He was silent. Then: “Yes. I agree.”
“My conclusion, if I might be so bold to give it, sir, is we might as well try and do our part,” she said quietly. “With as much time as we have left.”
He nodded and stared off into the distance, lost in thought. Then: “Gather as many troops as you can. Comb the forest, comb the hills—carefully. Round up the survivors. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to move.” He took out his spyglass and watched the little hamlet in the valley. “We’ll approach from the southwest, through the forest. It’ll be slow going, but we’ll want to surprise them. And damn it, Mulaghesh…” He ripped away his spyglass and held it tightly in his hands, as if imagining choking someone, and she understood how furious all this made him. “If…If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this right. We’ll do it peaceably. We’ll be organized, disciplined. No casualties, unless we can’t avoid them. I will not condone the shedding of innocent blood, even if it is Continental. Certainly not women or children. We are soldiers, not raiders, with strategic goals. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
“Do you think we can achieve that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you have your orders, Lieutenant. Dismissed.”
She saluted and trotted away through the woods.
***
Lying upon the bed in the SDC headquarters, head swilling with the fog of nickletop, Mulaghesh looks back on that moment and thinks, What wild promises we make in order to justify the worst of decisions.
Yet even as her body grows leaden and numb, one last thought persists, nagging at her.
Something she saw today isn’t right.
She remembers the corpses from the farmhouse that afternoon, and thinks, I’ve seen those bodies before. I’ve seen something like that before.
She tells herself: Bodies in the Continental wilderness. Certainly. I know that sight well.
Yet still: No. No. I saw those bodies just recently. I saw that sight just today, before I went to that farmhouse….
And she realizes that she’s right.
Mulaghesh attempts to sit up, but her body won’t obey. She lurches forward with one arm outstretched, grasping for her portfolio, but succeeds only in knocking it off her nightstand. Then darkness closes in on her.
Don’t lose that thought. Don’t lose that thought….
***
When she wakes in the morning she feels like her eyes are made of drying mud. It takes a disconcertingly long time for her to make some basic connections—Where am I? Why does my arm hurt? What in hells is wrong with my head?—and an even longer time for her to find the energy to sit up and rub her face.
“No side effects,” she mutters. “Fucking bullshit.” Everything hurts: her back, her legs, her arms. It’s a miracle she didn’t overdose and kill herself.
Suddenly, she remembers.
“Holy shit,” she says. She grabs her portfolio and sprints out the door.
It takes twenty minutes for an SDC telephone to open up—apparently some major construction work is going on upshore—and even longer for the on-call sergeant to get Captain Nadar on the phone.
“What?” says Nadar’s voice, not even bothering to try to be cordial. “What is it? Who is this?”
“It’s General Mulaghesh. Listen, I realized something about those bodies the other day.”
“Oh.” Nadar clears her throat, affecting a more formal tone. “Yes, General?”
“We’d seen them before. Both of us had. That very day, as a matter of fact. We saw them before we ever went to that farmhouse.”
A long pause.
“What?” says Nadar, bewildered.
“I made some copies of the sketches in Choudhry’s room,” says Mulaghesh, flipping through her portfolio. “And in one corner was something I couldn’t make sense of. They looked like, like little chicken wings on kebab sticks or something like that. But that’s not what they were. It was a drawing of human bodies. Bodies mutilated just like the ones we saw yesterday!”
The Dreyling foreman on the phone next to her slowly turns to stare at her over his shoulder, bug-eyed.
“What are you suggesting, General?” says Nadar.
“I’m suggesting that Sumitra Choudhry drew the murder scene we saw yesterday months before it actually happened. She predicted it, somehow!”
“What? How could that be?”
“I don’t know. But I know what I’m looking at.”
“But Choudhry was mad….Couldn’t it just be a coincidence?”
“I feel like drawing ritually mutilated torsos and then seeing ritually mutilated torsos is a pretty damned unlikely coincidence, even for a madwoman.”
The Dreyling foreman is now sweating heavily and stretching out his phone’s cord to its fullest extent as he inches away from her.
“So what are you proposing?” says Nadar.
“You probably don’t have time for this, but I do,” says Mulaghesh. “I want to ride up to where the first murder took place and check it out. If there’s a chance Choudhry was involved in this, we need to look into it.”
“The first murder took place deep in disputed territory, General. It’s not safe.”
“Neither am I. I can handle myself.”
“I admire your confidence, General, but—if it turns out that you can’t?”
“Well, you all are getting pretty handy at boxing up dead generals. I expect you could handle me in your sleep.”
Nadar sighs. “I’ll talk to Pandey and have him make preparations for you.”
“Excellent,” says Mulaghesh. “I appreciate your cooperation, Captain Nadar.”
“Always happy to help, General,” says Nadar, though she pauses just long enough to make it clear the reverse is true.
***
Later that day Mulaghesh—armed and provisioned in case she gets lost—sets out into the countryside, taking the same road they took yesterday, north of Fort Thinadeshi. But at one creek she makes a hard right toward the Tarsil Mountains, which swell up in the distance, forming a towering pink-and-green wall.
She consults the map again. The village she’s looking for is called Ghevalyev, deep in the woods along one of the many creeks in this area. Everything she sees is covered in damp, soft green moss—tree branches, stones, even the road itself. Eventually Mulaghesh wonders if she, too, would find herself covered in moss if she didn’t keep moving. But after a few miles the lumps of moss take on some more organized shapes, and she realizes that underneath the greenery are walls, fences, and gates—civilization, in other words.
She checks the map. “I must be here,” she says, surprised. “Huh.” She checks the rest of the original report, which Pandey included with the map. There’s not much on this first incident—they thought it was a clear and simple case of murder at the time, albeit a particularly gruesome example—but there is a note that the man found dead at the scene was the village charcoal maker.
She keeps riding until yurts and huts emerge from the firs ahead. A small boy of about eleven sits by the road, filthy and malnourished, surrounded by an absolute swarm of tiny goats. Both the boy and the goats stare at her with the same expression: curious but utterly lacking in intelligence.