The bathroom door was locked. I felt an idiotic surge of hope; maybe a fourth person had witnessed the crime, but had managed to hide here in safety. I rattled the handle, and I was on the verge of yelling out words of reassurance, when the meaning of the chained front door finally penetrated my stupor.

I stood frozen for several seconds, at first not quite believing it – and then afraid to move.

Because I could hear someone breathing. Soft and shallow – but not soft enough. Struggling for control. Centimeters away.

I couldn’t let go of the handle; my fingers were clenched tight. I placed my left hand flat against the cool surface of the door, at the height where the killer’s face would be – as if hoping to sense the contours, to gauge the distance from skin to skin by the resonant pitch of every screaming nerve end.

Who was it? Who was the extremists’ assassin? Who had had the opportunity to infect me with the engineered cholera? Some stranger I’d passed in the Phnom Penh transit lounge, or the crowded bazaar of Dili airport? The Polynesian businessman who’d sat beside me, on the last leg of the flight? Indrani Lee?

I was shaking with horror, certain that a bullet would pierce my skull in a matter of seconds – but part of me still wanted, badly, to break open the door and see .

I could have broadcast the moment live on the net – and gone out in a blaze of revelation.

Another shell exploded nearby, the shock wave resonating through the building so powerfully that the frame almost flexed itself free of the lock.

I turned and fled.

#

The procession out of the city was an ordeal – but perhaps never more than it had to be. From my snail’s-eye view of the crowd, everyone looked as terrified, as claustrophobic, as desperate for momentum as I was – but they remained stubbornly, defiantly patient, inching forward like novice tightrope walkers, calculating every movement, sweating from the tension between fear and restraint. Children wailed in the distance, but the adults around me spoke in guarded whispers between the ground-shaking detonations. I kept waiting for an apartment block to collapse in front of us, burying a hundred people and crushing a hundred more in the panic of retreat – but it failed to happen, again and again, and after twenty excruciating minutes we’d left the shelling behind.

The procession kept moving. For a long time, we remained jammed in a herd, shoulder-to-shoulder, with no choice but to keep step – but once we were out of the built-up suburbs and into the industrial areas, where the factories and warehouses were set in wide expanses of bare rock, there was suddenly space to move freely. As the opaque scrum around me melted into near transparency, I could see half a dozen quadcycles ahead in the distance, and even an electric truck keeping pace.