By now the once-billowing column was all but exhausted, a few threads of smoke twisting into the sky. But they could see the source, a roughly rectangular patch of scorched woodland at the bottom of the hill. Or rather, a roughly rectangular outline: the center of the area appeared to be unburned.

Lubin had his binocs out. "See anything?" Clarke asked.

He hmmmed.

"Come on, Ken. What is it?"

He handed her the binoculars without a word.

There was disquieting moment when the device tightened itself around her head. Suddenly the world was huge, and in sharp focus. Clarke felt brief vertigo and stepped forward, bracing against sudden illusory imbalance. Twigs and blighted leaves the size of dinner tables swept past in a blur. She zoomed back to get her bearings. Better: there was the scorched earth, there was the patch in its midst, and there was—

"Oh shit," she murmured.

Miri sat dead center of the clear zone. It looked undamaged.

Ouellette stood beside it. She appeared to be conversing with a gunmetal ovoid half her size, hovering a meter over her head. Its carapace was featureless; its plastron bristled with sensors and antennae.

A botfly. Not so long ago, teleoperated robots just like it had hounded Lenie Clarke across a whole continent.

"Busted," Lubin said.

The world was bleaching in Clarke's eyecaps by the time they reached the MI. Ouellette sat on the road with her back against the van, legs bent, arms crossed loosely over knees. She stared listlessly at the pavement between her feet. She looked up at the sound of their approach. The botfly hung overhead like a bodyguard. It showed no visible reaction to their arrival.

Bleached light wasn't enough to account for the pallor of Ouellette's face. She looked absolutely bloodless. There were wet streaks on her face.

She looked at Clarke and shook her head. "What are you?" she said. Her voice was as empty as a cave.

Clarke's throat went dry.

"You're not just some refugee. You're not just some rifter who's been hiding for five years. You—you started this, somehow. You started it all..."

Clarke tried to swallow, looked to Lubin. But Lubin's eyes didn't waver from the botfly.

She spread her hands. "Tak, I—"

"The monsters in the machines, they're all—you," Ouellette seemed stunned at the sheer magnitude of Clarke's betrayal. "The M&Ms and the fanatics and the death cults, they're all following you..."

They're not, Clarke wanted to shout. I'd stop them all in a second if I could, I don't know how any of it got started—

But that would be a lie, of course. Maybe she hadn't formally founded the movements that had sprung up in her wake, but that didn't make them any less faithful to the thing she'd been. They were the very essence of the rage and hatred that had driven her, the utter indifference to any loss but her own.