Smoke seeped from the earth, charred trees fell, as he watched, at no more than a breath from the direction of the sea. Powdered dust rose up at every footfall, turning clothes white, faces to masks of dust. The farther up the peninsula, the less damage. A strange gradient of death and wreckage, south to north, in which the poorest and most helpless got it worst—as, indeed, the gradient was to run east to west, in London a year later when the rockets began to fall. Most of the casualties had been among “foreign workers,” a euphemism for civilian prisoners brought in from countries under German occupation. The wind tunnel and the measuring house were untouched, the pre-production works only slightly damaged. Pökler’s colleagues were outside Scientist Housing, which had been hit—phantoms moving in morning fog still not burned off, washing up in buckets of beer because the water was still out. They stared at Pökler, failing, enough of them, to keep accusation out of their faces.

“I wish I could have missed this.”

“Dr. Thiel is dead.”

“How was fairyland, Pökler?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. It wasn’t his fault. The others were silent: some watching, some still in shock from the night.

Mondaugen showed up then. “We’re exhausted. Could you come with me to Pre-production? A lot has to be sorted out, we need a hand.” They shuffled along, each in his own dust-cloud. “It was terrible,” Mondaugen said. “All of us have been under some strain.”

“They sounded like I’d done it.”

“You feeling guilty because you weren’t here?”

“I’m wondering why I wasn’t here. That’s all.”

“Because you were in Zwölfkinder,” replied the enlightened one. “Don’t invent complications.”

He tried not to. That was Weissmann’s job, wasn’t it, Weissmann was the sadist, he had responsibility for coming up with new game-variations, building toward a maximum cruelty in which Pökler would be unlaid to nerves vessels and tendons, every last convolution of brain flattened out in the radiance of the black candles, nowhere to shelter, entirely his master’s possession… the moment in which he is defined to himself at last…. This is what Pökler could feel waiting now, a room he’d never seen, a ceremony he couldn’t memorize in advance….