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“No way,” he says, panting.

The sniper fires a third time. And a fourth. Tilo falls backward now. The loaf of bread in his shirt is soggy with blood.

“You fugging Kraut asshole, he’s already dead!” Rio cries.

The unseen German sniper shoots Tilo a few more times, maybe hoping to goad them. And Rio is ready to be goaded, panting and sobbing in frustration and rage, but feeling Jack’s arm on her shoulder, hearing his voice, “He’s dead, Rio, he’s dead. We can’t help him.”

“I’ll kill that Kraut bastard,” Rio says. The threat is hollow, and she knows it. They may well get the sniper, but Tilo will still be dead.

“We have to go back and warn Stick that Jerry’s booby-trapped the place.”

“Goddammit, Suarez,” Rio says, half like she’s yelling at him, half like she’s mourning. But she turns away into the shelter of the alley and in a few minutes finds Stick and the squad, much where she left them.

“Where’s Suarez?”

“Stayed behind,” Rio says with a quick, furious wipe of her eyes. “Booby trap and then a sniper.”

“Suarez bought the farm?” Geer asks, an almost tender note in his usually abrasive voice. He reaches to the cat—no longer a kitten—that rides inside his shirt.

“We have to get out of here,” Jillion says in a trembly voice. Like all of them, her face is covered in dirt, grease, sweat, and plaster dust. It makes the terror in her wide eyes even more insistent. “We gotta go back and tell Sergeant Cole we can’t get through.”

She’s not wrong.

Jesus Christ, I lost Suarez!

Stick says, “We pull back, that Kraut up there’ll see it and have an MG sitting down on this very rock, and we’ll have to pay twice for the same rubble. No, we are not pulling back, to hell with pulling back, we’re finding a way through!”

If only I’d seen Suarez reach for that bottle.

Should have. Could have.

Didn’t.

It’s a sickening, grinding thing inside her, a weight, like she’s swallowed a cannonball. She feels a poison spread through her body, a sapping weariness. It will swallow her up if she lets it. It will grow and consume her, she knows that, and she fights it down, fights it down like a seasick person straining not to puke.

He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, and he’s lying there chewed up like a . . .

Tilo Suarez has joined Kerwin Cassel in whatever place dead soldiers go to. Maybe heaven. Maybe hell. Maybe oblivion. Tilo would have wanted none of those choices. Tilo would only have wanted to go home.

He’s dead, just like Cassel, but with one terrible difference: she was leading the patrol.

Tilo’s death is on her.

27

RIO RICHLIN—A VILLAGE IN ITALY

Jenou says, “What about we make our own path?”

“What?” Rio snaps at her. It’s getting harder to ignore a growing distance between them, a cordial, polite, but definite distance.

No time to worry about that, there is a war on.

I lost Suarez.

Jenou’s eyes flare and she almost turns sullen, but she shakes her head and says, “Listen, maybe this is stupid, but instead of crawling down the street in the open, why don’t we go through the walls between all these buildings?”

“Because they’re walls?” Cat says.