had defeated the humans. The crocodiles had caught the peacock and were dragging it feet first into the carved waters. She got it, she got it all, the death of the captives, the passing of the typhoon, the triumph of the monkeys, and their bodies and spirits being pulled into the underworld.
She came to a little cemetery. They had buried their dead, or at least, while they still had their strength and sanity, their early dead. But thirty years of animals had undone their labor. White bones lay strewn across the hillside by the hundreds.
The bones and relics were so obvious to her this morning. It was as if the Blackhorse soldiers were coming out of hiding. She thought the storm must have thinned the canopy to allow more light, or that the fever made her senses more acute. The bones practically greeted her.
She had no idea how many men the cemetery had held. Duncan or Kleat could have judged by the bones; they had trained themselves to puzzle together the remains. But they were gone. She was the last one left. That was her first conscious admission of the fact.
She was dying.
If Luke didn’t find her, the fever would take her, or the infection. It was only a matter of time. But then who would take the soldiers home?
A rifle stood, jammed barrel down in the black earth with a helmet on top, a classic shot. She framed the picture in her mind, the rifle, the white bones, the black earth. Molly blinked. She recognized this dirt. It was the same rich black soil they had shed on their white tablecloth in the restaurant. This was where Luke had grabbed his fistfuls of mud and dog tags. Here was where her journey had started. The circle was tightening. She was getting to its center.
42.
She found the tower by looking not up, but down. Overnight, the rain had filled a long, rectangular reflecting pool that extended beneath the trees. This was a new approach, different from her other forays into the city’s center. The image of the tower hovered at its far end, upside down in the mirror. There between the branches, a hundred yards ahead, stood the root of the tower.
As she skirted the pool, a ripple spanked the stone. She paused and the water went still. The lily pads lay motionless. She waited and, like yesterday at the reservoir, something shifted in the depths. The surface seemed to open.
Tangled with weeds, a big machine gun rested on the bottom. Coils of belted ammunition were turning green, like old pennies. The gun was not mounted on a tripod or neatly positioned. It had the look of a thing thrown away without care.
Then the surface sealed over. It became a mirror again, and she found herself facing the gunner, or his reflected image. She lifted her eyes. What remained of his skeleton—the limp spine and his skull and a few ribs— dangled from a noose. The rope twisted. The skull turned, and he had jade eyes, also.
First Luke, then the sniper in his coil of wire, now this man. Despair had swept them like a virus. She felt it, too, trapped at the center of the earth, chased by uncertain dangers. Languishing. That was the worst part, the wheel of time turning without measure, the obsessive maps filled with circles. Even that made sense to her. Even suicide made sense.
But why had they separated from one another? When they most needed each other’s company, these men had made themselves desolate and estranged. They had retreated to distant lonely hideouts, the sniper to his perch, Luke to his bamboo lair, this gunner to a noose.
There was no evidence of an enemy finding them here. Had the men taken to hunting one another, then? Or imagined themselves being hunted? Why not? The monkey meat could have passed on a brain fever. Had they been killed by their own ghosts?
She looked up, into the ever present smile of God. Where was the joke? In their suffering and confusion? No matter where you turned, the city seemed to mock you. She tucked her head down, containing her anger. Every which way, the place made you mad.
The tower seemed to drift toward her. Duncan would have led them there. It was more wish than calculation. She had no time for the rest of the labyrinth.
She came to the bas-relief crowding the base of the tower. She looked again and the carvings really were in motion. One of the stone children—a little girl—turned and looked right at her. Molly cupped one hand against her eyes and hurried past, to the stairs.
Duncan had come this way. His red and white scarf lay in a heap on the stairs. The rain must have washed it clean. For all his blood last night, there wasn’t a drop on the scarf. She draped it around her neck and gathered her courage, step by step.
Higher and higher she wound. She battled her dizziness as she kept to the precarious outer edges. The doorways whispered to her, tempting her to come in and stay awhile. She resisted their havens. She forced herself to climb on.
As she neared the top, a motion in the grass far below made her melt against the stairs.
There was no mist to hide them this time, and the green light was as good as it got. And yet they still evaded a complete inspection. They appeared in pieces from the mouth of one of the great avenues.
A man’s shoulder and arm surfaced, then sank into the grass. A head appeared, scouting right and left before ducking behind a pillar. A man’s hunched back appeared. Some were bearded and naked. Others wore rotted fatigues stolen from the graveyard. Some went barefoot. Rifles and rucksacks parted the grass. They were a procession of weapons and gear. Their skin and bones were little more than vehicles for the war relics.
All carried the jungle on them. She thought the vines and weeds must be part of their camouflage. But then she spotted the small animals moving on them, lizards, and a snake, and even a monkey riding majestically on one’s shoulder. The forest inhabited them. They had lost their souls to this place.
They were not ghosts.
Molly refused to call them that. She clung to her powers of reason. Call them supernatural and she would lose all control over her rational world. It was not that she rejected the idea of ghosts. Her mother was a ghost. But you possessed them, not the other way around. Ghosts were data. They were pieces of your past. They allowed you a dialogue with yourself, and they had no reality except the reality you granted them.
She granted them nothing. She had conjured up none of these hide-and-seek scavengers creeping through the grass below. As eerie as he was, Luke had appeared well before she had any inkling of him, or them. There could be no Blackhorse ghosts because Blackhorse did not belong to her past. She had no connection with the Eleventh Cavalry.
And so, while these men might haunt the ruins and mimic the dead, they were real in some way. If only she could focus her mind. There had been no way to directly confront their whispering and silhouettes on her tent and their slouching through the mist, but she could dispute their unreality. They were hunting her. She was hiding from them, whoever they were. And Duncan had probably sacrificed himself to shield her. All for nothing. They were bound to find her.
The real contest was not with them anyway, but with herself. She had no hope of defeating them. There were too many of them, and this was their territory, and she was fading fast. She couldn’t beat them, but she could make sure they didn’t beat her. Just holding on to her sanity would be a triumph.
The line of men—looters, lunatics, or manhunters caught in a Vietnam loop—worked diagonally across the overgrown square. They moved like a patrol, spaced in a line, taking their time. They had nearly reached the far trees when the ambush caught them.
At first, Molly couldn’t understand what was going on. It looked more like a squall striking the grasses than an attack. Some havoc burst from the trees. Limbs bent, leaves parted. Birds sprang from their perches and filled the air with their colors and cries. From three sides, furrows sliced through the green surface of grass.
Peeking down from the edge of the tower, Molly saw shapes, degraded shapes, pieces of creatures that were even less than these pieces of men. They were human in theory. Human in outline. But in fact she couldn’t be sure she was seeing anything at all.
