“Good,” Will said, and then, turning to Mary, “Summer pastures.”

She nodded.

The truck strained. Here began the climb to the highlands. She remembered studying satellite images—filaments of roads along the Turkish border. Now they were on them. The last light was tricked out to her right as they threaded south. Some of the meadows were gloaming carpets of green. The peaks far away on her right were now a blunting white. They were covered with perforated ice and frozen slag, even in August.

This boy, recruited from among the radical, those who insisted on the restoration of Kurdistan, a separate nation stretching from Iran through Iraq and Turkey south to Syria, would help them retrieve Hoseyn. Nutjobs, Frank always said, were cavalry for the normally damned. Here were the unlikeliest hussars: Baz would pose as their son. Mary would be his seeming mommy. Will, wife gone, children alienated, was dad.

This family’s home would be emptied Iran. Two-thirds of it not even nomads walked. This basal margin, the bottommost in population density, hosted mountain ranges made from cooled magma. As the last light gave out, Mary could just see the folds of olivine basalt ahead. Hidden among them were encampments and goat flocks. In the north, their tenders were Kurdish, like Mary and Will’s pseudoson. Farther south, the shepherds were Bakhtiari or Torkashv.

“We are giving thanks to you,” said Baz, irrepressible.

She looked at him in the light from the dashboard. He looked as if he was shaking to speak to them, his eyes moving constantly, his alertness a pinball. Will took no note of it. He studied the rearview with menacing reverence. He read the road with ossified concentration. What he really looked like was submerged. If you talked to him, he might come up from the deep, but maybe not.

“You okay?” he asked her. Like the mirrors, she needed constant checking.

“Yeah,” she said, but she wished Will would direct more of his concern toward Baz. “We appreciate your thanks, Baz,” she told him.

“I am from peshmerga. My father’s father died under the Baathist hand. My uncles lie in Al-Anfal.”

Peshmerga. Those ready to die. It was the self-given name of the Kurdish guerrillas of northern Iraq. They were America’s only unquestioning fan club, the still-grateful few in an international of disbelievers. They could even count Frank among their majority, if she read his letters right.

“Your bravery is important,” she said to Baz. “We couldn’t be here without you. Do you know that?”

His smile swept the truck cab.

“Al-Anfal is a sad place,” she said. “I am sorry your family lost loved ones there.”