Anana raised an eyebrow at this as they made their way to her bedroom and arranged themselves, Anana on her side on the bed and Kara on the dressing-table bench. 'Despite your words, I get the impression that you are no stranger to guns.'

Kara's responding expression was bleak. 'I was raised around weapons; from handguns to rifles, from bullets to shells weighing half a ton, from the handguns worn by officers that were their favourite choice when it came to shooting innocent civilians and their own shellshocked soldiers in back of the neck, to the machine guns that were used to cut down hundreds of men at a time like so much harvested wheat.'

She laughed, bitterly. 'It's funny, you know, but when I slipped away to London, I thought that I was making my escape from the world of mechanized warfare my father helped create. When I got off the boat, I didn't speak any English, and a Cockney girl I met helped get me the one and only job I could find- working on the docks at the fish market. But nearby there is an asylum where they hide away the awful truth about the war. It is full of men too maimed or disfigured to return to or be taken care of by the ones they love. They are shunned, broken, dispossessed, and live a bleak, furtive life of agonizing loneliness. Children follow them when they dare to venture out at all, and make fun of their missing limbs, or run away in fright from the sight of the masks they wear to hide the unspeakable atrocities committed upon their bodies.

'I wanted to flee this reminder when it became known to me . . . . I did not want to see what my father's weapons had accomplished. But for some reason I stayed, and endured remembering his gloating over the fortunes he'd amassed, even as I looked upon the lives he'd help destroy.

'There- there was one man-' she choked on her words, started crying, then fighting back tears forced herself to continue. 'There was one man who used to come to the market, just to buy fish from me. He . . . he wore a mask because . . . I caught a glimpse one day when his head was turned . . . the whole bottom of his face was gone . . . I could see his upper teeth, and below it this horrible, gaping hole-'

'Kara, don't,' Anana said softly, getting off the bed and putting her arms around the weeping girl.

Trembling with emotion, Kara put her arms around her friend- but she didn't stop.

'I have to tell someone,' Kara told her. 'I'm sorry . . .




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