So I didn’t ask her. The three of us pushed onward, away away away from the scene behind us, what had just happened, what we’d seen and not seen, heard and not heard, smelled and not smelled. I’d walked this moist path to the bus stop on Tung Tau Wan Road a dozen times before, since the field hospital was set up earlier that month, always with the anticipation of home warming my belly. I had moved back to the Stable shortly before the invasion, to be better prepared for trouble, though not necessarily the trouble we had just gone through. But I couldn’t put today’s events behind me, and because I couldn’t, I couldn’t anticipate home either. I lurched in its direction like an animal, on instinct, because I couldn’t go back and I couldn’t think what else to do.

Courchene said, “Her leg.”

“What?”

“Her leg,” he repeated.

There was blood trickling down Emily’s leg.

“Em.”

“Don’t talk to me Violet. I can’t talk. I just want to go home.”

“You’re bleeding.”

Once I said it a switch turned in her. She stopped, and sat down on the side of the road. She didn’t cry. Her face was white as salt, that is to say a bit grey, a bit yellow—pale.

“Can I see?”

“Of course not. Don’t talk to me.”

I tore off the bottom third of my lab coat and gave it to her to clean herself. She turned away from me and cleaned. She didn’t cry. Her elbow moved mechanically. I could have given her morphine but then we would never get out of here.

Tung Tau Wan Road was pure chaos. Japanese soldiers were everywhere. There were very few civilians, and those who were there were ran along the ditches trying to get away from the soldiers, who bayonetted them indiscriminately as they moved in our direction, toward the field hospital. I pulled Emily and Courchene into the ditch, and we scrambled through fields, angling away from Tung Tau Wan Road now, back past St Stephen’s chapel toward the beach, roughly in the direction of Stanley village. Emily was bleeding badly and moved slowly. She was in rough shape, though also numb with shock. Courchene, too, bayonetted in the gut and newly stitched up, could not move very fast. I had to get them somewhere safe soon.

Along the beach was a little row of huts. I knew that to enter one might present dangers, but we couldn’t stay out in the open. I approached the nearest one and stepped onto the porch, which still had chairs and a fold-out bed on it from a happier moment days earlier. Bamboo blinds were rolled down to cover the single window. I tried the door, but it was locked. I shook it and thought I heard a whimper. Was there someone inside?