I hear cries.

Screams, from the forward margin of the camp. Without thinking I pop up, trying to drill my vision into the dark.

“Drop down!” Kaladze barks at me as something that whirs like a giant bumblebee passes me on the right. I cower behind the cart, Jil Punkinflake’s grip convulsively tight on my arm, and bullets whack into the wood by our faces. His face seeks mine and he has become a petrified creature, starts to shake, shakes so hard it’s turning into a fit.

A strangled cry from close by us. Kaladze points and I automatically follow his arm. One of the asylum inmates is curled up on the ground there, covered in blood, pain locked up in knots all over his face.

“Get him! Be quick! I’ll keep them off you!”

With empty mind I dart out to the wounded man, feeling myself tear loose from Jil Punkinflake’s grip. Resounding crashes from where I came, and another flash whir bare inches from my nose. I awkwardly drag the man, who cries out as I pull him, back under cover, and begin to tend him. He relaxes as I do my work, and dies.

A shout from somewhere cut off in the middle, and more voices raised in pain. The dark crawls with screams.

“This is a bad spot,” Kaladze says. “Come on!”

“He won’t go,” I point to Jil Punkinflake, who has shrunk into a ball.

Kaladze takes me roughly by the shoulder and drags me to a heap of stones, so that my legs whip up into the air as I am yanked along. He rushes back and overturns the cart on top of Jil Punkinflake, covering him like a turtle in a shell, and somehow gets back to me in one piece. The rock I hide behind snaps hard against my hand and stone chips flicker everywhere.

I follow Kaladze through the stones and trunks in toward the front where the cover is best. What I pass on the way I barely see and can’t describe.

Now I am flung into an enclosure of carts and barrels and I don’t know what, making a hasty barricade. Makemin has hacked a thin slit in the enclosure and snipes through it.

“Where are the grenadiers?!” he rants. “Where are my sharp shooters?!”

Nikhinoch, calm but blanched, his blue skin turned grey as ash, flits back and forth like a helper spirit. Bullets pelt and crack against the wood, ping off metal. The Clappers have congregated in a tight knot and their bleating chant drones in the gaps between blasts.

Bald Spot streaks across the open space and folds sideways not three steps from cover, his face crushed in shock his mouth a tight O and a despairing grunt forced out of his abdomen, his hands swing instantly to his right side where his body bends. His momentum takes him one swerving step more and he drops backward onto his left side. I rush to him and turn him over. He is rigid his eyes blank. His right side is smashed in, soft moonlight on jagged ends of his broken ribs. Blood from his wound has swept up onto his grey face, and spattered even his eyes.