And then he went back to bed. They’d wake him soon enough.

The Librarian did not nurse Shadenfreude. He was not pleased when his sour predictions came to pass. It began with the Christian High Churches. The Armenian and Syrian Catholic churches a few blocks from his office, the Russian Orthodox church across the river, and the Chaldean church on the south side of the city were bombed during high mass the following afternoon. Several of his colleagues’ family members suffered minor cuts from flying debris, and bruising from being trampled in the ensuing confusion. After the bombings, the red lights and sirens went on for hours.

The first two explosions rattled the office building. He could also hear the second two in the far distance. Several people arrived at the office a few minutes later, shaken, bloodied, battered, but otherwise all right. Colchis showed a kindly, tender side. He cleaned them up, dressed their wounds, and offered what support he could. They reported that at least three were killed at the Armenian Church, and perhaps a dozen injured. Later that day, the death toll rose to twenty.

The community took the immediate precaution of closing the Christian clubs and offices, so communications were effectively shut down. Colchis himself was fine, and other colleagues even joined him at his hotel for coffee late in the evening. In the night, he was awakened once by gunshots in the street outside, but nothing seemed to come of it.

There seemed to be several local news outlets. One, which provided especially graphic coverage, was subsequently shut down by the True Church Bishop himself. Barthes presumed that it had become confusing. A competing piece, commenting on the muzzling of its competitor’s reporters, ran a hyperbolic headline: “No Bad News Allowed!” It railed against suppression of the free press.

Colchis questioned this. No bad news? From Saint George? His impression was that there had been very little except bad news reported—despite concerted, obvious, and often successful efforts by a great many citizens to calm things down and move life onto a—if not normal, than at least hopeful—footing. The utter failure to report any of the good news was clearly demoralizing for a lot of people who had not had a day’s respite in quite some time. They just wanted a little credit for what they had accomplished.

The next evening, after the office closed, Colchis went grocery shopping. The experience was utterly mundane. No-one harassed him. No-one closed the door. No-one nervously thanked him for his custom, then requested quietly that he not come back. He made selections from well-stocked shelves, paid predictably high-ish prices for imported items, and predictably dirt-cheap prices for local commodities, then went on his way.

Next stop was a roadside fruit stand. Much haggling ensued over a melon the size of New Scotland. He insisted that it not be cut for a sample. The melon was cut nonetheless, with a knife worthy of a bad horror flick. Once it was cut, Colchis didn’t want it. Now that it was cut, he had to take it. A price was named worthy of a Spartan grocer. For an unwanted, uncut melon? Never! Colchis bought elsewhere. Despite much brandishing of melon knives, only fruit was threatened, and in the end he bought two monstrous fruits for half a crown.

Of course, he was hoping for archival news, mundane or otherwise. Much of the next several days was mundane indeed, spent reviewing invoices for equipment orders, making final decisions about placement of things, and figuring out what, if anything, they were to do about the leaky roof. It required the combined decision-making skills of four professors, the university president, a civil engineer, a security chief, a systems integrator, a budget analyst, and a secretary to accomplish this, but accomplished it was. Installation at Zion University, God willing, was to be finished the following week. Work would start in earnest on the Temple in the next several days, with Bonneville to follow.

One might well have asked what fighting in remote corners of the city had to do with installing archives. Nothing. Everything. Nothing, at any given moment, in that it was physically happening far from where Colchis was. Sometimes he heard gun ships flying overhead. Sometimes, if mortar fire and counter-fire was really intense, he heard a distant rumble, mostly drowned out by traffic noise. Everything, over the toll of days, because of rumored calls for, and threats of, violence. One day, a rumor would ripple down the street from the fruit stand: it’s bad today! But Colchis would hear nothing. Two days later came footage of the extent of the fighting; the hundreds or thousands (hard to tell) demonstrating in the streets in some far-off neighborhood.

Barthes saw news interviews with locals, righteously indignant at the prospect of Maxroy’s Purchase TCM troops entering this or that pocket. Any talk regarding Maxroy’s Purchase and Accession resurrected fearful memories of the aftermath of the first “Jackson Delegation” visit. There was strong conviction that MP and Imperial factions were sponsoring a good deal of the violence. Local TCM members, formerly sympathetic to the Maxroy’s Purchase troops, now saw the latter as spoilers who wished only to take over control of holy sites on New Utah. MP fighters, in the local view, were a bunch of hired thugs, and quietly most would allow that their True Church Elder was the worst kind of political opportunist. Colchis heard this from people of all religious stripes: Sixer, High Christian, Muslim, even True Church adherents themselves.

A rumor was circulating, supposedly corroborated by several witnesses: on the day of the church bombings, before the bombs went off, reporters were on hand, cameras trained on the doorways on the sheltered side of the church, just in time to catch the screaming victims burst out. How could they have known to be there? Who knew. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe they were not there at all. But in that climate, calls to random violence certainly did not need any more media outlets.

Flyers appeared, circulated to non-Mormon shops. Convert to the True Church, they said, and you will no longer be in danger. The Bishop himself declared a curfew on all ministries, warning employees to stay home “for their own safety.”  “Hooligans” attacked ambulances and water-delivery trucks serving poorer, fringe neighborhoods. So although nothing overt happened within central Saint George itself, and certainly nothing within the Security Zone, events elsewhere cast a pall over street-level commerce. Some businesses closed up for the day; some just closed early; others opened late. Yet again the university was closed, and no work done. So, they would not finish the following week after all.

One Thursday night was exceptionally bizarre. All was normalcy: the shops, the traffic, the bustle of loading docks. All was awry: the brightness, the meetings, the walk home; the gun ships, the horns, the sirens. Then silence. Then cheerful sounds of an evening get-together next door: laughter, clinking glasses, a blaring tri-v. A game of some kind. The rising and falling cheers of a sporting match. A happy evening. He was lulled to sleep.

He awoke to discover that, instincts intact, he’d just hit the floor behind cover, as a roar of gunfire engulfed the city. It volleyed; it rolled; it thundered; it erupted from beneath his very balcony. Shouting erupted with it, from every direction: hundreds, it seemed thousands, of—of cheers? And fans screaming GOAL!!!!? He realized that he’d been jolted from sleep by—a winning side in a trophy match? Yes! Saint George defeats Bonneville! Securing the cup! The gunfire was deafening. It grew in intensity. It swept eastward, then westward, then eastward again. Then, in a staccato riff on dueling strings or howling dogs, distant burps were answered by local reports. As it began to fade, he could once again hear his neighbors clearly—unconcerned, laughing and clinking and happy. He became extraordinarily bright himself. He climbed sheepishly from the floor.