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the pattern. Now Cade had to find the Sharp Side, and find out who had given the orders. Why they'd given them. And then he'd make them pay.
    Casually he strolled across the bridge, giving no outward sign of the fast beating of his heart, his disgust and agony, his despair.

CADE 33
    Slowly he headed toward his old house, his inmost self creating an ineffective shield against the world that passed before his eyes. Downwind was pain, for its inhabitants and for any with the eyes to see. All about him, as he wound his way through the filth-strewn streets, the nightmare was acted out. The adults were empty husks of aimless motion, the children dirty and mean. The toddlers plodded about, unwatched, their distended stomachs seeming to lead them about in their desperate search for anything remotely edible.
    But that wasn't the worst. There were the carcasses of shacks, like decomposing animals, in which the inhabitants played out their desperate lives. The little girls, and boys, offering their bodies for a piece of bread.
    And of course the blood. Everywhere apparent, drying on the walls, spilling fresh from ragged wounds, and behind the eyes of every poor bastard who walked the empty streets. Every one of them seemed to carry an ugly scar, a reminder of some time when a blade met their flesh
    ... or a thrown rock ... or a fist.
    He shuddered. Worse? What was worse? The term was meaningless. The blood? The hunger? No, the disease ... the corruption in everyone's veins. Scales and shingles covering thin limbs. Eyes oozing mucus, coughs racking whole frames. Their slow descent toward uncaring death. That was it, of course, the heart and soul of Downwind. Death. Coming at them from so many angles, attacking them, and they had no chance to defend themselves. Like his mother: the hard work she'd endured, the food she'd denied herself so that her children could have one more mouthful. What was it that finally killed her? Was it one of the many diseases ravaging her? Was it the fear? No, she was past that in the
    end. Past desperation. Past hope . . .
    For her, as for so many, it had been the humiliation. The constant unending shame of being trapped, of having failed. The self-hatred for all
    those things she'd had to do just to survive. Cade still remembered the first night she had sold herself to a man. How she had bathed afterward in a decrepit washtub borrowed from a more fortunate neighbor. How he had stumbled upon her naked. The water red with her blood as she scrubbed and scrubbed, her skin floating like bits of dried leaves in the
    soft pink water.
    He sobbed once at that memory, but he didn't cry. He had only cried twice in his lifetime. The first time when poor Terrel came home with his
    broken fingers, the pieces of his slate clamped between two swollen and useless hands. The second time . . .
    His mother had been thirty-one when she died. She had looked much Older. He could remember it so well. Her once thick black hair was gray Sod thin, the skin wrinkled with grime caught in the folds, her eyes dull
    34 AFTERMATH
    and empty as they had never been in life. He remembered the hollow thump as her hardened corpse was tumbled into the shallow pauper's grave. He heard the sound all the time, every day—thump-thump-thump
    —as he waded through hell, his hands red with the blood of those he set free, to one fate or another.
    It was agony to remember it all. His sensitive nose twitched at the familiar hateful smells. The harsh odor of human waste warming in the sun, the tang of sweat and urine, the thick reek of corruption. The sights,
    the smells, even the sounds. They built up about him, surrounding him like a vast sea of mud.
    He moved through Downwind like a great black shark, swimming through the slime and seaweed of an ocean floor. About him were the remains of a thousand dark meals, bits of flesh and bone, floating in the
    silt-filled waters. Occasionally he bumped into a half-eaten corpse. And all around him were the