“Antiseptique,” she said. “In English, it is the same, no?”

He nodded. Oh, sweet Jesus, he thought.

In training, they had told him to expect pain—from extreme missions, from wounds, or worse—under torture. Like all the fresh-faced boys eagerly signing up for adventure, Hank had dismissed the advice, too busy dreaming of falling from the sky like a leaf on the wind. He was going to see places and meet people so far from Vermont that they might as well be on a different planet.

He told everyone he was enlisting—with special permission to sign up at age seventeen—for the sake of God, country, and freedom. Deep down, he admitted only to himself that his real reason for going to war had been to escape Mildred Deacon.

Oh, she was pretty enough, and sweet as all get-out. Too sweet for Hank. She wanted to settle down and have babies and keep house while he went off to work at the quarry every day. Now, there was no shame in the family business—they were stonecutters for monuments of all sorts—but Hank wanted more. He wanted to see the world. And he was cocky. He volunteered for the trickiest missions, possible or impossible.

Clearly he had overreached, and this was his punishment.

He nearly bit through the leather, and tears squeezed from his eyes, but he managed to hold still while Lisette used tweezers to pull splinters and ripped fabric from the wound. It was a kind of pain he’d never experienced before. It felt as if the top of his head was coming off. He tried to go away somewhere, to travel deep in his mind to another place. Back home. Moonlight Quarry, where they dug glorious marble from the earth to create pillars for libraries, headstones for the departed, statues to honor heroes.

He had been at war less than a year, and he already knew that the real heroes were not the generals and battle commanders, but the everyday soldiers and common folk who endured the war, day in and day out, often fighting just to stay alive, and burying their dead along the way. When he’d first signed up, he thought it sounded heroic to be a specialized soldier dropped behind enemy lines for reconnaissance work.

Hank had never been much for school, but in special training, he became the scholar his parents never thought he would be. He learned to operate aids to navigation, to read a map and compass in the dark, to sense the wind and weather with the lick of a finger. He knew how to use compass beacons, colored panels, Eureka radar sets, even colored smoke. His stick, which consisted of a dozen pathfinders and the bodyguards tasked with defending them on the ground, had performed successful missions in Sicily and along the coast of Italy. Their job was to land in the DZ in advance of the main body, setting up visual and radio signals for the incoming troopers, finding pickup zones and landing sites, creating a clear field of action for the ground ops to come. Some fellows didn’t think the work was as important as combat runs, but Hank had eagerly volunteered for the advance mission. When it came down to it, he didn’t really want to kill anybody.