“I suppose bringing us together in here was only prudent,” Wertz said. “A sensible precaution.” She paused, crossing her arms. “Without making too much of it, though, when do you think the alert condition will be called off?”

Megan looked at her.

“That depends on when we hear from our firefighting team,” Megan said. “With a little luck we’ll have you safely and comfortably back in your quarters tonight . . . before anyone gets too homesick for civilization. Then we can all relax and can get some sleep.”

Across the room, Granger sat quietly in his chair. The redhead was as cool and slick as the block of ice she probably snuggled up to at night. He wasn’t sure how much she knew about the fire’s cause. But she would at the very least know where it had broken out, and was minimizing its impact to the politicos . . . which made him wonder what else she realized and was keeping to herself.

Granger crossed his arms, feeling a chill in his stomach despite the more than adequate warmth of his surroundings.

He felt neither safe nor comfortable, and sleep was the furthest damn thing from his mind.

Phil Corben wanted to know how he’d gone from a night of beer and darts at the Meat Locker to lying outside in the cold to die.

Thrown face-down off his bike, snow mashed into his eyes, nose, and mouth, halfway burying him where he’d fallen, the flesh under his insulating garments damp with blood from his monstrous gunshot wounds, Corben wanted to know.

It wasn’t that he was muddled about the events that had brought him to this point. Although his wounds had left him slack and disoriented, he could have recounted what happened in something very close to a coherent, sequential order. There wasn’t that much to it . . . he’d sped toward the water-treatment dome with Rice’s squad, and the men who’d set fire to it had rushed to meet them, and the shooting had started, and he’d gotten in the way of a burst of bullets.

Easy to follow.

The problem for him was believing it was all real as opposed to being part of some grotesquely implausible nightmare.