A blinding flash and she was knocked down. Her ears roared. She was at the foot of a building, pressed against its polished stone side. Jaspilite: red jasper and iron oxide, in alternating bands. Pretty. Her back and bottom and shoulder hurt, and her elbow. But nothing was agonizing. She could move. She crawled around, looked back to the triangle park. Things were burning in the wind, the flames little oxygen-starved orange spurts, going out already. The figures there were cast about like broken dolls, limbs akimbo, in positions no bones could hold. She got up and ran to the nearest knot of them, drawn by a familiar gray-haired head that had come free of its helmet. That was Kasei, only son of John Boone and Hiroko Ai, one side of his jaw bloody, his eyes open and sightless. He had taken her too seriously. And his opponents not seriously enough. His pink stone eyetooth lay there exposed by his wound, and seeing it Ann choked and turned away. The waste. All three of them dead now.

She turned back and crouched, unclipped Kasei’s wrist-pad. It was likely that he had a direct access band to the Kakaze, and when she was back in the shelter of an obsidian building marred by great white shatterstars, she tapped in the general call code, and said, “This is Ann Clayborne, calling all Reds. All Reds. Listen, this is Ann Clayborne. The attack on Sheffield has failed. Kasei is dead, along with a lot of others. More attacks here won’t work. They’ll cause the full UNTA security force to come back down onto the planet again.” She wanted to say how stupid the plan had been in the first place, but she choked back the words. “Those of you who can, get off the mountain. Everyone in Sheffield, get back to the west and get out of the city, and off the mountain. This is Ann Clayborne.”

Several acknowledgments came in, and she half listened to them as she walked west, back through Arsiaview toward her rover. She made no attempt to hide; if she was killed she was killed, but now she didn’t believe it would happen; she walked under the wings of some dark covering angel, who kept her from death no matter what happened, forcing her to witness the deaths of all the people she knew and all the planet she loved. Her fate. Yes; there was Dao and his crew, all dead right where she had left them, lying in pools of their own blood. She must have just missed it.

And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in its center, was another knot of bodies— not Reds— they wore green headbands, and one of them looked like Peter, it was his back— she walked over weak-kneed, under a compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally circled it. But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like Peter’s, poor thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.