Ripples appeared in the grass, at first just flattening the blades, but then Yatima saw dust rising up between them. The air came in powerful gusts, and when the pressure rose so did the temperature. Yatima raised vis hand into the hot wind, and tried to feel it flowing past vis fingers, tried to grasp what it would mean to be touched by this strange storm.

Lightning hit a building on the far side of the playground; it exploded, showering glowing embers. Yatima hesitated, then moved quickly toward the burst shell. Patches of grass were burning nearby. Ve could see no one moving inside, but between the lightning flashes it was like a starless night, and as the embers and the grass fires sputtered out there was a moment when everything seemed blanketed, smothered by darkness. Yatima stretched the gleisner's vision into infrared; there were patches of body-temperature thermal radiation among the wreckage, but the shapes were ambiguous.

People were shouting frantically, somewhere, but it didn't seem to be coming from the building. The wind masked and distorted the sound, scrambling all cues for distance and direction, and with the streets deserted it was like being in a scape with a soundtrack of disembodied voices.

As Yatima approached the building, buffeted by the wind, ve saw that it was empty; the body-temperature regions were just charred wood. Then vis hearing cut out again and the interface lost balance. Ve hit the ground face down, an image lingering on vis retinas: vis shadow stretched out across the grass, black and sharp against a sea of blue light. When ve scrambled to vis feet and turned around, there were three more buildings charred and smoking, walls split open, ceilings collapsed. Ve ran back across the playground.

There were people stumbling out of the ruins, ragged and bleeding. Others were searching frantically through the debris. Yatima spotted a man half-buried in rubble, eyes open but expressionless, a black splintered length of wood lying across his body from thigh to shoulder. Ve reached down and grabbed one end of the beam, and managed to lift it and swing it away.

As ve squatted beside the man, someone started punching and slapping the back of vis head and shoulders. Ve turned to see what was happening, and the flesher began yelling incoherently and striking vis face. Still squatting, ve backed off from the injured man awkwardly, as someone else tried to pull vis assailant away. Yatima stood and retreated. The flesher screamed after ver, "Vulture! Leave us in peace!"

Confused and disheartened, Yatima fled.

As the storm intensified, the bridgers' hasty modifications were falling apart; crumpled tarpaulins were blowing down the street, and the ceilings of some of the walkways had come loose and crashed to the ground. Yatima looked up at the dark sky and switched to UV. Ve could just make out the disk of the sun, penetrating the stratospheric NOx easily at these wavelengths, but still veiled by the heavy clouds.

Inoshiro had been right, there was nothing ve could do; the bridgers would bury their dead, treat the injured, repair their damaged city. Even in a world where the darkness at noon could blind them, they'd find their own ways to survive. Ve had nothing to offer them.

The link to Konishi was still down, but ve wasn't prepared to wait any longer. Yatima stood motionless in the street, listening to the cries of pain and mourning, preparing verself for extinction. To forget this would be nothing but a sweet relief; vis Konishi self would be free to remember the bridgers in happier times.

Then the sky roared, and the lightning descended like rain.

The street became a sequence of dazzling staccato images bathed in blue and white, shadows jumping wildly with each new jagged arc of light. Buildings began exploding one after another, a relentless cascade of sudden orange flashes spraying sparks and fist-sized lumps of burning wood. People appeared, ducking and screaming, panicked out of their vulnerable shelters. Yatima watched, helpless but transfixed. The dying stratospheric plasma had found a way to reach down to Earth, its radio frequency pulses pumping vast quantities of ions through the lower atmosphere, inducing a massive voltage difference between the stormclouds and the ground. But now the voltage had crossed the breakdown threshold of the dust-filled air below, and the whole system was short-circuiting, rapidly and violently. Atlanta just happened to be in the way. Local damage, insignificant on a global scale.

Yatima moved slowly through the actinic blaze, half hoping for a lightning strike and the mercy of amnesia, but unable to abandon the bridgers now by choice. Driven from their homes, people were cowering beneath the onslaught, many of them burnt, torn, bloodied. A woman strode past with her arms stretched wide and her face to the sky, shouting defiantly: "So what? So what?"

A child, a half-grown girl, sat in the middle of the street, the side of her face and one exposed arm a raw pink, weeping lymphatic fluid. Yatima approached her. She was shivering.

"You can leave all this behind. Come into the polises. Is that what you want?" She stared back, uncomprehending. One of her ears was bleeding; the thunder might have deafened her. Yatima delved into the instructions for the gleisner's maintenance nanoware, and had it rebuild the lost delivery system in vis left forefinger. Then ve commanded the surviving Introdus doses to move into place.

Ve raised vis arm and aimed the delivery system at the girl, shouting "Introdus? Is that what you want?" She cried out and covered her face. Did that mean no, or was she just bracing herself for the shock?

The child began sobbing. Yatima backed away, defeated. Ve could save fifteen lives, ve could drag fifteen people out of this senseless inferno, but who could ve be sure even understood what ve was offering?

Francesca. Orlando. Liana.

Orlando and Liana's house wasn't far. Yatima steeled verself and pushed on through the chaos, past the shattered buildings and the terrified fleshers. The lightning was finally dying away—and the fireproof buildings had only burnt when directly hit—but the city had been transformed into a scene from the age of barbarism, when bombs had rained from the sky.

The house was partly standing, but unrecognizable; Yatima only knew ve'd found the right place because of the gleisner's navigation system. The top story was gutted, and there were holes in the ceiling and walls of the ground floor.

Someone was kneeling in the shadows, picking away debris at the edge of a vast heap where the ashes of most of the top story seemed to have landed. "Liana?" Yatima broke into a run. The figure turned toward ver.

It was Inoshiro.

Inoshiro had half-exposed a corpse, all black dessicated flesh and white bone. Yatima looked down at it, then recoiled, disoriented. This charred skull was not a symbol in some jaded work of polis art; it was proof of the involuntary erasure of a living mind. The physical world could do that. The death of a cosmic mayfly could do that.

Inoshiro said, "It's Liana."

Yatima tried to absorb this, but ve felt nothing, the idea meant nothing.

"Have you found-?"

"Not yet." Inoshiro's voice was expressionless.

Yatima left ver, and began scanning the rubble in IR, wondering how long a corpse would remain warmer than its surroundings. Then ve heard a faint sound from the front of the house.

Orlando was buried beneath pieces of the ruptured ceiling. Yatima called Inoshiro, and they quickly uncovered him. He was badly injured; both his legs and one arm had been crushed, and a gash in his thigh was spurting blood. Yatima checked the link to Konishi—ve couldn't even guess how to treat such wounds—but either the stratosphere was still ionized, or one of the drones had been lost in the storm.