of shoulders. “You’re a doctor. Think logically. Think about your wife. Think about yourself. Think about your silence. It’s reckless.”
“I owe Dokka my silence more than I owe you anything,” Akhmed said.
“Owe? We’re beyond obligation,” Ramzan said. “We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. I know you think you are being noble, that this is some terrific act of sacrifice. You probably believe that because you fucked Dokka’s wife two years ago, you owe it to him to save his child. But let me be clear, Akhmed. You don’t. She is not yours.” Ramzan’s voice cracked, and he steadied himself with two deep breaths. It wasn’t an act. “I know you think I’m a traitor and a coward, Akhmed. And you’re right. But that doesn’t make me wrong. I’m telling you this because we were friends. You don’t owe this to Dokka.”
Akhmed hadn’t lusted for Esiila before the wars, hadn’t thought of her as more than the wife of his closest friend. She could have been anyone. He had just wanted to hear his name breathed in his ear, a body warm and damp beneath him, whole and alive and a world away from pain. Was it such a sin? No, of course not. But Dokka. There was Dokka. Now he stood up for them, as if he were a hero rather than a hypocrite, as if he hadn’t betrayed, dishonored, and broken the family whose last living member he now offered his life to save. Ramzan stood across from him, but he knew that in their hearts, they stood on the same side.
Pale moonlight fell across his snowy boot tracks, and Akhmed suddenly saw the fragility of the plan he’d designed over the past day. The girl would be safe, he had assumed, if he severed the link between the village and the city, and the link was him. But this meant trusting that Sonja would care for the girl. It meant trusting an erratic, overextended surgeon, who had put a gun to his back a day earlier, with the girl’s life. It meant pushing through his endless doubts and trusting, however misguidedly, the decency he believed was buried inside Sonja.
“Why do they want the girl, Ramzan? You still haven’t tried to explain.”
“Revenge,” Ramzan said flatly. “Dokka fucked up.”
“But what did he do?”
“Akhmed. So many questions. If you had learned to keep your mouth shut, your eyes on your feet, you would have had a happier life.”
“They already have Dokka, Ramzan. Why do they need the girl?”
Ramzan shook his head. “Because the life of a Russian colonel doesn’t equal the life of a Chechen arborist.”
“You can’t mean that—”
“A few days after we returned from the Landfill, Dokka asked me for a pistol. He wanted to be able to protect his family, so I gave him one of the Makarovs I’d kept from our final fucked-up gun run. That same Makarov was later used to assassinate a colonel.”
“But Dokka couldn’t have been an insurgent. He couldn’t hold a gun in his hand, much less fire it!”
“That doesn’t matter when the serial number on the pistol used to kill a colonel sequentially matches the serial numbers of the guns those lost soldiers took off us before they left us at the Landfill. The Feds made the connection. I couldn’t give Dokka up, because they already had him.”
“But why do they want the girl?”
Ramzan gave him a sad smile. “You know the saying, As the son inherits from the father, so the father inherits from the son? The Feds have made it official policy. There is a campaign to disappear not only suspected insurgents but their relatives as well. The idea being that you are less likely to go into the woods with the rebels if you know that your house will burn and your family will disappear. Rebel recruitment has plummeted in recent months. It’s part of the new hearts-and-minds strategy. It’s how they will win the war on terror. They will kill Havaa and call it peace.”
Akhmed’s head hummed with the shock of how not shocked he was. What Ramzan said made sense to him. He understood why the Feds would want to kill a child. Accompanying that understanding was a second, equally shameful recognition: this incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m trying