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bursting from inside. That alone proved it hadn’t been the work of any military tribe rampaging around on Cylinder’s exterior, but something else.
     
    Through the viewfinder, Axxter estimated the jag-rimmed hole at over a kilometer across, a gaping cavity in the building’s side. Turning the camera to the interior, he taped the twisted girders of a horizontal flooring level jutting out. Farther inside, only blackness, the walls of the broken corridors blackened with smoke.
     
    He reattached the camera to his belt, right behind where the gun’s handle protruded. A lot of footage, more than he needed. If he was going to sell this – and there was no question of that; he needed all the cash into which other people’s misfortunes might translate – it wouldn’t be on the basis of aesthetic appeal. The thought of what had done this would be, as for him, just a little too much for people to bear. That thing that everybody’s afraid of, back in the darkness, way inside the building – Axxter shivered. Maybe that’s why I like it out here, one way or another. At least it’s out here. Away from that. He craned his neck and looked back inside the charred hole.
     
    Something looked at him. He felt it before he caught sight of it. A white face, right at the edge of what had been a floor. He lifted the camera and zoomed in on it.
     
    He lost it in the viewfinder, panned across the black metal, and found it again. He felt no surprise, nausea more than fear.
     
    Empty eye sockets gazed toward the camera. Flame-scabbed remnants of another stuff, the odor the outside winds hadn’t yet cleansed from the atmosphere, blackened the withered neck and cage of ribs behind the skull. A hand, unmarked, clutched the broken edge of steel.
     
    You too . The skull grinned as it spoke inside Axxter’s head. Watch out . The smile licked out and relished the knot in the still-living gut. Watch out, watch out, watch out  . . .
     

 

     

     

     

     

     

    THREE
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    He’d fallen asleep among corpses. His fatigue had caught up with him, in the burnt-out sector. Dreaming of bad things; Axxter cradled his head on his wrist, back of hand against ashes and concrete. The familiar comfort of sleeping on a horizontal floor, no matter how torn where it ended in air. An even more comforting weight of metal on his chest, finger curled against sickle trigger. A space cleared among the grinning things, so they wouldn’t whisper in his ear. But he was dreaming of them nonetheless.
     
    “You too!” Dancing in a circle around him “Even as we are! You too will be!” From their white faces and spider ribs the charred-tissue remnants flutter, black rags. (In sleep, Axxter moaned, clutched the gun tighter.) A skull squared off with a mortarboard cap turns to its audience, hand rattling like dice, the thin end of the pointer tapping on Axxter’s breastbone. The lecture-hall lights come up, blinding him, standing naked on the podium.
     
    The pointer flicks his nose, then draws a line down to his navel. “We see the front side.” The skull’s voice is Guyer’s, oddly, but no longer kind. “The sun comes up on this side. We see this side, we know this side.”
     
    “We see! We are! Will be!” White grins swaying in the seats. (The crosshatched handle sweats in Axxter’s grip.) “You too!”
     
    “The sun goes up and over –” The pointer traces vertical between Axxter’s eyes, bisects his forehead. He strains to hear the skull’s words; some analogy here, but he can’t make it out. “Then it’s on the other side, the rear side. We don’t see that side, we don’t know what’s on it – we don’t even care!”
     
    “Don’t care!”
     
    “But ah! The center! The core!” A flourish, and an overhead mirror lights up. Axxter rolls his eyes brow-ward, to see what the pointer stabs at. And observes, with sick surprise, the reflection of a circular hole at the top of his own head. A flat hat of