“Tell me something,” Jo asked Carrington.


“Tell me something,” Jo said again. “How can I do the things that I do? How can I fire thirty rounds at a moving target while I’m in motion at the same time, and be certain each of my shots will hit? How can I be a better shot than Steinberg? How is it that I’ll be in the middle of a firefight and know exactly where to move, how to do it, how to survive unscathed? How is it that when I do get hit, when I am injured, I seem to recover in half the time it would take all the others around me?
“And why, Mister Carrington? Why is it that when I choose to kill, I do it as easily and effortlessly as breathing?”
“You want to know why you’re different?” Carrington asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish that I did. I’d bottle it and make a half dozen more just like you, Joanna.”
Jo hissed in disgust. “A half dozen murderers.”
Even in the darkness, she could see the look of shock on Carrington’s face. “Is that how you see yourself?”
“I’m a killer, Mister Carrington.”
“No, you’re a soldier, Joanna.” Carrington’s voice had lowered, his tone becoming almost urgent. “There’s a world of difference between the two. A killer is always a killer, and that’s all he can ever hope to be. It’s the thing that gives him purpose and pleasure, perhaps the only thing that does. A killer is a killer by nature, Joanna, by design.
“But a soldier, a soldier is first and foremost a warrior, a fighter. Some of them come to the battlefield for a cause, some to prove themselves, others for revenge—there are a thousand reasons, some noble and others not. They do what they do by choice, and they do what they do not to kill, but to win the battle being fought. Sometimes, yes, even oftentimes, that requires the taking of lives. But that isn’t what defines them.
“For a killer, death is all that defines them.”
Jo said nothing, thinking about his words, thinking about the truth she was finding in them. Wondering if she saw it not because it was truly there, but because she so desperately wanted to believe Carrington was right.
As if he sensed what she was thinking, Carrington added, “The problem you’re having, Joanna, isn’t that you’re a killer. It’s that you’re a soldier, and you haven’t yet realized that the war is upon you. You’re a soldier who’s been in skirmishes and battles, and never yet realized that you’re part of the war you’re fighting.”

“How can you do the things you do?” Carrington said. “I don’t know. But it’s clear to everyone who sees you do them that you were born to it, Joanna. You were born to fight, to soldier, to battle. You have a genius for it. And the only way you will ever come to peace with it is if you embrace it, and find the war you’re willing to fight.”
"Your war,” she said.
“Not mine,” Carrington said. “Ours.”