“I can figure out how to play that memory shard. Give it here.”

They sat at the console.

As Alan slipped the shard into a port, Ethan looked up at the screens.

All were dark but one.

A camera feed showed the school basement—a large crowd packed into a classroom. In the center of the room, the injured lay on makeshift cots while neighbors tended to them and nursed their wounds. He searched for Kate but couldn’t pick her out.

An image appeared on another screen.

It was a long camera view across a field—the riverside park. It showed a man limping beside the river.

Ethan said, “Look, Alan.”

Alan looked up.

The man on the screen began to run—the awkward, stumbling gait of someone who’d been wounded.

Three abbies sprinted into view on the left side of the screen as the man disappeared out of the right.

A new monitor flashed to life—a feed looking down Sixth Street, Ethan’s street. The man ran out of the field and into the road, the abbies in pursuit, upright, all four of them moving closer and closer to the camera.

They ran him down in front of Ethan’s house and killed him in the street.

Ethan felt a surge of nausea. Rage.

“I wondered this morning if something was up,” Alan said.

“Why’s that?”

“Mustin, that guard back there? He’s a sniper. All day every day, he sits on top of a mountain overlooking the town and the canyon and shoots any abbies that try to come in. I saw him in the chow hall this morning when he should’ve been at his post. He said Pilcher had pulled him off the peak for today. No reason given. It was a clear day too.”

“So Mustin wouldn’t see what his boss had done to all those innocent people.”

“When did they breach the fence?” Alan asked.

“Last night. You weren’t told?”

“Not a word.”

A new screen flared to life.

“That’s the memory shard file?” Ethan asked.

“Yep. Have you seen this?”

“I have.”

“And?”

“You can’t unwatch it.”

Alan played the file.

From high in the corner of a ceiling, a camera looked down on the morgue. There was Pilcher. Pam. And Alyssa. The young woman had been strapped with thick, leather restraints to the autopsy table.

“No audio?” Alan asked.

“It’s a good thing.”

Alyssa was screaming, her head lifting off the table, every muscle straining.

Pam appeared, took a handful of Alyssa’s hair, and jerked her head down against the metal table.

When David Pilcher moved into frame, set a small knife on the metal table, and climbed on top of Alyssa, Ethan looked away.

He’d seen this once before, didn’t need the images reinforced inside his brain.

Alan said, “Jesus God.”

He stopped the video, pushed his chair back from the console, and stood.