other men were running and soldiers were shooting. He said he was a teacher of literature, that he had a little girl. He said he had taken his twelve-year-old to Disneyland Paris once.
“He’s fucking with us,” Plough said. “What’s a professor of literature doing out at two A.M. in the worst part of town? Your queer-fuck bin Laden friends blew the face right off an American GI, a good man, a man with a pregnant wife back home. Where do your friends— Mal, make him understand he’s going to tell us where his friends are hiding. Let him know it would be better to tell us now, before we get where we’re going. Let him know this is the easy part of his day. CI wants this motherfucker good and soft before we get him there.”
Mal nodded, her ears buzzing. She told the Professor he didn’t have a daughter, because he was a known homosexual. She asked him if he liked the barrel of her gun in his ass, if it excited him. She said, “Where is the house of your partners who make the dogs into bombs? Where is your homosexual friends go after murdering Americans with their trick dogs? Tell me if you don’t want the gun in the hole of your ass.”
“I swear by the life of my little girl I don’t know who those other men were. Please. My child is named Alaya. She is ten years old. There was a picture of her in my pants. Where are my pants? I will show you.”
She stepped on his hand and felt the bones compress unnaturally under her heel. He shrieked.
“Tell,” she said. “Tell.”
“I can’t.”
A steely clashing sound caught Mal’s attention. Anshaw had dropped the crutches. He looked green, and his hands were hooked into claws, raised almost but not quite to cover his ears.
“You okay?” she asked.
“He’s lying,” Anshaw said. Anshaw’s Arabic was not as good as hers, but not bad. “He said his daughter was twelve the first time.”
She stared at Anshaw, and he stared back, and while they were looking at each other, there came a high, keening whistle, like air being let out of some giant balloon . . . a sound that made Mal’s racy blood feel as if it were fizzing with oxygen, made her feel carbonated inside. She flipped her M4 around to hold it by the barrel in both hands, and when the mortar struck—out beyond the perimeter but still hitting hard enough to cause the earth to shake underfoot—she drove the butt of the gun straight down into the Professor’s broken leg, clubbing at it as if she were trying to drive a stake into the ground. Over the shattering thunder of the exploding mortar, not even Mal could hear him screaming.
MAL PUSHED HERSELF HARD ON HER Friday-morning run, out in the woods, driving herself up Hatchet Hill, reaching ground so steep she was really climbing, not running. She kept going until she was short of breath and the sky seemed to spin, as if it were the roof of a carousel.
When she finally paused, she felt faint. The wind breathed in her face, chilling her sweat, a curiously pleasant sensation. Even the feeling of light-headedness, of being close to exhaustion and collapse, was somehow satisfying to her.
The army had her for four years before Mal left to become a part of the reserves. On her second day of basic training, she had done pushups until she was sick, then was so weak she collapsed in it. She wept in front of others, something she could now hardly bear to remember.
Eventually she learned to like the feeling that came right before collapse: the way the sky got big, and sounds grew far away and tinny, and all the colors seemed to sharpen to a hallucinatory brightness. There was an intensity of sensation when you were on the edge of what you could handle, when you were physically tested and made to fight for each breath, that was somehow exhilarating.
At the top of the hill, Mal slipped the stainless-steel canteen out of her ruck, her father’s old camping canteen, and filled her mouth with ice water. The canteen flashed, a silver mirror in the late-morning sun. She poured water onto her face, wiped her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt, put the canteen away, and ran on, ran for home.
She let herself in through the front door, didn’t notice the envelope until she stepped on it and heard