But still, the guilt was there. Perhaps what she felt was a betrayal of her past self. Or maybe she was just dumb. Sasha shook it off. She tried to focus on the carnage. It was horrible, she knew that in a detached academic sense. She couldn’t quite feel the horror, though. It was as if shooting Darryl had opened up a great, gnawing hole inside her heart and that hole had spread, like a black film, over her entire body. All her feelings seemed so distant now.

She wanted to cry about Darryl. She wanted to cry about this. She wanted to cry for Susannah and Anne, left alone in that living hell of a Kingdom. She wanted to cry for herself, too. But she couldn’t. And so she didn’t. Instead, she sat and watched as the warrior gods of this strange city helped the Martyrs earn their title.

Sasha looked out at the citizens of Rolling Fuck. Most of the people she could see were crying, and even those who weren’t looked shaken, horrified. The perpetual party atmosphere she’d come to associate with the City of Wheels was gone. It had been suspended to allow for pain. Sasha wanted to hurt with them.

But instead she thought about the offer that man Jim had made. She thought about the squicking sound of the razor blade flipping out of Roland’s forearm. She’d seen the way he fought. She longed for the high that had come with the violence in the clinic, but she couldn’t stand more of the guilt that killing Darryl had brought her. I could be a medic, Sasha thought, Jim said so.

She looked up to the screens again, at the parade of death. She wasn’t sure if any of the dead had been Rolling Fuck’s soldiers. It didn’t look like it. But as she settled back in to watch, something glitched on the screens. The stream of faces sped up, well past the point where she could focus on any of them. Then the flow stopped, sputtered, the picture glitched out and then righted itself.

Whatever algorithm handled the show eventually stabilized, and the individual images on each screen shrank to accommodate many, many more people, a flood of the dead and moments from their lives. The nature of their deaths changed, too. Most of the first wave seemed to come from a sudden burst of explosive detonations. But the explosions stopped and the dying continued, and whatever was killing the Martyrs now moved too fast to be clearly seen.

“What’s happening?” she heard Manny ask. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” the old man said. “That’s Roland.”

Roland.