“Flyers, Theo, what else?” The question wasn’t serious; she was amazed at all he’d done.

“Potatoes.”

“Potatoes?”

“They’re mostly gone to seed now, but we can still use some. I’ve moved a bunch down to the bins in the cellar.” With a long fork he speared the steaks onto their plates. “We won’t starve. There’s lots, once you look.”

After breakfast, he washed the dishes in the sink while she watched. She wanted to help, but he insisted that she do nothing.

“Feel up to a walk?” he asked.

He disappeared into the barn and returned with a bucket and a pair of fishing poles, still strung with plastic monofilament. He gave her a small spade and the shotgun to carry, and a handful of shells. By the time they reached the river, the sun was high in the sky. They were at a spot where the river slowed and widened into a broad, shallow bend; the banks were dense with vegetation, tall weeds golden with autumnal color. Theo had no hooks but had found, tucked in a kitchen drawer, a small sewing kit, containing a tin of safety pins. While Maus dug in the dirt for worms, Theo tied these to the ends of their lines.

“So, how do you fish, exactly?” Maus said. Her hands were full of wriggling dirt; everywhere she looked, the ground was teeming with life.

“I think you just put them in the water and see what happens.”

They did. But after a while, this seemed silly. Their hooks were sitting in the shallows where they could see them.

“Stand back,” Theo said. “I’m going to try to get mine farther out.”

He drew back the latch on his reel, lifted the rod over his shoulder, and threw the line forward. It shot out in a long arc over the water, disappearing into the current with a plunk. Almost at once, the tip of the rod bent sharply.

“Shit!” His eyes went wide with panic. “What do I do?”

“Don’t let him get away!”

The fish broke the surface with a shimmering splash. Theo began to reel him in.

“He feels huge!”

As Theo pulled the fish toward shore, Maus stumbled into the shallows-the water was astonishingly cold, filling her boots-and bent to grab him. He darted away, and in another moment her ankles were all wrapped up in the fishing line.

“Theo, help!”

They were both laughing. Theo snatched the fish and rolled him onto his back, which seemed to have the desired effect; the fish gave up his struggles. Maus managed to untangle herself and retrieved the bucket from shore while Theo pulled the fish from the river-a long, glimmering thing, like a single slab of muscle flecked with brilliant color, as if hundreds of tiny gems were set into its flesh. The pin was hooked through its lower lip, the worm still on it.

“What part do you eat?” Maus asked.

“I guess that depends on how hungry we get.”

He kissed her then; she felt a flood of happiness. He was still Theo, her Theo. She could feel it in his kiss. Whatever had happened in that cell hadn’t taken this away from her.

“My turn,” she said, pushing him away, and took up her rod to cast as he had done.

They filled the bucket with wriggling fish; the abundance of the river seemed almost too much, like an overly extravagant present. The wide blue sky and the sun-dappled river and the forgotten countryside and the two of them together, in it: it all seemed, somehow, miraculous. Walking back to the house, Maus found her mind returning to the family in the pictures. The mother and the father and the two girls and the boy with his victorious, gap-toothed smile. They had lived here, died here. But most of all, she felt certain, they had lived.

They cleaned the fish and set the tender meat on racks in the smokehouse; tomorrow they would take them out to dry in the sun. One they saved for dinner, and cooked it in the pan with a bit of onion and one of the seedy potatoes.

As the sun was setting, Theo took up the shotgun from its place in the corner of the kitchen. Maus was putting the last of the dishes away in the cabinets. She turned to see him ejecting the shells, three of them, into his palm, blowing on each to clean the cap of dust, then sliding them back into the magazine. Next he removed his blade and cleaned this also, wiping it on his pants.

“Well.” He cleared his throat. “I guess it’s time.”

“No, Theo.”

She put down the plate she was holding and stepped toward him, taking the gun from his hands and placing it on the kitchen table.

“We’re safe here, I know it.” Even as she said the words, she felt their veracity. They were safe because she believed they were safe. “Don’t go.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Maus.”

She leaned her face into his and kissed him again, long and slow, so he would know this about her, about both of them. They were safe. Inside her, the baby had begun to hiccup.

“Come to bed, Theo,” said Mausami. “Please. I want you to come to bed with me, now.”

It was sleep he feared. He told her that night, as they lay curled together. He couldn’t not sleep; he knew that. Not sleeping was like not eating, he explained, or not breathing; it was like holding your breath in your chest as long as you could, until motes of light were dancing before your eyes and every part of you was saying one word: breathe. That’s what it had been like in the cell, for days and days and days.

And now: the dream was gone, but not the feeling of it. The fear that he would close his eyes and find himself in the dream again. Because, at the end, if not for the girl, he would have done it. She’d come into the dream and stayed his hand, but by then it was too late. He would have killed the woman, killed anyone. He would have done whatever they wanted. And once you knew that about yourself, he said, you could never unknow it. Whoever you thought you were, you were somebody else entirely.

She held him as he spoke, his voice drifting in the darkness, and then for a long time both of them were silent.

Maus? Are you awake?

I’m right here. Though this wasn’t so: she had, in fact, dozed off.

He shifted against her, pulling her arm over his chest like a blanket to keep him warm. Stay awake for me, he said. Can you do that? Until I’m asleep.

Yes, she said. Yes, I can do that.

He was quiet for a while. In the marginless space between their bodies, the baby flipped and kicked.

We’re safe here, Theo, she said. As long as we’re together, we’ll be safe.

I hope that’s true, he said.

I know it’s true, Mausami said. But even as she felt his breathing slow against her, sleep taking him at last, she kept her eyes open, staring into the dark. It’s true, she thought, because it has to be.

FIFTY-NINE

By the time they reached the garrison, it was midafternoon. Their packs had been returned but not their weapons; they were not prisoners, but neither were they free to go as they wished. The term the major had used was “under protection.” From the river they had marched straight north over the ridge. At the base of a second valley they’d come to a muddy trace, rutted with hoofprints and tire tracks. It was sheer chance that they had missed it on their own. Heavy clouds had moved in from the west; the air looked and felt like rain. As the first spits commenced to fall, Peter tasted woodsmoke in the wind.

Major Greer came up beside him. He was a tall, well-built man with a brow so furrowed it looked plowed. He might have been forty years old. He was dressed in loose-fitting camouflage spattered in a pattern of green and brown, drawn tight at the waist by a wide belt, pockets fat with gear. His head, covered by a woolen cap, was shaved clean. Like all his men, a squad of fifteen, he’d painted his face with streaks of mud and charcoal, giving the whites of his eyes a startling vividness. They looked like wolves, like creatures of the forest; they looked like the forest itself. A long-range patrol unit; they had been in the woods for weeks.