Meoraq backed up into the room behind him and looked around at whatever there was in there to see. “It somewhat resembles a niyowah.” He glanced at her. “A place of display, such as one might exhibit trophies of battle or holy relics. Except that these were people,” he added as Amber moved past him to see.

A niyowah, he’d called it, which she’d taken to mean a museum or something. But the word that leapt at once to her shocked mind was laboratory.

It was a great round room, the surfaces all neutral and utilitarian in appearance and architecture. The door they had come through appeared to be the only exit. The rest of the outer wall was paneled in glass, or this world’s equivalent, and it would not surprise Amber to find it was one-way glass. On the other side were seven cells, each holding a small number of desiccated bodies gnarled together in a violent heap. At the center of these viewing chambers stood the room’s control center—a raised dais sporting a horseshoe-shaped console whose video screens were attempting to come on in spite of several cracked monitors. From that vantage, the scientists or guards assigned to watch the prisoners or patients could see into every cell. And as impossible as that seemed, they must have just stood there and watched as the inhabitants of those cells slaughtered each other.

Each chamber was its own vignette of horror and no one had died peacefully. In the first, setting the tone for all of them, one mummy lay with its belly ripped open and another sprawling face-down in the cavity, as a third and fourth (stained black from chin to chest, as if they had been…feeding) remained where they had fallen, hands still locked around one another’s throats. Not all the violence was reserved for murder alone; the male mummies were easily identified by the dried cobs of their genitalia, fully extruded at the time of their terrible deaths, and several had expired either in the act or as the victim of violent sodomy.

She didn’t want to look at any of it, but was powerless to look away. Amber moved slowly from cell to cell around the steadily rising walkway, oblivious to the rest of her surroundings until she stepped on something that crunched underfoot. She looked down, already knowing what she was going to see.

She’d stepped on someone’s toes, but of course, the someone was hundreds or even thousands of years beyond caring. He lay face-up and snarling against the console, his arms and legs sprawled as awkwardly as those of a rag doll carelessly thrown, his withered penis laying crookedly across one thigh, stained to his belly with old blood. Beside him, perhaps six other bodies knotted together. The body at the bottom was that of a woman, still pinned in place by three cocks that Amber could count—one in her vagina, one in her mouth (her snouted jaws snapped wide open so that her throat could be speared), and the last stabbed in just under her right rib—although it appeared that she had been dead for some time before the rest of her attackers expired. They had killed each other without bothering to stop the rape. Two were being themselves sodomized as they fucked her. The corpse crowning the heap, the last survivor one might assume, was fucking a hole in the back of someone’s skull, nearly castrating himself in the process. It may have been what killed him.

“What…” Amber’s whisper scraped across the dead air like a match. She tried to lick her lips, but had no moisture. “What happened here?”

“I don’t know.” And didn’t care, his tone said.

Amber’s hip shook; she put out her hand to steady herself and caught the console. As if drawing strength from her life-force, the monitor nearest her flashed an urgent yellow and played a few silent seconds of some lizardman’s face. His mouth opened and closed as if he were talking, but there was no sound, only a low hiss. It was perhaps even the same transmission she had first seen and heard in the ruins where Scott got the idea of a skyport, but the picture spat and died without ever quite coming into focus and she couldn’t be sure.

“What really happened?” Amber asked again, wrenching her gaze away to Meoraq. “What was the Fall? What the hell did God do to you people?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. But, with an air that suggested he was humoring her, he came to the console (nudging the rag-doll mummy aside with his foot), and examined each of the sputtering monitors in turn. “The Ancients used our letters, but made many senseless words. Something to do with safety,” he read. “And with locks. Report to your…I do not know that word. Your abbot, I suppose. Doors will unlock…I do not know those words. It is a warning, clearly,” he said, straightening. “The exact nature of the threat eludes me. I don’t know what they used to do here.”

“We call it biological warfare,” Amber said, looking past him at the cells.

“Eh? I don’t mark you.”

“They made weapons. Very small ones.” And it got out. Fear flared, but died away. Judging by the corpses, death may not have been immediate, but the bloodlust that had led to murder had been. If the germs were still alive and kicking, surely Meoraq would be raping her to death at the moment.

She eyed him warily.

He noticed and his head cocked. He was definitely annoyed, but certainly not consumed with murderous rage. He wasn’t even annoyed enough to tell her there was nothing worth looking at in this room.

And yet she kept staring, curiously frozen, not just in her body, but her mind also. Because there was something about him, something obvious. Like lyrics to a song she’d heard a hundred times and couldn’t quite sing along with; like getting the right word on the tip of her tongue, but no further; like those detective shows where the clues were right in front of her, but she never the saw the end coming until the TV-cop put it all together for her.

God’s wrath. She’d asked him what the Fall was and he’d called it God’s wrath, when the trees had bled red in the springtime because of all the blood soaked into the ground. War covered the world, he said, like skin covers a man.

She looked at the bodies on the floor again, the heap of them locked in dried-out death, and tried to imagine how it must have been, not just here in this room with the people you’d worked with for years, but everywhere. She could imagine the sound—alarms blaring, fire roaring, and everyone screaming—because she’d heard it once before, as she’d stumbled out of the wreck of the Pioneer, but even that was just one ship, just a few thousand people. This had been everywhere, everyone.

Meoraq’s head was creeping over a little deeper into that pissed-off angle. She was still staring at him. Something was still wrong, but all she could think when she tried to figure it out was those two words: everywhere, everyone.

It had gone on for years, he’d said. The war and the blight and the storms—years—until the Prophet came and started tossing Bibles around. Heck, if you wanted to look at it that way, the storms hadn’t even ended yet. It wasn’t always as bad as it was tonight, but the wind was always blowing and the sun was never more than a shiny smudge behind the clouds on even the best of days. In fact, if you really wanted to be bitchy, you could argue that the land still looked pretty damn blighted. Nothing but grass and thorns and the toe-catching rocks, which were themselves mostly the eroded rubble of collapsed buildings.

Because they fell. All of them. All over the world. And nothing was left except ruins like these, like the little patches of trees that you could sometimes find out in the wasteland of the plains. The cities fell, and whether it was the dust of their falling or the ashes from all the funeral fires, the wind buried them and the grass covered them up, and it was starting to grow up again, starting to, but not really, because—

Amber felt it start in her stomach, of all places, like a menstrual cramp more than anything else, or even like an orgasm, if an orgasm could be cold and awful.