The sky blued as they carried her from the dust. Altemoc ran to the Quechal woman who had met Tara on her arrival at camp. His rhythm was off, or Tara’s was, the clock of her heart erratic. The woman hugged him, fierce, stepped back and shouted words Tara couldn’t sort from one another. Altemoc pointed at the mountain in stutter-step motion, slow and too fast at once.

Gray chewed the edges of her vision, and her colors bled. The ground was not where she expected it to be, the force vector into her ankle a crucial few degrees off just. She fell hard on her knee, felt trousers, stocking, and skin tear.

Human speech was wind through a flapping aperture of meat. Altemoc ran three-legged toward her, mouth producing more dumb meat-sounds. The fields back home looked like this in the hours before dawn, hueless and achromatic. But the home wind tasted of earth and dew and waking things. Where was that taste now? Had she lost it?

He caught her, and his scars burned green.

The sun rose.

59

59

Corbin Rafferty heard a thunderclap of silence.

That was new.

The screams weren’t. There were always screams inside his head these days.

But he had never heard (or not-heard) silence like this. It fell like a ten-ton sandbag and broke as suddenly. The cries and hospital noise, metronome ticks and cart wheels and doctors’ footsteps, returned as if never interrupted, until the silence struck again.

The silent bell peals were hands that squeezed his heart, lungs, stomach.

Am I dying? Is this how death feels?

His arms did not tingle; he felt no pain in his head. He heard, but there was nothing to hear.

The moon had dragged him through so many nightmare memories, his life seen from outside as if a stranger lived it. He did not like this stranger. But this silence was not of the moon: always in those dreams he heard the crash of surf on the beach where he’d wept when she left.

He opened his eyes. He could not do that in the dreams, which was part of their torture: he felt his body as an inmate felt prison walls. But he opened his eyes, and closed them at the brilliance of the day. No, not of day: of fire in the sky, of fire that was the sky.

He howled in panic and the sky clenched. Silence pealed through him, broke his cry in half. When he could hear again, he closed his mouth.

He was awake. Some cataclysm had struck the city, and in the chaos he’d wormed free of the moon’s grip.