PARSING. It’s what Melody did at the analytical center. Running words, phrases, sentences over until they were timely, accurate, actionable for the audience. Pulling a world of conflict and lethality into dots and probability and connectors. Games of cause and effect, uncertainty, gaps. Excel sheets. Framing the question. Knowledge review. Methodology. Collect and process. Evaluate the analysis.

Family days that happened on Fridays or Mondays for government workers could be cause for tension at the Bridgeworth analytical center as the military rolled out early, with the civilian analysts, leaving the contractors to have to still reach their hours. But as a DIA intelligence officer, she knew it was part of the job, working shifts for coordinating final reviews of what her division had produced. Besides, she’d be heading into London in several hours, and the center was closer to the train station than going home first. It worked out.

Melody adjusted her right arm in her lap and studied the limp hand’s nails. The polish was bright enough to become distracting. That was what Melody wanted. Especially were she to see Aurore. Correction: she would definitely see Aurore, because Aurore was the lead for the show at the National Theatre. Thirteen years between them.

Melody pulled up her speech to text program and spoke, paused, read the screen, gave directions, stated the desired text again, paused and reviewed the slide. All that was left was to check on some numbers and potential courses of action- did they have the most likely course of action correct? The most dangerous? She began an email and cancelled it. She could go down to the watch floor offices and ask Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was a MILCAP, or military capabilities, analyst. Absolutely gorgeous, with two children and a marriage to a former Green Beret, she could chat about canning fruit one moment and segue into the disposition of equipment and troops the next.

The previous week they worked on an exploratory analysis together, two people in a small office. Melody felt Elizabeth’s hand brush away the hair that hung over the right side of her face and softly tuck it behind Melody’s ear. It could have been a way of helping Melody since her right arm couldn’t have done it quickly. But Elizabeth’s touch sent a current of pins and needles from her scalp down her shoulders. By the time Melody was ready to ask what had just happened, Elizabeth was seated and inspecting her notes. The work meeting resumed.

Melody carefully dragged the headphones off her head and stood up to straighten her Armani suit with a terse tug on the right sleeve so that it came down to her knuckles. She cleared her desk—pushed the orange foam ball for increasing strength in her right arm far off to the side—so that no personal items or loose papers remained.

When she arrived at Elizabeth’s office, she had left for the day. Melody studied the pink and blue portrait of Jesus Christ framed on Elizabeth’s desk, next to the photo of a man in waders and a camouflage baseball hat holding a large trout. Maybe it was time for Melody to leave too.

On the LNER Azuma train, she read the copy of “There Are No Secrets” by Peter Brooks that Aurore had left behind when she moved out from their Andersonville apartment almost fifteen years ago. All that Melody kept of it was the black drape they tossed over a clothesline in the living room when they staged in house productions for friends every month.

With her rucksack slung over her left shoulder, her silk pajamas rolled up inside the way she’d learned how to pack in basic school, Melody descended into the Underground at King’s Cross station to get to Waterloo. Across from the Duke of Wellington pub and Le Petite Auberge, she walked up the stairs of the Union Jack Club, presented her ID card as a Member of a Visiting Force, and was buzzed in.

She reached the National Theatre a half hour before the curtains were to go up. She passed the time browsing the books in the British Film Institute giftshop across the street, then continued at the tables of used books set up under Waterloo Bridge. A hardcover with a binder disintegrating into light brown threads gave the account of a colonial soldier who had survived the Black Hole of Calcutta. She spent ten minutes analyzing the grammar and syntax of the soldier’s account of the deaths by suffocation, holding one page between her fingers and tilting it back and forth as she scanned its paragraphs. When finished she closed the book and bumped it back into its place with the back of her hand.

It wasn’t until Melody turned around that she realized Aurore had already found her. A poster billowed down the three-story side of the National Theatre; Aurore in an evening gown, her hair in a Twenties perm, a cigarette to her lips as she stared at the camera. It was all very edgy until Melody asked herself, what was the substantive narrative of what she was seeing? Nothing, other than (reading the print at the bottom) Federal Express Bank being a proud partner. Now that was the story.

Back in the summer of 2008, Aurore’s agent was succeeding at getting her on-camera auditions. She was flying to New York and Los Angeles several times a year while Melody, in stained overalls, stood on scaffolding adjusting light films and angles late at night, her executive assistant clothes for her temp job discarded in a canvas bag on the front row of seats. Things were changing between them. A month before Melody’s birthday, Aurore had sent out the invitations. Freelancing as a theater lighting designer, Melody sat on Moody’s patio on a humid thundering summer night waiting at 9:30 for someone, anyone she invited or Aurore’s friends (who were now Melody’s friends) to show up. No one did. Aurore’s debut on a prime-time show came before the end of the year.

Melody gave up theater soon after. Felt invisible to it. (And here she was now, another anonymous stroller along the Thames, with a professional invisibility.) After Aurore ghosted her, Melody found her footing in mud and sand, like a proper grunt. No more dealing with dreams.

“WE EMBRACE POSSIBILITIES” said the quote on the banner running across Aurore’s torso. Well, Melody did too. She dealt with likely, possible, probable, almost certain. She expressed confidences. She saw and told stories that were too sensitive to stage by the Thames.

She pulled out her phone and told Siri to show new texts. There was a new one from Jason Montgomery. “Splat” went the bird in Peanuts in a cartoon gif.

Melody and Montgomery had met during Melody’s tour in AFRICOM in 2015—that was when she was an E-5 with a specialization in HUMINT won through two tours in Afghanistan. Montgomery was part of the Special Ops team for the joint mission she’d been assigned to track to minimize the threat taking hold in Central Africa, around Nigeria, from religious extremists.

The detachment had been going around together, talking with the women in the village that the extremists had left. Melody, leaning on the rail to behold St. Paul, closed her eyes and savored the memory of walking with no pinch in her right side, her right hand resting on her tactical belt, or adjusting her helmet, or cleaning off the fingers on her left hand with alcohol wipes. Montgomery was beside her, often turning away quickly to spit chewing tobacco juice into an empty Fanta can, a leader that took care of his team. He’d grown his soldier’s buzz cut out into something long and shaggy like his beard and it fell over his Oakley sunglasses. His gun slung around his shoulder, pointed down. He looked like any number of SpecOps soldiers. That was the point. There would be no individual soldier to ID afterwards. As a team, they would all share the burden of a target on their backs.

In the market, from the other side of the street, a young woman in a long green robe with a hijab that had partially slid off her head was stumbling, crashing into fruit carts and babbling in a manner that made the locals keep their distance. But to Melody, she looked like a young woman in need. “She was,” Melody murmured as she leaned on one of the lampposts along the boardwalk as a lightheadedness started. It’s just that there was more to the story.

The detachment stopped to ask if she needed help. The moment that the girl turned to Montgomery, Melody saw the extent of the dilation in the girl’s eyes opened so wide. There was a tug in her stomach and a heat wave from adrenaline spread over Melody’s skin. A yell began in her throat. The events followed quickly- the girl reached underneath her robe, a loud rip of metal and fire, a painful pop in Melody’s right ear with a heat flash, something hot hitting the corner of her right eye. Her right arm swung back like a maddened windmill. Screams and a sound like juices from a rain of overripe tomatoes hitting the ground. She felt her legs give, almost to duck the fatal blow already given.

The girl had detonated herself and M had been covered with her and the metal shrapnel packed onto her body underneath the robe. There were more screams. Melody felt someone tapping her face over and over in different places, and it was a local woman who looked very concerned, with an older woman too, holding her hijab in place with the fabric pulled tight under her chin and watching Melody’s face for motion. A voice in accented English asked are you alright miss, can you hear me. Melody told them they needed to check on M- yes they had, apparently she had missed some time, because she saw his bloodied form be carried away on a stretcher, and marveled at how light the khaki fabric of his pants looked when dry, and how filled and soggy with blood they looked now, especially where the fabric had been tucked inside his tactical boots.

Melody opened her eyes and acclimated to the evening sun in the English summer on her face. She took in its gentle warmth while she waited for her heartbeat to slow down, until she couldn’t feel it anymore. She then walked under the brutalist architecture of the National Theatre where a young woman, not unlike her theater self a decade earlier, zapped the ticket on Melody’s iPhone and told her to enjoy the show. There was already a crowd, clad in designer shirts and very tight trousers of all kinds, enjoying drinks and conversation on the round sitting pods scattered between the suspended staircases that led to the upper floor seating.

Melody ordered a coke from the bar at the center of the lobby, which was covered with the same crimson color from the carpeting to the round leather sofas, and she chatted up the bartender as her left hand worked to get the credit card put back in her wallet safely before she took the glass. She found a spot facing away from the theater doors that no groups or couples took interest in, sipped her coke, placed the glass with a trembling hand beside her left foot and took another deep breath. She had learned to let the movie run through her mind until the story wanted to stop.

In the period that she was floating in and out of consciousness after the blast, memories of riding horses, of caring for them, came back to her. Mucking stalls, moving hay. Wheelbarrow of manure at the back of the barn. A small metal radio with its antenna stretched out to the maximum length, next to a dusty bottle filled with blue-colored fly spray and a broken bit from a bridle. Working alongside a girl nicknamed Barbie. Loved horses and jumping down from the high haystacks. After chores were done and horses were groomed and water was replenished, they’d listen to the Cowboy Junkies on the upper hayloft and drink sweetened lemon iced tea they got from the vending machine by the bathroom stalls with rust-colored water.

One day Melody learned from the stable owner that Barbie’s family had been in a terrible car accident—her mother and brother had died, her father paralyzed. The next time Barbie was at the stables, she was very distant. She and Melody were watching the horses in the paddock.

“I heard,” Melody said. “I’m sorry.” She handed Barbie a mixtape of songs, with the cover carefully decorated in colored markers. Barbie took the tape, stared at it for a long time. She didn’t look at Melody, so Melody ended the awkward moment by getting on with her chores. Melody never saw the stables or Barbie again.

Melody came out less to the stables after that. Ownership changed from a retired couple that rescued animals to a racetrack horse trainer seeking to win prizes. Her mother told her watching TV after school did not count as an extracurricular activity. So she tagged along with Wolfie, her chemistry AP lab partner, to a tech rehearsal and helped rig lights. She liked working with her hands and could be patient to achieve a precise effect—a spectacle, even—while remaining unseen. Eventually the theater crowd took over her social life.

She spent several nights in the village hospital built by missionaries a hundred years ago, waiting for her medical evacuation. Correction: Melody had been too far out of it to be waiting, but the nurses and doctors were. Montgomery was several beds down. When Melody would come out of her sedated state, there would be a group of nurses and two doctors around him. Sometimes a bright overhead light too. Then one day Melody came out of the fog of painkillers and his hospital bed was immaculate and empty.

She was the only patient in the infirmary, a long hall with beds spaced out under the six windows on both sides. Her nurse Iké, with freckles and a Discman that she kept playing over Fela Kuti on, told her with the first morphine shot in the evening that she may see some visitors, but to not to get upset about it. One she thought was another patient that had arrived while she slept a deep morphine sleep; a young boy coughing terribly on the dark end of the room. His silhouette appeared in the last bed during the early morning hours, coughing. Sometimes he’d cry, and then the sounds from him would cease completely. After several minutes his form would disappear. The other visitor usually arrived for the final period of darkness until predawn: a Roman centurion. He entered with armor guards strapped to his shins and torso and his helmet perched on his head. He would stand, turned at an angle away from Melody, and stare. Melody felt within her a deep desire to fall asleep, but the centurion’s presence caused confusion that kept her awake. Once he turned to her and she could see he had suffered a disfiguring blow to the left side of his face. He approached her and leaned in so close she felt waves of cold upon her neck that pulsed with his raspy breath. His eyes gleamed silver. His lips were so chapped that the cracks had small wells of dried blood. The surface of his front lower teeth were jagged like a sheared mountain cliff.

His mouth didn’t move but Melody heard his raspy voice in her head clearly.

Ego sum de terra somnorium gladius non potest occidere quod miles non potest.

I am from the land of dreams to tell you that that swords cannot kill what soldiers cannot see.

Rex est somnium?

“Is King a dream?” Melody asked in her high school Latin; “king” came more readily to her than the conjugated forms of “you.”

Rex narrat regina est de terra somniorum. Gladius non potest occidere quod miles non potest.

“King tells Queen he is from the land of dreams. Swords cannot kill what soldiers cannot see.”

He stood up, still gazing at her, and faded away.

During her morning shots Melody mentioned seeing a Roman soldier. Iké said others had seen him as well, and she believed he kept guard of the patients and was a good sign. “If you have seen him, you won’t die.”

“I didn’t know I might die,” Melody responded.

“No?” Iké shrugged but didn’t stop chewing her gum. She gave Melody a shot.

At the critical care facility in Stuttgart, Germany, she was told she would be able to keep her arm, but that her mobility would remain very limited due to the bolts they placed in her shoulder and elbow. Following her discharge from the hospital, she would be medically separated from the military. Intelligence work as an Defense Intelligence Agency analyst became her way forward.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the theater is now open. Would you please take your seats. The performance is set to begin in fifteen minutes.” She waited for her doors to open, along with an older couple, and made her way to the fourth row, center of the aisle.

When Montgomery had suggested Melody for a senior intelligence analyst at his new posting in England, they hadn’t seen each other for five years. He had a kidney stone and grey hair. She had trouble breathing from a chronic pinch on her right side. They began her job interview by hugging for a long time in front of the panel of senior analysts with moussed hair who politely studied their notes or looked out the window. They were wrecks, the two agreed, and laughed about it until they cried. Here she and Montgomery were now, standing next to each other, her right side drooping slightly under her Armani suit, his left leg not straight in his uniform, the presence of the young woman who exploded hovering in the air between them.

M wiped his eyes and regained his military bearing. “As before. My team will get the information. You will find the implications.” She agreed.

A month later she was living in the medieval market town of Matterthorpe, crossing over the bridge that covered the River Ouse for her commute, driving on the left and stopping at the penguin walks. Shopping at Waitrose. Fighting the spiders that made impressively strong webs in her house. Just another American in the area that the locals knew worked on the base and did not like to talk about their work.

When she needed a break from her office, she’d head down to the watch floor where Sherina Ayebe worked. Sherina had left Rwanda with her family when she was eight years old and had relocated to Houston. After high school enlisted in the Air Force so that she could pay for college.

They’d go for a walk to the coffee truck on the other side of the parking lot and sit a while at a nearby picnic bench. As they chatted, Melody would run through one memory in particular from the Africa mission. A humanitarian worker that Montgomery’s team had met and warned to be careful when coming and going from the IDP camp. One morning, two young men on a motorbike had sped past the worker and grabbed her purse. The momentum of the motorbike propelled her so hard into the ground that her teeth broke and the grit from the gravel got embedded in her gums.

The worker was seen again walking into the camp two days later, mouthguards in place for both upper and lower teeth, and a hydrogen peroxide bottle stamped “Made in China” in her hand, washing her mouth out as she walked and spitting it out. She passed the dark splotch in the road where she’d fallen without a single glance downwards and walked the same damn road with the same damn purse (she had never let go), no armed escort, no security, nothing, and the crowds parted in front of her, because there was something inside of her to help people that could not be killed, and this confidence calmed the dust in the path before her because the people made way for her, and they came back together again once she had passed.

Melody came out of her reverie when the bartender tapped her on the shoulder and asked if he could take her glass. She nodded. He asked if he could help her to her seat. She shook her head. It was an aisle seat three rows from the front, and she settled into it several minutes later.

Melody had stayed. She had mastered the eccentricities of the UK. The uneven roads. The tractors that took over the uneven roads. The pheasants that played chicken in the road. The slippery icy unlit roads in the winter. The massive traffic jams on the highway. The lorries that did not wait for slower cars driven by Americans not used to manual. The long gardening days. The hedgehogs. She had stayed.

The play started. In the third scene of the first act, Aurore was making a face at an actor in the show, and her eyes scanned the audience before she said her line—and there—it happened—her eyes saw Melody—came back to Melody—and then furtively moved on—she covered her face with her hands for a moment—Melody was there—reappeared, not so much an audience member as a witness of absence—and Aurore was in this theatre remix of a social justice cause that was being paid for by a major credit card company. The Aurore Melody had known would not have taken the role. Then again, the Melody that Aurore had known was not really there anymore; more of a distant dream that occasionally came and went in the early hours of the morning.

At intermission, Melody decided not to go back in. She took several minutes to finish her coke, recalling Moody’s. She walked out of the building, the breeze from the Thames picking up, and gave the building one last glance. In the silence of the empty boardwalk, she sang.

That night she dreamed of being back in the arena. She had fallen off her horse and was bleeding on the arena sand while the horse patiently stood beside her and fiddled with its bridle bit. A woman’s voice said, Melody, get up. Get up, sweetie. Gladius non potest occidere quod miles non potest.

The next week, Melody worked again with Elizabeth on a product due to DC by midnight. Elizabeth suggested they go for a walk on the far end of the base, around the defunct missile siloes, while there was still some light out, to get some fresh air. On the far end, the base bordered a horse pasture.

Again, Elizabeth smoothed Melody’s hair away again, and told her to take off her blazer. She rolled up Melody’s sleeve on her right arm, cradled the arm and traced the scars with her finger. She knew things about this sort of injury, she explained- the exercises for flexing the fingers to maintain flexibility, squeezing Melody’s arm in pulses.

“Elizabeth, who are you?” Melody asked.

“You already know who I am.”

The mixtape that Melody had made for Barbie—Elizabeth pulled it out of her pocket. And then she began to tell her story of how she was sent to live with her aunt in Georgia soon after her family’s car accident, how she resorted to her birth name Elizabeth instead of Barbie after the trauma. Melody was like a shark whose nose was being held by phantom hands, her neuroelectric impulses telling her to go still, relax in the deep waters, listen.