He fell and fell, long enough to wonder: Why am I always falling? The distance to the catwalk was more than he’d expected—not two meters but four or even five—and he hit the metal with a bone-rattling bang. He rolled. The pistol was gone, squirted from his grasp. And it was as he rolled that he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye, a figure below: wrists bound, body slack with submission, wearing a sleeveless shirt that Peter recognized. His mind grabbed hold of this image, which was also a memory—of the smell of pyre smoke on the day they’d burned the body of Zander Phillips, standing in the sunshine outside the power station, and the name stitched over the pocket. Armando.

Theo.

The man in the ring was Theo.

His brother wasn’t alone. There was someone else beside him, a man on his knees. He was stripped to the waist, slumped forward on the ground so that his face was obscured. And as Peter’s vision widened he realized that what he was seeing on the floor of the ring was the cattle, or what had once been the cattle—they were strewn in pieces everywhere, as if they had been situated at the heart of an explosion—and crouched at the center of this heaping mass of blood and flesh and bone, its face bent to bury itself in the remains, its body twitching with a darting motion as it drank, was a viral—but not like any viral Peter knew. It was the largest he had ever seen, that anyone had ever seen, its curled bulk so immense that it was like some new being entirely.

“Peter! You’re in time to watch the show!”

He had come to rest on his back, useless as a turtle. Jude, standing above him, wearing a look that Peter had no name for, a dark pleasure beyond words, was aiming a shotgun at his head. Peter felt the shudder of footsteps coming toward them—more orange-suited men racing down the catwalks from every direction.

Jude was standing directly below the vent.

“Go ahead,” Peter said.

Jude smiled. “How noble.”

“Not you,” Peter said, and flicked his eyes upward. “Hollis.”

Jude lifted his face in time for the bullet from Hollis’s rifle to strike him just above the right ear. A misty bloom of pink: Peter felt the air dampen with it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the shotgun released from Jude’s hands, clattering to the catwalk. A large-butted pistol was tucked at his waist; Peter saw Jude’s hand grope for it, blindly searching. Then something released inside him, blood began to pour from his eyes, a pitiful weeping of blood, and he dropped to his knees, flopping forward, his face frozen in an expression of eternal wonderment, as if to say: I can’t believe I’m dead.

It was Mausami who killed the operator manning the fuel pump.