as easy as it
sounds, even with a kidney weakness to help. But she turned the trick.

"Then a cock crows. She wakes with a tearing start from the gray dreams
of death that fill her lifeline. It's cold daybreak. There's the smell
of a French farm. She feels her ankles and they're not at all like huge
rubber boots filled with water. They're not swollen the least bit.
They're young legs.

"There's a little window and the tops of a row of trees that may be
poplars when there's more light, and what there is shows cots like her
own and heads under blankets, and hanging uniforms make large shadows
and a girl is snoring. There's a very distant rumble and it moves the
window a bit. Then she remembers they're Red Cross girls many, many
kilometers from Passchendaele and that Bruce Marchant is going to die at
dawn today.

"In a few more minutes, he's going over the top where there's a
crop-headed machine-gunner in field gray already looking down the sights
and swinging the gun a bit. But she isn't going to die today. She's
going to die in 1929 and 1955.

"And just as she's going mad, there's a creaking and out of the shadows
tiptoes a Jap with a woman's hairdo and the whitest face and the
blackest eyebrows. He's wearing a rose robe and a black sash which belts
to his sides two samurai swords, but in his right hand he has a strange
silver pistol. And he smiles at her as if they were brother and sister
and lovers at the same time and he says, '_Voulez-vous vivre,
mademoiselle?_' and she stares and he bobs his head and says, 'Missy
wish live, yes, no?'"

[Illustration]

* * * * *

Sid's paw closed quietly around my shaking hands. It always gets me to
hear about anyone's Resurrection, and although mine was crazier, it also
had the Krauts in it. I hoped she wouldn't go through the rest of the
formula and she didn't.

"Five minutes later, he's gone down a stairs more like a ladder to wait
below and she's dressing in a rush. Her clothes resist a little, as if
they were lightly gummed to the hook and the stained wall, and she hates
to touch them. It's getting lighter and her cot looks as if someone were
still sleeping there, although it's empty, and she couldn't bring
herself to put her hand on the place if her new life depended on it.

"She climbs down and her long skirt doesn't bother her because she knows
how to swing it. Suzaku conducts her past a sentry who doesn't see them
and a puffy-faced