She actually hadn't had a chance to see much of the damage then. She'd been trapped in her hotel when forty-six stories of glass collapsed onto the streets outside. It was a good hotel, five stars all the way; the ground-level windows, at least, had held. Rowan remembered looking out from the lobby into a murky green glacier of broken glass, seven meters deep, packed tight with blood and wreckage and butchered body parts jammed between piecemeal panes. One brown arm was embedded right next to the lobby window, waving, three meters off the ground. It was missing three fingers and a body. She'd spied the fingers a meter away, pressed floating sausages, but she hadn't been able to tell which of the bodies, if any, would have connected to that shoulder.

She remembered wondering how that arm had got so high off the ground. She remembered vomiting into a wastebasket.

It couldn't happen here, of course. This was N'AmPac; there were standards. Every building in the lower mainland had windows designed to break inwards in the event of a quake. It wasn't an ideal solution— especially to those who happened to be inside at the time— but it was the best compromise available. Glass can't get up nearly as much speed in a single room as it can racing down the side of a skyscraper.

Small blessings.

If only there was some other way to sterilize the necessary volume. If only ßehemoth didn't, by it's very nature, live in unstable areas. If only N'AmPac corpses weren't authorized to use nukes.

If only the vote hadn't been unanimous.

Priorities. Billions of people. Life as we know it.

It was hard, though. The decisions were obvious and correct, tactically, but it had been hard to keep Beebe's crew quarantined down there. It had been hard to decide to sacrifice them. And now that they somehow seemed to be getting out anyway, it was—

Hard? Hard to bring at 9.5 moment-magitude quake down on the heads of ten million people? Just hard?

There was no word for it.

But she had done it, somehow. The only moral alternative. It was still just murder in small doses, compared to what might be necessary down the—

No. This is being done so nothing will be necessary down the road.

Maybe that was why she could bring herself to do it. Or maybe, somehow, reality had finally trickled down from her brain to her gut, inspired it to take the necessary steps. Certainly, something had hit her down there.

I wonder what Scanlon would say. It was too late to ask him now. She'd never told him, of course. She was never even tempted. To tell him that they knew, that his secret was out, that once again he just didn't matter that much— somehow, that would have been worse than killing him. She'd had no desire to hurt the poor man.

Her watch chimed again. "Override," it said.

Oh God. Oh God.