He rolled as the man sent off another shot, then again, all the way to the other side of the road.

Where he found Roy, who grabbed him down.

“Where have you been?”

“Reconnaissance.”

In the firelight, he spotted a red rash down Roy’s face, blood in his eyes, his arm at a strange angle.

“Now what?”

“Here,” Roy said and slapped something into York’s hand.

A grenade. “Where —”

“While you two were wrestling, I unpacked his bike. He’s got a small armory in there. But I have bad aim.” He was looking past York, and now pointed.

York turned. The man had found his feet, had started for them.

York pulled the pin and tossed the grenade.

Roy grabbed him and they rolled down into the well of the ditch.

The grenade detonated and for a long moment he didn’t move.

Then, he popped up.

Roy was ahead of him, scrabbling up the embankment. He shot a look at the attacker. “Oh. Well, the helmet worked.”

York winced.

Pieces—although his body was still on his head. He got up and walked over to the body, then lifted the visor.

“I wasn’t being paranoid.” He turned away.

Roy came up, looking like the terminator, bloody, in pieces, grim and angry. “Gregori?”

York gave another look at the man. “Maybe.”

“My cell phone was in the car,” Roy said.

“The bike is wrecked.” York had walked over to examine the machine, hoping.

Too bad. It was a nice bike.

“We should grab some of those munitions,” Roy said.

York looked at him. “And be arrested as terrorists? Look at you. We need to find a hospital.”

Roy had walked over to the ditch, staring at the burning Fiat.

York joined him. “You’re not getting your deposit back.”

“At least I wasn’t driving the Maserati.”

Roy looked at him and York met it with a shake of his head, a wry grin.

Then he turned away from Roy, the burning car, the moonlight, and stared at the road ahead, a light in the distance. “Gotta love Italy.”

Then he put Roy’s good arm over his shoulder, and they headed up the road.

Chapter 4

Chapter 7/Portami a casa: un ricordo della resistenza italiana

I’d left him in the grotto, behind a wall of wine casks, on a pallet. He had barely roused when Arturo and I retrieved him from the field, and even when I removed his shirt and pulled the bullet out of the terrible wound in his back. When he didn’t die the first night, breaking out in a fever instead, I wanted to fetch the doctor, but Arturo forbid it.

He doesn’t want the stranger here. Doesn’t want me to feed him, tend him.

Arturo knows the dangers. He is the one who visits the monastery in the valley, retrieves the news from the other hilltop cities.