I turned away again.

“There, there, Sergeant,” he said. “I'm sorry. Very sorry. We should have gotten that over with long, long ago. Shouldn't we have? Shouldn't we?”

I left him there. I walked away-away from Gurley away from the balloon, away from the tents and the boats. I walked toward nothing. But I didn't get far before I ran out of land. I waded in, stumbled, soaked myself, and retreated. I walked back toward Gurley, who was still talking-to me, to himself-and tried a different direction. Again I sank. I just wanted to leave, and leave all of them behind. I wanted to keep walking until I could no longer hear Gurley's voice, until I could no longer see anything. But wherever I stepped, the water rose around my feet. I wanted a balloon of my own.

I returned and stood by Gurley. He kept talking, and talking, whether or not I was looking at him. Usually I wasn't. I was embarrassed with what I'd done to him. I might as well have attacked the little Japanese boy; Gurley looked almost as pathetic and wild-eyed.

Gurley made it worse by insisting that he forgave me. He said this in a dozen different ways, cited anecdotes, quoted the Bible, said he understood, offered consolation, commiseration. Unfortunately, I was young enough and Christian enough to want and need, and worst of all, believe, that forgiveness. Which meant that when he finally worked his monologue back around to Lily and the boy, the two of them in the tent, it was already too late for me. The most potent tranquilizing drug would not have worked on me so quickly or so well. He was planning, and I was listening. “A little awkward, a little awkward,” he concluded, “but-we'll make it work. We'll find a way. We've had bigger challenges in this war, haven't we, Sergeant?” I looked away. “And bigger yet to come. Now, let us find our way back to the boat, and I shall tell you what we-what you, in particular, have to do.”

Gurley used what light the night provided to pick a way back to the boat that didn't lead us directly past the tent. There wasn't much of a moon, but somehow the tundra still managed a silver glow. I was too full of all that Lily had told me to stop him or even speak up. The only things I had to say in fact, were about Lily and I couldn't find a way to tell Gurley what I knew. Did he know that Lily really loved him? Actually the word probably wasn't love but it was something like that. Needed him. Had found herself bound to him. Gurley meanwhile, spoke of bombs and fuses and delays, and whether we had the equipment required to detonate something remotely. Then he stopped talking, and after a moment, I realized he was waiting for a reply.

“I think we do-I think we have all that, sir,” I said, having trouble readjusting from the world we were in to the one we had left, where there were rules, a war, and bombs, and people like me who dealt with them. “You want to blow up the balloon after all?” I asked, mostly to get additional time to refocus. It took a moment: after Lily's frantic whispers, I'd forgotten that it had been a balloon that had brought the boy here, not spirits, not magic, not Lily.

Gurley stopped walking and looked at me warily. “Yes,” he said. “I want to blow up-the balloon.” He looked over my shoulder in the direction of the tent. “No need to save it. We certainly have enough balloon carcasses by now,” he said. “But you see the problem, Sergeant- yes?”

Peter betrayed Jesus three times before the cock crowed at dawn. To my knowledge, the devil has asked me to be faithful just once-right there, before dawn-and I obeyed: I listened.

Gurley wanted to blow up the balloon, yes, but he also wanted to blow up the boy. A living, breathing Japanese who'd arrived by balloon was a glorious prize, but an outdated one. The war was ending. Worse yet, men like the major in Fairbanks would add the boy to the two dead “fishermen” and decide the sum equaled the start of a massive, and manned, balloon campaign. That could only mean extra months (years?) in Alaska. No: we had to dispose of the balloon and the boy destroy any trace that they had ever existed, and we had to do it immediately. The major and the men from Ladd Field were likely just hours away from deciding to strike out across the tundra in search of germs.

The boy was dying, Gurley said, building his case. What was wanted was mercy, not agony, not for anyone. Now, he couldn't put a gun to the boy's head, Gurley explained. He wasn't a barbarian. And he couldn't ask me to do it: I wasn't enough of a soldier. (He didn't even pause to smirk.) No, things had to proceed according to the natural order of things, which was this: whoever had put the boy in that balloon (“A stowaway?” I asked, merely to have some way to counter him, but Gurley rolled his eyes) had intended for him to die in the ensuing explosion. When the balloon crashed, it should have exploded. He should have died. Our presence had upset this plan; we could give fate its due by placing the boy back at the crash site, and then detonating the balloon. This was not about the army, or war, or anything else. It was about predestination. The divine order of things. We had the equipment, which was simple enough. C3, blasting wire, a little hell box. Put the boy in position, affix the explosives, run the wire, retreat to safety, depress the plunger, and-

“Lily?” I asked.

Gurley spun around, then turned back to me, relieved. We'd reached the boat. “I thought you meant she was here.”

“No,” I said, taking a quick look for her myself. “But she'll hear the blast.”

Gurley nodded and exhaled and said nothing for a while.

When he started speaking again, his voice had changed. Just slightly, but the effect was startling. “It's too much,” he said. “It's too much to ask her, too, to die-of simple heartache,” he added. “Not over me, of course,” he said, his face tight with disdain. “But dear Saburo.” I stared. “Rapist and rival, and spy.” He waited, clearly looking for a sign in me that I understood what he meant and did not need him to go on. But whatever he saw wasn't enough, so he continued. “As you must know, hormone-besotted as you are, Fair Belk, Miss Lily has become a… difficulty, yes. 'Tis true?”

“Sir,” I said, and stopped. “My-my God-”

“Yes,” Gurley said. “Your God. Does not smile down upon this part of the world. No, tremble not, Sergeant. As convenient as it would be if Lily, too, lay beside the boy, beside the balloon, only to disappear with the rest of the mess, it is a trifle inconvenient as well,” he admitted. “Morally.”

“She-loves you,” I said. It was all I could think of to say. “She told me.”

Gurley looked at me. First his face said: a lie. Then it said: how sweet if it were true. And then he spoke. “Well, Sergeant,” he said. “You see our dilemma.”

I COULD HAVE REFUSED to set the charge against the balloon. Refused to unspool the wire, refused to attach it to the hell box. I could have refused to knife the wall of the tent where the boy and Lily lay, refused to snatch the boy through the gash-his screams instant, inhuman-and sprint for the crash site while Gurley wrestled with Lily quieting her with the force of his words and, when that didn't work, force alone. I could have refused to set the boy in the place Gurley had designated within the balloon's wreckage. I could have refused to bind the boy's arms and legs to the control frame just as Gurley insisted he would tie Lily to the boat, or to stakes in the ground, or to whatever he had to in order to keep her from following us back to the balloon.

But I did as I was told, and, with Lily's plea still echoing, a little bit more. When Gurley and I met, however-me walking back from the balloon site and him walking toward it-I realized, too late, that I could have done better.

He looked furious, on the point of weeping. He didn't break his stride nor even turn to look at me as he spoke: “Change of plans, Sergeant.” I think my heart stopped beating. I certainly stopped walking, and turned to watch him lurch through the swampy tundra toward the balloon.