“You will,” she says. Panting and hot eyed she grabs me by the front of my uniform and shakes me. “You will do it. You are the narrator.”

“I’ll say they were all insane, I’ll call them murderers, and you too!” I shout it into her face, waving my head back and forth.

“You! You’re nothing!” Shaking me, “You tell lies and nothing is all you are—even a traitor tells lies for a reason! You’ll tell the truth!”

“I won’t do it! I won’t say anything! If I get back, I’ll say I never went anywhere! I was never in the army!”

I tear open my tunic, the buttons fly in all directions.

“I won’t say a word about this obscenity! I’ll say it never happened!”

She pushes me away from her.

“You think history can’t do without you? I can talk too you know—I can tell the truth better than you ever could! I’ll see to it every name is memorialized in a list of heroes, except yours! I’ll leave you out altogether, like you never lived at all! Or no, that’s not what I’ll do, I’ll tell everyone you were a hero just like the rest of them, then no one will believe your lies anyway. You’ll do your part whether you like it or not!”

I fly at her, she throws me to the ground so hard my breath is knocked out.

“If I didn’t need you—! ” she snarls.

“You don’t need me!” I shout back from the ground when I can. My voice is squashed flat.

“I could have been in those mountains by now, if I hadn’t held back to keep up with you! I’ll never understand why the spirits talk to you—that’s one thing I can’t understand.”

I get my breath back.

“The spirits never said anything to me you cretin! Pepedora gave both sides special compasses that showed the way in. I was following it until your boy broke it for me in service to your great cause, so don’t stick to me on your own account! I never knew any more about this place than you or the rest of them did—I knew less!” I’m getting onto my hands and knees, trying to rise.

“You’re not a traitor,” I hear her say, livid in her voice.

“You’re the one who’s thinking like war, not me,” I say gingerly, pausing until a twinge of pain in my gut fades.

“You’re not a soldier—you aren’t anything at all!”

I look up as she turns and begins to leap, each step growing longer and longer—now she is bounding away from me, toward the mountains, streaking just above the ground like an ice skater. She disappears into the trees.