“Are you all right?” he asked.
She looked up. Her face changed; she gave him a melancholy smile. A peculiar quiet took the room—not merely an absence of sound but something deeper, more fraught. “Yes. I’m fine.” She patted the mattress. “Come sit with me.”
He took a place beside her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
She took his hand, not looking at him. He sensed she was on the verge of some announcement.
“When I was in the water, I went someplace,” she said. “At least, my mind did. I’m not sure I can explain this right. I was so happy there.”
He realized what she was saying. “The farmstead.”
Her eyes found his.
“I’ve been there, too.” Strangely, he felt no surprise; the words had been waiting to be said.
“I was playing the piano.”
“Yes.”
“And we were together.”
“Yes. We were. Just the two of us.”
How good to say it, to speak the words. To know that he was not alone with his dreams after all, that there was some reality to it, though he could not know what that reality was, only that it existed. He existed. Amy existed. The farmstead, and their happiness in that place, existed.
“You asked me this morning why I came to you in Iowa,” Amy said. “I didn’t tell you the truth. Or, at least, not all of it.”
Peter waited.
“When you change, you get to keep one thing, one memory. Whatever was closest to your heart. From all your life, just the one.” She looked up. “What I wanted to keep was you.”
She was crying, just a little: small, jeweled tears that hung suspended on the tips of her lashes, like drops of dew upon leaves. “Peter will you do something for me?”
He nodded.
“Please kiss me.”
He did. He did not so much kiss her as fall into the world of her. Time slowed, stopped, moved in an unhurried circle around them, like waves around a pier. He felt at peace. His senses were soaring. His mind was in two places, this world and also the other: the world of the farmstead, a place beyond space, beyond time, where only the two of them resided.
They parted. Their faces were inches apart. Amy cupped his cheek, her eyes locked on his.
“I’m sorry, Peter.”
The remark was strange. Her gaze deepened.
“I know what you’re planning to do,” she said. “You wouldn’t survive it.”
Something came undone inside him. All strength drained from his body. He tried to speak but couldn’t.
“You’re tired,” Amy said.
She caught him as he fell.
Amy laid him on the bed. In the outer room, she pulled her frock over her head and replaced it with the clothing that Greer had fetched for her: heavy canvas pants with pockets, leather boots, a tan shirt, the sleeves torn away, with the insignia of the Expeditionary on the shoulders. They possessed a warm, human odor—a smell of work, of life. Whoever had owned these articles was small; the fit was nearly perfect. On the back porch the soldiers slept soundly, like babies, hands tucked under their cheeks, lost to all cares. Amy gently relieved one of his pistol and tucked it into her trousers, against her spine.
A deep quiet held the street, everyone in hiding, bracing for the storm. As Amy made her way toward the center of town, soldiers began to take notice, yet none spoke to her; their minds were elsewhere, what did one woman matter? The exterior of the stockade was unguarded. Amy strode purposefully to the door and stepped inside.
She counted three men. Behind the counter, the officer in charge glanced up.
“Help you, soldier?”
The sound of tumblers: Alicia raised her eyes. Amy?
“Hello, sister.”
Alicia looked past her but saw no one; Amy was alone.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Amy was unlocking the shackles. She handed Alicia her goggles. “I’ll explain on the way.”
In the outer room, the guards lay asleep on the floor. Following Greer’s directions, Amy and Alicia made their way via backstreets and trash-strewn alleys into H-town. Soon the southern wall rose into view. Amy entered a small house, little more than a hut. There was no furniture at all. In the main room, she drew a threadbare rug aside to reveal a hatch with a ladder. One of the trade’s stash houses, Amy explained, though Alicia had already figured that out. They descended into a cool, damp space that smelled of rotten fruit.
“There,” Amy said, pointing.
The shelves, stocked with liquor, pulled away to reveal a tunnel. At the far end they came to another ladder and, ten feet up, a metal hatch set into concrete. Amy turned the ring and pushed.
They were outside the city, a hundred yards outside the wall in a copse of trees. Soldier and a second horse were tied up, obliviously grazing. As Alicia climbed free of the hatch, Soldier raised his head: Ah. There you are. I was beginning to wonder.
Her sword and bandoliers were hanging from the saddle. Alicia strapped on her blades while Amy covered the hatch with brush.