Lieutenant Sayle had been conferring with his sergeants, but now he looked up, a pale cadaverous mantis turning attention to its prey.

“Looks like dinner.”

He returned to marking off quadrants on a moldy map, uninterested in what he had ordered, or whom it affected.

The soldier boy looped Gabby’s rope around her legs, trussed them, and abruptly shoved her over. It was a casual shove, almost bored. The goat fell with a thud and whuff of surprise, as powerless as a sack of dropped rice.

Lieutenant Sayle was back to talking with his sergeants, his words blending with the rest of the soldiers’ activities. “Flush it up against the coast, sweep south.” The details of their hunt. “A-6, push along this ridge; it’s still above tide line. This river cut might give it protection…”

Mahlia watched, powerless, as the soldier boy knelt beside Gabby, lifted his machete, and hacked into her neck. Gabby bleated once in panic and then the blade sank in and the goat lost her voice. The boy started sawing across. Blood spilled out. Mahlia looked away.

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.

Mahlia finished washing her hands in boiled water and rinsed in alcohol, fighting to ignore Gabby’s dismemberment.

It’s what they do, she reminded herself. Don’t fight things you can’t fight. She needed to think like Sun Tzu. Make her own plans for how to get the meds she needed and escape back to Mouse.

Mahlia focused on Sayle, listening to him plan. “B-6, Hi-Lo Platoon, Potomac…” None of the names meant anything to Mahlia except that soldiers were out there—lots of them—and they wanted that half-man, and Mouse’s life wasn’t worth rust. If they found the half-man before Mahlia could return, the monster would believe she had betrayed it, and Mouse would die, and she was stuck here, fixing up someone who would just as soon chop off her last hand.

Mahlia finished washing, grabbed boiled forceps and scalpels and needles from their battered cook pot, and shoved through the ring of watching soldiers to the last living victim, wishing there were some way to tell the doctor what was happening to Mouse.

“Ease back,” she ordered as she pushed through. The soldiers shifted a little but didn’t move away.

The doctor looked up. “Your comrade needs air and he needs your dirt away from his wounds. Either you listen to the girl, or your friend will not survive.”