We sit gloomily in the street, straggling in and out of buildings, forking food out of cans. The light here is silver, haggard as rain and retarded by the fog. I join Thrushchurl as he slips into a narrow alley. He stands himself on top of a sizeable rock and gazes off toward the mines.

“They’re so still,” he says. But everything here is still.

Makemin stands with the Clappers around him, conjuring us to gather and hear his orders. This is not something I am eager to do. The loonies are there already—they seem cowed, and dislike to leave Makemin’s vicinity. They sit together in rows, looking around with mouths open and slumping eyelids. The Clappers’ tattoo struggles to make itself audible in the muffling air, and the rhythm begins to click and patter, its regularity to break.

Only now, as they start to their feet, do I realize that it’s bullets that click and patter around us. I turn and push Thrushchurl into the nearest doorway with both my hands on his broad flat chest. He turns suddenly and plucks at the latch, teasing it with his fingers, his other hand flat on the calloused wood, and then the door subsides and we are covered—I hear the bangs against the wall. Do I go to the window?

Thrushchurl fingers the air, saying “It won’t last long.”

My thoughts are all out of order; I numbly ask my eyes on the light from the window to restore me. The banging has stopped, come and gone like a summer shower down in the valley. I turn to the open door. Voices in the street, men emerging from cover.

“How did you know?” I ask.

“I didn’t,” he says, going out into the street.

They hit one of the loonies, who had generally needed someone to lead him by the hand and had not had that someone just then, when the shooting began.