The sand didn't discriminate. It covered everything equally -- dead British, dead German, dead whatever-you-were-before-you-were-a-number. Samuel Kowalski knew this because he'd seen it happen in Sicily, in Tunisia, and now here in the vast white desert of Libya, where the sun was a hammer and the earth was an anvil and every battle was a forge that beat men into dust.

Sam sat on an overturned ammunition crate behind what used to be an oasis -- a cluster of palm trees, a ruined stone well, and three dead men in various states of decomposition. The flies had arrived. They always arrived first.

"Doc," a voice said.

Sam looked up. Lieutenant Marcus Webb stood over him, young and sharp and wearing the kind of expression that said he had a question but was afraid of the answer.

"Corporal Malloy's looking for you. He's got a shrapnel wound in his leg -- not bad, but he's insisting on seeing the medic personally."

Sam wiped his hands on a rag that was already stained beyond salvation. "Tell Malloy his leg's fine. If it were bad, he wouldn't be complaining."

"Sam."

"What?"

Webb sat down beside him. The shade from the palm trees did nothing against the heat. "How did you know the patrol route would be hit?"

Sam didn't answer. He looked at the dead man at his feet -- a German boy, maybe nineteen, with a helmet that was too big for his head and a photograph in his tunic pocket. Sam had taken the photograph. He would send it to whoever was left in Berlin. Or Dresden. Or wherever the boy was from. He never remembered which.

"Sam." Webb's voice was lower now. More urgent. "You moved that patrol fifteen minutes before the mortar hit. Fifteen minutes. That's not luck. That's not guesswork. That's --"

"I got lucky."

"Don't." Webb leaned forward. "Don't do that. I've seen you do this three times now, Sam. The ambush at the ridge. the artillery strike on the supply convoy. And this. You always know. You always know before it happens."

Sam looked at the dead German boy. He thought about telling Webb the truth -- that he didn't know, that he couldn't know, that every time he tried to save someone, the universe found a way to collect its debt in a different currency.

But Webb wouldn't understand. No one understood.

"It's luck," Sam said. "That's all it is."

Webb stood up. He didn't look convinced. He looked scared, which was worse. Because when an intelligence officer gets scared, he starts asking questions, and questions lead to interviews, and interviews lead to men in uniforms with clipboards, and Sam had spent the last three years running from men with clipboards.

He waited until Webb was gone. Then he opened the German boy's tunic pocket and took out the photograph. A woman, smiling, holding a child. Berlin, the back -- written in a shaky hand.

Sam put the photograph in his own pocket, alongside a dozen others. He didn't know what he was going to do with them. Send them home, presumably. But to whom? He didn't even know the boy's name.

The oasis was quiet now. The battle had moved on, as battles always did, leaving behind the dead and the wounded and the men like Sam who tried to fix the unfixable. Sam sat in the shade and ate a ration of hardtack that tasted like sawdust and regret, and watched the flies do their work.

The visions had started in Sicily, three months ago. A shell had burst too close to the aid station, and when Sam opened his eyes, he was seeing double -- the battlefield as it was, and the battlefield as it would be in ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour. He'd seen the mortar team set up on the ridge. He'd seen the ambush in the wadi. He'd seen death, over and over, like a reel of film running through his head.

At first, he thought it was shell shock. The combat psychiatrist who examined him diagnosed "transient stress reaction" and prescribed rest. Sam took the rest. He didn't take the prescription. He couldn't afford to be sidelined. Not with the visions getting stronger, more detailed, more impossible to ignore.

He'd tried to move men out of harm's way. He'd shifted patrol routes, reordered bed assignments, sent the most vulnerable soldiers on unnecessary supply runs. It didn't help. The shell always found its target. The ambush always happened. Death was a marksman, and Sam was shooting at the wrong target.

Because the real problem wasn't saving lives. The real problem was that every life he saved sent that person into a longer, more terrible sequence of events.

Corporal Malloy was the clearest example. Sam had pulled Malloy from a collapsing trench in Sicily -- a thing of mud and blood and panic -- and the kid was alive, laughing, thanking Sam like he was God's gift to the infantry. Two months later, Malloy would be assigned to a unit that walked into a German minefield near Benghazi. Six men killed. Malloy among them. Sam had "saved" him in Sicily, and in doing so, sent him to a worse death in Libya.

That was the chain. That was the curse. Not premonition -- entanglement. Every act of salvation was also an act of damnation.

"Doc?"

Sam looked up. Corporal Malloy stood at the edge of the shade, grimacing, his leg bandaged and propped on a rifle.

"You gonna sit there all day, or you gonna help me?" Sam asked.

Malloy grinned. "That's what I like about you, Doc. You make me feel important."

"Your leg's fine. You can walk."

"I know. But Lieutenant Webb says you don't want me walking."

"Webb talks too much."

Malloy sat down heavily. "Doc, can I ask you something?"

"Already did."

"No, seriously. How do you do it? Every time -- you always know something's gonna go wrong. How?"

Sam looked at the dead German boy. He looked at the dozen photographs in his pocket. He looked at Malloy's young face, bright with gratitude and completely unaware of the chain of cause and effect that had brought him here.

"I don't," Sam said quietly. "That's the problem. I don't know. I just... see things. And they always come true. And I can't stop them."

Malloy frowned. "From what I hear, they come true because of you. That doesn't sound like you can't stop them."

Sam almost smiled. Almost. "Kid, you have no idea."

He stood up. He picked up his medkit. He shouldered the weight of a thousand impossible choices and walked back toward the aid station, where the wounded waited and the dead piled up and the desert wind howled through the ruins of the oasis like a mournful spirit that had been howling for a thousand years and would continue to howl for a thousand more.

No one comes back from the oasis. Not really. You survive the battle, you survive the war, but the oasis -- the sand, the heat, the dead boys with photographs in their pockets -- that stays with you. It stays with you forever.

And you carry it, silently, like a stone in your chest, until the day you die and someone finds the photographs and doesn't know what to do with them.

Sam Kowalski carried his stones every day. And he would carry them until the war was over. And probably after.