Harman remembered Savi’s husky, cynical voice, and her huskier laugh. He perfectly recalled their cheering and shouting when Savi had driven Daeman and him out of Jerusalem in the crawler, with thousands of voynix chasing to no avail. And he saw his friend Daeman’s face as if through two lenses—the pudgy, self-absorbed boy-man from when Harman first met him, and the lean, serious version—a man to be trusted with one’s life—whom he’d last seen a few weeks ago on the day Harman left Ardis in the sonie.

And, as the sun entered the Breach so perfectly that its outer curves just touched the Breach wall—Harman smiled to think of a hissing steam sound rising and actually thought he heard one through his failing ears—Harman thought of Ada.

He thought of her eyes and smile and soft voice. He remembered her laugh and touch and the last time they had been together in bed. Harman allowed himself to remember how, when they turned away from one another as sleep came on, they also soon would curve against the other for warmth—Ada against his back, her right arm around him, himself later in the night against Ada’s back and perfect backside, a bit of excitement stirring in him even as he drifted off to sleep, his left arm around her, his left hand cupping her breast.

Harman realized that his eyelids were so caked with blood that he could not really blink, could not really shut his eyes. The setting sun—the bottom of it already below the Breach horizon—was burning red and orange echoes into his retina. It didn’t matter. He knew that after this sunset, he would never need to use his eyes again. So he concentrated on holding his beloved Ada in his mind and heart and on watching the last half of the sun’s disk disappear directly to his west.

Something moved and blocked the last of the sunset.

For several seconds, Harman’s dying mind could not process that information. Something had moved into his field of vision and blocked his view of the last of the sunset.

Still propped on his right elbow, he used the back of his left hand to rub some of the caked blood from his eyes.

Something was standing in the Breach not twenty feet west of Harman. It must have come through the Breach wall of water there on the north side. The thing was about the size of an eight—or nine-year-old child and was shaped more or less like a human child, but it wore a strange suit of metal and plastic. Harman saw a black visor where the little boy’s eyes should be.

On the verge of death, as the brain shuts down from lack of oxygen, an unsummoned protein memory molecule prompted him, hallucinations are not uncommon. Thus the frequent tales from resuscitated victims of a “long tunnel” ending in a “bright light” and…

Fuck that, thought Harman. He was staring down a long tunnel toward a bright light, although only the top rim of the sun remained, and both walls of the Breach were alive with light—silver, bright, mirrored surfaces with millions of facets of dancing light.

But the boy in the plastic and metal red-and-black suit was real.

And as Harman stared, something larger and stranger forced itself out through the north wall of the Breach.

The forcefield is semipermeable only to human beings and what they wear, thought Harman.

But this second apparition was nowhere near human. It was about twice the size of the largest droshky, but looked more like a giant, robotic crab monster with its big pincer claws and many metal legs and its huge, pitted carapace now pouring water off it in loud rivulets.

No one told me that the last minutes before death would be so visually amusing, thought Harman.

The little boy figure stepped closer. It spoke in English, its voice soft and rather boylike, perhaps sounding much like Harman’s future son might sound. “Sir,” it said, “can you use some assistance?”

It was just after sunrise and fifty thousand voynix were attacking from all directions. Ada paused to look back at the Pit where the shredded corpse of the Setebos spawn still lay.

Daeman touched her arm. “Don’t feel bad. We had to kill it sooner or later.”

She shook her head. “I don’t feel the least bit sorry,” she said. To Greogi and Hannah she shouted, “Get the sky-raft up!”

Too late. More than half the survivors had panicked at the scuttling roar of the voynix attack—the creatures were still invisible in the forest but the two-mile radius must have been cut in half by now. They’d be at Ardis in less than a minute.

“No! No!” shouted Ada as thirty people, in their panic, tried to fit aboard the slowly lifting sky-raft. Hannah was at the controls, trying to keep it at a steady three-foot hover, but more people were trying to clamber aboard.

“Take it up!” shouted Daeman. “Hannah! Take it up now!”

Too late. The heavy machine let out a mechanical whine, dipped to its right, and crashed to the ground, sending people flying.

Ada and Daeman ran to the fallen machine. Hannah looked up with a stricken face. “It won’t start again. Something’s broken.”

“Never mind,” Ada said, her voice calm. “It would never have made even one trip to the island.” She squeezed Hannah’s shoulder and raised her voice—“Everyone to the walls! Now!! Bring every weapon in the compound. Our best chance is to break their first charge.”

She turned and ran to the west wall and a minute later the others began to do the same, choosing empty spots in the now-circular palisade. Everyone followed Ada’s example of carrying at least two flechette rifles and a crossbow along with a heavy canvas bag of magazines and bolts.

Ada settled herself into a firing niche and discovered that Daeman was still beside her. “Good,” he said.

She nodded, although she had no idea what he was really saying to her.

Working very carefully, in no rush, Ada slapped in a fresh magazine, clicked off the safety, and aimed the rifle at the treeline no more than two hundred yards away.

The rushing, hissing, clacking noise made by the approaching voynix grew deafening and Ada found she had to resist the urge to drop her rifle and cover her ears. Her heart was pounding and she was feeling slightly nauseated, almost the way she’d felt earlier in her pregnancy, but she did not feel afraid. Not yet.

“All those years of the turin drama,” she said, not realizing that she was speaking aloud.

“What?” said Daeman, leaning closer to hear.

She shook her head. “I was just thinking about the turin drama. According to Harman, Odysseus said that he and Savi started that—distributing the turin cloths ten years ago, I mean. Maybe the idea was to teach us how to die with courage.”

“I’d rather they’d given us something to teach us how to win a fight against fifty thousand fucking voynix,” said Daeman. He clicked back the activation bolt on his rifle.

Ada laughed.

The little noise was drowned out by the roar as the voynix broke free of the forest—some leaping from tree branches even as others scuttled beneath the leapers—a gray wall of carapaces and claws rushing at them at fifty or sixty miles an hour. There were so many of them this time that Ada had trouble making out individual voynix bodies in the rising and falling mass. She looked over her shoulder and saw the same nightmare coming at them from all sides as the tens of thousands of voynix narrowed the radius at full speed.