"Past this point I won't be able to return you. I can afford a forty-six hour delay more than I can afford someone slowing me down once we get to the mainland."

"We've been over this, Ken. What makes you think I'm going to be any easier to convince now?"

"Things are worse than I expected."

"How, exactly? It's already the end of the world."

He points at a spot under the stairs where the paint's been scraped off.

Clarke shrugs. "I don't see anything."

"Right." Lubin turns and starts back towards the scorched remains of the control hut.

She sets out after him. "So?"

"I left a backup recorder behind. Looked like a rivet." He brings his hand out, holds thumb and forefinger close together, almost touching, for scale. "Even painted it over. I would never have been able to find it." The forefinger extends; Lubin's pointing hand describes an imaginary line between hut and staircase. "Nice short line-of-sight to minimize power consumption. Omnidirectional broadcast; impossible to backtrack. Enough memory for a week's worth of routine chatter, plus anything they might have sent our way."

"That's not much," Clarke remarks.

"It wasn't a long-term record. When it ran out of new memory it overwrote the old."

A black box, then. A moving record of the recent past. "So you were expecting something like this," she surmises.

"I was expecting that if something happened, I'd at least be able to retrieve some kind of log. I wasn't expecting to lose the recorder. I was the only one who knew it was here."

They've returned to the radio shack. The blackened door frame still stands, an absurd rectangle rising from the rubble. Lubin, perhaps out of some cryptic respect for standard procedure, passes through it. Clarke simply steps over the knee-high tatters of the nearest wall.

Something snaps and cracks around her ankle. She looks down. Her foot is imprisoned in a blackened human ribcage, her leg emerging from a shattered hole where the sternum used to be. She can feel the knobs and projections of the spine underfoot, brittle and crumbling under the slightest weight.

If there's a skull—or arms or legs—they must be buried in the surrounding rubble.

Lubin watches while she pulls her foot from the remains. Something glitters behind his eyecaps.

"Whoever's behind this," he says, "is smarter than me."

His face isn't really expressionless. It just looks that way to the uninitiated. But Lenie Clarke has learned to read him, after a fashion, and Lubin doesn't look worried or upset to her. He looks excited.

She nods, undeterred. "So you need all the help you can get."

She follows him down.

Nightingale