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will?”
    “Don’t know. Not sure I want to. Killing people for real ain’t like it looks on TV. All that blood has a smell, did you know that? And them bullets, they’re hot; makes the skin where they hit smell a little like cooking bacon.” Her voice had grown soft and quiet. She was describing things she recalled as sensations rather than full-blown memories. She took a deep breath and continued. “Plus sometimes you have to kill someone sitting as close to you as I am. Think you could do that?”
    Aiden shrugged. “If he was trying to kill me.”
    “So you could kill someone if he’s trying to kill you because you’re trying to kill him because…” She trailed off and waited.
    His face scrunched up the way it had when he was a puzzled toddler. Affection for him swelled in her; then like every emotion, it found no real purchase and faded back to the numbness. “It sounds complicated,” he said after a minute.
    “It is. And it’s supposed to be. It shouldn’t be easy.”
    “But you did it.”
    She nodded. “ If I did it, it was because I was trained to do it, and I gave my word I would.”
    He leaned against her, his own arms pressed tight to his side to keep from hurting her. “Glad you’re back,” he said simply.
    “Me, too,” she said, and kissed the top of his head.
    “Your leg going to be okay?”
    “Eventually.”
    “It’s all hairy.”
    “Yeah, well, shaving around all this stuff is like mowing around the garden statues in Uncle Hamilton’s yard. Hey, you see where these metal pins go into my skin? I have to put antibiotic cream on them or they’ll get infected, but I can’t reach all of ’em. Reckon you can help me out later?”
    His eyes lit up the way a boy’s do when presented with the chance to do something icky. “Heck yeah. How about your arm?”
    “Oh, that was nothing. Bullet went right through. Want to see?”
    He nodded eagerly. She undid her uniform blouse and pulled it off her shoulder. The gunshot wound was now a puckered, scabbed hole that would shortly fade to a scar. His eyes widened as he leaned around to see the back of her arm with its matching exit wound.
    “Wow,” he whispered. “Does it hurt?”
    “Compared to my leg? No way. Now, can you do me a favor?”
    “Sure.”
    “Get Magda out from under the bed for me.”
    He jumped up, which bounced the mattress again and sent a lightning bolt of pain through her leg, up her spine, and into her skull. She bit back the cry, but sweat broke out all over her. She grabbed the bedspread tight and clenched her teeth.
    Oblivious, Aiden pulled the tattered case from beneath the bed. It had once been expensive, and even now only the outside showed signs of age and wear. The buckles were shiny, and when she placed it across her lap and unsnapped them, the green velvet lining was as rich and deep as it had been the day it was made.
    But the mandolin inside held her attention. Magda had been built in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1914, according to the history Brownyn had been told when Granny Esme gave her the instrument. She was a Gibson A-5 model, with two sound holes that looked like calligraphied letter f ’s parallel to the strings. She was polished to burnished perfection except in places where the finish was worn down to the wood grain, evidence of her nearly century-long use. This was no priceless heirloom to be locked away; Magda had been passed to Bronwyn so she could be used, so the songs embedded in her might grow and be shared.
    Granny Esme first played Magda in one of the mandolin orchestras popular at the time the instrument was originally built. It had been something of a scam at first: traveling music peddlers put together small community groups, encouraging the purchase of their wares as a way to participate in the latest fad. But in Cloud County, among the Tufa, the mandolin’s antecedents were already well known, and the merchant was surprised to find families who actually owned Italian mandores. He’d