It has taken that first mosquito-woman a minute and a half to suck the last of the liquid from the pig (Bellis could never shake the memories of that sight, or of the little sounds of the woman-thing’s satisfaction).

The anophelius rolls from the animal’s shrunken carcass, sleepy-eyed, drooling a little blood as her proboscis retracts. She withdraws, leaving the pig a sack of tubes and bone.

The hot air around Bellis is thick now with the stink of spew as her companions lose control of themselves at the sight of the anophelii feeding. Bellis does not vomit, but her mouth twists violently and she feels herself raising her pistol in what does not feel like anger or fear, but disgust.

But she does not fire. (And what would have happened if someone untrained as she had pulled the trigger? Bellis wondered much later, looking back.) The danger seems to have passed. The Armadans are moving on up the hill, past that little clearing and the smells of dung and hot blood, past more rocks and pestilential water, toward the township they had seen from the air.

The sequence of events became less blurred, less mashed together by heat and fear and disbelief. But then, at that point, at that moment, as Bellis retreated from that hot carnage of pig and sheep blood and drained offal, the repulsive frenzy of the anophelii repast and then (worse) their bloated torpor, a mosquito-woman looked up from the sheep she had arrived at too late to drain and saw their retreat. She hunched her shoulders and flew dangling toward them, her mouth agape and her proboscis dripping, her stomach only a little swelled by her sisters’ leftovers, eager for fresh meat, angling past the cactacae and scabmettler guards and bearing down on the terrified humans, her wings awail.

Bellis felt herself jerked by fear back toward that confused trash of disjointed images, and she saw Uther Doul step forward calmly into the mosquito-woman’s path, raise his hands (carrying two guns now) and wait until she was nearly upon him, till her mouthparts jutted at his face and he fired.

Heat and noise and black lead exploded from his weapons and burst the mosquito-woman’s stomach and face.

Even half-empty as she was, the woman’s gut split audibly, in a great gout of blood. She collapsed from the air, her shattered face runnelling in the dirt, her proboscis still extended, a greasy red slick soaking rapidly into the earth. Her body came to rest in front of Doul.