Doctors drove past the shorn grass alongside the walnut-shaded drive into the military hospital. Medical pilgrims came to her bed, disbelieving at first. One doctor asked her about the crash and tape-recorded what she said. Another touched her pelvis and hip and thigh with concentration, questioning her at pauses, looking at her face as he did as if he could read in it something more than what she said. Every so often, another doctor in the room would add a question. Her nurse, a young man with red sideburns and a bird face, interrupted from time to time, bringing up whatever he thought was important. He liked to use Latin words—“acetabulum” was one—that excluded Mary. She learned that the acetabulum connects the pelvis to the femur, the body’s longest and strongest bone. The acetabulum was a socket. A capsule. In her—they discovered after scans and tests and analysis of childhood records—there was an unusual genetic mutation. It was like being born with six fingers or webbed toes. Her acetabulum was malformed in such a way as to make what would have been a cataclysmic injury into something less. It was a holy abnormality. One morning, the bird-faced nurse with his love of Latin handwrote Mary Mirabilis with a broad-tipped Sharpie on an envelope. He taped it above her bed.

That afternoon, Will Holmes walked through the ward. No one was nearby. He was glad he could stare, that she was alone with eyes closed. He heard voices, an emergency of problems, in a room two doors down. It had drawn everyone on the floor into the crisis.

So he looked at his crisis. It was a woman in a bed. His reaction was different than expected. He’d hoped that by now he’d feel relieved she had survived. He checked the inventory of his emotions, trying to kick out the guilt. Would he have felt the same had it been a male pilot? He believed women had no place in combat. He was convinced that the innate response to the female, which study after study found to be difficult to train out of the healthy adult male, was protective. And he failed to understand how most men could command individuals they wanted to safeguard. You had to send soldiers to hell. As he stood there, he changed the scenario. He’d sent an object into harm. The object was an F-16 Viper, one that everyone who signed off on Potomac Pilot agreed was the best guinea pig. An airliner couldn’t be used. How would it be if an empty airliner fell? No, a Viper had to be the pig, and it never occurred to him to check the gender of its pilot. Yet, as he looked at her cracked lip, he thought he could have. Just then an orderly in white streaked brown—his latex-gloved hands trying to roll a crackling paper gown into a ball—rushed past Will.