Makemin gathers us in a few buildings at one end of town, where the land rises. We can’t all fit inside one. I am present when the scouts report signs of the enemy moving back and forth on a spur of high land thrust out from the foothills and overlooking the town. Twice I hear the ping of bullets again, and now I see, in the fog, a blur here or there, that flits from rock to rock, or sways as light as a ghost swinging to and fro, guns banging far away ... Saskia wants to go after them—Makemin won’t hear of it in this fog. He takes my arm and tells me he is suspicious, he has intuitions, and doesn’t wait to see me nodding obediently. As the afternoon comes on, and there’s been some time with no shooting, the scouts go out again. Signs the soldiers have withdrawn—dusk is coming. We stay together in the houses until darkness falls, and leave our lamps unlit. We crane our ears into the silence, knowing the enemy is there in the dark and the fog, hidden in the rocks, high over us.

*

On patrol that night, again with the lieutenant. We fall in step with few words, following a street on the thin town’s thin edge. The houses loom larger than they are.

He’s looking away from me, at the windows we pass on his side.

“Any more riddles?” I ask.

“What?” he turns. “No,” he smiles faintly, looking away distracted.

I can go on walking these streets of fog for eternity. I look at the lieutenant, so when I hear the distant snap from above, when he stops and I hear him abruptly make that soft, sad “oh” as though he’d just blundered gently into something in the dark, I also see: his head dips, his face splits, his mandible swings wildly from his head on a strip of ligament, like a helmet’s loose chin strap, and blood cascades down his uniform to the ground. His feet take two little steps to the side, in the direction of the force, toward me, his body shudders and with it the jaw hanging by a scrap of left cheek, and now he makes and indescribable sound his eyes starting from their sockets, raising hands around a wound he dare not touch. Flinging out his arms he disappears into the house to his right.

I call and run after him—his shadow before me arms flailing, jaw swinging, the shape of the doorway as it runs feet loud on planks. A raw voice whoops out from the cavity, flying back to me from every wall in the dark as I’ve lost sight of him, the voice riots from everywhere as though the night were belching out its entrails.