Megan wandered on for a while until she came to a municipal garden dominated by a miniature canopy tree rising higher than most of the buildings surrounding it. She dug amidst its roots and pulled out a sprig of flowering lizard-tails with red and green blooms, then headed back to the ruins, laying her tribute on the chest of the cindered corpse.

Goodbye, Sabby, she said, under her breath. You were a son of a bitch in more ways than one, but I still liked you better than most.

She next returned to the apartment Sabby had loaned her, to find it undamaged. Entering the bedroom, she sat staring around her and feeling as if shed lived an entire lifetime since shed last been here. She stripped off her clothes and showered until the water sputtered and suddenly cut off, then she dug fresh garments out of a drawer, before gratefully binning the stinking rags shed worn for all too long.

Finally she crawled into bed and slept, without dreams, for the next sixteen hours. Nevertheless, when she woke late the next evening, it was with a new plan almost fully formed in her mind.

It was something, she realized, that she should have thought of long before now.

The next day, Megan departed Aguirre for what she knew was the last time. News remained sparse and unreliable. There were conflicting stories that other cities belonging to the River Concord States had been seized by Freehold forces apparently intent on warring against all of Redstones Uchidan nations, and not just targeting the Demarchy. There was no way of verifying any of these reports, however.

Exiting the city, she guided the bus onto a highway that led to Dios, a long way further down the coast. Aguirre itself was built on a plateau and, as the road gradually wound its way down to sea level, the more evident the damage resulting from the floods became. In fact, it looked as if a hand as wide as the sky had reached down and swept the land clean of most signs of human habitation.

When she reached another checkpoint on the border between the Demarchy and the River Concord States, the Accord troops staffing it made it abundantly clear she would be allowed to go no further. The Freehold, it was explained to her, had turned the whole of the country beyond into a war zone. Thanking the checkpoint guards good-naturedly, she turned her bus around, and drove back the way she had come for a good ten or twenty kilometres, until she found a side road shed spotted earlier. Before long she was on her way back towards Dios by a different route, this time encountering no more checkpoints.