Chapter 13

Learning Gouyan’s terrain took longer than Marisol expected, and it took a different shape of patience than anything the mountain had ever asked of her.

Lan’s squad worked in a rhythm Marisol had to learn from the outside in, since none of it resembled the linear watch-and-wait discipline her father had built into her as a child. Mai came and went from the western villages on a schedule only she seemed to fully track, returning some evenings with nothing and other evenings with a single sentence that reorganized everything the squad thought it knew. Linh’s maps grew denser by the week, red ink marking confirmed sightings, black ink marking rumor, a scattering of small blue marks that Marisol eventually learned indicated where a body had been found bearing Gouyan’s signature — a signature Lan had described to her that first afternoon but which Marisol hadn’t yet seen firsthand.

She saw it for the first time three weeks into the work.

A patrol out of a firebase near the Que Son Valley found the body at dawn, a young corporal who’d gone missing on a solo latrine run two nights earlier, and by the time Marisol arrived with Hanh as escort — a nurse’s presence explainable as confirming cause of death for the report, though everyone in the truck understood the actual purpose of the trip — the body had already been under a poncho for six hours in the heat.

What Gouyan left behind was not simply a killing. He’d been tied upright to a tree at the edge of the clearing, wrists lashed behind the trunk, and opened from sternum to groin with a blade that had taken its time about the work — nothing hurried in the cut, nothing that suggested a woman fighting to finish before she was discovered. His entrails hung in a dark, glistening rope down the front of him, already black with flies by the time Marisol reached him. He had been castrated, the wound packed crudely with his own severed genitals forced into his mouth until his jaw sat unnaturally wide, and someone — Gouyan, Hanh confirmed without needing to be asked — had carved something into the skin of his cheek and forehead afterward, deliberate strokes rather than frenzy, a signature written in a language of cuts that needed no translation to be understood as a message.