He doesn’t say any of that.

“Yard work,” Bell tells her.

She looks at him, eyebrow arched, then bends her head so her hair brushes over him in a wave. He feels her tongue light between his fingers, her lips as she kisses her way along his arm, onto his back, where she stops again.

“This one?”

“Shot.”

“It’s ugly.”

“Wasn’t too bad.”

“Does it hurt?” she asks. “Getting shot?”

He doesn’t answer at first. Thinking of Amy again, how she never once asked. How her face would fall and her eyes would turn dark, how her lips would draw thin and tight. But she would never make a sound. She never would ask.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Bell says.

Bell switches the sat phone off. Chaindragger’s heard just one half of the conversation, but he knows what’s coming, and still he hasn’t moved.

“Pack it up,” Bell says, and then says it again for the benefit of the radios.

“We got a VBIED parked down there-,” Bone starts to say.

“We are ordered to pull out.” Bell cuts him off. “Brickyard says mission abort, return to LZ Venus.”

There is another heartbeat’s pause, then the confirmations come back to Bell’s ear. Chaindragger is already at his knees, breaking down the rifle. A shout carries through the hot, still air, and Bell looks out at the square once more. Without optics, more than one hundred meters away, figures look like animation tests, waggling, hopping, running back and forth. He sees the makeshift soccer ball sailing through the air, bounce to a stop in front of the parked Benz.

“Sons of bitches,” he mutters.

Chaindragger looks up at him. Like Bell and the rest of the squad, he’s let his hair grow out, now to his shoulders, his beard a scraggly mass of black hanging from his coffee-dark face. Wearing the local color, the way all of them are, baggy trousers and a long shirt-coat to the thighs.