“What it is, these places we’re fighting, we need to gather intel from the locals, the villagers,” she said, still scratching behind Lucy’s right ear. The dog leaned into her knuckles, groaned a little bit, visibly relaxed. “But the way it works, the women in those villages won’t talk to our men, it’s a cultural taboo. But just because they won’t talk doesn’t mean they don’t have good intel.”

“So they send you to talk to them,” Burke said.

“It was everything I wanted.” Lucy was practically sitting in Jess’s lap now, gazing up into her eyes with those big, gentle brown eyes of her own, sad and anxious and content at the same time, and the dog’s warmth against her body was a comfort to Jess, too, and she guessed that was the point of a “companion animal,” someone to calm her nerves down, keep her centered.

To Jess’s chagrin, it was working.

“I grew up believing a soldier’s role was combat,” she said. “Even if I was a girl, I didn’t want to get stuck behind the front line, some stupid support position. And my team, they embedded us with an infantry unit, rotated us to the front and sent us out on patrols like we were regular marines. It was action, and I liked the action, and I liked the job, too.”

“Working with the local women.”

She nodded. “They’d tell me stuff that no man would tell our men. They knew stuff their men didn’t, stuff they would only tell another woman. And once I got them to trust me, I really felt like I was making a difference over there.”

“Sounds like a good thing you had going on,” Burke said.

“Who knows? In the broad scheme of things, it never amounted to much. Our guys made advances, took up forward positions; their guys would ambush and try to take it back. People died on both sides, and nothing ever seemed to change. As far as I can figure, they’ll be fighting over that little nowhere valley long after we’re all dead and gone.”

Burke looked out over the water, seemed to be considering this. “They teach you Arabic?” he asked after a beat.

“Pashto,” she said. Something stirred in her chest, something uneasy and miserable. “Pashto is the language.”

“Do you speak it?”

“No.” She could feel that something in her chest coming to life now, and she could feel her mind withdraw to compensate. “I had an interpreter.”

“What, like a local woman? One of the villagers? How’d they sign her up?”

Afia.