Black char fringed the distant hole in the web where the mob had burned a passage to eject him. He stared at the hole. His chest pained him with each breath. Slowly he grew conscious of sounds other than his own gasping. The ground under his hand was trembling with some distant thunder. Waves!

Oakes looked toward the sea. The tide was higher than he had ever seen it. A white line marked the entire sea horizon. Gigantic waves crashed against the headland where they had built the shuttle facility. Even as he watched, a great wedge of headland slid into the waves, opening a jagged gap in the shuttle hangar. He staggered to his feet, stared. Black objects moved in the white foam of the crashing sea. Rocks! There were rocks larger than a man in that surf. Even as he watched, the garden—his precious garden—sloughed away.

Mewling cries like near-forgotten seabirds insinuated themselves across the spume. He looked up and turned around once, completely. Hylighters? Gone. Not one orange bag danced in the sky or hovered above the cliffs.

The cries continued.

Oakes looked toward the cliffs where Thomas had begun the attack. Bodies. The battleground lay there with pieces of people twitching in the harsh glare of the suns. Figures moved among the wounded, lifting some on litters and carrying them toward the cliffs.

Once more, Oakes stared back at the Redoubt. Certain death lay there. He turned toward the battleground and for the first time, saw the demons. A shudder convulsed him. The demons were a silent mob sitting in a wide arc beyond the battleground. A single human in a white garment stood in their midst. Oakes recognized the poet, Kerro Panille.

Those cries! It was the wounded and the dying.

Oakes staggered toward Panille. What did it matter? Send your demons against me, poet!

Here was the fringe of the battleground . . . mutilated bodies. Oakes stepped on a dismembered hand. It cupped his boot in reflex, and he leaped away from it. He wanted to run back to the Redoubt, back to Legata. His body refused. He could only shuffle on toward Panille, who stood tall amidst the demons.

Why do they just sit there?

Oakes stopped only a few meters from Panille.

“You.” Oakes was surprised by the flat sound of his own voice.

“Yes.”

The poet’s voice came clearly through the pellet in Oakes’ neck and there was no movement of Panille’s mouth. “You’re finished, Oakes.”

“You! You’re the one who wrecked things for me! You’re the reason Lewis and I couldn’t . . .”

“Nothing is wrecked, Oakes. Life here has just begun.”

Panille’s lips did not move, yet that voice rang through the neck pellet!

“You’re not speaking . . . but I can hear you.”

“That is Avata’s gift to us.”

“Avata?”

“The hylighters and the kelp—they are one: Avata.”

“So this planet’s really beaten us.”

“Not the planet, nor Legata.”