She peeked around the barrel-like trunk. She could see, through the undergrowth, the glow of the sentry hut, hear the two men talking, their voices carrying easily across the moonless night. Black woman, some kind of accent, and the other one saying over and over, Shit, he’s going to have our ass for this. How the fuck did we miss her? Huh? How the fuck! You didn’t even fucking aim!

Whoever they were talking to on the phone, they were afraid of him. But this man—Lacey knew he was nothing, no one. And the soldiers, they were like children, without minds of their own. Like the ones in the field, so long ago. She remembered how, through the long hours, they’d done and done. They’d thought they were taking something from her—she could see it in the dark smiles streaked across their mouths, taste it in their sour breath on her face—and it was true, they had. But now she’d forgiven them and taken this thing back, which was Lacey herself, and more besides. She closed her eyes. But you are a shield around me, O LORD, she thought:

You bestow glory on me and lift up my head.

To the LORD I cry aloud
and he answers me from his holy hill.
Selah.

I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, because the LORD sustains me.

I will not fear the tens of thousands
drawn up against me on every side.

Arise, O LORD!
Deliver me, O my God!
Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.

She was moving through the trees again. The man on the other end of the sentry’s phone: he would send more soldiers to hunt her down. And yet a feeling like joy was coursing through her—a new, nimble energy, richer and deeper than anything she’d felt in her life. It had been building through the weeks as she made her way to—well, where? She didn’t know what it was called. In her mind it was simply the place where Amy was.

She’d taken some buses. She’d ridden awhile in the back of someone’s truck with two Labrador retrievers and a crate of baby pigs. Some days she’d awakened wherever she was and known it was a day to walk, just walk. From time to time she ate or, if it felt right, knocked on a door and asked if it would be all right if she slept in a bed. And the woman who answered the door—for it was always a woman, no matter what door Lacey knocked on—would say, Of course, come right in, and lead her to a room with a bed all made up and waiting, without saying one more word about it.