Silichieh is looking in my direction as I turn. He comes toward me, seeing me, looking past me to the dead private. Two feet away from me now he is staring into my eyes, and using them—I can tell—to swim back.

“He’s dead,” he says, now looking past me again. “Shot. How shot?” Gives his head a toss—“Who shot him?”

“I don’t know. I heard shooting before, I think ... and I found a blackbird in one of the buildings. He had a bullet in him.”

“They’re here? ... What happened? Was I knocked out?”

“... Let’s see about the others.”

Saskia is in the square, foaming about the enemy to bypassers that aren’t there. One of the asylum soldiers is listening to her intently. Her eyes flick from one spot in space to another, where the faces would be, as she shouts. The others seem to be coming out of it. Nikhinoch strides briskly up to me, but he’s himself again, searching for Makemin.

Not far to look. We find him frenziedly barricading himself inside a sunken building like a roofed basement, all of thick rusted metal. The noise draws us, coming up from behind so that at first the protruding roof, round as a jar-lid, hides from us the bodies littering the ground in front. Most wear Wacagan uniforms, but many wear ours.

Nikhinoch goes cautiously up to the ground-level loophole and calls to Makemin in his high voice a little wavering. The whole structure booms with the report of a gun and I can hear the sharp crack as the shot strikes the inside of the roof. Nikhinoch lunges backward unhurt—Makemin fired right at him, as though the bullet could penetrate such thick metal. Out of the explosion comes a shower of curses.

Rapid footsteps, rattle of armor. Saskia pushes past us, draws Nikhinoch aside by the shoulder, and shouts back, her powerful voice battering through Makemin’s fusillade.

“Wake up Makemin! Wacagan are here! They’ve put us all under their spell and we’ve been cut to ribbons, Makemin!”

She uses his name repeatedly—“Makemin!” she shouts into his silence. Then, as she pauses to listen ... uncoordinated speech, hard to hear, inside.

After a long while, there is a sudden burst of activity as the barricade is pulled apart from the inside. Makemin emerges, slowly and rigidly, his face livid, stony. An ugly wound scars the side of his head above the right ear, and the skin at his right temple, and around his right eye, is scorched red and black.

... Gathered all together, we are less than twenty. Everyone I know is alive. Thrushchurl crept up to join us from a stone-lined culvert. Jil Punkinflake we found sitting on the chest of a dead blackbird, doodling with a stick in the rust. When he saw us, he popped up smiling gaily as a child and scampered over to Saskia; she is the only one he saw. She glares at him, but puts her hand on his head, which he lowers the instant he sees her raise her arm. I’m close enough to see his nostrils tremble.