Her head was swimming. She was hungry, she was thirsty, and she was tired. She had been terrified of dying, but now she was much less so. They had made her say terrible things about her father, things she didn’t mean, things she didn’t even remember. She knew they were horrible, and that was all. She hated them for doing that.

She tried to focus on what Ahmet was saying, on what it meant, but it was hard.

A fighter had suddenly walked in, spoken to Ahmet in their language, and then started killing him. Then the fighter had turned his back on Ahmet, and Ahmet had killed the fighter instead. Ahmet was a slippery guy. Who could trust him?

But Ahmet had also saved her life.

“If I go west, is there a way down?”

Ahmet shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. But west will take you away from the mujahideen, who are mostly deployed to the east. They will try to hold the line against the enemy coming uphill. The terrain here is harsh. There is nowhere for the Americans to land.”

“So what’s to the west, then?”

“The cliffs.”

She stared at him.

“You are wearing bright orange,” Ahmet said. “If you are lucky, your friends will see you from the sky. If you are unlucky, you can still choose your own death, and not the one the militants would choose for you.”

It took a few seconds for that idea to sink in with her.

“Jump?” Elizabeth said. “From the cliffs?”

Ahmet nodded. “Yes.”

Elizabeth didn’t love the sound of that. Maybe there was another choice here, one that Ahmet wasn’t thinking of. She had learned that in a business class once. Look for the third option, the one that was being overlooked.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

He had picked up the other man’s gun and was checking the ammunition. Now he was taking what looked like hand grenades from the man’s vest.

“I’m going to die protecting you,” he said.

She gestured at the gun. “Do you even know how to use that thing?”

He patted the barrel. A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “Of course. I was trained in the jihad camps.”

He put the gun down and began to go through the dead man’s pockets. There was blood soaked into the dirt near the man’s head. It was shocking to her, a little bit, the businesslike way Ahmet killed someone, then went about looting the corpse. Ahmet was cold-blooded. All of these people… they just…

She didn’t have words for it.