War on Terror period

The War on Terror period marks the abrupt passage from Jessica Mastriani’s unfinished adolescence into a conflict that makes her ability to locate missing people indispensable. In her account, the war is not a distant sequence of television reports: she is sent to Afghanistan to identify places where people are hiding, and the work exposes her to consequences that persist after she comes home. The period therefore joins public crisis to private rupture, changing both what Jessica can do and whether she can sleep, dream, or resume ordinary life.

The War Reaches Indiana

Jessica recalls the war as arriving without warning, much as the lightning strike that had earlier changed her life. Its presence first registers in the neighborhood: American flags appear in front yards, and people remain glued to CNN around the clock. For most Americans, as she describes it, the conflict is mediated by nightly reports of Marines killed and terrorists found in caves. That distant, televised view forms a deliberate contrast with her own experience.

Jessica has not even finished high school when the government calls on her. Her initial arrangement is to work from home, which would allow her to complete twelfth grade. But the need to locate people quickly makes that arrangement inadequate. Her first instinct is to refuse; the person who urges her to go is her brother Douglas, whom she had expected to oppose the idea. His encouragement helps turn a frightening demand into a responsibility she accepts: innocent people are dying, and she believes her ability can help find them.

Searching in Afghanistan

At first Jessica tries to direct searches remotely, and later works from Washington. The method depends on the certainty of her power: when teams return saying no one was at the location she identified, she believes their report is wrong, not her ability. The mismatch between her knowledge and what the searchers can verify becomes the reason she asks to be sent to the field. She wants to show them where to look rather than continue guiding them from a distance.

In Afghanistan, the war shifts from television images to immediate work. Jessica says she is there to tell the searchers which caves to investigate, helping the United States Marine Corps track and detain men trained at terrorist death camps. Her findings do not produce one uniform outcome. Some people she locates become subjects of news reports; others remain secret. Some are beyond reach in deep mountain hideouts, some are monitored while officials wait, and some are found dead. Jessica nevertheless regards each location as a successful finding, even when it cannot lead to a rescue or an immediate capture. That distinction gives her role its particular weight: identifying someone does not mean she can control what happens next.

The Cost of the Work

The effort eventually gives way to nightmares and an inability to sleep. Because Jessica’s search ability operates through dreams, insomnia is not only a symptom of distress; it also removes the means by which she can find anyone. Her loss of sleep and her loss of usefulness thus become inseparable. The ability that made her valuable to the wartime search is no longer accessible when the war’s experiences begin to follow her into the night.

The condition is called post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSS. The people trying to help her attempt drugs and therapy, and send her for a week beside a large pool in Dubai. None of these measures restores her sleep. The sequence is significant not because the novel presents a simple remedy that fails, but because several different kinds of intervention leave the central problem unchanged. With her capacity to dream and search gone, the people around her send her home in the hope that a return to normal surroundings might help.

Coming Home Changed

Home does not restore the life Jessica left. She recalls that everything was different, even though the expectation had been that things would return to normal. Later, Rob Wilkins recognizes the gap between the scale of what she endured and the ordinary life she has managed to lead. He acknowledges that she faced pressure and saw things no one her age, or any age, should have seen, then describes her as having returned broken. Jessica resists the idea at first, but later reflects that some part of her did come back different, and that the change reaches beyond the ability she can no longer use.

The war consequently remains present in the story after Jessica’s physical return from Afghanistan. Its aftermath appears in her difficulty sleeping, the interruption of her dream-based work, and her uncertainty about whether she has recovered. When she later confronts Hannah Snyder’s danger, she invokes the year she spent working with Marines to explain why a threatening man does not frighten her in the same way. The contrast is sharp: wartime experience has left Jessica injured and altered, yet it has also given her a measure against which she assesses later danger. The period is not a backdrop with a clean endpoint; its consequences persist in her body, her self-understanding, and the way she responds to people in need.