Her hand is on my head. She strokes my head, begins to brush my hair as she used to do for both me and Emily at night when we were little. Where did she get the brush? Is she really there? It’s not possible. I know where I am. I know what’s going on outside. But if I turn around and she is not there, that would be the absolute worst thing in the world. I can’t lose her, I can’t lose her, I can’t lose her again. Mama, please don’t leave me, I can’t bear it, I just can’t. She brushes and brushes, and all the time, that soft wind blows. The little bird sits beside the boxes of morphine syrettes and sings. More flower petals rush from the folds of the scarf, now flapping and blowing as the wind grows stronger. The floor is littered with petals, an inch of pink snow covering the ground. She brushes and brushes and brushes my hair. The wind grows stronger, colder, no longer entirely pleasant. She brushes harder. She’s pulling my hair. Ow, Mama, stop, that hurts.

I pull away.

I turn.

There’s no one there.

Of course there’s no one there. What was I thinking? When I turn again there is no wind, no birds, no flower petals. Nurse Petrov’s scarf hangs on its hook beside her coat where she left it before this whole ordeal began.

Another century passes. It is a quieter century than the centuries previous. I leave the closet.

I cannot describe the ward in which I sutured ordinary wounds just yesterday.

I heard groaning. “Help me.”

It was coming from a body beneath two other bodies, those of a dead naked nurse still bleeding from down there and a dead soldier without eyes. I stood for a long moment and looked at them, seeing without seeing.

Tenderly, I moved them to empty beds. How did I get so strong? Beneath them, a man was alive. Miraculously, it was the soldier I’d been tending before the attack. He was holding in his guts with his hands.

I went back to the closet to get ligature thread, morphine syrettes, and iodine. I was still stitching the way Professor Ride had taught me when a British captain came to tell me that all the soldiers who hadn’t been killed were to be interned.

“Since you’re Chinese, you’re still free. You should go home to your mother.”

“My mother is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

The man in the bed groaned softly.

“He’s Chinese too,” I said, on impulse. He looked enough like me that he could be.

The captain scowled. “Looks like a soldier. He’s wearing a soldier’s uniform.” He examined the man’s face. “A Chinese soldier? It doesn’t make sense …”

“Chinese enough,” I said.