As the room filled up, and some people spilled onto the overflow chairs on the lawn, Wednesday felt someone sit in the chair next to her. “Frank?” She glanced round.

“These are your people?” he said. Something in his expression made her wonder if he had internal ghosts of his own to struggle with. He seemed haunted by something.

“What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Some other time.” She turned round to face the front. A few stragglers were still filling the seats, but a door had opened to one side of the podium and a dignified-looking albeit slightly portly woman — possibly middle-aged, possibly a centenarian, it was difficult to tell — walked up to the stage.

With her chestnut hair tied back with a ribbon, her black embroidered coat buttoned at the waist and cut back above and below, and the diamond-studded chain of office draped across her shoulders, she was exactly what Wednesday-had expected the Ambassador to be. She cleared her throat and the sound system caught and exploded her rasping breath across the lawn. “Welcome,” she said. “Again, welcome. Today is the fifth anniversary, absolute time standard years, of the death, and exile, of our compatriots. I” — she paused, an unreadable expression on her face — “I know that, like you, I have difficulty understanding that event. We can’t go home, now or ever. The door is shut, all options closed. There is no sense of closure: no body in a coffin, no assailant under arrest and charged with murder.

“But—” She took a deep breath: “I shall try to be brief. We are still here, however much we mourn our friends and relatives who were engulfed by the holocaust. We survive. We bear witness. We go on, and we will rebuild our lives, and we will remember them.

“Someone destroyed our homes. As an agent of the surviving caretaker government, I dedicate my life to this task: to bear witness, and to identify the guilty parties, whoever they are and wherever they may be sheltering. They will be held to account, and the accounting will be sufficient to deter anyone else who ever contemplates such monstrous acts in future.”

She paused, head tilted slightly to one side as if she was listening to something — and, as she continued, Wednesday realized, She is listening to something. Someone is reading her a speech and she’s simply echoing it! Startled, she almost missed the Ambassador’s next words: “We will now pause for a minute in silent contemplation. Those of us who believe in the intervention of higher agencies may wish to pray; those of us who don’t may take heart from the fact that we are not alone, and we will make sure that our friends and families did not die in vain.”

Wednesday was disinclined to meditate on much of anything. She looked around surreptitiously, examining fixtures and fittings. The ambassador’s girth — She’s not fat, but she’s carrying a lot of padding around the waist. And those boxes around the podium … and the guy at the back there, and that woman in the dark suit and business glasses … Something smelled wrong. In fact, something smelled killing zone, a game Herman had taught her years before. How to spot an ambush. This is just like a, a trap, she realized. But who—

Wednesday turned back and was watching the Ambassador’s eyes as it happened. They widened slightly as somebody a couple of rows behind Wednesday made a nervous noise. Then the Ambassador snapped into motion, sudden as a machine, arms coming up to protect her face as she ducked.

Then:

Why am I lying down? Wednesday wondered fuzzily. Why? She could see, but everything was blurry and her ears ached. I feel sick. She tried to moan and catch her breath and there was an acrid stink of burning. Abruptly she realized that her right hand was wet and sticky, and she was curled around something bony. Dampness. She tried to lever herself up with her left hand, and the air was full of dust, the lights were out, and thinly, in the distance through the ringing in her ears, she heard screams.

A flicker of light. A moment later, she was clearer. The podium — the woman wasn’t there. The boxes to either side had exploded like air bags, blasting heavy shields into the air in front of the Ambassador as she ducked. But behind her, behind them … Wednesday sat up and glanced down, realized someone was screaming. There was blood on the back of her hand, blood on her sleeve, blood on the chairs. A bomb, she thought fuzzily. Then: I ought to do something. People were screaming. A hand and an arm lay in the middle of the aisle next to her, the elbow a grisly red mess. Frank was lying on the floor next to her. The back of his head looked as if it had been sprayed with red paint. As she recognized him, he moved, one arm flailing at the ground in a stunned reflex. The woman who had been seated behind him was still seated, but her head ended in a glutinous stump somewhere between her neck and her nose. Bomb, Wednesday realized again, confused but trying to hold on to the thought. More thoughts: Herman warned me. Frank!

She leaned over him in panic. “Frank! Talk to me!” He opened his mouth and tried to say something. She winced, unable to hear him. Is he dying? she wondered, feeling lost and anxious. “Frank!” A dizzy laugh welled up as she tried to remember details from a first-aid course she’d taken years ago — Is he breathing? Yes. Is he bleeding? It was hard to tell; there was so much blood everywhere that she couldn’t see if it was his. Frank mumbled something at her. He wasn’t flailing around. In fact, he seemed to be trying to move. “Wait, you mustn’t—” Frank sat up. He felt around the back of his head and winced, then peered at Wednesday owlishly.

“Dizzy,” he said, and slowly toppled toward her.

Wednesday managed to brace herself with one arm as he fainted. He must weigh over a hundred kilos, she realized fuzzily. She looked round, searching for help, but the shout died in her throat. It hadn’t been a big bomb — not much more than a grenade — but it had burst in the middle of the audience, ripping half a dozen bodies into bloody pulp, and splashing meat and bone and blood around like evil paint. A man with half his clothes blasted off his body and his upper torso painted red stumbled into the epicenter blindly, arms outstretched as if looking for someone. A woman, sitting in her chair like an incisor seated in a jaw between the empty red holes of pulled teeth, screamed and clutched her shredded arm. Nightmares merged at the edges, bleeding over into daylight, rawhead and bloodybones come out to play. Wednesday licked her lips, tasted bright metal dampness, and whimpered as her stomach tried to eject wine and half-digested canapes.

The next thing she knew, a man in black was standing over her, a gun at the ceiling — looking past her, talking urgently to a floating drone. She tried to shake her head. Something was crushing her. “—an you walk?” he said, “—your friend?”

“Mmf. Try.” She pushed against Frank’s deadweight, and Frank tensed and groaned. “Frank—” The guard was away, bending over another body and suddenly dropping to his knees, frantically pumping at a still chest.

“I’m, I’m—” He blinked, sleepily. “Wednesday?”

Sit up, she thought fuzzily. “Are you okay?”

“I think—” He paused. “My head.” For a miracle, the weight on her shoulder slackened. “Are you hurt?” he asked her.

“I—” She leaned against him, now. “Not badly. I think.”

“Can’t stay here,” he said faintly. “The bomb. Before the bomb. Saw you, Sven.”

“Saw who?”

“Jim. Clown.” He looked as if he was fading. Wednesday leaned toward him. “Sven was here. Wearing a waiter’s—” His eyelids fluttered.

“Make sense! What are you saying?” she hissed, driven by a sense of urgency she didn’t understand. “What do you mean—”