Marcus looked at the screens lining the walls. Many of them showed the same scene, often from the same perspective, though he guessed that of the hundred or so screens there were still several dozen separate feeds. Most showed battle scenes, and he assumed that they were live; Trimble was watching the war unfold from a central location, the way Kira had done with her radios. He wondered again where Kira had gone, and if he would ever see her again. Most of East Meadow had given her up for dead, no one having come forward to end D Company’s murderous occupation, but he still held hope—probably vain hope, he knew—that she would survive.

One of the largest screens was repeating a single scene: a running soldier, an explosion of mud and grass, and then it would all rewind in rapid motion. The flailing man would fly forward, land lightly on the ground, and run backward while the earth knit itself together again, and then suddenly the feed would reverse once more and the man would run forward and the ground beneath him would explode. After the fourth such cycle, Marcus realized that the speed and the stopping points were slightly different each time—it wasn’t on a loop, someone was manipulating it, back and forth, searching for . . . something. He stepped forward, circling slightly to the side, and saw that Trimble was sitting at a faintly glowing desk-screen, her fingers sliding back and forth across a series of digital dials and sliders. She zoomed in and out, she wound the video backward and forward, and all the time the young man died in the explosion, over and over and over again.

“Excuse me,” said Woolf.

“Wait for her to talk to you,” said the guard.