He drank again, leaning back to put his feet up on the side of the desk, one leg crossed over the other. He looked at the camera, then at the bottle, then snorted again. “Water,” he said. “Enhanced, though. Something else we were working on. Everything the body needs in one bottle. We were all the way into development when that contract was canceled—feeding our soldiers just isn’t as profitable as killing them—so there’s a whole storage cell full of the stuff down below. It’s not bad. Tastes a little like ykara.” He drank some more, then set the bottle aside.

“So what happened?” he asked. “How did all these nice, sane people who designed the annihilation of the world let it get out? It wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t even by accident. It was just one of those things, as my daughter would say. Just one of those things. Who knew? Wait.”

He got up and walked out of frame, then came back with a small, black disc-shaped object. He held it up for the camera, then sat it down and tapped it. A second image sprang up, flickering so madly that only the most general outlines could be made out. He tapped through a few different shapes before he stopped and held the disc up. “This is Bsaia,” he said. “She’s thirteen. And if everything happened the way it was supposed to, she died eleven days ago, in the first two hours after the cloud hit. She and her mother—” He tapped back two images. “—Ylati, and our two sons—” Forward one tap. “—Tivon and Uluraq, went to the safe-room of our house as soon as the alarm went out, not knowing that the safe-room’s air circulator is not rated for a Class 5 contaminant. So. Two hours after the cloud hit, one of two things happened. Either our neighbors broke in or Tivon and Uluraq did it themselves, but my wife and my daughter were raped to death, and my sons either killed each other or were killed by one of our neighbors. I honestly don’t know what to hope for.” He looked at the images once more, then switched them off and looked at the camera.

“I keep talking about the cloud like you know what it is. So. Each of our development stations is powered by a geothermic fission system. Safest and most reliable form of power in the world. Cheap, too. Once the fixtures are in place, the generator runs itself, all the way down to the automated maintenance system. The surplus power it puts out pays for its installation before the first year is done, so naturally, only the military knows about it.” The man started to say something else, then laughed curtly and waved it away. “Never mind. I’m sure I’ll come back to that at some point. I’ve got all the time in the world to talk now…there’s just no one left to listen to me.”

The man leaned over his desk and covered his face for several long, brutally indifferent minutes of silent recording before he finally switched the camera off.

Meoraq turned around and went to the door. He hit the lockplate twice. Both times, the door clicked and counted down the minutes for him until the locks would open. He stood rigid, staring into the closed face of the door until, with a curt motion, he looked at her. He didn’t say anything.

Neither did she.

The monitor flickered. Meoraq turned his head a little more, enough to watch the man in the recording lean back in his chair. The bottle was still there beside him. He said, “Safest and most reliable power in the world. I’m sure there’s been a few close calls that I’m not aware of, but there’s never been an accident. The system maintains itself. Under optimum conditions, they say it can run without dumaq intervention for a thousand years. Maybe more. So. The military uses it for all its most sensitive installations. Because it’s so safe. And no one wants these things to get out, remember. No one built them to actually be used. That would just be crazy, right?

“Kunati exploded,” he went on without any change in his tone or expression. “Saiakr says they were working on three major projects, but the Wrath was the only one that seems to have gotten out. I guess the others were incinerated in the blast. I don’t know. I only know no one’s bleeding out their eyes or having their bones turn to jelly while they’re being fucked to death, so it’s not as bad as it could have been.

“Kunati was in a relatively unpopulated area. Protected. No one wanted this stuff to get out.” He snorted, uncapped the bottle, but then capped it again without drinking and just held it restlessly between his hands. “But the virus was designed to be delivered through explosive payload, so when Kunati blew, it did just…just what we built it to do. It turned to vapor and the wind took it away.”

The man gestured back at the wall of yellow lights without looking at it. “Saiakr says, when the virus hit, you could actually see it happen in the way people started fighting. If you were close enough, you could hear it…the roaring…coming in like the tide. He said, in the cities, the fires were opening up like flowers. Blooming. Isn’t that a pretty way to describe the end of the world?”

“Blooms,” said Meoraq, impassive. “I call it, ‘Blooms’.” He looked at the lockplate, pressed it, punched it.

“All of us were locked down by then, of course. Watching the blooms. For the first two days, we were told that it was temporary and we’d all go home as soon as the risk of contamination had dropped to acceptable levels. Like there were acceptable levels. Like none of us knew what the damn thing had been designed to do. And on the third day, a few hours before the cloud reached the capitol, the word came down that we needed to start incinerating the viruses. And firing the bombs. Because—and this was actually what they said—we couldn’t allow Tirazez to fall when the rest of the world still stood. So. So.” He dragged in a deep, shaking breath and looked right at the camera. “So, knowing that billions of people were dead and millions more would be dead by the next day, someone out there loaded up the rest of God’s Wrath and fired it. The whole world…bloomed.”

He looked at the camera stonily for a few more seconds, then switched it off.

“It’s just a recording,” said Amber softly.

Meoraq pressed his palm to the lockplate and rested the top of his head on the door. “I know.”

“It’s awful, but it’ll be all right.”

He glanced at her.

The recording came back on. The man was back. This time, he was entirely naked except for some lizardish underwear. To see him wearing something as flimsy as fabric there instead of a metal loin-plate was a little shocking. “It’s day sixty-three,” he said, dropping into the chair. “It’s late. I was exploring the administration levels today and found some koa, so I’m drunk as fuck. Celebrating,” he added, and raised his empty hand in a salute. “I saw a fire today. Which means someone’s still alive to set one. I lit the outer lamps, but no one’s come yet. I’m still hopeful.” He snorted, muttered, “So hopeful,” under his breath, and laughed.

“Saiakr killed himself this morning,” he said at the end of it, and raised his imaginary cup again. “Or as good as. He’s been talking about it for a while, although he doesn’t call it that. He doesn’t have any enhanced nutrition water at his base, just what comes out of the purifiers, so he’s been eating out of the officers’ lounge all this time. This morning, he brought out the last of it. Then he called me up to say goodbye. Said he was going to eat all he wanted and then take a transport from the garage and start driving. Said he could be here in three days. He said…Contaminant levels are still at ninety-nine percent,” he said suddenly. “But I still saw that fire and thought…”

He bent over, rubbing at his brows, and abruptly laughed. “If he makes it, I’m letting him in,” he announced. “I don’t care if he’s infected or not. Even if he’s fucking me to death, it’s still a living touch, you know? It’s still another person. And it’s still sixty-three days gone and I’m the only one left and I thought, for posterity, I ought to maybe explain how that happened.