Half an hour later, dressed in her khaki pants, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt, Nola lay on the grass under a sycamore tree behind an unkempt hibiscus hedge, while Lulu played. Once, Nola caught sight of two passing mechanics in military uniforms. The pilot returned with one of Lulu's bottles refilled with milk and another glass of the red liquid for Nola. Whatever this concoction was—probably minerals—it flowed through her veins, pumping her body back to life. Nevertheless, shivers still ran through her. She curled up in her heavy jacket.

The prisoners, showered and dressed in clean cotton overalls, dipped chopsticks into the bowl of sticky rice the pilot brought, and Lulu, cradled between Nola's knees, tried scooping it with pudgy fingers in her eagerness to imitate the men’s frenzied eating. Nola hoped Ming-Ji was right, that the baby’s body was safe from the local germs.

Nola watched the men eat. Even though her stomach still felt tender, she stabbed her chopsticks into the communal rice bowl. It felt good to sit among the men, bound together by the experience of the night. Forever they would share their rebirths. She hoped they would be able to unite with their loved ones.

She pointed at her watch to the pilot and raised her eyes in question. He gestured toward the sky, one way, then the other. Nola failed to understand him. Were they waiting for a change in wind direction? For dusk? For another plane? Only one plane had landed, a military one. The pilot looked at the equipment on top of a tower. Radar? Had their plane flown below the radar detection level? Were they waiting for the flight operators to change shifts?

Sam, stronger and younger looking than the other two, paced around in growing concentric circles. After a while, gathering confidence, he threw his arms in the air and jumped. “Oooooh!” he cried in delight, “Oooooh!” He broke off a stick, threw it as far as he could, and then chased after it, as though disbelieving his right to move at will. When he picked it up, he laughed. “Heeeeee, Heeeeee.” The other men teased him, but he kept cackling, running, throwing, like a puppy at play. Nola tossed him Lulu's ball, and he threw it at his friends, enticing them to play, but they giggled and remained seated on their haunches.

Zach, a stooped man with a grizzly face, lowered his jumper top to soak in the sun. His back was crisscrossed with flogging scars in various degrees of healing. The horror of it made the fuzz on Nola's skin rise. Max filled a tin bucket from the storage area with warm water and brought it over. Zach rolled up the bottom of his pants to reveal a blue-and-purple ankle the size of a small tree trunk. He submerged it in the water and, with his back toward the sun, closed his eyes.