The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 3
What nobody tells you about a war is how much of it is waiting to eat. The push toward the city had bogged down the way pushes do — a line that moved three miles one week and not at all the next three — and while the generals argued over their maps we sat at a forward position on a low rise east of the fighting and did what soldiers have always done in the gaps, which is cook, and complain, and cook again. The Peshmerga ran that position, and they ran it better fed than any American outfit I ever saw. There was always a pot of something going, and always an argument about it — the old man at the fuel drum held opinions about rice he was prepared to defend to the death, and the water boy held the opposite opinions purely to keep the old man talking, and Aland refereed with the patience of a man who had heard every word of it a thousand times and found it restful. Rice, mostly, and whatever meat had been talked out of a farmer, and a bread one of the older men made against the side of a fuel drum that I would trade a month’s pay for right now if I could find it.
It was over that food that I watched two people who had no business falling in love start doing it, slowly, in front of everyone, while pretending to talk about rifles.
I should say plainly that I did not see it coming, and I was closer to it than anyone. Carlos and I had been in and out of that position for weeks — he on whatever errand the Agency dressed up as liaison work that season, I on the arms side, there to put my name to a report about whether the guns we sent were worth the sending. Avîn was the reason both our reports would say yes. She was the best shooter on that whole stretch of line and everybody from the men cooking rice to the colonels back in the rear knew it, and a person that good draws a certain kind of quiet respect that has nothing to do with being a woman and everything to do with being the one you want on the roof when it goes bad. So we all ate together, the way you do, and I noticed after a while that Carlos and Avîn had started ending up next to each other when the food came around, and that neither of them seemed to have arranged it, and that it happened every single time.
I had known Carlos going on fifteen years by then, in the way men in our line know each other — across too many bad rooms in too many bad places, trusting each other with things we would never say aloud at home. He was not a man who fell for people. It was almost a professional condition with him; the work he did made attachment a liability, and he had trained it out of himself so thoroughly that I had watched women far more obviously trying than Avîn slide off him like rain off a tarp. He kept a careful distance from everyone, me included, and called it the job, and mostly it was. So when I noticed the distance was not there with her — that he leaned in when she talked, that he remembered what she had said three meals ago and carried it back to her — I noticed it the way you would notice a man who never drinks order a second whiskey. Something in him had decided something without asking his permission, and he did not know it yet, and I did, because I had known him a long time and I knew the look of a careful man being careless for the first time in years. It worried me and it gladdened me in about equal measure, because I liked them both, and because I have never once in my life seen it end gently.
~ ☆ ~
The way they got close was they talked shop. That was the whole of it, at first, and if you had asked either of them they’d have told you with a straight face that it was nothing but two professionals comparing notes.
And it was that. It was genuinely that. I sat through a hundred of those meals and most of what passed between them would have bored a civilian to tears — wind, and holdover, and the way heat coming off a road will lie to you about distance, and whether the American scope was worth the weight, and how far you could really trust the little ballistic tables when the air was full of dust and burning. Carlos knew enough to ask the right questions, which is a rarer thing than knowing the answers, and Avîn knew all the answers and gave them the way she gave everything, flat, economical, not a word spent she didn’t mean to spend. But she gave them. That was the thing. She would sit with her plate on her knee and take a man’s honest question about her trade and turn it over and hand it back better than he’d asked it, and you could see her enjoying it, the way anyone enjoys being asked about the one thing they’re better at than almost anyone alive.
“You hold for a man’s breathing?” he asked her once, meaning at distance, meaning did she time the shot to the rise and fall of the target’s own chest.
“I hold for mine,” she said. “His breathing is his problem.” And then, because he laughed, and because she had made him laugh and it had cost her nothing, something in her face opened a half a degree before it closed again. “But yes. When there is time. A man at rest breathes the same as you or me. You watch him long enough, he tells you when.”
“Tells you.”
“Everything alive has a rhythm. You wait for the bottom of it.” She tapped the side of her tin cup, once, with a fingernail. “The empty at the bottom of the breath. That is the quiet place. You do the same thing on that rifle you are always cleaning and pretending you know how to shoot.”
It was a joke between them by then, the rifle. Not the one across her own knees — the American system Carlos had moved heaven and a good deal of paperwork to put in her hands months before, when getting a woman on that line a weapon that good meant going around three kinds of men who would have said no. He never brought it up. She never thanked him for it, not in words. But it lived between them at every meal, that rifle, the first thing he ever gave her and the finest thing she ever held, and the way they talked about it — him needling, her defending it like it was a member of the family — was the two of them saying a thing out loud that they were each careful never to say plainly. She had seen, in the giving of it, exactly what he thought she was worth; and he had learned, in how she kept it, exactly how she said thank you when the word itself was more than she could spend.
Carlos put a hand over his heart like she’d wounded him, and the water boy — grown taller that year but still the boy, still hovering wherever she was — laughed so hard he had to put his rice down, and Aland, her spotter, a wide calm man who I never once heard raise his voice, smiled at the fire and said something in Kurdish that made all of them laugh harder, and Avîn told me later it meant roughly that the American had finally met a woman who could out-shoot him and out-talk him in the same afternoon and had decided he liked it.
Another evening he pushed her on the scope — all that fine glass and the little grid of numbers floating in it, the machine doing the arithmetic a shooter used to carry in his own head. Did it make her better, he wanted to know, or only faster. She thought about it longer than the question seemed to ask for. “It makes a good shooter faster,” she said at last. “It makes a bad one confident, which is worse than slow. The glass tells you where the bullet goes. It does not tell you whether to send it. That is still the shooter. That will always be the shooter.” She turned the cup in her hands. “A machine has never once had to live afterward with what it did. So everything is easy for the machine. Everything is easy for a thing that does not have to remember.” Carlos had nothing light to say back to that, and for a moment neither did I, and the fire filled the gap the way fires do. She had a way of doing that — walking a conversation off the edge of the trade into something with no bottom to it, flatly, as though she had not noticed, and then stepping back onto safe ground before anyone could follow her down. It was the same move she made at the door of herself, over and over. I came to think the trade talk was the only language anyone had ever given her for the things underneath it.
But I do not want to make it sound heavier than it was, most nights, because most nights it was not heavy at all — it was two people enjoying the hell out of each other and calling it business. She gave Carlos a harder time than she gave anyone, and that was its own tell, though it took me a while to read it. She questioned his marksmanship on principle. She informed him, straight-faced, over rice, that she had watched him qualify once and that the Americans had very generous standards. She asked whether the Agency issued a man that bad a rifle out of charity or as a joke on their enemies. Carlos, who was in truth a fine shot and knew it, took every bit of it and came back for more, because getting insulted by her was plainly the best part of his day and he had stopped bothering to hide it. Once he offered, grandly, to give her a lesson. She looked at him over the rim of her cup for a long moment, almost smiling and not quite, and said, “Yes. Come. Bring your rifle. I will stand behind you and tell you which of the mistakes to make first.” The whole fire went up. Even Aland, who refereed everything and laughed at almost nothing, put his head back. And she sat there in the middle of it, not smiling, exactly, but lit — lit in a way she was not lit with the rest of us — and I looked at Carlos looking at her and thought, not for the first time, that the man did not stand a chance, and had stopped wanting one.
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