Gently he pushed her away. “I told you before,” he said softly. “We’re in a war for survival. There’s no room for sentiment.”

She tossed her head to clear her eyes of tears. “There is always room for compassion.”

“You talk easily enough of compassion, Ms. Moon,” Sobel said. “How much compassion will the nats show us when you’ve broken the back of our solidarity?”

Us? she thought. She wanted to scream at him, You’re a nat! What would you know about it? But she still felt toward him as if he were a parent. She could not show anger to a parent; she could only hope to change his mind, to make him see…

“The lynch mobs are out there in the night, Isis,” Eric said in a low, intense voice. “The hounds are baying for our blood. Don’t bring them down on our necks, my love. Don’t be a party to -”

Her mind filled with horrific images, burning babies and shredded women. “No!” she screamed, holding futile hands over her ears. “Eric, stop! I won’t let you in my mind anymore! That’s rape.”

Eric stepped back, ruined face stark, hands held out from his sides. He looked to Sobel.

“I’m sorry you see things that way,” the Colonel said.

The room filled with jokers and guns.

Moonchild’s first thought was, I must keep them from hurting each other.

Beyond that her main concern was to keep from getting shot up too badly for her healing to handle. She was careful not to underestimate people who lacked ace powers: Bruce Lee said that in the martial arts all skills are learned skills. A nat or joker might be her master. Besides, some of the New Joker Brigade were aces as well as jokers.

But there were just too many of them, a dozen or more in close confines, bumping elbows and getting in each other’s way. She moved swiftly, decisively, twisting weapons away, aiming nerve-center strikes to numb arms and legs – which has a real mystic-Asian-fighting-arts ring to it, though nerve centers shouldn’t seem too damned esoteric to anyone who’s ever banged a funny-bone.

Her brain filled with terrible pictures again, momentarily overwhelming her vision. A wooden rifle butt cracked against the side of her head. She dropped to her knees.

The mind-tearing pictures were gone, replaced by heartbeat pulses of white light. She thrust a leg out, swept it around. The man who’d clubbed her went down in the act of raising his weapon for another crack, tangling with half a dozen others, kicking and cursing and flailing.

She head Sobel’s voice bellowing like an angry carabao above the noise. A weight landed on her back. She jackknifed forward in a throw made more of expediency than art, sending her attacker flying into a phalanx of his fellows.

An image came into her mind: herself held down on the wood floor of the ravaged temple, her uniform in shreds about her, while jokers pinned her wrists and ankles, and others knelt between her legs and by her head to ravage her. “No!” she screamed, shaking her head, her black hair whipping paint and sweat-streaked faces.

As she was distracted, a youth stepped forward and jammed the muzzle of his Kalashnikov into her belly. Even the ugliest dream Eric could generate couldn’t slow her reflexes; her left hand whipped up under the muzzle brake, snapped the barrel toward the ceiling before finger could clench trigger.

The boy had his weapon set to full automatic. The noise was enough to implode your head. Everybody froze comically in place, fixed by the gut realization of what a burst of 7.62mm bullets could do in a room jammed full of bodies. Coughing and blinking in the rain of red dust dislodged from the rafters by the gunfire, the ambushers momentarily lost interest in Moonchild as they frantically checked themselves over for perforations.

It was time to leave. Time to leave the Colonel, her would-be father, and his betrayed trust, time to leave Eric and his poisoned dreams, time to leave the New Joker Brigade cursing and fighting in its madness. She made for a window, delivering hammer-fists and backhands to temples, hard enough to temporarily blind the recipient with the sparks behind his eyes, not hard enough to shake anything permanently loose. She reached the wall.

It fell in on her in a cascade of masonry and plaster dust.

A masked and black-clad figure stepped stiffly through the hole. It towered above her like a redwood, gazing down on her with a single eye.

A horrible smell of decay enfolded her. Behind her she heard a snarling: “Get out of my way, you morons! If you hadn’t fucking jumped the gun, the bitch would be toast!” She glanced back to see a savage threshing-machine fury of motion, and jokers flying in all directions.

The essence of command, as J. Robert liked to point out, lay in the ability to take snap decisions. Moonchild took a couple here. She decided that the hole in the wall was her handiest exit, especially since its lone guardian seemed none too agile. She also decided he must be one of Colonel Sobel’s vaunted new aces and that she therefore ran small risk of the eternal shame of taking a life by delivering a strike to his midsection with every gram of strength and every milliwatt of ki she could focus.

She stepped right into him and punched. He took a step back, turned the blank, dark eye of the filter that covered his eyehole upon her. Then his right arm lashed around backhand with the awful, inevitable majesty of an avalanche.

Nobody and nothing had ever take a full-force blow from her unscathed. Not Durg at’ Morakh, the toughest and deadliest opponent she had ever known. Not second-stage Swarmlings tall as young houses. Nothing. She was so completely shocked that she stood there dumbly to receive the counterstroke.

It swept her right past the giant figure and out into the hot-black night. She landed on clay tamped to tennis-court consistency by the sandals of the furtive faithful. Too stunned to make a good landing of it, she hit on her cheek and shoulder and rolled over like a log.

Stench. She gagged and opened her eyes. A shadow blotted the stars. A monstrous hand reached down to her.

She kicked at his legs, trying to sweep him. It was like the muay Thai toughening exercise of kicking palm trees: the most fanatically savage kick-boxer never brought the tree down. Neither did she.

He grunted, bent low, grabbed her by the shoulder. Pain blazed through her shoulder like a flash-fire. She rolled right, breaking his grip, came up to her knees.

The cloth of her uniform had melted away where he touched her. Smoke rose in thin wisps. The skin exposed was reddened and beginning to blister.

“Ah can hurt you if Ah want,” the being said in a voice like sand in the gears.

He was working his way around her, trying to pin her against the temple wall. The pain that flamed in Moonchild’s shoulder was lighting up an emotion highly unfamiliar to her – an emotion Mark Meadows himself always repressed when he could: anger She had been betrayed, manhandled, and psychically raped. Now this weird monster in the mask had burned her and spoiled her costume. She was getting royally pissed off.

“I’m glad you leave me no other way,” she said, rising to her feet in a spasm of motion, “than straight over you.”

She sprinted toward him, driving herself with all the fury in her quick-firing ace muscles. She didn’t get much runway, but she didn’t need it. As he stood there with arms outstretched to capture, she jumped high in the air and delivered a jumping sidekick with both feet to the notch of the creature’s clavicle. She felt a dull snap, and he toppled over with the grandeur of a felled tree.

She fell back to the ground, sprang up, hurled herself through the air in a forward snap-roll right over his supine body. She sprinted toward the enfolding safety of the woods and their shadows.