She laid her spoon across her plate. Her appetite had faded. She chided herself: how long since you actually took food with these lips, this tongue? And he’ll think you don’t appreciate his cooking.

“I was born. My father worked in a factory. I don’t remember much about my father. When I was very small, he returned to the North. He was never happy with life in the South.”

Eric nodded. “The feverish drive to feed the insatiable appetites of Western consumer-junkie culture. The materialism and greed.”

“So I believe. My mother seldom spoke of him… we moved to the country. She ran a village clinic. I remember she was quiet, not saying much, interested only in helping people.

“My great-grandfather took care of me. He told me stories of the ancient hwarang knights and their traditions of duty and honor and skill in the martial arts – they were much like the Japanese samurai, you see. He himself was descended from the sulsa, the Knights of the Night. They were a special sect of the hwarang, an elite, trained in stealth and hidden ways. They were much like the ninja, of course, but unlike the ninja they were never outlaws. He taught me much about their ways; he did not want the skills to die.”

She gazed into the flame of the wick suspended in a bowl of fish oil that was the only light. The fire danced kata in her black eyes.

“When I was seventeen, I came to America to attend the University of California at Berkeley. My recollections become confused after that.”

“That’s fascinating, Isis,” Eric said, holding her with those beautiful eyes, “and I want to know as much about you as I can – I want to know all about you, if you’ll let me. But it wasn’t what I asked.”

He laughed gently at her crestfallen expression. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I just didn’t ask it clear enough. I wonder where you come from – here, now. How did you get into the middle of a well-guarded military base without anyone spotting you? Where do you go after you go into Meadows’ bunker? And what’s your relationship with Meadows, anyway?”

“I am Mark’s friend,” she said deliberately. “Friend” was what he termed his alter egos, after all. And she truly felt herself to be his friend, so it wasn’t a lie. “Mark’s ace ability is to… call upon us.”

Eric raised an eyebrow. “’Us?’”

“He has other such friends.”

“Yeah. Okay. I remember seeing Jumpin’ Jack Flash on Peregrine’s Perch once – one of the few times I watched TV since I left my parents’ house. He’s one of Meadows’ ’friends,’ isn’t he? And Starshine, isn’t he another?”

Pain rippled across Moonchild’s face. She stared at the planking floor on which she sat cross-legged. “Yes,” she said, all but inaudibly. She longed to pour out her loss, their loss, to this deformed and beautiful young man, to share the pain. But she sensed resistance from Mark and the others. She would not go against their wishes. Not yet.

“Did I say something wrong?” Eric asked.

“No. It was a memory a memory only”

“So how does Meadows call you? How does such a beautiful woman come into the midst of us, and where do you go when you’re gone?”

He was leaning forward, face almost touching hers. Her breath was coming rapidly, as if she had been sparring for minutes on end. Can I tell him? Can I trust him? How can I not?

Thunder detonated. Moonchild cried out and clapped her hands over her ears to keep the drums from imploding. The earth rocked. Fine red dust filtered down between the planks in the low ceiling.

She leapt up and began to dart outside, convinced the bunker was about to collapse on them both. She grabbed Eric in passing, to rush him to safety. He went limp, becoming deadweight.

She stopped. She was strong enough to have hauled him bodily out, but she didn’t want to risk dislocating his shoulder.

“Come on!” she cried. “We must get outside.”

She saw he was laughing at her. “That’s exactly the wrong response to artillery,” he said.

“Artillery?”

“Have no fear. It’s outgoing, from the 152-mm guns in the People’s Army camp next door.”

She frowned. She let him go, went up the steps made of crates to look out. The whole southern sky lit up in a yellowish flash. A heartbeat, and the noise hit her like a tidal wave. She set her jaw, made herself endure the awful sound.

“Pretty bad, isn’t it?” He was standing beside her. She could scarcely hear him for the ringing in her ears.

“Whom do they shoot at?” She thought she could see faint trails of light arcing away across the night. West, into the mountains.

“Nothing in particular. It’s just practice firing, that’s all.”

Just practice firing, that’s all. And Sarge Hamilton had said that the punji trap that injured poor Eraserhead was a relic of the War of Liberation, that the young joker’s stumbling into it had been a bad accident, happenstance of a country still recovering from a horrid military upheaval a decade-and-a-half ended.

Mark Meadows was no jungle-warfare expert. But even he could recognize green bamboo when he saw it. That punji trap was new.

At first she thought the spasm that passed through her was a product of recalling the truth of that trap, and all that it implied. A second shock passed through her, tangible as the blast from the distant guns.

Grandfather! My hour’s up! I’m about to change.

She tore away from Eric, not knowing till then that he had laid a comforting hand on her arm, running across the compound with her long black hair flying.

“Isis!” he shouted. “Isis, come back! It’s all right, the guns can’t hurt you.”

She felt tears squeeze from her eyes and whip across her temples. Her transition back to Mark was intensely personal, private. For others to witness it would be a violation.

She felt guilt at shutting Eric out. He was open with her. How could she hold a part of herself back from him – especially a part as fundamental as where she came from and where she went?

Another spasm wracked her. She almost stumbled. Her molecules were stirring, getting ready to realign themselves. The change was almost on her.

She reached the bunker, hurled herself inside, dove behind the cheap painted rice-paper screen Croyd had scrounged somewhere as a privacy shield. It was Mark Meadows who hit the palette floor. A crack like the gun-thunder echoed in his ears as air rushed in to replace the atmospheric gases that had been sucked into the transition-vortex, to make good the mass difference between compact Moonchild and gangly Mark. The screen lay across him like the wings of a big origami bird.

He picked himself up. Croyd was lying on his back on his bunk, drumming his sucker-tipped fingers on his belly. He looked at Mark with big golden eyes.

“So how was your date?” he asked.

Chapter Thirty-two

“The Man says burn the village,” Sarge said, “we burn the village.” It was a sort of post facto mantra for him; behind them the bamboo hootches were already ablaze, sending clouds of dense smoke to join the overhang of gray.

Sarge’s German shepherd face was grim. Behind him the squad was chatting excitedly, elevated by what had happened.

“Did you see the looks on their dumb nat faces when we torched their shacks?” Haskell asked. His mouth tendrils waved like cheerleader arms.

“Yeah,” the Spoiler said, marching along turning his rifle around in his hands, pointing it this way and that. His eyes shone in his backswept skull. “We really dissed ’em, man. We laid some hurt on them. Too bad we couldn’t burn some of them.”

“Payback for the Rox begins now!” Studebaker Hawk cried, pumping his fist in the air.

“The Rox lives!” the squad shouted. Sergeant Hamilton frowned.

Beside the trail the elephant grass stirred, and Croyd emerged next to Sarge, popping up on his hind legs. He was the only one who could move easily through the taller-than-head-high, razor-edged grass. Sarge whipped his M-203 up to cover him, then lowered it again.