“I haven’t seen any of your people die yet,” Sasha said. “Is that abnormal?”

“No,” Donald’s voice was grim. “There’ll be a lot of injuries, but I don’t expect Rolling Fuck will lose a single warrior.”

“Good,” Sasha said.

“Is it?” Donald asked.

“Of course it’s good, you silly fuck,” Nana Yazzie snapped. That was the first time Manny could recall hearing her angry.

“I disagree,” the old man grumbled. “We’re on a precipice here, the edge of a deep cliff. Every time this happens we get a little closer to falling off.”

“What do you mean?” Manny asked.

“He means,” Nana Yazzie replied with a bit of drunken slur to her voice, “that he doesn’t trust the people of this city. He thinks they’ll get a taste for war and this whole experiment will turn into a nightmare.”

“You can’t trust the dark,” Donald Farris insisted, “and we’re in the dark here.” He waved out at the field and the hundreds of people, in tearful silence, watching the faces of the dead. “Right now we’ve managed to lash together a chain of rituals that keep them peaceful. How long can that last?”

Nana Yazzie glared at him, and then shifted her gaze to Manny. She pointed a finger at Donald.

“He thinks we should have let your people die,” she said. “I think we have a responsibility to intervene.”

“I’m not saying we don’t,” Donald Farris insisted. “I’m just saying, I’ve seen how this story ends. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

“Pithy,” Nana Yazzie said, “but– Oh!”

She stopped mid-sentence and stared out into the screens. Manny looked back just in time to watch the flow of dead faces speed up again. The screens jerked and shuddered to accommodate the new flow. Once they adjusted, Manny was shocked again at the violence on display. He saw men run through with lances, gutted by scimitars, burnt by napalm, and trampled under the spiked hooves of Quadrophracts.

“Oh god,” he moaned.

“Ah yes,” Nana Yazzie sighed, “that would be the cavalry. It won’t be much longer now. They’re here to finish the job.”

Roland.

The Knights of Rolling Fuck were a sight to see, truly. It wasn’t often that Roland came across something that registered as completely new to the deep, battered banks of his memory. But there was no déjà vu here, no sense that he’d watched anything like it before. Rolling Fuck’s riders worked in two- and three-person squads, mostly using a mix of hand-grenades, small arms, flamethrowers, and melée weapons for shock value.