Easily, she knows. She had seen it in the men—boys, really—she’d served with, some not even twenty years old. They were all strong, funny, smart, bright-eyed, with smiles that could cleave your heart in two—colorful, powerful life forces that were vibrant one moment, and dust the next. It isn’t hard to die. It doesn’t take much. That’s the worst part of it. There is a saying: “When one man dies, a whole universe dies,” and while the implications are obvious—the death of even a single soul is like destroying a world, that human life has profound value—dying is also routine, mundane, almost
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