If the mission had succeeded, surely he would not be here.

He forced himself to his feet. Moving toward the light and the sound of the waves, he was once again hampered by dizziness, and this despite his efforts to control it. Nevertheless, he forced himself forward until he came out on a narrow beach. To his right was the huge structure, which he recognized as one of the great piers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ahead was fog-shrouded water, the city visible only as an occasional ghost behind the rolling clouds. Beyond the first pier, there was another, then another. High overhead was the great iron structure itself. The deck was gone, all of it, the iron suspenders a ropy tangle between the arches.

There was more lightning, followed instantly by another blast of thunder. The storm, now thick and dark, was marching down from the north. Throughout his life of conflict, his program had always guided him. It failed him now, because he could not make sense of his obviously having survived a nonsurvivable event.

Coming to the end of his ability to understand his situation caused him to experience deep loneliness. He raised his eyes to the sky and uttered a cry from his core—and heard his own great bellow snatched away on the wind.

He went down to the water’s edge and stood before its dark, lapping indifference. The loneliness caught at his heart, and along with it also a hope that hurt almost too much to feel, but which he could not avoid feeling. But he would not think of her, he must not.

Rain came in a sudden burst, sweeping the steel gray sea, sighing in the forest, making the ruined bridge gleam with runnels. Trying to see through the storm, he looked toward the city he had struggled so hard to defend. But he could not see it.

His need to determine the status of his mission caused him to review his assets. His knife was gone. No Metal Storms, no soldiers, no—

“Gina! Gina! Gina!”

Nothing came back but the wind.

Gina came toward him through sunlight.

He took her face of heaven in his hands.

In the air of a summer night, she played the piano.

He sat down on the hard sand, not because he wanted to, but because he was at the end of his strength and in the depths of a sorrow far greater than he had thought it possible to feel.

The warrior, his strength finally at an end, now slumped. This masterpiece of Inner Iron and the application of the most subtle zinc-finger modifications was truly exhausted. In fact, if the tide hadn’t been going out, he would have drowned here, because he was far below the tide line.

The mission still called to him, but he could not answer.