The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
I’d asked to come. She had told me to wait until I’d seen her do the thing they sent her to do, and then decide, and a few days after that the chance came and I took it. Nobody stopped me. I’ve come to think that was its own kind of answer — that she had decided something about me too, in that broken room, and this was her way of saying it without spending a word she didn’t have to.
We moved out a long time before there was any light. That was the first lesson, though I didn’t take it as one yet. In my head the work was the shot. To her the shot was almost nothing. The work was the getting there, and the getting there was done in the dark, slow, along a route she had walked in her mind so many times she didn’t need her eyes for it. She went ahead of me. I followed the pale shape of her pack and set my feet where hers had been and tried not to be the reason we were found.
There were four of us at the start. Her. Me. A spotter named Aland — an older man, wide and unhurried, who never once in the whole day raised his voice above the sound of the wind. And a boy with the extra water and the radio, who would peel off partway and wait for us below. Nobody had brought the boy along with me in mind, but he stayed near me on the walk, and once, when I put a boot wrong and sent a stone away down the slope, he caught my sleeve in the dark and held it until the sound had died and nothing answered it. He couldn’t have been sixteen. He did it the way you would steady a younger brother who didn’t know any better, except that out there he was the one who knew better and I was the younger brother, and we both understood it, and neither of us said so.
By the time the sky went from black to the color of a bruise, the boy was gone below and it was three of us, and then she found the place she wanted and it may as well have been two. Aland folded himself into the rock at her shoulder, and I was left to be still and quiet and out of the way, which is harder than it sounds, and which I was not good at.
She got down behind the rifle the way water finds the low place in a floor. There was no drama in it. She was simply, suddenly, part of the ground, and the rifle was part of her, and the three things — woman, rifle, hill — had stopped being three separate things and become one thing that was waiting.
Then we waited.
I want to be honest about the waiting, because the stories never mention it, and it is nearly the whole of what she did. We waited until the light came up all the way and went hard and white and started sliding back down the far side of the sky. We waited until my legs stopped belonging to me. We waited until every thought I owned had been taken out, turned over, and set back down, and there was nothing left behind my eyes but the ache in my hip and a single fly that kept returning to the same corner of my mouth no matter what I did about it.
She never moved. I don’t mean she moved a little. I mean I lay six feet from her for the better part of a day and could not have sworn she was breathing. Back in that room she had told me the hitting was arithmetic, that a boy could learn the arithmetic in a season, and that the rest was being a stone — wanting nothing, so that when the moment came there was nothing in her to shake it. I had nodded like a man who understood. I had understood none of it. Now I lay next to a person who had made herself into a stone on purpose, and held it, hour after hour, and I understood at last that it was not calm, and it was not peace. Whatever it takes out of a person to empty themselves that far, she was paying it the whole time, quietly, and she would go on paying it after, and it was nothing I would have wished on a living soul.
An hour in, maybe two, I shifted to save my hip and made too much of it, and without turning her head she spoke, so low the words barely cleared the ground between us.
“Breathe out,” she said. “Then be still on the empty. Not the full. Everyone waits on the full breath and shakes. The empty is quiet. Live there.”
I tried it. She was right, which I would learn she almost always was about the body and its small treasons. I settled into the bottom of my own breath and found there was a floor down there to rest on, and after that the fly could have the corner of my mouth if it wanted it.
“How long can you do this,” I said, when I dared. “This waiting.”
“As long as he makes me.” She never gave them names, and she didn’t give this one. “He is a patient man too. But he is patient because he is afraid, and I am patient because it is the work. Fear runs out.” Her shoulder rose and fell, once, the only large motion I had seen from her all day. “The work does not.”
“And if he doesn’t come at all.”
“Then we walk home in the dark, and I am here again tomorrow, and the day after. He comes eventually. They always come eventually. A man cannot stay afraid forever — it is too much to carry, so one morning he decides he is done being afraid, and he steps out into the light to prove it to himself.” She was quiet a moment. “That is the morning I am waiting for. Not his brave day. His tired day.”
I asked, because I had lain there half a day for him and still didn’t know, what this one had done. She didn’t answer at once. It was Aland who answered, without taking the glass from his eye.
“Three weeks ago, in the village under that hill, he put nineteen men and boys against a wall,” Aland said. “Because the village had fed our people, once, a year before. He made the women watch. Then he made them thank God for it.” He was quiet a moment. “The youngest was eleven. His mother is still in that village. She is the one who will hear the shot today and know what it was.”
Nobody said anything after that for a while. The fly came back to the corner of my mouth. Below us, somewhere I couldn’t see, was a woman who had watched her son put against a wall and made to give thanks for it, and up here was another woman who had folded herself into the rock at first light and would lie in it until the man who’d done it grew tired of being afraid. I stopped, around then, thinking of what she did as killing, the way you’d stop calling it killing if you watched a doctor cut. It was closer to that. Something had gone wrong in the body of the place, and she was the instrument thin enough and steady enough to reach it.
Aland breathed something to her then, three words, and she made a sound that was less than a word in answer. He had told her, I learned after, that the men below on the radio were saying the emir might not come at all today — that he had been spooked, that he had started moving only after dark.
Then we wait for the dark, she said. And went back to being a stone.
We didn’t have to wait for the dark. He came in the last of the good light, when the sun was low enough to be in no one’s favor, out of a doorway across a distance I could not have thrown a stone a tenth of. I only knew he had come because something changed in her. Not a movement. A settling. Some last gram of slack going out of the whole arrangement of her, the way a line goes quiet just before it takes the weight.
I never heard her decide to shoot. There was no breath drawn that I could catch, no whisper to Aland, no count. There was the long nothing, and then there was the shot, and the two were joined so cleanly that the sound seemed to arrive from somewhere else — a thing that had happened to the valley, rather than a thing a woman beside me had done with her hands.
That was all of it. I keep wanting to give it more, because a man died and it seems it ought to take longer than that. It didn’t. Across the distance a small figure that had been walking was, between one of my heartbeats and the next, not walking. The report rolled out flat across the ground and came back off the far slope thinner, and I lay there stupid with how little there was to it, how a whole day of stillness spent itself in a sound shorter than a cough.
She was already moving. That was the thing I hadn’t braced for — that the shot was not the end of the day but the start of its most dangerous hour. “Up,” Aland said to me, the first word of English he had spent on me all day, and there was iron in it. Because the shot is the moment you stop being invisible. Every man in that valley had just been handed a direction and a grudge, and they would come up the likely hills fast and angry, and the only thing between us and them was distance and her knowing the ground better than they did.
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