Part 3 (2/2)

She stood in a town center. Tibetan? Nepalese? Definitely not Western. A murmuring throng of people waited on folding chairs neatly arranged on either side of a wide center aisle that led to a rough stone platform. Conversation ceased when a huge, swollen figure in an ornate blue and silver military uniform drifted up from behind the platform and floated across it.

Ah. So this is why everyone's here. To Jamie, the figure resembled one of those big balloons at New York City's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but she sensed these people were supposed to be awed by it, fearful even.

* 34 *

Instead, they laughed while the figure slowly lifted away, lighter than the thin mountain air. Soon came a second balloonish character, this one wearing a uniform of red and gold. It, too, wafted off, provoking even more merriment from the people, now impatient and ready to depart.

Jamie a.s.sumed the entertainment had ended.

Abruptly, however, an omnipotent rumble hushed the crowd.

As one, the gathering gasped at the source of this sound so deep it could only be felt, not heard. A colossal abstraction of a human face hewn out of granite rose from behind the platform. Then, as the infrasound intensified, a whole granite being of incomprehensible weight loomed over them, tall as a ten-story building. Adorned in a simple long robe, it glided across the platform and down the center aisle through the crowd. Although it moved sleekly, entirely without friction, its tenacious oscillations shook the ground.

Jamie stared up agape. Her chest, her head thrummed, claimed by an unfathomable seismic vibration that had begun to disperse every molecule in her body. Yet she had no fear, only awe.

And then the folding chairs were all askew; the crowd had left.

Slowly, slowly, Jamie turned around in her chair toward a white-haired woman in a simple, oatmeal-colored robe who sat behind her, framed by a sky grown even more intensely blue than before. Jamie talked and talked to this woman who listened and understood everything, whose benevolent eyes never left her face, whose smile embraced her. And Jamie knew she was safe.

Then she was standing again before the motel room dresser, gazing at the mother-of-pearl interior of the little lady buddha. Closing the container, Jamie realized the woman and the immense granite being were one and the same. And she realized something else, too. You're the one who whispered in my ear. You said it'd be all right.

When Jamie woke up, the numbers on the clock radio had changed. 7:53. She found nothing when she searched the room for the lady buddha. Convinced for nearly an hour that it must have been there somewhere, she looked again and again.

By the time she gave up the search, she couldn't remember what she'd said to the white-haired woman or recall the details of the woman's face. But she couldn't forget what the woman's smile, the woman's eyes had given her. Jamie hunted for the word.

Bliss.

* 35 *

v Thirty-two hours after the senior DI boomed his final ”Dismissed!” Jamie still expected a banshee to blow right through the motel room door howling, ”Pla-toon! Fall- IN!” Every few minutes, an echo of DI thunder clattered in on some innocent noise, especially if she dared lie down on the motel room bed.

Once she scrambled all the way to her feet and found herself pulling in her chin, adjusting her heels, and sending her thumbs in surrept.i.tious search of her pants seams before she realized the sound was in her head, only in her head.

s.h.i.+t. I gotta calm down.

Thirty-two hours after the last of Parris Island, Jamie faced eight days and nine nights of time to fill and nothing to fill it with. So she paced the room. After a few minutes, she recognized the cadence. How many hours close-order drilling? Once she got the moves down, she liked the autopilot relief of close-order drilling.

So she paced some more. In cadence, the kill hat's favorite jody call playing in her head. Once you take the devil's card, h.e.l.l will claim you no holds barred...

It didn't help. She flopped onto the bed and turned on the TV, but five minutes later, she flicked it off again and wandered into the bathroom, to the mirror, where the face there stared back at her.

It's because you're alone, you know. Because you don't have a home to go to or anyone who gives a s.h.i.+t that you're a frigging marine.

During those thirteen weeks on Parris Island, she had wished there was someone to miss, wished Joe had been clingable to. Yet she knew the truth: Being cut loose from all the world made boot camp less wretched.

Now the person in the mirror demanded a conversation-just like the old days when the person in the mirror was the only person she could really trust, really talk to.

C'mon, admit it. They got a real slick racket going. Didn't take them long to have you living minute to minute, humiliation to humiliation, trying not to beg, not to cry- ”And then, after you're groveling, only then come the morsels of praise, those little cult rewards for surrendering your body, your mind.

* 36 *

They're meaningless to everyone else, but G.o.d, you wanted them, didn't you?”

There it was. Spoken.

The old Jamie Gwynmorgan took in a deep breath, forced it out again, and studied what the mirror showed her. The face there was leaner now, but yes, she could still see the skinny girl with the maverick heart who almost got out. Almost.

Jamie had to avert her eyes from the kid who'd gotten so, so close, the kid who always soothed the cramping in her stomach which she refused to think of as fear by telling herself it's okay, it's okay, she would find that safe place, that home she yearned for. It was out there somewhere on the path that began in the comlink screens at the Barnstable High School library. She just had to keep searching.

Even got herself, with the librarian's help, into the school's Special Self-Directed Study Program so she didn't have to endure cla.s.srooms where she was scorned for being way too dyky, no comlink of her own, has to wear the same clothes more than once a week, and then there's that drugged-up wh.o.r.e of a mother of hers. Instead, she searched and learned at a pace fast enough, exhilarating enough to trade despair for a long shot at a college scholars.h.i.+p-until Alby crashed and burned.

Until Bob Baines.

Ah h.e.l.l. At least I get to play with a real nice rifle.

”So what the f.u.c.k is wrong with you?” she defiantly demanded of the mirror. ”Buy a d.a.m.n comlink!”

The store she needed was just four blocks away. She spent a hefty chunk of her pay on the best she could find-a high-performance, multi-powersource wrist/eyescreen model-so she could finally return to the Internet's many libraries and begin reading again.

While the store clerk generated a receipt, Jamie donned the comlink eyewear, activated its shadowscreen, and launched a dictionary search: fug (noun): A heavy, stale, or ill-smelling atmosphere, especially the musty air of an overcrowded or poorly ventilated room.

That's it? That's what it means?

”They can't hit you,” she informed the bewildered clerk. ”Can't * 37 *

even swear. But they use that Look and that Frog Voice when they say 'fug,' and we're all frigging terrified. Wizard of Oz in a Smokey the Bear hat.”

The clerk smiled polite wariness. When Jamie started giggling, he grinned, then couldn't keep himself from giggling too. The sound of his laughter pealed through the store and followed her out the door.

v For six days and seven nights, Jamie read, interrupted only by the time she took for food, workouts, sleep, and basic bodily functions. At first, she tried to pick up where she'd left off before Parris Island and finish reading the ten books of Vitruvius's De Architectura. But she couldn't get past ”Cla.s.sification of Temples” and began to poke around in The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

When she came upon ”All warfare is based on deception,” she was hooked. She consumed as much as she could. Machiavelli, Chanakya, von Clausewitz. Essays on asymmetric warfare, Fabian strategies, fourth-generation conflicts, network-centric operations, wicked problems, soft power. At least Private First Cla.s.s Cannon Fodder'll have a clue.

Then, on the eighth evening of her leave, she couldn't keep her eyes on the screen anymore. Restless memories of Alby and Joe had finally made reading impossible.

d.a.m.n. If she thought about them, she'd have to think about them not existing, which wrecked the sensation that they were out there somewhere, too busy to deal with her, but out there somewhere, able to return when they were ready.

Maybe it would've been better for her to have seen them dead instead of finding out from someone else that they no longer existed.

Jamie closed the comlink, then closed her eyes. She tried to imagine Joe's dead body, then Alby's.

Alby all burned up, sizzling like fried b.u.t.ter.

<script>