I thought I’d been ready, but a scream fills the cavity of my body as I peel back the last blood-crusted layer and let the cloth fall from my fingers.

In the flinted symmetry of his face, Quinn’s wound is monstrous. Bruise-blackened, his eyelid raw as bitten plum, the whites of his eye filled with blood. He takes the mirror and stares at himself, then puts it down and looks at me, his head tilted like a hawk. Quinn was so beautiful. How he must suffer this mutilation. I pinch my thigh through my skirts as I return his gaze.

“It must have been terrifying to be shot,” I say. The tremble in my voice betrays me. I sense his dare for me to keep looking.

“It was, but this wound’s not from gunfire. It was Will who took the bullet.” Quinn’s words are hammered flat, though there’s density of emotion behind them. “That’s all you want to hear about anyway. On May sixth. It pierced his lung. We’d been fighting in Virginia, southeast of where we lost Toby. A special pocket of hell called the Wilderness.” His hand slips under his pillow and pulls out an envelope, thin as a moth wing.

I open it. The paper of the telegram is creased and blotchy, but the writing is legible enough to see what matters. The message is signed by a Captain James Fleming.

I refold it and return it to Quinn, vowing to come back for it later. I’m not stealing; I need it for my scrapbook. It’s evidence, a dossier fit for the spy that Toby had so desperately wanted to become. In the months since his death, I’ve been honing my skills. Toby was an astute observer. He never got lost; he could see like a hawk. Now it is up to me to adapt these habits. If I’d been his brother instead of his sister, I’d have stepped firm into Toby’s boots and charged out the door in a heartbeat to join the infantry, becoming the Union scout he wanted to be.