Thorn laughs again. He smells the subtle oil of a firearm. He looks around and sees some men backing away from him, a couple coming closer. There are only a few women in this bar, most of them sitting in shadowy booths. One watches in terror, another with a strange smile. There are security cameras behind the bar covering most of the room, and Thorn leaps high and settles onto a joist, spinning around several times and maintaining his balance on one foot. He grins at the nearest camera.

See me! You can all see me now.

He’s not sure this is what Mallian wants, but right now he doesn’t care. The thought of what’s to come, the anticipation of Ascent, has Thorn acting like the child he has not been for centuries.

A gun fires. He senses the bullet whip past him and bury itself in the ceiling. He hangs onto the joist and swings down, landing on a table without disturbing any of the glasses. A shadow turns and points something his way. The shadow stinks of body odour and fear, its breath fast and phlegmy, and Thorn kicks out and knocks the weapon from its hand. He snatches the spinning gun from the air and buries its barrel in the fat man’s stomach. He pulls the trigger so quickly that three shots sound like one.

Panic begins to spread and Thorn soaks it up. He dances here, slashing a man’s throat. He leaps there, shoving a broken pool cue into a woman’s eye. People scream. They run and collide with each other, fighting to reach the door first, not understanding what’s happening and struggling to flee the chaos.

Thorn is the chaos, and for a few seconds more he presents himself to the cameras, soaked in blood. He sticks up both middle fingers and grins.

“Hello, humans,” he says. “Wait ’til you get a load of us.”

* * *

A sandstorm rages in the playground of a school in Minneapolis. It’s small and confined, manifesting as a twister two metres tall and hardly wider than two spread hands. It flits and zips back and forth across the yard, and at first the teachers on duty that afternoon smile and look at it as something of an oddity. The seventh-graders watching shout and laugh, rushing back and forth to pluck blades of grass or twigs from shrubberies around the yard to throw into the miniature whirlwind. It swallows them up, rips them to shreds, and spits them out into the air above. As it moves back and forth across the ground it leaves a trail of shredded plants behind.