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even louder. Maybe the battle wasn’t so far away, after all.
    I don’t know who’s fighting whom. I wouldn’t know which side to join. I don’t have a weapon—I’d be killed for sure.
    He was still arguing with Jen, and she’d been dead for nearly a year.
    Sighing, Luke slipped out of his cave and stood upright. He could just go see what was going on. He’d hide and watch. Surely it wouldn’t be dangerous if he didn’t get too close.
    He began walking toward the sounds of battle, but the noise echoed in the trees, confusing him. Twice he got turned around and found himself walking back toward the mountainside. Or maybe it was the mountain that curved around, hugging the woods on more than one side.
    He’d just started to feel confident that he was walking in the right direction when suddenly the shooting stopped. He froze, waiting, but the woods were silent again. And then he heard whoops and hollers off in the distance—off in the distance, but getting closer.
    Luke slid behind a tree and crouched down, trusting that the shadows would hide him.
    â€œWoo-hoo! We showed them, didn’t we?”
    â€œDid you see their faces right before they turned tail and ran?”
    The voices were barely close enough for Luke to make out the words. But he could hear the laughter, the trampling feet.
    One other time Luke had stood behind a tree in a shadowy wood, eavesdropping. That time he’d been brave enough to jump out and announce his presence, to lay down a challenge. But he’d witnessed a lot of awful things since then; he’d been betrayed as well as encouraged, tortured as well as rescued from torture.
    This time he stayed behind his tree.
    Eventually the voices and the laughter and the footsteps faded into the distance again. Luke waited in the shadows a while longer, wondering, What was that all about? Which side were those people on? Were they involved in the shootings? Who were they fighting against? Who ran away?
    Luke remembered his own desperate fleeing, and the same sick panic flowed over him once again. He tamped it down, trying to think logically. The voices couldn’t have been talking about him. He was just one person, not a “them.”
    But I was with other people—Officer Houk and the driver and the other boy. Luke had not let himself wonder what they’d done after he dropped the gun and ran. In his mind, the scene in the village of Chiutza had frozen the minute he left, like in some magical fairy tale. It was almost as if hebelieved he could wander back into the village now and still find the gun on the ground, the old lady standing straight and tall and defiant, the crowd with their mouths open in little circles of horror and disbelief, Officer Houk leaning against the jeep, holding the radio, his eyes popping out of his head. But of course that was wrong—something had happened after Luke ran away. Somebody had fired a gun, and a lot of somebodies had been firing a lot of guns since then. Luke couldn’t go back and cower in his cave again without finding out who and what and how and why.
    Grimacing, Luke stood up and began inching forward again. After a few paces, he could hear the voices again—not actual words, exactly, but he could catch the tone of triumph and glee. He turned and followed the voices at a distance, trying to tread as silently as possible. He didn’t think that occasional snapping twigs or rustling leaves would alert anyone, but each sound was enough to send him back into a panic anyway. It was all he could do to force himself to keep going.
    Jen, you were lucky, he thought, wanting to argue with a ghost again. You planned your actions; you were in charge; you didn’t have to deal with any mysteries.
    But of course that wasn’t true, because Jen hadn’t known what would happen at her rally. She hadn’t been able to control the other third children who were supposed to go to the