like a stained-glass window. Only it wasn’t his kitchen, it was a magazine ad.

Here was the red setter with the bandit’s neckerchief that he’d grown up with, except the setter and the neckerchief belonged to three children in a snapshot with a digitized date, two months ago.

Here was Kent State in all its bloody details—in a paperback history of the war.

Here was Duncan, the scraps of him gathered like stolen homework.

He had dissected each thing. He had underlined sections, circled faces in snapshots, written marginalia, and then dropped it in here to be layered over with more of the same. He had memorized a life.

Who was he?

She looked out into the night. Logs detonated, splitting open with loud snaps and bangs, offering their white meat to be burned, renewing the fuel. The rain evaporated in a cloud above the fire. Eventually one would win out, the rain or the inferno. For now they were in perfect balance.

Duncan came in from the darkness. “Feeling better?” He began weaving shut the hut like a giant cocoon, braiding strips of bark into a front wall. “Once we close the front door,” he said, “we’ll escape through the back door.”

“There is no back door, Duncan.” Samnang had woven solid walls to the rear and sides.

“That’s what Luke will be thinking, too.” He went on knitting the raw strips into a screen.

She mopped the sweat from her face. Chills shook her. The hut seemed to be spinning. If only her body would make up its mind, hot or cold.

He was either her murderer or her savior. Maybe he was both, like a Jekyll and Hyde. Was he the one who had mined the road that he was so desperately trying to lead them away from? Could this explain his reluctance to follow Luke here, the knowledge that his other self, his forest self, was waiting to stalk him? But then, who was Luke? The son of a soldier who had lost his mind in the Cambodian wilderness? Had Duncan told her everything already?

Molly struggled to piece it together. Sweat poisoned her vision. The smoke was hard to breathe. While she was still able to aim the gun, she had to judge this man. Should she confront his fiction or let herself raft along on it and hope for the best? Would he confess his mimicry or stick to his innocence? Or was he so insane that he was incapable of guilt anymore? And what about her? If it came down to it, could she pull the trigger?

He didn’t look like a monster sitting there, weaving strips of green bark. But he was Oklahoma all over again, sharing some food and talk while they waited for the night to pass and the highway to carry them on. This very morning she had lain in his arms and spun a romance in her head. She had trusted him.

She gripped the gun. This had to be done. “Who are you?” she asked.

He looked up with his farm-boy smile. “Me?”

She kept the gun along her leg, out of sight.

“I looked in your briefcase,” she said.

He looked at the briefcase and back at her. He was confused. “Yes?”

“I know who you’re not,” she said. “I want to know who you are.”

“Molly?”

She had made a mistake. She didn’t have the strength for this. He was too practiced at his masquerade, or too far over the edge. But she had started it now. “I’m trying to understand,” she said.

“What is it?” He was earnest. He pulled the briefcase onto his lap and opened it. He lifted up papers, his sketchbook of nonsense, someone’s plastic booklet of snapshots from MotoPhoto, a decomposing British passport, a plastic badge that said UNTAC. He saw what she had seen, and none of the musty pile seemed out of order to him. Was he more harmless out of his mind than in it?

“Where did you get those things, Duncan?”

He frowned, trying to grasp her point. “My documents?” He spoke without a hint of self-defense.

“Are these your children?”

“My children?”

“In that photo of the setter.”

He studied it. A frown appeared. He had not seen the children before. Then his eyes clarified. “You mean my brother and sisters,” he said. “With Bandit. He was a dog’s dog. There’s his scarf I told you about.” He showed her.

“But you’re not in the photo,” she said.

He looked at it again. He thought. “Dad was teaching me how to use the camera.”

“How old were you?”

“Gee, probably eight. I liked Cheerios.” There was a box of Cheerios in another photo.

“Duncan.” She didn’t know what else to call him. “Look at the date.”

He couldn’t see it. He opened one hand helplessly.

“The digital numbers along the side,” she said. “It was taken two months ago.”

His lips moved. He held the photo closer and rubbed at the date with his thumb. Then he flinched.

His face aged. It was the firelight shifting, she thought. The laugh lines turned into deep creases. His forehead blossomed with worry.

“What’s this?” he muttered.

“I thought you could tell me.”

He was trying to think. The date confounded him. Plainly, he’d never seen the children before. He’d plagiarized the photo for a dog, nothing more. Where was the harm in that?

He pawed through more of his documents. The Hustler spilled open, all tits and labia. Postcards, photos, yellow news clippings.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.

“How long, what?” He was disoriented.

She chose her words carefully. No harsh accusations. He looked so frail suddenly. “Borrowing,” she said. “Stitching together a masquerade.”

“Molly?” He spoke her name as if it were a lifeline.

She wanted to believe in him. Amnesia would pardon him. It would make him a virgin almost, an understudy to everyone he’d ever stolen from. That would make sense of the skin mag and its nudes and all the rest. He was simply trying to catch up with the world.

She kept hold of the gun. Someone had planted those mines on the bridge. Someone had trapped them in here.

The light twisted again, and his face drew into itself. It didn’t collapse exactly, but some aspect of him seemed hollowed out. The shadows were invading. The furnace blast of light dimmed.

The rain, she despaired, not taking her eyes from him. It was winning. She’d made a mistake. Wounded and ill, she’d chosen the middle of a storm at the beginning of night to unlock this man’s asylum.

“The fire,” she said to him. If she could keep the light strong, if she could keep Duncan occupied, if she could wear him down, if she could make it to dawn, some opening would present itself.

He peered at her. His eyes had a glaze to them, a cataract glaze. Old, she thought again. “Sorry?” he said.

“The fire needs more wood.”

“Yes, I’ll do that.” He spoke softly. He sounded broken inside.

It took willpower not to reach across and pat his arm. He had saved her time and again. She didn’t want to have to pronounce sentence on him. What difference was there between an angel and the devil except for a fall from grace? Was it his fault that he had stumbled among the ruins?

He closed his briefcase and laid aside the plaited strips of bark. He brushed his legs clean. His big hands looked thinned. The fingers trembled.

He had never seemed frail to her. Her heart was racing. Had she broken his mind? Or was he only pretending…again?

He started to scoot out through the doorway, then stopped. Something stopped him.

Molly tightened her grip, praying he wouldn’t turn to her. But he kept staring ahead. She darted a glance through the doorway.

Luke was out there, waiting for them on the far side of the fire.

38.

Duncan’s steeple of logs collapsed. Sparks and steam erupted. Molly turned her face away from the fiery heat, and when she looked again, the flames were strong and Luke was still there.

He stood so close to the fire his rags of clothing were smoking. His shirt had torn open, exposing one very white shoulder, his mortality on display. The rain poured off the planes of his face as if over ceramic. His hair was gone. He’d shaved himself bald.

He was the trickster, all along. Who else? Their captor. The devil.

Duncan was frozen. He couldn’t move. It occurred to her that he was Duncan’s monster. Or his master. Which was it?

As a photographer, she’d learned to shoot first, ask later. But that was with photos. And what if she was wrong? She kept Kleat’s Glock hidden behind her thigh.

“Where have you been, Luke?” she said. “We missed you.”

Luke didn’t answer. He was staring at Duncan. Into Duncan.

“You had us worried,” she said. “We called for you. We thought you’d left.”

“Our wandering brother.” Luke spoke to Duncan. Brother, not father. And Duncan had left, she understood. But now was back.

She tried bravado. “What the hell do you want?”

She brought the gun up from its hiding place. It held Kleat’s bidding in it, like a spirit resident. How else could she explain pointing it at another human being? This was her hand, but it couldn’t possibly be her willpower. The gun found its perch in the space between them.

“Did you lay those mines?” she said.

Luke turned to look at her. She remembered his eyes in the restaurant, cornflower blue. Now they were rolled up into his head, only the whites of them showing. She’d known a prisoner who did that. Every time she started to snap his picture, he would roll his eyes into his skull, a one-man Black Sabbath.

“You have a job to do,” he said to her. Just as she’d feared, they weren’t being allowed to leave.

“Duncan,” she pleaded. She didn’t know what to demand with this weapon. A declaration of guilt? A promise of aid? Surrender? An end to the war? Say something, she thought to Duncan. But he was connected to Luke, or Luke to him.

“We saw what you did to the bones,” she said.

“There’s more,” he promised. More carnage? Or bones?

A movement caught her eye. The darkness shifted over Luke’s shoulder. She squinted through the flames. Animal eyes flickered in and out of view. A shape climbed down from the trees, then another. The monkeys were descending, she thought. Becoming jackals.

“What do you want?” Duncan’s voice broke. He was afraid.

“It’s time,” Luke said.

Duncan didn’t move. “You don’t make sense.” His neck was stooped.

“We said we’d follow you to hell and back,” Luke said. “We did. Only it took this long.” Out of his mind, she thought, him and us. Possessed by the remains of war.

Why hadn’t she listened to Kleat? He’d warned them in the restaurant. He’d said the man was a predator. And yet Kleat hadn’t believed his own warning. It was he who had pushed the hardest to follow Luke into this limbo of trees with bleeding names and the labyrinth and the hiding bones.

“Leave her out of it,” Duncan said. He sounded tentative. His brow tensed. He was trying to navigate. Searching for safe harbor.

“Out of what, Duncan?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he pleaded.

“It’s almost over,” Luke said.

“It was you,” said Molly. “You mined the road.”

The fire sank under the downpour. For a second, Luke’s empty sockets stared at her. It was the darkness. Then the flames leaped up. His eyes returned.

“I told you to tell him,” Luke said. “He lost his place with us. Now Johnny’s not ever going to leave.”

“Johnny,” Duncan repeated, trying to remember.

“Leave him alone,” Molly said. She reminded herself that she was the one with the gun.

“Molly,” Luke whispered. But his jaw didn’t move. It wasn’t his voice. Us. They whispered from behind him.

The monkeys gained in size. They straightened. She was wrong. These weren’t monkeys, what she could see of them. Some were naked among them. Others wore rags. Some had skin. Not all of them.

She tore her eyes from the shadow shapes. They weren’t real. It was her fever.

The gun took on weight. It wavered. She slipped her arm from the sling to steady her aim.

“What do you want with him?” she said.

“Him?” Luke said.

They wanted her.

“What do you want?” She could barely hear herself.

“We’ve been waiting long enough, don’t you think?” said Luke.

The words came back to her, Duncan’s refrain at the dig.

Luke smiled at her, and she recognized them, the ruins of his teeth green with moss. Only now three more were gone, the three she’d plucked from his skull that morning. He hadn’t shaved his hair off. It was gone. She’d carried his scalp off in her pocket. Lucas Yale was no forgery. He was dead.

Molly pulled the trigger.

He had not made a move. He’d done nothing but smile. No witness on earth would have called it self-defense. And yet she fired. She killed his impossibility.

There was a cry, and the sound of a body pitching into the fire. Torches of wood catapulted from the flames.

The rain hissed. Steam and smoke pumped upward, sucked by the wind. The light nearly died.

“Duncan,” she shouted.

He looked at her, at the gun, at the body smoldering on the logs. He finished getting out of the hut. The shadow men—the monkeys—had fled.

Molly crawled from the hut with the gun in one hand. The rain whipped at her like cold stones. Her wound seemed distant, no longer clutched in the crook of her arm and held close to her face. It was, for now, beneath her attention.

Together, she and Duncan rounded the fire to the body. His clothes were too wet to combust quite yet. But there was that smell again, the stink of burning hair. What hair? And when had this rifle appeared across his back?

Duncan dragged the body, hair flaming, from the fire. They turned him faceup, and it wasn’t Luke staring at them with jade eyes, not with the crude tattoos along his arms and the gold teeth sparkling between his burned lips. She had just killed Vin.

Molly let the gun drop from her hand. In her fever state, she had mistaken the missing boy for a phantom. Or the rain had infected her. It was dark. The night was diseased with shadows.

Duncan picked up the gun.

She was too horrified to care.

He aimed the gun. She saw it through a foggy lens. Her mind was shutting down. The bang of shots rang in her ears. He was firing point-blank into the hut.

She had forgotten the jerry cans stacked inside. The smell of fuel reminded her. It was leaking downhill, toward the fire.

Before her eyes, he’d built a bomb.

“Run,” Duncan said.

She tried, and fell.

He caught her, and she thought he would carry her up the stairs. They would fly into the night, the typhoon for their wings.

But he was too weak. After a few steps, Duncan groaned, “I can’t.”

Her superhero lowered her back to the ground. He seemed frail, or injured. As they set off with her arm draped over his thin shoulder, Molly couldn’t be sure who was carrying whom.

39.

The clearing lit like a chalice of light. Like Lot’s wife, Molly could not resist glancing back at the destruction. Jerry cans pinwheeled out of the hut walls, whipping tails of flame. The hut was just fire squared on the edges, an idea of civilization. The ACAV glinted among the branches.

She looked for her phantom ape-men, but the light had banished them. All that remained was the body. She had imagined Luke, a dead man, even spoken to him, and then pulled the trigger. But in killing off a hallucination, she had murdered a poor lost boy. Blinded with stones. Or had she imagined his eyes, too?

She wanted to blame her fever, but feared the worst. Madness was built into her genes. Her birth mother had finally come home to roost.

“Climb,” Duncan said.

Another jerry can ignited. The faces of stone giants throbbed among the trees. Shadows fled and reassembled.

“We need to go back,” she said. “I need to bury him.”

Who were they running from except themselves? Luke was imaginary and she had killed a child and panicked this fragile hermit into detonating the fuel. It occurred to her that she might have imagined that, too, that she was the one who had emptied the gun into the jerry cans and destroyed their final hopes for survival. It was in keeping with the family tradition, slow suicide, only by jungle, not by snow.

“Climb,” Duncan whispered. “They’ll be coming for us.”

She forced him to stop, a matter of leaning on his shoulder. Where had all his strength gone?

“You saw them?” She spelled out her delusion. “Those others in the shadows?”

“I don’t know.” But his urgency was certain. “We need to keep moving.”

They were being hunted. Duncan didn’t speak it out loud. Maybe he thought she would stop functioning.

By midway up the stairs, the rain had drowned the scattered fires and the hut and their bonfire. The darkness gave her hope. Maybe Luke and his death squad would be reduced to hers and Duncan’s same blind groping.

They climbed the stairs, resting more often than they wanted. Duncan’s exhaustion mirrored hers. He seemed every bit as weak and confused as she was. She faltered, he faltered. She had wounded him with her doubt. It had to be more than that, of course. She remembered the smoke coming from his chest that afternoon, and feared he’d caught some of the shrapnel after all. Had she been so preoccupied with her own wound that she had missed his?

Near the top they huddled like invalids. Resting her head on his back, she could feel his ribs against her cheekbone. In her mind, his grip was big and meaty, but now his hand felt narrow. She blamed herself. He had shielded her so often that she’d built him into more than he was, a man, a tired man at the end of a long, terrible day.

They finished the stairs at last.

The city was alive tonight. She remembered Duncan’s embrace that morning, and his marvelous heartbeat and the swelling of his lungs, and the city was like that. It pulsed with water. Its clockwork was in motion. The rain had resurrected it.

The rain had stopped, even the wind. But the city was activated. Runoff coursed through its veins.

Molly thought the storm was over. The raindrops quit biting at her eyes. The great sea roar above the canopy was silent. But Duncan wanted the calm to be just the eye of the typhoon. He wanted more tempest and fury to cover their escape. “It’s our only hope,” he said.

Moonlight trickled through the leaves, not in straight pencils of light, but reflecting, from one leaf to the next. It alloted a silver murk to the ruins, enough to give her sight.

To their right and left, all along the rim, water poured from the cobra mouths of naga gargoyles. Monuments and spires formed silhouettes with flame and flower profiles along their edges. Massive heads drifted like asteroids bearing human features.

They crept deeper into the ruins.

The city was a hydraulic monument, a celebration of the water that had once powered an empire. Even terrified and hurting, Molly was astonished by the intellect within the ruins. Two thousand years ago, architects had designed the buildings to make music with the water.

Stealing among the moon shadows, she could hear the notes. Water overflowed from one huge bowl to another, cascading harmoniously. It streamed through stone flutes, forcing air through whistling pipes. It beat rhythms against panels lining the canals.

Each structure seemed to have a song built into its vent holes and gutters. The trenches and pipes were more than simple veins to drain away the water. They were throats designed to sing.

The Blackhorse men had heard it, the journal fragments said so. Had they felt her marvel? Had they listened to the music? It called to her from side paths and stairways, even from underfoot, beneath the paving stones. She wanted to linger and search the city, listening to its parts.

“Listen,” she said. It mesmerized her. The music overruled their pursuers. It seemed more powerful than any danger. It drew her. She couldn’t explain it.

Duncan kept himself immune to the temptation. “Keep going,” he whispered.

They came to the tower, and she would have been happy to rest in its summit. From up there they could scout for Luke and his shadows, and Duncan could warm her in his arms. They could forget with the city’s song rising up to them.

Duncan forged on. Each time she lagged, he said, “The gates.”

“But the gates are closed,” she said. “They’re choked with wire and vines.”

“One or the other will go,” he told her. “I know.” He stated it as an article of faith.

“I’m tired, Duncan.”

“A little more.”

“We can rest in the tower.”

“They’d find us.”

He pulled her by the hand, hustling her across a bridge. The architecture began to diminish in size. The high, dark snake back of the fortress wall appeared. The interior moat was bellowing with runoff. How many enemies had been sucked to their deaths trying to leap across that monster?

Duncan grew more wary, moving them from one pool of shadows to the next. The light began failing. The storm was returning. Clouds rushed the unseen moon. The intervals of silver gloom shortened, swallowed by darkness. The wind was finding its lungs again. The patter of leaves gave way to branches thudding like giant footsteps. Duncan was going to get the other half of his typhoon.

“There it is,” whispered Duncan.

The multiheaded gate tower straddled the wall. Another bank of clouds shuttered out the moon. But they had their bearings.

“I’ll go in front,” Duncan said.

He was afraid of mines, she thought. Luke had sealed one entrance, why not the others? That was the mischief they had to test. And if anyone could unravel the knot of wire and vegetation, it was Duncan. They had desperation on their side, and their hunters had a whole city to search.

They edged through the darkness, connected by her fingertips on his shoulder. The noise rose as the wind hit and the sail effect began to grind the city’s foundation.

Even blind, Molly could sense the gate’s nearness. That vague, familiar claustrophobia began to press at her. With each step, it grew, an undertow of disease and despair. What were they thinking? The barrier was impenetrable. A curse upon trespassers. The thought drove at her.

In the next instant, she heard a sudden dull crack. Duncan gave a startled cry and collapsed backward, against her. They both fell, and she thought, Now we are dead.

40.

He struggled for air. His feet scraped against the slippery stone. She was certain he’d been shot.

“What is it?” she whispered. He was pushing, she realized, to get back from the gate.

She stood and dragged him by his shirt, away from the gate. It surprised her. He weighed little more than a child.

Duncan coughed in animal bursts and sucked for air. Above the canopy, the clouds parted for a brief minute. The swamp glow lit them.

Black oil—blood—spread from his broken nose and mouth and a gash across one eye.

“What?” she moaned. She had to be strong. It was her turn to play savior.

He couldn’t form words, only noises, strangled and nasal, through the blood and the damage. His jaw was crooked. Had they shot him in the face? She rested beside him, searching for their attackers.

A small forest of ceramic warriors stood before the tunnel. Their heads had been returned. Their jade eyes surged with menace.

Molly tried to take it in. They had risen up. Shoulder to shoulder, they no longer lay toppled or sunk into the earth. Someone—Luke, or Samnang, or others—had dug them from the ground and propped them upright to block the exit. They were ranked in columns, more than she could quickly count.

The tumble of light made them seem alive. They were nothing but hollow shells. But with their incandescent eyes, it was almost as if they were the ones who had maimed Duncan. She searched for Luke hiding among the statues. But all was still among the legs and jade armor.

The moon died again. Darkness swamped them. She held Duncan on her lap.

He kept reaching for his face. She could feel him touching it, probing his own wounds, and that made her more afraid. They were like deep-sea creatures reduced to learning the world with feelers.

Terrified of hurting him more, Molly made herself touch his face. She deciphered blood and the bony protrusion at his jaw, and that scar above his ear. She ran one hand through his wet hair, and it pulled away in long strands. It was weeds or moss, she told herself. But it felt like hair as she untangled it from her fingers.

The stones grated under her knees. He groaned.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He patted her hand reassuringly.

She felt him grip his jawbone, and knew what he meant to do. He got his thumbs underneath and clutched the sides, and tugged at the bone. The bones gave a gristly pop and he groaned. But the jaw would not go back into joint. She was almost sick.

The moon returned. Duncan leaned forward to let the blood run from his nose and mouth. She got to her knees and unknotted her sling, his checkered kroma, and wrapped it around the gash on his forehead. What now?

The statues scared her. Luke had posed them as a warning, obviously. What other tricks had he arranged in the tunnel?

She got Duncan to his feet. He was so thin. “Put your arm over my shoulder.”

Holding him gave her strength. The endorphins were kicking in, she thought. He seemed almost light enough to carry in her arms.

Clouds gobbled up the moon again. The gate was out of the question, and it would be foolhardy to try for the tower at the center of the city. By now their pursuers would be hounding the ruins.

She led Duncan along the moat path, following it by ear. She planted each foot with care. One slip and they would both be swept away. They shuffled higher, alongside the wall.

The wind began to scream, clamoring to tear the canopy open.

Thunder fell upon the mountain. She heard the bamboo chattering at her, and vines lashing like bullwhips. The ruins grated like the bowels of a glacier.

She felt helpless. They were the walking wounded. Even if there were a breach in the wall, how far could they hope to get? What lay out there in the night?

While she still had strength, Molly turned Duncan toward the city.

There were no more holes in the darkness, no more moon. The storm sprang at them. Molly found her way by the songs of the ancient buildings.

She listened for hollowness and found a doorway. That got them out of the rain, but the floor was half flooded. She felt her way up a short staircase to a ledge.

By touch, quivering with fever, she tucked Duncan along the back wall and foraged moss and leaves to pile over him. When he was well covered, she burrowed under to hold him. The rain would wash away their tracks and scent and any last evidence of them. In the morning, they could start over.

41.

She woke holding an armful of leaves on a ledge, an ancient veranda that faced out upon the ruins. Maybe lovers had once cooled themselves here and shared this secret view of the street below. The light was blue turning green, and the mist was sinking in the street below. It was dawn in the city.

She lay unmoving above the ghost river. A dragonfly appeared, a jewel with wings. Gods—their wandering faces—invited her back into the great dream.

The typhoon had passed. The stones no longer grated. The water songs had dried to a faint trickle.

Duncan was gone.

She looked at her empty hand sticking through the leaves. He had gone to draw them away from her. That was Duncan.

Whispers threaded up from the mist. “Molly,” she heard. They knew she was here somewhere. They were backtracking for her, which could only mean they’d run Duncan to earth. His footprints or scent, whatever they were following, led this way.

Her hand drew into the leaves. Eyes wide, she watched them from above.

They surfaced in the street mist, phantom hints of them, a bare shoulder, a hunched back, a wisp of black hair, khaki-green rags. It was a parade of apparitions, of fragments of apparitions, even of relics. Held by no one she could see, a rifle barrel, beaded with dew, swiveled from side to side.

They were mere pieces in the mist, silent except for their hiss of words. They might have been a giant serpent gliding through the labyrinth, its skin whispering against the walls.

Molly waited, hating the adrenaline that woke her body. The shrapnel wound burned with infection. She could feel the tickle of insects on her legs, the gentle suckling of leeches.

At last her hunters faded away.

She forced herself to wait, counting time in her head, devising plans. The gods smiled at her foolishness. The fortress walls stood whole. There was no exit.

She crawled out from the decay. Her vision swam in broken auto-focus, soft to sharp, near to far. Glossy black leeches clung to her arms. The forest was stealing her. It took all her strength to stand, and when she glanced down, her bed looked like an animal lair.

Her thighs trembled as she descended to the street. She went the opposite way from her pursuers, both to avoid them and to find the origin of their tracking. That was where they would have left Duncan.

As the mist cleared, the spires grew taller. All around, buildings leaked their lungs of fog. It ushered out of blank doors and cascaded down stairs. It exhaled from the mouths of giant heads. Between the flags of it, she saw parrots and smaller birds wheeling in the morning air. Monkeys sprinted overhead like spies. Invisible deer barked at her progress.

They were giving her away. But her presence was already known. She accepted that.

Here and there weapons and rusted C-ration cans fanned across the road, tossed from doorways like garbage. Had the soldiers become so careless, even discarding their rifles? It was the animals, she knew. Over the years, they had rooted through the fragments and pulled them outside. Her mother had been scattered over a mile of mountainside.

It was all she could do to stay on her feet.

She peered inside a room, and it was like a lunatic’s cage. Hand-sketched maps were plastered to the walls like wet leaves. Their ink had bled, but it was still possible to see the attempts to map the ruins. Each map bore a date in one corner, July, then August, and one made in late September…three months after their arrival. Each was scratched out, drawn over, crumpled, and smoothed. The mapmakers never had gotten the hang of this place. The ruins had defied them to the end.

When she stepped from the room, Molly saw the black bead of a gun barrel aimed straight at her. The sniper’s nest was practically invisible among the leaves, but her eye went straight to it. She could not explain her gift for finding them.

The sniper sat in a fork, tied to the tree. His rifle was rooted in place, stitched to his shoulder by vines. His skull leaned against the stock, taking infinite aim with round stone eyes. Like Luke, he had been fitted with the vision of jade. It was as if the city watched itself through their eyes.

Nothing remained of his uniform, though he still wore web gear and a towel around his neck vertebrae, and the skull sported a do-rag. His leg bones and boots had long ago fallen to the ground, but his upper half still maintained a bull’s-eye on the street.

Duty was one thing, this was something else. Besides tying himself to the tree, the man had cooped himself up inside a cocoon of barbed wire. His last act—hauling up the wire and constructing a shapeless ball of it—bewildered her. What had he hoped the wire would protect him against? Starvation, despair, madness? Had he caged himself to prevent his own wandering?

She recalled the monkeys plundering the body yesterday. Had he chosen the tree for his tomb and wired shut his mortal remains against the animals? Who else could he have feared among his dead and dying comrades?

Molly stumbled on, passing beneath his aim. One of the soldiers—or perhaps some of Duncan’s seventeenth-century Dutchmen trekking through Indochina—had carved a cross into the wall. A red and white painted Confederate flag graced one sheltered wall, and beside it a black-and-white peace symbol. They had scratched the names of wives and girlfriends among dancing, round-breasted aspara nymphs.

She passed through the canyon of story panels that she and Duncan had shared, and the carvings had altered. Now the train of prisoners lay beheaded. The dragon had retreated back into the sea. The monkey-gods had defeated the humans. The crocodiles had caught the peacock and were dragging it feet first into the carved waters. She got it, she got it all, the death of the captives, the passing of the typhoon, the triumph of the monkeys, and their bodies and spirits being pulled into the underworld.

She came to a little cemetery. They had buried their dead, or at least, while they still had their strength and sanity, their early dead. But thirty years of animals had undone their labor. White bones lay strewn across the hillside by the hundreds.

The bones and relics were so obvious to her this morning. It was as if the Blackhorse soldiers were coming out of hiding. She thought the storm must have thinned the canopy to allow more light, or that the fever made her senses more acute. The bones practically greeted her.

She had no idea how many men the cemetery had held. Duncan or Kleat could have judged by the bones; they had trained themselves to puzzle together the remains. But they were gone. She was the last one left. That was her first conscious admission of the fact.

She was dying.

If Luke didn’t find her, the fever would take her, or the infection. It was only a matter of time. But then who would take the soldiers home?

A rifle stood, jammed barrel down in the black earth with a helmet on top, a classic shot. She framed the picture in her mind, the rifle, the white bones, the black earth. Molly blinked. She recognized this dirt. It was the same rich black soil they had shed on their white tablecloth in the restaurant. This was where Luke had grabbed his fistfuls of mud and dog tags. Here was where her journey had started. The circle was tightening. She was getting to its center.

42.

She found the tower by looking not up, but down. Overnight, the rain had filled a long, rectangular reflecting pool that extended beneath the trees. This was a new approach, different from her other forays into the city’s center. The image of the tower hovered at its far end, upside down in the mirror. There between the branches, a hundred yards ahead, stood the root of the tower. Lost no more, she thought. There was her destination.

As she skirted the pool, a ripple spanked the stone. She paused and the water went still. The lily pads lay motionless. She waited and, like yesterday at the reservoir, something shifted in the depths. The surface seemed to open.

Tangled with weeds, a big machine gun rested on the bottom. Coils of belted ammunition were turning green, like old pennies. The gun was not mounted on a tripod or neatly positioned. It had the look of a thing thrown away without care.

Then the surface sealed over. It became a mirror again, and she found herself facing the gunner, or his reflected image. She lifted her eyes. What remained of his skeleton—the limp spine and his skull and a few ribs—dangled from a noose. The rope twisted. The skull turned, and he had jade eyes, also.

First Luke, then the sniper in his coil of wire, now this man. Despair had swept them like a virus. She felt it, too, trapped at the center of the earth, chased by uncertain dangers. Languishing. That was the worst part, the wheel of time turning without measure, the obsessive maps filled with circles. Even that made sense to her. Even suicide made sense.

But why had they separated from one another? When they most needed each other’s company, these men had made themselves desolate and estranged. They had retreated to distant lonely hideouts, the sniper to his perch, Luke to his bamboo lair, this gunner to a noose.

There was no evidence of an enemy finding them here. Had the men taken to hunting one another, then? Or imagined themselves being hunted? Why not? The monkey meat could have passed on a brain fever. Had they been killed by their own ghosts?

She looked up, into the ever present smile of God. Where was the joke? In their suffering and confusion? No matter where you turned, the city seemed to mock you. She tucked her head down, containing her anger. Every which way, the place made you mad.

The tower seemed to drift toward her. Duncan would have led them there. It was more wish than calculation. She had no time for the rest of the labyrinth.

She came to the bas-relief crowding the base of the tower. She looked again and the carvings really were in motion. One of the stone children—a little girl—turned and looked right at her. Molly cupped one hand against her eyes and hurried past, to the stairs.

Duncan had come this way. His red and white scarf lay in a heap on the stairs. The rain must have washed it clean. For all his blood last night, there wasn’t a drop on the scarf. She draped it around her neck and gathered her courage, step by step.

Higher and higher she wound. She battled her dizziness as she kept to the precarious outer edges. The doorways whispered to her, tempting her to come in and stay awhile. She resisted their havens. She forced herself to climb on.

As she neared the top, a motion in the grass far below made her melt against the stairs.

There was no mist to hide them this time, and the green light was as good as it got. And yet they still evaded a complete inspection. They appeared in pieces from the mouth of one of the great avenues.

A man’s shoulder and arm surfaced, then sank into the grass. A head appeared, scouting right and left before ducking behind a pillar. A man’s hunched back appeared. Some were bearded and naked. Others wore rotted fatigues stolen from the graveyard. Some went barefoot. Rifles and rucksacks parted the grass. They were a procession of weapons and gear. Their skin and bones were little more than vehicles for the war relics.

All carried the jungle on them. She thought the vines and weeds must be part of their camouflage. But then she spotted the small animals moving on them, lizards, and a snake, and even a monkey riding majestically on one’s shoulder. The forest inhabited them. They had lost their souls to this place.

They were not ghosts.

Molly refused to call them that. She clung to her powers of reason. Call them supernatural and she would lose all control over her rational world. It was not that she rejected the idea of ghosts. Her mother was a ghost. But you possessed them, not the other way around. Ghosts were data. They were pieces of your past. They allowed you a dialogue with yourself, and they had no reality except the reality you granted them.

She granted them nothing. She had conjured up none of these hide-and-seek scavengers creeping through the grass below. As eerie as he was, Luke had appeared well before she had any inkling of him, or them. There could be no Blackhorse ghosts because Blackhorse did not belong to her past. She had no connection with the Eleventh Cavalry.

And so, while these men might haunt the ruins and mimic the dead, they were real in some way. If only she could focus her mind. There had been no way to directly confront their whispering and silhouettes on her tent and their slouching through the mist, but she could dispute their unreality. They were hunting her. She was hiding from them, whoever they were. And Duncan had probably sacrificed himself to shield her. All for nothing. They were bound to find her.

The real contest was not with them anyway, but with herself. She had no hope of defeating them. There were too many of them, and this was their territory, and she was fading fast. She couldn’t beat them, but she could make sure they didn’t beat her. Just holding on to her sanity would be a triumph.

The line of men—looters, lunatics, or manhunters caught in a Vietnam loop—worked diagonally across the overgrown square. They moved like a patrol, spaced in a line, taking their time. They had nearly reached the far trees when the ambush caught them.

At first, Molly couldn’t understand what was going on. It looked more like a squall striking the grasses than an attack. Some havoc burst from the trees. Limbs bent, leaves parted. Birds sprang from their perches and filled the air with their colors and cries. From three sides, furrows sliced through the green surface of grass.

Peeking down from the edge of the tower, Molly saw shapes, degraded shapes, pieces of creatures that were even less than these pieces of men. They were human in theory. Human in outline. But in fact she couldn’t be sure she was seeing anything at all.

They seemed to be part animal, part glass—or water—as they streamed out from the trees. They cast shadows like the shadows of fish, amorphous and distorted, muscling in the green light. She saw their weapons better than she did them, not bits and pieces of the Blackhorse arsenal, but ancient things, swords and axes scything through the grass, and they appeared to almost move of their own will, racing for the kill. The forest shapes converged on the patrol.

The battle had no real form. It was over in seconds. The grass thrashed in a furious centrifuge of shapes. It bent and whipped and pressed flat. She heard a howl crowded with men shouting. Then the whole aspect of the violence lifted. It was as if the wind had touched down and gone on. The men, the suggestions of them, vanished.

She didn’t move for another minute. Something had happened down there, something elemental, a microburst or a dervish. The grass lay torn and flattened in a whorl, and that howl echoed another few seconds from the forest as if a battle of spirits was swirling within the fortress walls. Then the shadows went still again. The birds returned to the trees.

She could have descended at that point. Her pursuers were gone, or seemed to be. But where would she go? Her legs were going on her. Even if she made it back to the terminus, there was nothing left but ashes.

On her hands and knees, Molly resumed her climb. She was terrified of losing the last of her strength out here in the open. She wanted enclosure. She wanted sanctuary. A fairy-tale tower where the bad men could not find her.

She had to whisper her way to the top: “A little more.” She had never before felt burdened by her flesh like this.

She reached the summit deck and peered over. The city wheeled in circles down there, a mandala of ruins and emerald grass.

Even as she looked, her hunters reappeared. The patrol emerged from the mouth of one of the great avenues. A man’s shoulder and arm surfaced, then sank into the grass. A head appeared, scouting right and left before ducking behind a pillar. A man’s hunched back appeared.

They were repeating themselves. Endlessly recycling. Ghosts, she thought, after all.

43.

The infection had spread into her wing muscles. The walls of her chest and shoulder and back were burning with strep. And yet she managed to stand and face the door.

The blood rushed from her head. She was patient. The spinning stopped.

The stone Amazon that had toppled from her niche was now restored to her place. Molly couldn’t even tell which of the twins had been broken. Even the doorway looked restored. The sagging lintel stood level. The red columns seemed brighter, the moss scrubbed away.

“Duncan?” she whispered into the room. Not a whisper back.

She stepped inside. The statue women let her pass, and the room was just as she had left it. Where she and Duncan and Kleat had peeled back the carpet of leaves, the floor still broadcast its black SOS. Brass shells littered the stones. The aperture in the roof was pouring green light onto the far wall. She was alone with the remains of the Buddhas.

Their desecration didn’t shock her this morning. She understood now. The soldiers had seen through the cosmic smiles. The city’s tranquility was a lie. Beneath its facade, the fortress sanctuary was a deadly trap. In chewing off the Buddha faces with their gunfire, the men had been erasing a terrible deceit.

“Duncan?” Sweat seeped down her spine. It was cold.

Her grip slipped on the doorway. She caught her balance. She asserted it. Once down, there would be no getting up.

She scanned the room for a friendly patch of ground. The monkey hands reached out from the fire pit. The gutted radio set stood along one wall. War junk and dank shadows crowded the corners. Animal dung plastered the boxes and cans.

This was important stuff, the choice of her bed. It was her Kodak moment: Someday, a hundred years from now, another expedition would ascend this tower. And while they weren’t going to find any Sleeping Beauty, she could at least compose her mortal remains without monkey hands and garbage for her backdrop.

Her eyes went to the chopped, riddled Buddhas. In and out of focus, they seemed to float in the green light, luminous and detached from the world, separate from one another, even separate from the wall. For all the savagery that had been heaped upon them, for all the bloodshed they had presided over in this spirit city, they still promised peace. Now if only some of their karma would rub off, maybe she could come back as a complete human being next go-round.

She set off across the hall, shuffling through the bullet shells and beetles. The Buddhas retreated into their niches. Ravaged by bullets, they looked more like lepers than deities, like victims, not masters of the universe.

Molly glanced up at the canopy. No sun, not even a single beam? It would have been so sweet to curl up on a spot of heated stone.

She arrived at the knife in the wall.

The knife was all wrong, a spiteful thing. Would they think she had stabbed the Buddhas? Kleat had grappled with it, and she knew the blade was jammed, but she gripped the handle anyway.

The blade slid free.

The wind must have moved the canopy, which had moved the trees, which had moved the stones. The joints had opened. The knife practically fell from the seam. The weight of it, all eight ounces, yanked her arm down. It dropped from her fingers.

She stared dumbly at the thing lying at her feet. The blade was scratched and mottled, a name engraved above the blood gutter. With the next storm, the stones would have shifted again and bound the knife. She’d happened along at the right moment, that was all.

A string of saliva dangled from her mouth. Lovely. In a stupor, she lifted her eyes.

“God,” she whispered, and lurched backward.

The statues were changing.

Their pox of bullet holes was smoothing over. The Buddhas were regaining their stone flesh.

It had to be a trick of the light. Clouds were crossing above the canopy. Whales passing through the deep.

She closed her eyes and staggered, fetching up against the wall. Now was not the time to be seeing things. Her mother had died from hallucinations. And yet she could feel the wall against her palms and cheek, and the cool, gutted surface really was mending itself.

She pushed away from the wall.

Molly had spent a lifetime learning the rules. They allowed for yetis and unicorns, so long as you winked. They allowed for lost cities to float out like dust bunnies. You could hold heaven as a hope. But the rules did not allow for this.

The wall—the entire length of stone and statues—was healing. The bullet tracks dissolved. Thirteen smiles glimmered into being, so many Cheshire cats paying a visit. Faces formed around the smiles.

A vine tripped her. She might have blacked out. She smiled up at the fever dream. The metamorphosis streamed on.

At the far end of the wall, where the facade had been blasted, rubble began to reassemble. Lying there, Molly could not find words to describe it. Pieces of stone did not fly through the air and into place. Somehow the wall drew the destruction back into time.

She went with it, a pleasant delirium. As fissures sealed and lead slugs pattered to the floor like hailstones and the leprous figures became beautiful again, she forgot her pain and exhaustion. She all but vanished from her own mind.

Consciousness came and went.

Perhaps the wall had never been destroyed. Perhaps she had imagined it. Or again, that wondrous thought, maybe the ruins had imagined her. If the stones could command a people to shape them into a city, if the city were nothing more than an instrument for monsoon songs, why couldn’t she be that little girl carved among all the other stories? What else was humankind—all life—but a figment of a stone spinning through time?

Her eyes opened. The wall was whole again. The war was gone. It had never been. How righteous, she thought. How stoned-out cosmic cool.

She rolled onto her back, a change of view. Parrots flickered overhead like bits of flame. A gecko eased in along the skylight. A few monkeys perched along the rim. Like this, in unconditional surrender, her mother must have watched the snow descend.

44.

The afternoon thunder arrived. It came up from the earth, not down from the sky. It was still too far away to hear. The vibrations buzzed against her skull. She remembered sitting in a restaurant along a river long ago and how the sunset had trembled. Let it rain, she thought. Come what may. She was finding her happy zone.

But then she saw the soldier. He was sitting at the far end of the wall where the rubble had cleared itself away. Thirty years ago someone had buried him violently, with plastic explosives. Now he was bared to the world.

His legs and boots were crushed flat. The rest of his skeleton rested precariously upright. It must have been hot the day he died. He had no shirt. But like Kleat, expecting trouble, he wore a flak jacket.

She knew him, or at least of him, not his name or his face, but his legend. The fragments of the journal had spoken of him. He was their commander. Here was the man who had gotten them lost and found them sanctuary, and doomed them by preserving them among the ruins. This was the tower of his tomb.

She dragged herself closer, a creature of her curiosity.

Their discoverers would link them, a man and a woman, a soldier and a civilian, two Americans caught in a faraway land. Never mind that she was as old as he was dead. Details. The story was too good. They were as good as married, a Romeo and Juliet for the ages.

The rubble had flattened his left hand in his lap. It looked like some complicated fossil. He wore a wedding band.

His skull leaned on his chest as if he were in mid-siesta. His sole wound, it seemed, was a crease along the temporal bone. The bullet had not pierced his skull. It might only have stunned him, in which case he’d been buried alive.

Molly touched nothing. The skeleton looked like a house of cards ready to fall. She lay beside him, resting her head, hunting for clues.

This was not another of their suicides. For one thing, there were more certain ways to put a bullet into yourself, and the bone was not scorched or powder burned. Also there was no weapon lying close at hand. And again, the bullet did not seem to have been a killing shot. Someone had shot him, and then buried him. Her eyes wandered higher. All in front of the Buddhas.

How had it gone?

He had caught them in the act of savaging the statues and gotten between their weapons and the wall. The journal fragments whispered to her. It’s not true he loved the city more than us. He was only trying to preserve us all. They had looted the city, or part of it, planting that terra-cotta head on their exhaust pipe. Had he tried to protect the Buddhas? Had someone kept on firing?

There was just one wound that she could see. She couldn’t find any bullet holes or bloodstains on the flattened fatigues or the flak jacket. Just the single shot along his head. Just one shooter.

Had it been an accident or an execution? Had they tried to revive him, or panicked and given him up for dead? No matter. They had blasted this section of the wall and hidden their deed under a ton of debris. That much was no accident. Someone had deliberately tried to conceal the evidence. The body, living or dead, damned them. And so they had shut it from sight.

The journal spoke of one man whipping up the mutiny. But once the commander was killed, the rebels had realized their fall from grace. At least the journal writer had expressed repentance.

The story took shape, a murder. The soldiers had driven the shooter from their midst…like Cain, the killer of his brother. He was the same man who had led them in mutiny. Molly knew it. The murder had shocked the rebels from their rebellion. They had scattered after the killing. The mutiny had dispersed.

The shooter had set off on foot, west of Eden. Did that mean he’d fled toward Phnom Penh or gone out the western entry, or was it simply the writer carrying through his biblical strand? No matter. Somewhere out there the killer had met his end. The rest of the Blackhorse men had stayed in the city, languishing, divided, hungry and diseased, drifting into madness, and, like her, too weak to leave, dying in animal niches among the ruins.

End of story. Everyone, it seemed, had paid for the sin. In a way, the commander was lucky. Of all the bones she’d seen in the city, his had come the closest to a permanent burial.

But the knife still bothered her. It could have been their way of marking the grave, but why mark a grave you wanted no one to find? No, she thought. Someone had added it to the wall as a finishing touch, after the shooting, after the killing, probably after the blast, a final piece of rage.

It was the shooter’s knife. Molly knew it instinctively. He had stabbed the wall.

Thunder rippled far away. A breeze stirred the canopy.

She clutched her cold, fiery self.

“Now what?” she whispered to the bones.

It didn’t seem right. They’d brought her here. Her. Luke had said so. But all this way for what? This was just another dead soldier from a dead war. Vietnam had nothing to do with her. She had a life. For a little while longer.

The trees moved. The floor shivered, or she did. It was like a dock that seems to move because the water is moving. The big river was waiting.

“Not yet,” she said. Where’s my circle? She deserved that much. A bit more beta. Some raw connect. Her missing link.

The tremors upset the careful construct of his bones. With the clatter of sticks and empty spools, the soldier spilled to pieces. The skull landed facing her, mouth parted, his jaw still wired in place with tendons. Weighted with vertebrae and ribs, the flak jacket tumbled into her hands. It was a simple matter to pluck the dog tag from inside.

The name was perfectly legible.

She should have known.

“ ‘O’Brian,’ ” she read aloud to him, “ ‘Duncan A.’ ”

The jaw stayed frozen, half open, caught in the act.

There was his date of birth. She made the calculation. He’d been shot on his birthday, or shortly after, twenty-one years old. She’d fallen for a younger man.

Molly cocked her head to see the skull.

His features emerged clearly now. It was almost like lying with him in her tent, watching his young face while he slept. There was his thick brow and his thin cheekbones, and the white teeth he’d brushed so religiously. She purged from her mind the poor creature dwindling in the rain last night, losing his long hair in her fingers, that phantom crumbling beneath her doubts. She closed her eyes and saw Duncan at dawn in the blue-green light.

Had he suspected his flesh encased a ghost? She recalled his briefcase full of tidbits and his confusion when she’d confronted him. And his odd reluctance to follow Luke to these ruins.

It wasn’t that he’d tried to fool anyone. Duncan had been as truthful as he could remember, in fragments, with an Ace comb in his pocket, just a spirit borrowing himself together, the same as Luke and all the rest.

When had he escaped from the ruins? Obviously, Luke had been sent to fetch his restless brother back to the source, back to the underworld. But why bring her?

She had daydreamed about taking Duncan home with her. Over these last few days, that seemed to be what she was meant to do, to usher him back into America. But he’d turned the tables on her, not knowing himself. He’d brought her home with him.

More chills, more salty sweat. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Darkness threatened. Molly fought back to consciousness.

What were the laws of this place? The rain would purify them. Her bones would mingle with his. But then?

“Duncan?” she called to his spirit. Had he joined that never-ending patrol around the tower? Or flung himself up into the canopy? “Where are you?”

Suddenly she was afraid. She wanted reassurance. She had no answers, only more questions. Would she go out into the world with him now, or would they stay to wander through the ruins? How did it work? Would they take on disguises? Enter cities? Cross the oceans? Haunt the future? They could live a thousand lives. But in giving birth to themselves, would they forget their anchoring bones? Would they come to forget each other?

They had voices. Where was his voice? “Duncan?”

The flak jacket had fallen open. There was something in the pocket, an edge of plastic. She tugged and it was a sandwich bag containing a snapshot.

The photo was dog-eared and harshly faded. Even without the “Dec. ’69” penned on the back, Molly knew the era by its chemicals and paper. She could have guessed the basic image. It was straight out of a war movie, the girlfriend picture.

Wife, she amended, glancing at Duncan’s wedding band. The young woman had one, too. She was flashing it proudly, with bravura, grinning at their in-joke. Six or seven months pregnant, she was dressed—barely—in a polka-dot bikini. She’d snagged her man in the nick of time.

Molly laid her head on the flak jacket and studied the photo, sliding into its story. Duncan had taken it. They were on a beach. It was Hawaii, in the middle of his deployment to Vietnam. She wore a flower lei. Molly liked her. She was audacious, ripe to bursting, and wildly in love with the photographer. A real firecracker.

She did the math. Duncan had been twenty. A few months later, he had become a dad. A few months after that, he had faced his killer in this city of the dead.

Her face eluded Molly. The girl’s hair cast a shadow, and that bulging tummy drew the eye. But that wasn’t the difficulty. The face made no sense to her.

The girl had a hundred-watt smile and a sloe-eyed green gaze. A pair of rose-colored sunglasses perched on top of her bushy black hair. The humidity had blown her pixie cut to chaos. Molly could relate. Atomic hair, she called it. That’s why she’d chopped hers short with surgical scissors. Black Irish did not go well with the tropics.

Molly stopped. The air leaked from her.

She was looking at herself.

She refused it. She had to be projecting. The fever was scrambling her mind. The ruins were stealing into her the way she had stolen into them, in darkness and fog. One step deeper, it seemed, and she might disintegrate.

The picture blurred, then sharpened. She struggled against it, then with it, finding her way into the impossible image. How could something so familiar feel so alien? The eyes, their shape, the nose, the smile, the hair…there was no denying it. That was her face in the photo.

Molly glanced at Duncan’s silent bones, trying to fathom it. What did it mean? Had she died and wandered and finally been led to her lover? Could she be her own orphan?

A drop of rain fell from the trees. Not yet, she commanded the sky. There were facts. She recalled them, an obituary in the Denver Post dated 1971, a coroner’s report, a grave marker among the wildflowers.

She fumbled at the belt holding her passport wallet and ripped open the Velcro and drew out her relic, a driver’s license issued in 1967 in Bay City, Texas, to one Jane Drake, age eighteen. The black hair was long and ironed straight, Cher style. The eyes were green and full of blue sky, as if all her life lay ahead of her. It was the same face Molly saw in her mirror, though younger and sweeter and smooth. But it was also the face in a photo buried next to the heart of a dead soldier. How could that be?

Rain began leaking from the canopy. A drop splashed across the photo. Molly raced on.

Once upon a time, she tried desperately. Once upon a time, a war bride lost her one true love. When he went missing, she went missing, too. She wandered off into madness, into the midst of mountain gypsies, and finally, into the mouth of a blizzard. That much was true. Jane Drake had died in a roofless miner’s shack in a blizzard on Boreas Pass.

Had she returned from the dead then, one ghost hunting another?

She searched her memory for Hawaii and young Duncan and the diamond on that finger, and the miner’s cabin and the blizzard. She tried to feel them as memories of her own, but none of it came to her.

The raindrops splattered across the photo. The image was melting before her eyes.

Hurry, she thought. Today was for keeps. Darkness was her last call. The forest would render her to bones. She would join the wandering spirits and never know more than her name.

Molly blinked away the rain. Put away the ghosts. She was too full of ghosts. Trust your eyes. What was she missing?

She brought the snapshot closer. She looked at the tipped skull.

Here stood a young woman in her glory.

Here lay the bones that had broken her heart.

And—it was suddenly so obvious—in that womb slept their daughter, Molly.

The muscles in her face relaxed. The labyrinth unraveled around her. No longer a stranger to herself, she let the city take her over. Its canals became her arteries. Its stone told her story. Her tangled threads were simply paths among the ruins.

Had her mother sent her, Molly wondered, or had her father drawn her? Did it matter? They had never meant to lose her. They’d done the best they could, but the world had taken them away, the soldier in war, his bride in sorrow. She only needed to forgive them for their love. She leaned the photo among the bones. The rain ran from her eyes.

45.

Molly took turns. She traded bodies with the gecko clinging to the wall, and prowled a Buddha’s palm. She hitchhiked on a parrot perching in the branches. She became a butterfly hiding from the rain. She spied on herself down there.

She looked like one of MacBeth’s witches haunting the edges of a battlefield, knife in hand. Her bloodshot eyes burned too bright in that mask of ash and smoke.

The thunder was majestic. She’d crawled to the knife. It looked like an Iron Age thing in her fist.

She knew the Blackhorse missing now. Even the bones still hidden in the forest had recited their names to her. They were all present and accounted for, even their ninth man, the rebel leader who had shot her father. His name was on the blade, “John Kleat.”

There was no telling where Kleat had traveled after they’d banished him from the city. She understood his hatred of the Khmer Rouge better than he did now. His bones remembered what he did not, the enemy who had slit his throat. Maybe someday he would rise up from the black water in the barays, and escape these walls, and resume the search for his own remains. Maybe someday he would find the nonexistent brother who was himself buried in the hills or in a paddy or thrown down a well. More likely he would forget and join the creatures in the mud.

They were driven by urges, these unburied dead. Where memory began and ended, she couldn’t say. They clung to their names, that much was certain, speaking them over and over. Also, no matter what they had become, they could not escape who they had been. She had been right to believe in Duncan’s goodness. Wherever he was.

“Duncan,” she called out.

She drifted in and out of delirium. The rain fell in slow strings. Now she was the gecko, now a butterfly, now a woman.

“Molly,” she heard. Let me sleep.

They kept calling her name from the forest, the birds and monkeys and ghost warriors, enunciating all the varieties she might answer to, Molly, Maw-li, Moll-lee. They were helping her remember her name in the next life. That was her hope, that they would be kind and welcoming. On the other hand, they had summoned her to carry home her father and them, and she had failed. There was no reason to believe in their mercy.

She caught herself whispering a Hail Mary to the Buddhas.

“Molly.” The voice was just outside the door, and it wasn’t Duncan’s.

She lay still. Her heart galloped. If only Duncan would come.

The doorway darkened. He was an emaciated thing made of rags. Part man, part bone, he entered.

She closed her eyes. The tip of bone ticked closer.

“Molly,” he commanded.

He’d come for her eyes, not to take, but to give. She belonged to the city now. Would he use a spoon? What shade of green would her jade eyes be?

Please, she thought.

He heard her whisper, or maybe smelled it. “You’re alive,” he said.

She opened her eyes. His leg was a stick, not bone, lashed to his thigh with vines.

She thrust with the knife. It was a feeble act, and he stepped on her wrist and took the knife away. She knew better than to fight. Lie still. Let him do it.

“Lie still,” the ghost said.

He stood overhead like a butcher sizing up meat. She searched for his eyes to connect with, but the rain smeared her vision.

She wanted to let go, to cast herself into the animals and scamper and fly and slither away. But suddenly she was anchored in her flesh. She couldn’t leave her body. She struggled, a small motion, a whimper.

He tugged at a pouch. A dozen or more round jade balls spilled onto the floor. The eyes rolled against her cheek, and she moaned and looked away. The city was preparing her, last rites, its funeral mask. But she was still alive, or had she passed to the other side? How to tell?

“Don’t fight,” he said. “You’re having a dream. Can you hear me?”

He lifted her shirt and looked underneath. She squeezed her eyes shut and the rain wept down her face. Would the eyes hurt as much going in as coming out? How loud would she scream? Where were her gecko and butterfly?

“Drink.” He held a leaf to her mouth as a funnel. The rain trickled onto her tongue. A kindness before the maiming.

“You’re leaving,” said the voice. “Take the others with you. They no longer belong. Do you understand?”

“No.” They were dead. How could they not belong? Limbo had borders?

“They were lost and the city took them in.” The voice chased like water through her mind. “It gave them shelter from the storm. Why them, barbarians? Compassion, perhaps, or God’s curiosity, I can’t say. The city took them in as children. It gave them sight. It showed them the path. But they refused to see. Do you know how many great warriors came and laid aside their armor here? Not these men. All except Duncan. He saw something, I think.”

“They were only boys,” she whispered to the rain.

“Blind they came”—the words were strict—“now blind they go. I’ve gone to each of them and taken back the dream.”

On one knee, he worked Kleat’s knife. She felt the steel blade worm along her breastbone. With a tug, he split the shirt and peeled it away like skin. One leg at a time, he sawed away her pants.

She was so afraid. But, oh, the rain felt glorious. It bathed her burning flesh. It warmed her like a blanket. Her lips opened to the water.

His hands began moving over her, working away. She didn’t dare look. For all she knew, he had opened her and was squatting to one side devouring her organs. Were the monkeys gathering for their share?

He pried open her eyelids and rain crashed into her brain. My eyes, she thought. The windows of her soul. “Please don’t,” she said.

“A little while longer,” the ghost soothed her, plucking away leeches. “Everything will be clear.”

Then he propped twigs under a large leaf to make a lean-to over her face and draped big banana leaves over her body and limbs. She was sinking.

“You’re free. You freed them.” He held up one of the jade balls. “But these stay. Take nothing but the bones. Forget the city. Remember the dream.”

Blackness rose up.

She returned to consciousness just as he was leaving. The stick leg sounded like a clock walking away. Then she smelled the rich fragrance. Under another leaf, he had planted a handful of incense sticks. Slow smoke leaked up to the Buddhas. Only then did she recognize him.

“Samnang?” she whispered.

But he was gone, into the ruins.

46.

When she woke again, the rain was clattering on her shield of leaves and the incense sticks were ash. Her bloodstained clothes lay in a heap. She was naked and encased in black mud. Night was falling.

They were shouting her name again. They were everywhere out there. Their voices were climbing the stairs. Duncan, she prayed. Save me.

A light flashed in the doorway. Dark forms clustered behind it. More lights appeared. They wore sheets like Halloween ghosts. Ponchos, she realized.

“Molly?” The voice boomed through the room.

She watched from under her chrysalis of leaves, perfectly invisible to them.

“She’s not up here,” one said.

“But he told us a tower.”

“It’s empty. We got the wrong tower.”

“We should have gotten him to draw a map of the place.”

“Too late now. It’s a miracle he lasted as long as he did. You saw what he looked like when they brought him in. Gut shot, bleeding out. The fuckers even took his leg.”

“What the hell did she get mixed up with?”

“Bad company, man.”

One had a cough. Others were winded. Their voices thundered, as if her last few days had passed in whispers.

The room lit green with distant lightning, then went dark. The sky rumbled.

“We don’t belong here,” a voice complained. “The captain gave us two hours. Night’s coming. You could get lost in this place.”

“Sam said she’d be here. Here’s the city. Here’s the tower.”

“That was yesterday. She could have gone anywhere since then. We’ll try again in the morning. It will look different in the morning.”

It was like swimming up from a deep recess. Sam? The captain? She knew these voices. RE-1 had come for her.

And now they were leaving. Molly tried to speak. But her tongue had turned to leather. There wasn’t enough breath in her lungs for even one word.

Their lights twitched away. It was over. She would never last the night.

But then the bones sighed beside her. “Boys,” they whispered. Duncan. His wisp of a spirit.

Somehow they heard through the thunder. It caught them. Their lights swung around. One splashed on the skull.

“Christ, there’s another one. And a flak jacket, look.”

They came across the room in a siege of boots and the whip-whip of wet plastic and the one man coughing. One stumbled against her leg.

“There’s something here.”

They converged in a circle and stripped away the leaves, staring down at her from the caverns of their ponchos, faceless, awed. Even in the rain, she could smell them. That struck her, too, the smell of living men.

“Is she still alive?”

“What did she do to herself?”

One bent to her. “Molly? Can you hear me? It’s us.”

“What’s she staring at?”

“We’ve got you now, Molly.”

Voices like thunder. They filled the room. “Get a litter. Bring ropes. Tell the captain.”

Shedding their ponchos to hold as a roof over her, they took on familiar faces, the hunters of the dead. As they pulled off their shirts, they made themselves half naked to warm her.

They couldn’t seem to hear the hymn of the city. She looked into the rain, listening as it faded. It was harder and harder to hear for the clatter of gear and the thud of feet and the creaking of pack straps. Men were shouting down from the tower’s ledge, calling out the good news.

So faithful, she thought, these warriors sent to harrow the underworld and unshackle every last American soldier’s soul. Year after year they hunted the bones, even as the fragments drifted deeper, towed under by insects, roots, and the shifting earth. In the end their quest would falter. The worm would win.

But for the moment it was like a great battle had been fought, and they had carried the day. In finding one alive, even if she did not belong to them, the soldiers could put death aside. They could dream of themselves tonight, free to believe they were more than a dream of the ruins.

Acknowledgments

The Reckoning takes history for its haunted house. In order to construct and inhabit it credibly, I sought out men and women who have lived various aspects of that history. They will be the first to notice my poetic license with procedures, details, and events. Any and all inaccuracies are mine alone.

I wish to thank army lieutenant colonel Gerald O’Hara, army chief warrant officer Tom Monroe, and retired marine master sergeant Joe Patterson of Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC). They patiently detailed the grueling search and recovery process that seeks a full accounting of American soldiers who went missing in foreign wars, particularly in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Because my story takes place in 2000, three years before JPAC was formed, I refer to its two earlier sister entities, Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA) and the Central Identification Lab in Hawaii (CILHI).

I am indebted to Earl Swift, a staff writer for The Virginian-Pilot. Though he was writing his own book about the military’s forensic quest (Where They Lay, a superb nonfiction account), this generous man did not hesitate to give me several hours of civilian perspective drawn from his trips with JPAC.

Many thanks to retired army colonel Charles L. Schmidt for enduring my questions and offering his advice about the 11th Armored Cavalry in Vietnam. Thanks as well to Geof Childs, whom I peppered with spontaneous phone calls about the military and Vietnam.

I am especially grateful to Sophea Chum Satterwhite for helping guide me through Cambodian customs, language, and history. My other guide through Cambodia was Melissa Ward, the bravest person I know, who led me through the devastation and recovery during her assignment with UNTAC in 1993. Wherever in the world you are, Tiger Lady, thank you. And keep your head down.

I owe deep thanks to my editors Emily Bestler and Mitchell Ivers, who refused to leave me lost among my ruins. And with humble appreciation, my thanks to Sloan Harris, my agent and literary sensei.

Finally, Barbara and Helena, you are the blessings I count each day.