December, two thousand, in Afghanistan.

  Their leader was shouting again. Likki ignored him for the most part. She couldn't understand him anyway. He was speaking whatever language they spoke here—something like Pas-doh, or Pushtu, she hadn't really been paying much attention to that part of their instructions—ranting about something she didn't care for.

  It didn't matter. Likki was here to do her job, like she always did. That's what they paid her for. Only, this time, for whatever reason, she'd been loaned out, along with a few others, to come help the Taliban in Afghanistan. She had no idea what they were doing there, or why the Taliban could possibly need help from a few random enforcers, but it didn't matter.

  As long as she could go home eventually. It was too dry here. She missed the snow.

  Finally, they climbed into trucks and set off. They bounced along rough roads, or sometimes no roads at all. One of the trucks at the front of the convoy had a gun mounted in the bed. Hers was toward the back of the small convoy, with the other three members of her team and a translator driving.

  Likki was the only girl in the whole group of twenty or so, but she was pretty sure nobody knew she was a girl. Her clothes were loose enough to hide her appearance, and she wore her hair short lately, after a fight where long hair became a serious liability. Between that, the thick clothes, and the face concealment to shield out the dusty wind, Likki didn't really look any different from her companions.

  So long as she never spoke, of course. Not that Likki ever needed to speak on a job. Her rifle spoke plenty.

  A village was coming up ahead. Their trucks were starting to spread out, kicking up huge clouds of dust as they encircled the place. Likki was starting to get suspicious. What were they doing out here? This didn't seem even remotely related to their typical work. She had a vague idea of how the Taliban operated, but how was that even remotely related to her?

  Likki leaned forward in her truck bed, dropping her voice so it wouldn't be overheard by their translator. "What are we doing here?" she asked.

  It was standard procedure to avoid using Finnish, Estonian, Russian, or anything that could link back to them while out of their territory. They didn't do so well with accents, but the leadership insisted, so Likki went along with it. She was picking up languages fast anyway—Finnish and Estonian weren't very different, and Russian she picked up very quickly after realizing how much she'd need to use it. English was her latest acquisition, and she felt like she already had a pretty good grip on it.

  In some small part of her mind, she'd wanted to learn English because she wanted to go to America someday. She'd heard all about America from some of the older members of the organization—how the mighty empire had won and toppled their Union, how everyone there ate like kings and lived in massive homes. She didn't really believe them, but she still wanted to see it for herself someday, one way or the other.

  Her associate shrugged. "We do what he say," he replied, nodding at the translator. "Orders of boss."

  "He's not one of us," said Likki carefully.

  The man shrugged again and looked forward, clutching his AK-47 between his legs. Likki leaned back, since she wasn't going to get a real answer, and examined her rifle. It was getting dusty from all the wind, but cleaning it would be futile in their rush toward the village. The place had been fully encircled now, and two of the trucks—the one with the machine gun and another—were driving into the center now. Her truck followed them in.

  "Everyone!" their translator supplied as the apparent leader of the Taliban group stood atop his truck. "Out of your homes right now!"

  Two of the men in the lead truck fired their rifles into the sky. Likki winced at the waste of ammunition and the carelessness. Still, she couldn't deny it was effective.

  From every door in the village, people streamed out. Men holding their children, women wrapped up tight, everyone practically stumbling over each other as they hurried out into the open. They all knew there was no point in running or hiding. The little village was surrounded. Trucks were still circling the place, engines roaring and echoing off the hills at the edge of their land. Goats bleated from a pen nearby, terrified.

  The Taliban leader grabbed five men, seemingly picking them out of the crowd, but Likki was almost certain he'd chosen at random. They were shoved down onto their knees in front of the well around which the village had been built. Two of them raised their eyes to the sky, murmuring prayers under their breath.

  "We are in charge," said the translator, as the leader of their group began a rant. "We have come to bring together all the peoples of Afghanistan, but you refuse us? The world is against us! Afghans must unite!"

  Likki got out of the truck. She leaned against the warm body, gazing at nothing in particular. She felt bored. This was pointless. The villagers weren't about to start attacking them, and the Taliban were more than well-armed. What was she doing there? What were any of them doing there? Why did they even care about this little village in the middle of nowhere?

  "...so they pay the price!" said the translator. Likki looked up, just as two of the Taliban soldiers executed the five men in front of the well.

  She winced. The crowd fell on their knees, pleading. People were crying. It all seemed so… so meaningless.

  "Have you learned your lesson?"

  Likki looked back up at the sky again. One of her team glanced at her, curious, but this was a common thing for her. Everyone knew that the quiet Finnish teenager with the rifle was always obsessed with the stars. It was the middle of the day, of course, so they couldn't see them yet, but everybody knew she was still looking. None of them ever knew why, of course, nor that it wasn't the stars—just one in particular.

  No matter where she ended up in the world, Likki always made sure she could find her star, and knew there was still hope.

  Something else was happening, but Likki didn't feel like looking down. There would be more ranting, maybe a little more killing, and then it'd be over. They'd leave, she'd ask again if she could get out of the country and go back north, and invariably one of them would say no. It had been over a month now, the longest job they'd ever been sent on.

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  "...and now we have allies from afar!"

  "Likki," murmured the closest of her companions.

  She looked down. The translator was looking at her expectantly… as was the speaker in the center of town. She walked forward, rifle in hand, unsure what was about to happen. The man beckoned her forward, looking excited, almost friendly. She resisted the urge to recoil from him.

  The man spouted a sentence in Pashto, pointing at the head of the kneeling pair in front of him. Likki had no idea what he'd said, but the meaning was more than clear.

  She was to kill this one.

  The rifle came up. Likki's finger curled out over the trigger guard, just outside, ready to strike. She looked down the sight, checking her aim, even though the target was less than a meter away. As her eyes adjusted, Likki caught—only for a moment—the faces of who she was meant to kill.

  A young girl, clinging to her mother's breast, and a sobbing woman's eyes pleading for her life.

  Likki knew it was insane, but for an instant, she saw the face of the girl back in Helsinki, on the couch in her home just before Christmas. She hesitated, her finger hovering over the trigger, and knew they were already suspicious. Likki was the ice-cold killer. This was why they'd wanted her, why they'd sent her in and chosen her to kill this woman.

  Under any other circumstances, Likki would kill anyone, without hesitation, without a single emotion crossing her face even as she buried her true feelings deep in her heart. She killed, simple as that, and this should have been no different.

  She couldn't do it.

  The man repeated whatever he'd said, a little more urgently.

  Likki's finger curled forward again, but she'd already made up her mind. This was just a show now, just a play she was acting out while she plotted her next move.

  No matter what happened, she was going to make sure that little girl survived.

  The man asked a third time, and took a step forward—and Likki struck.

  She slammed the butt of her rifle into his groin, too fast for him to react. He crumpled. Before anyone else realized what was happening, Likki had turned and fired a round into the gunner on the back of the technical, knocking him out out of the picture as well.

  She ran for cover, just as the quickest of the Taliban soldiers were lifting their rifles to retaliate.

  Gunfire erupted through the village. People scattered in every direction. Likki dove into the nearest home with a window, rolling across the floor while glass shattered above her. She crawled over the rug and past a water jug. As soon as she'd turned the corner into the kitchen and stood up, a bullet slammed into it.

  The jug burst. Water splashed out all over the floor, soaking into the rug, covering her boots. Likki winced, remembering her frozen shoes that night, and twisted around. Her rifle found an easy target—one of the soldiers had rushed into the house after her.

  A single pop. He died just as quickly.

  Wailing filled the village now, along with so many confused shouts in Pashto, English, and even a little Russian. Likki ran up the staircase onto the second floor of the little home. She knew the soldiers didn't have grenades. As long as she could keep anyone off the mounted machine gun, they didn't have anything to flush her out.

  She found a perfect alcove, where she could see both the bottom of the staircase and the gun on the technical. A Taliban soldier was just climbing up. She dropped him dead, right on top of the first body still lying in the truck bed.

  Engines roared back into the village as the other trucks returned. Likki twisted around and placed another shot into the windshield, but she missed the driver. It still worked, as the driver panicked and twisted the wheel. The truck slammed into a wall, disabled, and with a static target, Likki easily put another two bullets into the men crawling out of crushed cabin.

  AK fire peppered her building. Likki's spot was deep enough that the bullets weren't penetrating every layer, but the rattle on the wall below was distracting. She had to focus, as she took out another soldier rushing her building.

  That made six, out of the twenty who'd come to the village. Or should she count for twenty-three? Were her companions coming to kill her as well? She couldn't be sure.

  It didn't matter, she realized. Likki was never going back now. If she even made it out of this alive, she was stuck here. They needed the Taliban to transport and guide them. None of her group had a clue where they were.

  Likki killed another soldier, someone who thought himself clever by finding a position opposite her in another building on the second floor. The moment he emerged, she put a bullet through his neck. A third soldier tried to get on the technical's mounted gun, and she dropped him as well.

  The engines started to fade. She didn't hear any more gunfire. Likki waited, holding her position. She didn't believe them yet, and she knew she'd already found the best spot to defend herself. The village was so bare, and there wasn't much foliage in the surrounding landscape, just wide rolling hills. Moving would be suicide.

  Likki waited.

  After twenty minutes of quiet, with only the continued wailing of the villagers, someone finally dared to approach her building. Likki took aim, but kept her finger well away from the trigger.

  It was the woman she'd been asked to kill.

  She took one cautious step forward, gingerly walking over the body sprawled on the floor. Likki wondered if this was her home, by sheer coincidence. The woman took another step, and then another, until she could see Likki's spot up on the staircase.

  The woman said something she couldn't understand.

  "Bezopasnyy?" asked Likki in Russian. Safe? The woman cocked her head slightly. She tried again in Finnish, and the variant in Estonian just in case. "Turvallinen? Turvaline?"

  Still, the woman didn't understand. She looked afraid, but—she hoped—not of Likki. Likki lowered the gun a little, but not so much she couldn't still shoot if there was a Taliban soldier waiting just out of sight.

  "Safe?" she finally tried in English.

  The woman's eyes lit up slightly. She nodded.

  "Safe," she replied.

  "You speak English?"

  "A little," she said. "Americans came once. They speak English. I wanted to learn. I go to school and learn English."

  "You speak it good."

  "Well," she corrected, smiling slightly, but something was wrong. Likki could see it in her eyes.

  She lowered her rifle. "Where is she?"

  The woman shook her head. "No. Don't ask. Please."

  "Where?"

  The woman led her back out of the building. The men were picking up the guns, piling them in a corner of the village near the crashed truck. Likki saw her three companions being carried away—evidently, the Taliban had expected them to turn as well. A few of their own had died, and every corpse was treated with the utmost care.

  The girl was among them.

  The woman saw the body and started wailing again. Likki immediately recognized her voice as the one who'd been crying throughout the firefight. She felt pain, an emotional pain she hadn't recognized in years, and one she'd never wanted to feel again.

  A man walked over to Likki cautiously. "You not Russian," he muttered. "Not them either," he added, jerking his head at one of the bodies being carried from Likki's chosen building.

  "No."

  "They come back. They not give up."

  "No," she agreed. Likki looked at the pile of rifles they were stacking up thoughtfully. She glanced back at the man, but he was already shaking his head.

  "Not fighters," he said, gesturing at the village.

  Likki nodded. She was already putting together a plan, positions to set up, places where she could entrench herself. She glanced up at the sky, where night was already starting to fall. Her star was still up there.

  She sighed. She wasn't getting out of Afghanistan anytime soon after all. As Likki got to work, collecting all the weapons and ammunition she could gather, directing some of the villagers to help her get the technical out of sight, and preparing for the inevitable.

  Likki found her star, and wished for her again, the same one she made every year now.

  She wished that this December would be better than the one before it.