of his breath, she heard her own voice rising, bubbling past. God bless you. God bless and keep you, Mr. Carter.
Then he was gone. She was lying on the ground, bleeding, time passing, the sickness starting; that which was to pass between them had found its way, she knew. Lacey closed her eyes and prayed for a sign, but no sign came. As it had been in the field after the men had left her, when she was just a girl. It seemed, in that dark hour, that God had forgotten about her, but then as dawn opened the sky above her face, from out of the stillness came the figure of a man. She could hear the soft tread of his steps upon the earth, could smell the smoke of his skin and hair. She tried to speak but couldn’t; neither did the man address her, nor tell her his name. In silence he lifted her into her arms, cradling her like a child, and Lacey thought that it was God Himself, come to take her to His home in heaven. His eyes were hooded in shadow; his hair was a dark corona, wild and beautiful, like his beard, a dense mass of gray upon his face. He carried her through the smoking ruins, and she saw that he was weeping. Those are God’s own tears, Lacey thought, yearning to reach out and touch them. It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop. An exhausted peacefulness swept through her; for a time she slept. She did not recall what happened next, but when it was over and the sickness had passed, she opened her eyes and knew that he had done it; he had saved her. She had found the way to Amy, she had found the way at last.
Lacey, she heard. Listen.
She did. She listened. The voices moved over her like a breeze on water, like a current in the blood. Everywhere and all around.
Hear them, Lacey. Hear them all.
And so it was that through the years she’d waited. She, Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto, and the man who had carried her through the forest, who was not God after all but human, a human being. The good doctor—for that was how she thought of him; that was the name she used in her mind, though his given name, his Christian name, was Jonas. Jonas Lear. The saddest man in all the world. Together they had built the house in the glen where Lacey lived still—not much larger than the shacks she recalled from the dusty roads and red-clay fields of her youth—but sturdier, and made to last. The doctor once told her that he had built a house before, a cabin on a lake in the woods of Maine. That he had built this cabin with Elizabeth, his wife who had died, he did not say, but he did not have to. The abandoned compound was a bounty, waiting to be harvested. They had taken the lumber from the burnt remains of the Chalet; in the storage buildings they found hammers and saws and planes and sacks of nails, as well as sacks of concrete and a mixer, to pour the posts that would serve as the cabin’s foundation and to mortar the fieldstones that the two of them lifted into place to build the hearth. For one whole summer they stripped roofing shingles off the old barracks, only to find that they leaked, the asphalt torn in too many places; in the end they piled sod on top, making a roof of dirt and grass. There were guns, too, guns by the hundreds, guns of every sort and nature; it was not easy, getting rid of so many guns. For a period of time that was how they occupied themselves, dismantling the soldiers’ guns until all that remained was a vast mound of nuts and bolts and glossy metal pieces, not even worth burying.
He left her only one time, their third summer on the mountain, to go in search of seeds. He took the one gun he had kept, a rifle, with the food and fuel and other supplies he would need, all packed in the pickup that he had prepared for his journey. Three days, he said, but two whole weeks had come and gone before Lacey heard the sound of the pickup’s