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really wanted to know if Neiland was telling the truth. “Who else?”
    “Who else what?”
    “Made it,” she said. “Out.” She was a little freaked out by the empty stretcher beds.
    Neiland didn’t answer. Emily felt ice in her heart, a thin sliver, like a stiletto. She put her face in her mitten-hands. Her eye hurt. “I’ll tell them you’re conscious,” said Neiland. “For now, rest.”
    Once Neiland had left, Emily climbed off of her stretcher. There were tubes to take care of, which she did with her teeth, because her mitten-hands were useless. She was in a green smock, which flapped at her ankles and admitted a breeze at the back. Beneath this she suspected underpants and bandages. She felt padded. She peered out a glass panel on the classroom door and saw nobody so she opened it. A passing soldier pointed at her and said, “Get back inside,” not slowing, and she said, “Okay,” and closed the door and waited until he was gone. The hallway floor was warm. The adjoining classrooms were empty. Farther down the hall, behind a window almost completely obscured by posters, she saw soldiers wearing face masks around a gurney. On the gurney lay someone wrapped in odd gray packages and bandages. The person’s face wasn’t visible but she could see a forearm, blackened and blistered, and knew it as Harry’s. She covered her mouth.
    One of the soldiers in face mask saw her and gestured, and Neiland turned and frowned at her. Emily went to the door and tried to open it with her elbows. Neiland pushed it open. “Back to bed,” Neiland said in a low, no-nonsense voice, almost poet-like, which gave Emily a small start. “Bloody hell, did you remove your drip?”
    “Let me sit with him,” Emily said, but without the baritone or the persuasiveness, and Neiland took her arm and marched her down the hall. “Please,” Emily said. But Neiland did not engage. She took Emily back to her classroom and deposited her on the bed. “I want to sit with him.”
    “He’ll be okay,” Neiland said. “Stop worrying.”
    For some reason this caught Emily unawares and she began to shake. She couldn’t even say thank you.
    “You love him?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes.”
    “He was half-dead when he made it to the perimeter. Hard to believe he kept going. He wanted to save you very much.” Neiland gently forced her to recline. “Rest. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
    She let herself be forced. “Okay.”
    “Everything will be fine,” Neiland said, and sunlight flashed from a car outside the windows. It was a low black sedan, very different from the other vehicles, its windows tinted dark. It pulled alongside a truck and stopped.
    She sat up. “How long have I been here?”
    “About four hours.”
    “I need to see Harry.” The sedan’s door opened and a woman in a suit emerged, pushing back her hair. Emily had seen this woman once before, years ago. Her name was Plath. “Are you a dog person or a cat person?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Dogs or cats? Which do you like more?”
    “Dogs.” Neiland rose. “Now sleep.”
    “What’s your favorite color?”
    “Mauve,” said Neiland, one hand on the door, and there was no time for further questions. Emily had spent a grand total of about five minutes with Neiland, and there were twenty-odd segments to which she could feasibly belong, but Emily had spent time piecing together psychographics from first principles and had a strong feeling about fifty-nine.
    “
Vecto brillia masog vat
,” she said. “Come back here.”
    Neiland swiveled in mid-step. “Thank you,” Emily said. “Thank you, thank you; take me to Harry.”
    • • •
    She followed Neiland back to the other classroom and approached the gurney while Neiland invented convenient excuses for why the doctors or medics or whoever these face-masked people were to leave. Neiland had said Harry would be fine, but he was swathed in layers and layers and the only parts she could see were swollen and red. His eyes were beneath soft white circles and she wanted these off. “Wake him up,” she told Neiland. “But please be careful.”
    She reached for his fingers, which were poking out from gauze, but of course her hands were encased as well. “Harry, can you hear me? We’re going to get out of here.” Neiland finished pushing fluid into Harry’s drip and Emily set her to unwrapping her mitten-hands. They looked worse than she’d expected: Her fingers were cracked and