Hands in pockets I trudge through the streets and there at my back I have the weight of my uniform, my medic’s pack, waiting to take me over and make a soldier out of me. What will I do with my school uniform? Perhaps I ought to bury it with a brief service. I don’t want to change.

The gates of the college are barred, the windows are broken and empty. The district is empty. I turn and see only the distempered movements of trash, leaves. Not even a rat stirs in the gutters, nothing.

I sit by the wayside and watch the high, emaciated clouds drift. The days are shorter and shorter, and the sky is already becoming funereally ornate with another sunset. No lights come out, anywhere. The city and the landscape sing to themselves, and from the cave of the saint far above something reflective turns and flashes occasionally. If I wait long enough, I will calmly disappear too. Death is what I feel.

Has the camp disappeared? Somehow it’s more difficult to find my way there in the empty streets. Numbed branches tap with vacant insistence on the glass of a caved-in store. Hooves beat sharply behind me coming fast and I am seized up bodily by the shoulders—she lifts me with her fingertips as though I were a paper doll and flips me into the carriage, into her arms. She kisses me through the veil, her ardent mouth now soft now hard through the crepe. Her fingers sharp as daggers rake me up and down; I will sigh with bliss when they cut me open and plunge deep into me, greedily seizing and fondling my organs, won’t I?

—Now she crumples against the cushions. I see the soft open outline of her lips, where the veil clings to them. They speak.

“Don’t go __________ ...” she says quietly, calling me by her husband’s name. “Let me hide you.”

I look at her, whose first name I don’t even know, and I love her. I want to worship her. But when she speaks with her lips glued to her veil, calling me by the name of the husband whose body she devoured, I shrink. I think of soldiers on the road, and I think of hiding in her house, watching helplessly from the windows as the Edeks pass again and again in the street, closing in, loitering longer and more intently each time they return.

“I was seen by an Edek.”

“I can hide you ... from them ...” she’s falling asleep, cooing and smiling.

A light flickers by me and I seem to see the Girl climbing hastily into the carriage, but it may be I am confused again.

Orvar coughs up on the box. Are we alone again? Have we been? She sits bolt upright and she turns this way and that from the waist, her hands in the air.