Page 36 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

As always, before doing anything in these early morning hours, Poya listened.

Safer that way. His sleeping area was cordoned off by a woolen shyrdak suspended from the yurt’s ceiling.

In turn, the shyrdak was anchored to the many layers of wool and felt that made up the yurt’s floor.

When he’d first seen it, Poya thought pup tent.

Minus one side, of course. Which meant that anyone could poke a head around the shyrdak’s edge.

That made the arrangement dangerous if he got careless and forgot to listen to make sure no one else was up yet.

The hour was very early. True dawn wouldn’t happen for another hour and a half.

From experience he knew neither Amu nor Amu’s mother-in-law, Bas, would stir until then.

But as Baba once said, Assume makes an ass out of you and me.

Then, at Poya’s baffled expression, Baba added, It’s a much better joke in English.

Now, he heard only the familiar crackle of banked coals in the pot-bellied oven in the yurt’s center and the faint boom of the bad-e Wakhan slamming against the dwelling’s felt-covered reed walls.

Between windy gusts, he picked out Amu’s soft, steady sleep-breathing punctuated by Bas’s deeply nasal snores.

Amu’s mother-in-law spent a lot of her time snoring.

When she was awake, Bas smoked her pipe.

When her pipe was done, she fell into a deep sleep.

When Bas woke, she repeated the process with maybe a break for a meal or to wash.

And why did Bas dream her life away? That one was easy. All seven of Bas’s children were dead. That included her youngest daughter, married to Amu, who’d died in childbirth.

That happened in 2021, an awful year. Not only had the Americans abandoned the country, the winter which followed was brutal and bitter. People starved. Or froze to death. That happened to five of Amu’s six children, including the ten-month-old baby boy whose birth killed Amu’s wife.

The only child of Amu’s to survive was a sixth child, a son.

Who, it seemed, was missing.