Girl at War(64)

“I just know,” I said.

She readjusted her helmet, loosening the strap around her neck. “I trust all of you have the sense not to say anything about this. For appearances’ sake. Wouldn’t want to get poor Johnsen in trouble for an egregious failure to complete security check protocol.” Everyone looked at one of the Blue Helmets down the row.

“You fought in that village, didn’t you?” Stanfeld said.

“A little.”

She yanked the clip from my hand and stuffed it in her cargo pocket. No one spoke again until the landing gear protracted in a dull rumble beneath our feet.





Echoed by the Trees





1


“Are you sure this is the place?” Luka said.

I fumbled with my seat belt and got out of the car. “The sandbags were right here. And they had a tree across the other side of the road.” Luka got out of the car, too, and stood beside me. “My dad was driving, and the one guy with rotten teeth stuck his head in our window and he had his gun—” I touched the spot on my neck where the soldier had pressed his gun against my father.

“It’s okay.”

“It was my fault, you know. I made them stop for lunch. If we hadn’t, we might have made it back before the block.”

“You were ten. You didn’t make anyone do anything. And nobody could have known.”

I looked into the forest, but it was too shadowy inside to see anything.

“It’s over,” Luka said.

“It doesn’t feel over.”

We pushed into the roadside brush—scrubby ragweed, cleavers, and what looked like Christmas holly scratched my ankles. Then the bigger trees—towering pine and oak—overtook the shrubbery. Soon the canopy had filtered out most of the summer sun, and a cool mist hung in the lower branches. It smelled of earth and decomposition.

From far away I had hated this place, but now even that was blurring. The hatred was there, but there were other feelings, too: excitement, almost giddiness, and the strange calm of being close to my parents again.

The woods grew darker, then thinned, but when we reached the clearing it was not how I remembered it. The trees were all wrong, the forest floor different from the way I’d imagined it. The lush summertime green of the foliage confused me. The place was alive, almost pretty.

Across the clearing I spotted a tree stump, the clean, even slice the only evidence a human had been there. I scanned the area for traces of massacre, a concavity or rise in the earth suggesting interment. But there was nothing. Only dark clay ground, damp from the forest shade.

“I’ll never find them.” I ran my fingers along the tree beside me, its ashen bark ridged and fissured, a history of weathered storms on display. A beetle ran down a groove in the trunk and disappeared in the dirt.

I sat down cross-legged and raked my fingers over the ground, let the soil collect under my nails. A few acorns, still green, had fallen too early, and I took one and buried it in the furrow I’d dug.

“Where are you?” I shouted. A flock of starlings, startled by the noise, shot up from a branch and out beyond the forest.

“Ana?” I’d nearly forgotten Luka was there, and when I turned toward him I got the feeling I’d been sitting there much longer than I realized. “You all right?”

My knees cracked as I stood and wiped my hands on my shorts. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”

—

We returned to the car and I pulled a U-turn across the highway and drove back to the little road, then followed the stony path down into the valley.

The village was no longer a village—anything that had once made it deserving of the title, including residents, was long gone. Most of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, collapsed slabs of concrete. The few that were still standing were all the eerier for it; the glass was blown out, but nothing was boarded up, leaving hollow sockets where the windows had been.

We left the car in the middle of the road and continued down the main street by foot. I tried to work out which house might have been Drenka and Damir’s, but it was hard to tell where one lot ended and the other began.

“Careful,” Luka said. “Do you think there are zvon?i?i?”

I remembered Drenka’s exploded chickens and froze in my tracks. “There were.”

“They say it’ll take another twenty years to demine everything.”

Down the street I could see a large stone building, painted black. If I was in the right place it must be the schoolhouse, but I didn’t remember it being so dark.

“Walk like this,” I said to Luka, high-stepping toward the school. “Gives you more time to look before you put your foot down.”

When we got close enough, I could see that the building hadn’t been painted at all; it was black with soot, the window glass gone and shutters burned off.

“?etnik headquarters,” I said. “They raped so many women here.”

Luka stuck his hands in his pockets, looking squeamish.

“I was too little,” I said. “And I had a gun.”

Our own headquarters should have been across the traffic circle. But what was there looked more like the surface of the moon than the Safe House, all cratered earth and broken chunks of cement. Initially I had allowed myself to think that maybe the Safe Housers had torched the schoolhouse and the soldiers had gotten what they deserved. Maybe the villagers had won, or at least escaped. But now, staring at the sunken ground, I knew it couldn’t be true. I turned back to the charred building. On the far wall a wooden plank, unburned, poked through the overgrowth.