I looked away, feeling like an interloper.

Just as Patricia looked back and smiled beatifically at me, a truck approached head-on. The lorry weaved slightly, the ropes straining to keep its bundled cargo in place. The truck’s horn bleated, breaking through the ballad. Indigo yelled and jerked the steering wheel to the right. The van tilted, its tires lifting off the road just enough to make my stomach rise and fall. Tilly howled, her hand flying across my chest to secure me. My head bounced against the back of Patricia’s empty seat.

Metal and glass crunched against the unforgiving mountain.

I touched my head, blinking to clear the confusion. Patricia lay, facedown, in the small space in the middle of the van. Indigo yelled her name as he fumbled with his seat belt. The two men and the other woman scrambled to reach her, their limbs knotting the hollow of the van.

I feared, very seriously, that Patricia was dead, even as they called her name. Before the coup, death had been a plaything. My friends and I had laughed and joked about it. We’d made it part of our imagined stories. But I hadn’t believed in it because I hadn’t really seen it. If the sun rises every day, it is hard to imagine that it is not promised.

But now that I’d seen death, I knew it was a thing with teeth.

I buried my head in Tilly’s shoulder, not wanting to watch as Patricia’s friends pulled her onto the seat. Even when I heard her groan, I still did not dare look. From the floor of the van, she cursed at Indigo, which made him breathe a sigh of relief.

“You really scared me there. Oh, Patty, you scared me bad.”

My eyes were still clamped shut, my face pressed into the small space beneath Tilly’s collarbone.

Tilly.

I thought back to the night she’d knelt on the floor of Antonia’s apartment, rocking me as if I were hers. And the way her arm had sprung to keep me from flying out of my seat.

Why wasn’t that arm curled around me now?

“Tilly?” I said, looking up at her. A scarlet line trickled from above her left eyebrow, where the skin had split apart. Her eyes fluttered slightly.

“Tilly!” I called again, stupidly. I grabbed her by the shoulders.

The sun’s rays fell directly on Tilly’s head, her silver hair shimmering. I pressed my cheek to Tilly’s. It was because of me that she sat in the cradle of mountains, bleeding.

“Forgive me,” I whispered in Dari.

I turned my head to look out the window and saw the flighted creature, observer or omen, soaring above us with wings in full salute.

Chapter 21