“I’m a technician. I maintain the equipment that built the viruses. There are three other technicians that work here, so there’s always one of us on site, but we’re not soldiers. We’re not military. We’re not scientists.” He snorted. “Thank God for the cleaners or we wouldn’t have anyone to bully around. Of course, the cleaners don’t have to have someone on site at all times. Or the scientists. When Kunati blew and the base locked down, we were on dead shift. Ironic, eh? Six soldiers and me. And they were all down in the garage, playing High Six. Technicians not invited. So I was locked in when the cloud went up. And they were locked out.”

He was quiet for a moment, staring impassively into space, and then he said, “There were cameras down there. There’s cameras everywhere. And I could see them banging on the door trying to get back in, but I couldn’t override the system. I did try. Eventually. When the cloud was coming. But I couldn’t. The cloud hit and they…I shut off the monitor, so I’m not sure exactly what happened. I know there was one of them left alive, because I’d turn on the monitor sometimes and see him still…on them. But he wandered off eventually. I don’t know where. Maybe out to the base housing, eh? Maybe he was the one who found Ylati…and Bsaia…and the boys. I suppose it doesn’t matter, really. Saiakr had a full shift on at his base, though. All their people were safely locked in just like they should have been. One hundred and fifteen people, he said.

“But the word came down, like the word always does. The viruses were incinerated. Then the scientists were killed. Then the officers were told to kill the low-ranking soldiers, so they did, and I guess the commanding officer took out the officers. Saiakr was a technician, I don’t remember if I told you. Our job is to crawl around inside tiny tubes and under machines and behind panels. Nobody knows how to hide like we do. He worked his way up through the air system until he was in the floor under the commander’s office. That’s where he was when the base commander came back and shot himself. One hundred and fifteen people were saved from the cloud. One hundred and fourteen of them killed each other anyway. Because those were their orders. He told me that,” said the man, rubbing at his brows, “and what can I say? We called the stuff God’s Wrath, did I tell you? We called the stuff God’s Wrath…and maybe it was.”

He shut the camera off. The monitor flickered while Meoraq leaned on the door and took deep breaths and then the picture came back. The man was there, fully dressed, haggard, with a device in his hand that could only be a gun.

“I can’t believe I’m down here again,” he said and looked at the gun. “So. Fuck it. It’s day one-eighty-eight. Saiakr isn’t coming. No one is. I’ve been transmitting non-stop over every channel every day, but no one comes. I’ve got enough nutrition water to last a hundred people a hundred years, but there’s just me…and I’m tired. So.” He hefted the gun briefly. “So this is it. I just wanted to say, just in case there’s someone out there after all, that I’m sorry. If you find me…fuck, I don’t know. Burn me, I guess. I shouldn’t be infected, but burn me anyway. Just in case. I’ll understand if you want to piss on me first.”

He lifted his head and looked directly at the camera. “My name is Nuu Sukaga and I helped to kill the world.” He raised the gun and fired. The shot was silent, producing nothing but a pulse of light that briefly rippled across his scales. The sound of his skull bursting open and his brains hitting the back of the chair behind him was wet and loud. The body slumped over and out of frame. The camera kept recording.

Meoraq watched for a short time, then pushed himself slowly off the door. He walked out into the room and looked behind the desk.

“Is he there?” Amber asked uneasily.

“No.”

“Are you…Are you all right?”

He glanced at her, then at the monitor. “Apparently not. You understood more of that, I think, than I did. And you were not surprised.” He turned around to face her. “How long have you known?”

“I…”

“Since the niyowah in the ruins, the night of the storm,” he mused, looking away. “I think you tried to tell me. You had a word for it. I remember that.”

“Meoraq—”

“Tell me the word. I can’t say it. I want to hear it again.”

She felt her shoulders falling without ever realizing how tensely she’d been holding them. “Biological warfare,” she said softly.

“This means fighting? With…blooms?”

“With disease,” she said.

He looked at her, then at the monitor again. A cleanerbot had come silently into the room. She could just see the top of its rounded head as it hovered beside the chair, moving minutely back and forth as, presumably, it cleaned the corpse. “You built them?” he asked. “Like machines? You could actually make…madness? And hurl it, like a spear?”

The monitor went abruptly black. He looked at it, frowning, as a new image snapped on. The same room, now with several lizardmen standing around the desk. The nearest of them stepped back, his head cocked at a critical angle, and said, “There it is.”

“Is it working?”

“Says it is.” The man’s spines flared forward and snapped back in a terse shrug. “The only way to check is to turn it off.”

“Check.”

“Mkole!” one of the others groaned, but the first man, although plainly irritated, stepped forward again and the screen went briefly black.

“God, that’s awful,” said Amber, watching. “How long…I mean…Do you think that’s Saiakr?”

Meoraq grunted one of his I-don’t-know grunts, frowning.

The image came back in the middle of Mkole’s waspish, “—only to find out it was never recording!”

“Leave him alone, Brunt,” said the first man, his spines now completely flat. “Let’s just do this. My name is Oyan Ichazul.”

Meoraq startled. After a moment, Amber realized the name was familiar to her as well. Oracle Oyan was one of the Six. It could be a coincidence—who knew how many Bierces there were back on Earth?—but no sooner had this thought ventured itself into her brain than the others added themselves to the roster.

“My name is Uyane Xaima.”

“I am Surgeon Thaliszr Mkole.”

“Shev. Mykrm Shevas.”

“I was Amagar Silq. They call me the Brunt now.”

“And I am Lashraq Zhan,” finished Zhan. “It is now 3046, what some people are calling Year Seventeen after the Fall. Sometime in the spring, I think.”

Shev snorted. “Not that anyone can tell. The U’uskirs dropped their whole fucking array when they got hit by the cloud. They didn’t even aim the fucking thing, just fired whatever they had at whatever it all happened to be pointed at. Over seven thousand disruptors going off at once. Irradiated the whole fucking planet, and you can’t hear it from in here, but the storm it kicked up when it happened is still going on. I haven’t seen the sun once in seventeen years.”

“I’m sure we’ll be seeing the casualties for some time,” Mkole added anxiously, “but we seem to have stabilized for now. Death by direct exposure to radiation seems to have receded to nominal levels and the risk of related complications appears to be dropping as well. Along the eastern seaboard of Tirazez, anyway.”

“Ah fuck me, here we go,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at his brow-ridges. “Zhan, shut him down or tie me up. I can’t listen to this again.”

“Breathe, Xaima. Breathe and let him talk. This is part of why we came here.”

“What is this?” Meoraq asked. His spines were flat, his eyes wide, betraying a terrible tension and fear that had not been present even during Technician Nuu’s short series of narratives. “Who are these people? What are they saying?”

She put her hand on his arm and he looked at her wildly. “It’s all right, Meoraq.”

“Those are not priests!”

“Just listen.”

Mkole concluded his rather rambling summary of the post-apocalyptic health hazards he’d seen with the optimistic note that, “We’ve estimated that life expectancy has risen almost six months in the past seven years and although female fertility remains dangerously low, from all reports, one out of every thirty pregnancies is now being carried to term with no marked increase in infant defect or mortality.”