"Where's our goddamned parachute?" he shouts again, and yanks hard at her wrist, pulling her down onto himself. As she finally tries to break away, Annie catches another glimpse of his clutching fingers ... and sees for the first time that they are horribly burned, the fingernails gone, the outer layer of skin sloughing off the knuckles, baring raw, strawberry-red flesh underneath.

She wants to scream, tells herself she must scream, thinking... still without knowing why... that it might somehow bring her ordeal to an end. But it refuses to come, it is trapped in her throat, and all she can do is produce a small cry of anguish that is torn to shreds by her vocal cords even as she wrings it out of them--

Annie awakened with a jolt, her heart knocking in her chest, the trailing edge of a moan on her mouth. She had broken out in a cold sweat, her T-shirt plastered to her body.

She looked around, taking a series of deep breaths, shaking her head as if to cast off the lacy remnants of her dream.

She was home. In Houston, in her living room, on her sofa. From the TV in the kids' room she could hear the Teletubbies carrying on with manic effervescence. On the carpet at her feet, her newspaper was still folded to the article she'd been reading when she'd fallen into an exhausted sleep. Its headline read: "AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY." Above the columns of text was a photo of Orion in its catastrophic final moments.

Annie bent her head and covered her stinging eyes with her palm.

She'd flown back from the Center after having been there since very early that morning and attended meeting after meeting in which the participants--NASA executives, government officials, and representatives of the various shuttle and ISS contractors--had ostensibly been trying to sift through what they knew about the accident and lay out a preliminary framework for an investigation into its causes. Instead, they had spent the majority of the time staring at one another in dazed silence.

Perhaps, Annie thought, it had been a mistake to expect anything more constructive so soon after the explosion. At any rate, she had felt nothing but a sense of leaden futility by the end of the final session, and been grateful for the chance to go home.

Home sweet home, where she could take her mind off what had happened, enjoy some light reading and a refreshing nap before getting started on dinner.

Her hand still clapped over her eyes, she felt a small, bleak smile touch her lips.

An instant later the tears began streaming between her fingers.

The Barrett rifle against his shoulder, his cheek to its stock, Antonio aligned his target in the crosshairs of its high-magnification sight.

Moments after leaving Kuhl's vehicle, he had scurried up a tree that afforded a direct line of fire with the guard station, and was now half-sitting, half-squatting in the fork of its trunk, his feet braced on two strong branches. The thirty-pound weapon ordinarily required a bipod for support, but here on his treetop perch he'd been able to rest its barrel over his upraised knees.