Feedback by Peter Cawdron

and family, relaxing around the warmth of a fire.”
    Sun-Hee smiled, but her smile was forced. Lee couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was crying. Her tears mingled with the rain. Her blank stare told him she had given up. She couldn't go on.
    It wasn’t until he pulled his hands away from the side of her hair that he realized she was bleeding from a head wound. She must have taken a knock to the back of the head when she’d fallen from the track. In the darkness, he hadn’t noticed before now. Gently, Lee reached around, his fingers touching gingerly at her matted hair. Sun-Hee winced in pain.
    “I feel ... I feel sick.”
    The muscles in her neck felt weak. Her shoulders sagged.
    “Hey,” Lee said. “Stay with me. Think of your grandfather. Think about seeing him again. Think about the sunshine. Think about a warm summer’s day. We’re going to make it.”
    Lee pulled her to her feet, determined to continue on, but it was as though he was dragging a sack of coal. She had no strength with which to stand. Even with a broken leg, she seemed barely aware of the world around her.
    Sun-Hee collapsed in his arms, her legs dragging on the ground behind her.
    Lee crouched, placing both arms under her frail body. He lifted her up, holding her in a cradle before him.
    “This night will end,” he said softly. “There is always a dawn. There is always a new day ahead.”
    Somehow, their fates seemed entwined, and he felt as though he were destined to save her. Lee had never been fatalistic, had never been into horoscopes or fortune tellers, and would have ordinarily dismissed such a notion as bogus, but on that dark, cold night he felt vulnerable. Perhaps it was his own impending demise he felt so acutely. Having watched one of the SEALs being murdered on the beach, he knew his own prospects of survival were next to nil.
    Lee had been through evade and escape scenarios and one thing they made very clear was that the chances of escape were like winning the lottery. In the exercises, everyone got caught. It didn't matter how fit you were, how smart you thought you were or how cunning you could be, nobody escaped.
    Perhaps saving Sun-Hee would make up for his loss. Perhaps that's why he felt so drawn to help her. If he couldn't survive, maybe she could and in that he'd find some hollow victory.
    “My grandfather,” she mumbled. “Not my brother ... Don’t let my brother see you.”
    She was deteriorating quickly, becoming delirious. Lee had seen this before on too many occasions, the cumulative effect of shock and the onset of hypothermia. The solution was always the same: get the patient warm and dry. He had to get her to that village.
    Her head rolled to one side as he staggered back onto the track and continued down the hill, focusing on one step at a time. His ankles felt as though they had lead weights strapped around them. His boots scuffed at the loose stones as he stumbled along.
    “Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me, how I will know your grandfather? Where does he live in the village?”
    It didn't really matter, and he knew that. He could leave her with any of the villagers and they'd care for her and find the old man, but he wanted to keep her talking, to keep her conscious.
    Sun-Hee rested one hand at the nape of his neck, touching him gently. Her fingers were cold, but that she could touch him filled him with hope. Such tenderness was overwhelming to a man on the run, fighting for his life. With all he’d gone through, surviving both the crash and the raging sea, seeing his fellow man brutally murdered, running for his life and the physical exhaustion of a forced march over the best part of thirty kilometers, enduring the cold and wet, after all this, her touch was incongruous, disarming. Feeling her soft touch spoke to him of compassion, a reminder that beyond the calloused enmity of two nations on the verge of war, humanity was only ever one isolated soul reaching out to another.
    “Look for the diesel