“Stay away from her,” he says hoarsely, his eyes barely focussing on me before he walks away. At first the sounds make no sense. I have to think about them for a while before I understand them. I’m not hurt. The cold and the rain have cured me, made a numb rind of my outside.

*

Thrushchurl and I are chosen to scout together. No one leaves the group alone. We leave stakes to mark our path back, while the others regroup in one place. Thrushchurl turns his face like a dog catching a scent—he rushes forward, leaving me to hurry after planting stakes. I call to him, but he is preoccupied. I rush up to him, and as I catch him I see a shape loom ahead of us; the shape draws Thrushchurl to it. He is panting for it.

The trees have not encroached on the structure, which is a many-angled squat shape buttressed with tapering, inverted cones whose regularly-spaced flat round tops form a crown. The roof is irregular, with many gable-like shapes. The white enamel skin is like a tea kettle’s, cracked and flaking to reveal a drab black subsurface. The whole thing sits on a raised, smooth stone foundation that runs on into the wood shadows showing where the much vaster original edifice had been.

Thrushchurl, open-mouthed, rushes forward and lays his splayed hands on the stone as if he were placing roots there. He caresses the surfaces in rapture. I follow him, now oblivious to my presence, around to the opposite side. Here the building has been ripped open, and the rest of it is gone without a trace; not even a single loose stone or bit of broken glass, nothing but the unscarred, unmarked foundation to show it was ever there. The exposed edges of the small remnant’s walls and ceiling are shockingly jagged where the building was ripped away, with long triangular edges projecting out into space and many fine needle-like teeth in between.

We face a rounded inner wall that folds back on itself to make an aperture. Passing through it I feel a sudden oppressive vibration, like an organ droning at its lowest registers. We enter a hall-like space tall for its width, its floor strewn with cinders, tools lying in discs of dried grease, broken glass vessels and shards shoved rudely aside to form a rough path lined with curled bundles of green wire.

Now into the colossal main room. Thrushchurl dashes forward arms flung open. Everything is slightly phosphorescent. The floor is springy metal with a rectangular central panel of a glossy hard black substance like glass. Set into this panel are thick, transparent hexagonal tiles a little more than two feet across, and a corpse floats upright, head up, beneath each one, in honeycomb-like cells filled with a grainy scarlet fluid. Thrushchurl kneels crooning and running his hands over the tiles, his palm sweeping a dim shadow over dark heads.