Now Xin Sheng Boulevard ran like a river of destruction in his path. He crouched in the shelter of a flight of concrete steps leading up to a first-floor office—the nameplate next to the door read HARMONIOUS VOYAGING TRAVEL AGENCY. The office’s windows were all broken, and the room inside was dark. Laser flashes of rifle fire came from the upper windows across the avenue, and more flashes answered them from the windows above his head.

A squad of Capellan Confederation soldiers crouched in the shelter of a public transit stop, firing at the windows on the far side of the avenue. One of the CapCons threw a dark green smoke grenade, and in the next instant the air roiled with throat-clenching white fog. The CapCons shouted and rushed into the street, moving like shadowy figures through the smoke. More laser fire came flashing down; some of the shadowy figures fell, but the others kept on running. The smoke scattered the laser fire, making a light too brilliant to look at.

Then he heard the rumble of engines and the sound of metal thudding on concrete in regular, titanic footfalls. He looked to his left. Down at the Hall of Civic Governance end of the avenue, a looming anthropomorphic shape strode around the corner of the building, one massive arm punching out and into the third-floor windows as it came: a Thunderbolt BattleMech, swinging into action. He had no chance at all of crossing the avenue now.

In desperation, he backtracked a block to a transit tunnel entrance, and plunged down its steps into the dark. He paused at the bottom to let his eyes adjust—as he’d hoped, the battery-powered emergency lights were on, and the tunnel was illuminated by their crimson glow. He didn’t see either CapCons or defenders anywhere nearby. If the transit cars were no longer running, he could follow the tunnel down one—no, two—stops, then go up and through the Governance Center subterranean concourse to get out, and make it home that way from the other side.

Please, he thought, let them have gotten out in time.

He lowered himself off the platform and down onto the tracks, taking care to stay away from the electrified rail in case the power should unexpectedly return. That was not the way he wanted to go out, stumbling onto his death by mistake, not with his city, with his entire planet, being murdered wholesale overhead. The air down here was hard to breathe, heavy with chemicals and foul-smelling smoke. He couldn’t feel any vibration in the rails underfoot—as he’d hoped, all the trains were either stopped or dead.

He trotted down the tunnel, from one dim patch of red light to the next. A platform opened out ahead—the first stop—he kept moving, going on into the dark. At the second stop, he swung himself up onto the platform, barely noticing the pain when he banged his knee against the edge, and climbed the frozen steps of an escalator into the Governance Center concourse.

On a typical day, thousands of people passed through the concourse’s vast rotunda; at any given moment, it could hold several hundred. Today, after the fighting had passed through and reduced its stores and kiosks to wreckage, it was empty—no, not quite empty. As he made his way around the perimeter of the concourse, he saw half a dozen people, office workers by their clothing, huddled together inside what had been a coffee shop. One of them at least appeared badly hurt, a business-suited woman lying half across the lap of an older, stouter, secretary-looking female. The clothes of both women were soaked with blood.

He would have gone on, intent on his self-imposed mission, if a young man in a coffee shop worker’s uniform hadn’t pushed himself to his feet and come forward. Here was somebody, at least, who hadn’t left his post—loyalty above and beyond, wasted on “cream-no-sugar” and “double espresso” and “I’m-sorry-we’re-all-out-of-that.”

The coffee shop worker asked him, “Do you know if it’s safe yet outside?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. There’s fighting all over.”

“Please,” said the secretary-woman. She looked down at the woman who lay across her lap. “She’s dying. Please, can you call for help, or send someone, or—”

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anybody left to come.”

Another one of the customers spoke up—a businessman, gray-haired and well-tailored under all the dirt and blood. “Do you know if it’s true what they were saying before the news channels went dark? That we were betrayed?”

He felt the bitter anger rising up in him like a poisonous spring. He had not thought he could hate so much. “Betrayed,” he said. “Yes. That’s the word.”

Hard-eyed, the secretary-woman said, “I hope he burns.”

“Yes,” he said again, and felt a wave of dizziness pass over him—the lack of good air, he told himself groggily, here in the downbelow. Somebody pressed something cool into his hand; when his head cleared, he saw it was the young man in the coffee shop uniform with a chilled bottle of spring water.

“Here. Drink some, pour the rest over your head—we’ve got plenty in the cooler and I don’t think the manager is going to be in tomorrow to check the inventory.”

The water was good; it soothed his throat and cooled his skin. “Thank you,” he said. “I have to go now—my parents, in the Garden Square district—I have to see if they made it out.”

“Good luck,” said the older businessman. “Good luck,” came from the others in a murmured echo.

Then he was running again, around the perimeter of the concourse to the broad marble stairs going up into the light above. He slowed as he neared the street level, taking time to look and listen.

The street was empty, and the sounds of fighting were distant; the invaders had moved on. They had left behind the marks of their passage: overturned and burned-out vehicles; the marks of missile impacts in the cratered road; gaping holes in roofs and walls; trees and bushes shredded into mulch. A man—not CapCon, or local defense, but a civilian—lay dead near the transit entrance, crumpled and bloody in a limbs-not-meant-to-go-that-way heap.

He was running hard now. Two blocks, five blocks. In Allard Square, he saw the turf chewed and shredded by vehicles, and the children’s swings and climbing tower knocked into a pile of timber and twisted metal. Six more blocks, and he came to the row of gray stone town houses each with their marble steps and downstairs bay window and tiny front garden with flowers and trees in wooden tubs.

There was the house with the green door and the bronze dragonhead door knocker. He ran up the steps. The door wasn’t locked; it wasn’t even latched. It swung open when he touched—when he half-fell—against it. He stumbled into the front hallway.

The cherry-wood table with the big bronze bowl on it—it had stood there all during his childhood; he used to lean his forehead against the bowl’s cool metal on hot summer days—was knocked over now, the bowl rolled away into a corner and the flowers it had held scattered across the entry hall in a diagonal stripe, and spilled water everywhere.

He saw muddy boot prints on the stairway carpet, going up.

And everything else was silence.