Mal felt herself growing calm. Her panic was like static on a radio, and she had just found the volume, was slowly dialing it down. He would not begin with the shears, of course, but would work his way up to them. He meant to beat her first. At least. She drew a long, surprisingly steady breath. Mal felt almost as if she were back on Hatchet Hill, climbing with all the will and strength she had in her, for the cold, open blue of the sky.

“I’m not married,” she said. “I stole this wedding ring off a drunk. I was just wearing it because I like it.”

He laughed: a bitter, ugly sound. “That isn’t even a good lie.”

And another breath, filling her chest with air, expanding her lungs to their limit. He was about to start hurting her. He would force her to talk, to give him information, to tell him what he wanted to hear. She was ready. She was not afraid of being pushed to the edge of what could be endured. She had a high tolerance for pain, and her bayonet was in arm’s reach, if only she had an arm to reach.

“It’s the truth,” she said, and with that, PFC Mallory Grennan began her confession.

The Devil on the Staircase

I WAS BORN IN SULLE SCALE the child of a common bricklayer. The village of my birth nested in the highest sharpest ridges, high above Positano, and in the cold spring the clouds crawled along the streets like a procession of ghosts. It was eight hundred and twenty steps from Sulle Scale to the world below. I know. I walked them again and again with my father, following his tread, from our home in the sky, and then back again.

After his death I walked them often enough alone. Up and down carrying freight until with each step it seemed as if the bones in my knees were being ground up into sharp white splinters.

The cliffs were mazed with crooked staircases, made from brick in some places, granite in others. Marble here, limestone there, clay tiles, or beams of lumber. When there were stairs to build my father built them. When the steps were washed out by spring rains it fell to him to repair them. For years he had a donkey to carry his stone. After it fell dead, he had me.

I hated him of course. He had his cats and he sang to them and poured them saucers of milk and told them foolish stories and stroked them in his lap and when one time I kicked one—I do not remember why—he kicked me to the floor and said not to touch his babies.