All this Teresa had seen.

But the girl wasn’t gone. The girl was the girl in her dreams, and she stood now in her twine shoes and with her large eyes, not a memory but someone tangibly real, a separate entity. They stood in limbo, and she understood that this was a place inside herself, a place the dreamstone had brought her, the place the little girl lived. And if the girl is here, Teresa thought, and if she can speak, doesn’t that mean she’s alive somehow still? Alive inside me!

“You know who I am,” the little girl said solemnly.

She did, of course. The girl was herself. But more than that. A kind of ghost. A ghost of what she had been, a ghost of what she had never become.

It was possible to see all this, to understand it; it was possible, she thought, even to forgive. The girl had done nothing wrong. But the vision had been vivid and shocking, and the idea of stepping back inside that abandoned shell, of becoming, in some sense, this ragged girl again—

“But you have to,” the girl said. “Seeing isn’t enough.”

No. It was impossible. Too many layers of scar, a life built on that denial. To own all that torment, to own her mother and Carlos and the fire … it was terrifying.

Fire and guilt had made her what she was. She was Teresa; she could not put aside Teresa.

The girl stepped closer. Not really a little girl anymore, Teresa thought: more like a reflection in a mirror, but tousled and frightened. “I didn’t die. I walked you through the fire. I walked you to the mainland. You tried to kill me. You tried to kill me with the pills. But you can’t do it that way.”

Go away, she thought dazedly.

“I’ve been hidden too long,” the girl said.

Teresa said desperately, “It wasn’t your fault. I know that now. I—”

But the girl shook her head. “It’s not enough!”

A swirl of panic. “What, then?”

“Take me back.” The girl advanced. “Touch me.” She held out her small hands. “Be me.”

Teresa struggled to frame an answer, but could not: she was lifted roughly, shocked by a sudden and terrible light, surrounded at once by gunfire and smoke and the plangent stink of fear.

CHAPTER 14

Keller put his hands on her shoulders. Her eyes blinked suddenly and unseeingly open; the dreamstone was still clasped tight in her hands.

The contact between them was electric and strange, vastly more powerful than it had been that moment in the church in Cuiaba. He was lost in it.

He smelled the hot, granular earth of a manioc field in Rondonia, and knew the memory would be a bad one.

Until the moment of the ambush, Keller had every reason to believe this patrol would turn out okay.

Everybody said so. Meg said so. Their CO said the posseiros were hanging fire against the possibility of a dry-season offensive in the populated west. Covert sensors along guerilla supply trails had registered diminished activity for more than a month. Keller’s platoon had walked patrol into five government-held strategic villages in this ravaged farm country, and the only sign of enemy action had been a single undetonated flail trap loaded with monomolecular wire: the trigger had rusted open. They disarmed it and marched on.

Keller felt the obvious sense of relief, but also, curiously, a muted disappointment. Not that he was anxious to see combat. He wasn’t naive and he wasn’t stupid. He had seen the wounded ferried in to the base hospital at Cuiaba ; he understood about pain and death. Nor was he, in the cute Psych Corps phrase, “hypermotivated”—he was here strictly because his lottery number had come up.

But he could not help thinking of what Megan had told him that night in his bunk. “Out there, Ray, it’s easy-to do things you’re not proud of.”

It was more than anyone else had said to him. “Out there,” she had said. Like it was the name of a place. Out there. A mystery. No one talked about it, but it was at the center of all their lives. They were trained for it, they dreamed about it; Keller was reminded a dozen times daily that he was, by this final criterion, a virgin. And so he asked himself all the dumb and obvious and impermissible questions. Will I be brave? Will it hurt? Will I die?

But the end of the patrol had almost come, and Keller had begun to believe the questions would not be answered this time out. And he was occupied with this curious mixture of gratitude and disappointment when the dread thing actually became real—when the ambush came down around him.

They were crossing a manioc field toward the margin of the contested highway, BR-364. They were in loose formation. A nineteen-year-old named Hooper was walking point. Hooper was weighed down with sensory extenders and a heads-up helmet display that made him look like a cockroach (Byron had said this) on its hind legs. Hooper should have warned them. But Hooper was goofing off. In the glare of the first explosion Keller saw Hooper diddling his arm controls—maybe trying to focus in on some suspicious image but more likely just playing with the display, turning the sky purple or some shit like that. They warned you about that in basic. Don’t play games. It was elementary. Keller’s first reaction to the attack therefore was this burst of petulance toward Hooper. Hooper! he thought. Hooper, you asshole!

The shock wave knocked him down.

The next moments were timeless. By dint of luck he had fallen into a bomb crater as wide as his body. It afforded a little protection against the wire barrage flailing out from tree cover. Keller rolled on his belly in time to see Logan, a black Spec/4, take a wire. Keller was shocked into dis-passion. It was as if Logan had walked into a hail of razor blades. He was blood all over, toppling like a tree. He was too cut up to make any noise. He just fell.

My Christ, Keller thought.

His rifle was compressed in the mud beneath him. He drew it out now, trying not to panic, wanting the protection of it, but there was nothing obvious to shoot at: only the stand of distant trees, the empty ribbon of highway, the still air edging toward dusk. In this momentary lull Keller was able to hear the CO shouting incoherent orders somewhere off to the left, this escalating into a scream. He belly-crawled forward until he was able to scan a section of the field. Everybody down, whole or cut. Hooper down. The CO down and bleeding. Yards away, in the meager cover of a stump, the radioman made a staccato call for aid and air cover. With a dizzying combination of reluctance and urgency, Keller forced himself to look for Meg.

His eyes lingered a second on Byron Ostler, the platoon Angel, who was down and whole and scanning the scene methodically. Watching, Keller felt a microsecond of envy. He was deep in it, Keller thought: lost in some neurological subroutine, miles beyond fear. Angel Zen. The thinking part of him had closed up like a nut. It must be sweet.

All this in an eyeblink.

And then he found Meg. She had been walking to his left and a couple of yards to his rear. He had to crane his head to find her. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.

She had been hit.

The horror of it was giddy, skull-cracking. Keller blanked on it—was not sure for a second what he was looking at.

She had taken a wire in the legs, and her legs below the knees were a hideous red confetti. She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t stand. She was exposed, out there on the furrowed blankness of the manioc field. And she was alive.

She was gesturing to him. Her hand was out. Ray, she seemed to be saying. She wanted him to pull her into the crater with him, somewhere where she might be safe— might live until a medevac unit arrived. He blinked, watching. She stretched her bloody hand toward him, and the look in her eyes now was fervent, terrifying. He scuffled forward and reached for her. When someone hurts, he thought, you help. It was as simple as that.