The soldier with the field glasses turns to point this out to the officers, who look up in alarm as the claxons begin rasping—consternation on their faces, they shrink from the soldier, who stares at them in confusion. Rings of blood run down from where she held the field glasses to her eyes. Blood streams from her gums. She takes a step toward them, wavers and falls to her knees, raising her hands to her head. She puts her hands to either side of her head to steady it against the dizziness, and with the lightest pressure of her palms on her scalp, the skin over her cheekbones tears like a wet leaf.

All the soldiers in the room are on the floor now, skin sloughing with the faintest motion, blood streaming from ears, eyes, nose, mouth, smoking pools spreading from their groins. Blood trickles on the floor and boils there.

In the streets, the enemy soldiers sway to the ground slobbering blood. They turn to flee and their skins flap off. They clamber over each other and pull themselves apart, the claxons blaring a long exasperated note again and again.

... I am shown the position of the detectors, most of which aren’t working any more. Those that are, line the streets on the opposite side of the building to me. The traps they are set to trigger were built to last.

*

Glass lobby doors swing apart for me. I swim out into cool rainswept air, fresh smell of rainswept streets, wet pavement ... but there is no rain, only mist ... and that choking feeling still lingers anyway.

I sit on a rustbank. There is no aperture in the rubble, nothing I could have used as a doorway. How did I get in and out? Silence, air moving over fused wreckage. Corrosive, cold fear slides along inside it.

The street is still roughly there, a rust trough through the tossed city bones. I trot down its empty length, looking for the others. I don’t have to look far. I see them walking in orderly files on either side of what once were streets, entering what doorways remain or crossing invisible thresholds pushing open unreal doors. Silichieh darts up a ramp with two-step-at-a-time strides, taking a hasty look at his bare wrist.

The private I once saw stabbing himself with his pen weaves drunkenly to and fro across a broad glass platform to one side of the street, scraping it with the end of his carbine, oblivious to the bloody wound disfiguring one side of his abdomen. He thinks he’s sweeping. As I hurry over, he loses his balance, toppling down hard on the unyielding glass with the snap of a bone breaking somewhere. He’s trying to get up when I reach him, his face bloodless, eyes glazed. His pupils are fixed. I talk to him, put my hands on him to calm him, and he is ice cold. Gradually his struggle to stand erect subsides. Examining his wound, I find it oozing, not bleeding, though it has not clotted. It’s as though he has no blood left. His uniform is soaked with it. I put my ear to his breast, my eyes on his fingers still feebly curling and uncurling around the butt of his gun, but he has no pulse.