“Toll, toll, pay the toll,” he sang softly, his voice husky with the cold. He coughed; age not disease. He was healthy enough. Years more would likely pass, too many, before the memory blotter came and sucked his cares away.

He had done so little in his decades of service, as far as he could tell. The Earth after forty years was still a gaping wound, despite its official name; on its way to recovery, to be sure, but a place of constant reminders of death and human stupidity.

Why did the past come back to him so vividly now, of all times? To distract him from the frustrations of his widening rift with Karen? She had been positively stony since the funeral.

Twenty-nine years ago. A nameless town deep in the forests of southeastern Canada, a cold and snowy trap for three hundred men, women, and children. The men emerged from their solid, low-slung log cabins, emaciated beyond even Lanier’s experience, to confront the sky-travelers. Lanier and his partners, two Hexamon operatives, a man and woman, were well-fed and healthy, of course. They walked resolutely across the snowy field between their craft and the nearest hut, addressing the men in French and English.

“Where are your women?” the female operative asked. “Your children?”

The men stared at them, eyes elfin with starvation, ethereally beautiful, faces white, hair gray and patchy. One man staggered forward, jaw slack, arms out, and hugged Lanier with all his strength. Like being squeezed by a sick child. Lanier, close to tears, supported the man, whose yellowed eyes shone with something like adoration, or perhaps just relief and joy.

A rifle shot rang out and the female operative spun back across the snow, her chest a well of gore.

“No! No!” cried another of the men, but more shots clipped bark from trees, splashed snow, sang off the hull of the craft. A single middle-aged man with a thick black beard, less emaciated than the others, carrying a rifle that seemed even more nourished and fleshy than he, stood in the town’s lone road, cursing loudly, “Eleven years! Eleven! Where have you gods been these eleven awful years?”

The male operative, whose name he could no longer recall, knocked the man over with a hot flash of ball lightning spun from their only weapon. Lanier stood over the wounded operative, quickly assessing her condition. She would not survive unless they retrieved the marble of downloaded personality from the back of her neck; Lanier bent down and felt her pulse, letting her eyes flutter shut, allowing her to enter the first stage of death. Ignoring everything around him, he took out a folding scalpel and sliced open the woman’s neck just below the skull, feeling with his fingers for the black marble, pulling it from its socket, slipping it into a small plastic bag, as he had been trained.