It was a melee. There was no other word. Three more Watchers had been killed before the pod had been repelled: Gar Phillips and Aidan Strauss and Kip Darrell, the runner who had first reported the massing pod at the fireline. A fourth, Sunny Greenberg, who had left her post at the lockup to join the fight, was unaccounted for and presumed lost. Also among the missing—and here Ian paused with a deeply troubled look—was Old Chou. Constance had awakened in the early-morning hours to find him gone; nobody had seen him since. So it seemed likely, though there was no direct evidence of this, that he had left his house in the dead of night to go to the Wall, where among the others he’d been taken. No virals had been killed at all.

That’s all, Ian said. That’s what we know.

Something was happening, Peter thought; the crowd could feel it too. Never had anybody witnessed an attack like this, its tactical quality. The closest analogue was Dark Night itself, but even then, the virals had given no evidence of presenting an organized assault. When the lights had gone out, Peter had run with Alicia from the trailer park to the Wall to fight with everyone else, but Ian had ordered them both to the Sanctuary, which in the confusion had been left undefended. So what they’d seen and heard had been both softened by distance and made worse because of it. He should have been there, he knew. He should have been on the Wall.

A voice cut through the murmuring of the crowd: “What about the power station?”

The speaker was Milo Darrell. He was holding his wife, Penny, to his side.

“As far as we know, it’s still secure, Milo,” Ian said. “Michael says there’s current still flowing.”

“But you said there was a power surge! Somebody should be going down there to check it out. And where the hell is Sanjay?”

Ian hesitated. “I was coming to that, Milo. Sanjay has taken sick. For now, Walter here is serving as Head.”

“Walter? You can’t be serious.”

Walter seemed to regain focus, stiffening in his seat to lift his bleary face toward the assembly. “Wait just a damn minute—”

But Milo cut back in. “Walter’s a drunk,” he said, his voice rising, becoming bolder. “A drunk and a cheat. Everybody knows it. Who’s really in charge here, Ian? Is it you? Because as far as I can tell, nobody is. I say open the Armory, let everybody stand the Wall who wants to. And let’s get somebody down to the station right now.”

A buzz of acknowledgment shivered the crowd. What was Milo trying to do? Peter thought. Start a riot? He glanced at Alicia; she was staring intently at Milo, her body in a posture of alert, arms held from her sides. All eyes.