He found the major in the tent that once had been Vorhees’s. Peter and Greer had barely spoken since Alicia’s return; a heaviness seemed to have come over the major since the abortive raid, and Peter had kept his distance. It was more than the burden of command that was weighing on him, Peter knew. In those long hours he had spent with the two men, Peter had seen the depth of their bond. It was grief Greer was feeling now, grief for his lost friend.

A lamp was glowing in the tent.

“Major Greer?”

“Enter.”

Peter stepped through the flap. The room was blazing with warmth from the woodstove; the major, wearing his camo pants and an olive-drab T-shirt, was sitting at Vorhees’s desk, sorting through papers by lantern light. An open locker, half full of various belongings, rested on the floor at his feet.

“Jaxon. I was wondering when I’d hear from you.” Greer leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes wearily. “Come here and look at this.”

A pile of loose papers lay on the desk. On the top was a sheet bearing the image of three figures, a woman and two young girls. The image was so precisely rendered that Peter thought at first he was looking at a photograph, something from the Time Before. But then he realized that it was a drawing, rendered in charcoal. A portrait, done from the waist up; the bottom seemed to fade away, into nothing. The woman was holding the smaller girl, who couldn’t have been older than three, with a soft, baby-cheeked face, in her lap; the other, just a couple of years older than her sister, stood behind the two of them, over the woman’s left shoulder. Greer pulled more pages from the pile: the same three figures, in an identical pose.

“Vorhees did these?”

Greer nodded. “Curt wasn’t a lifer, like most of us. He had a whole life before the Expeditionary, a wife, two little girls. He was a farmer, if you can believe that.”

“What happened to them?”

Greer answered with a shrug. “What always happens, when it happens.”

Peter bent to examine the drawings again. He could feel the painstaking care of their creation, the force of concentration that lay behind each detail. The woman’s wry smile; the younger girl’s eyes, wide and refractive like her mother’s; the lift of the older one’s hair, caught on a sudden breeze. A bit of gray dust still floated on the surface of the paper, like ashes, pushed on this remembered wind.

“I guess he drew all these so he wouldn’t forget them,” Greer said.

Peter felt suddenly self-conscious—whatever these images had meant to the general, Peter knew they were private. “If you don’t mind my asking, Major, why are you showing these to me?”