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eyes widen. The monster loomed high above the outer walls of Old Trafford. The field shook with the simultaneous fire of dozens of cannons and rockets. The bombardment, apocalyptic at ground level, was reduced to insignificance when it hit the Eschaton.
    Streaks of fire became tiny blossoms against the articulated shell of the beast. With its next step, its lower leg smashed through the walls. As if kicked, Stretford End blew apart, its mosaic of red and white seats flying like confetti. The steel from the superstructure became a rain of javelins. Concrete chunks as big as cars catapulted across the field. Caldwell leaped aside to avoid a piece that hit the ground and rolled towards her, crushing the command tent. The Eschaton waded into the stadium. It stood on the wreckage of Challenger main battle tanks and AS-90 self-propelled Howitzers. It lowered its head, taking in its foes with eyes whose judgment was clear, alien, and absolutely frozen. It opened its jaws wide. Its chest rumbled, and there was the sound of a great wind being sucked away.
    Caldwell knew what was coming next. Everyone in the stadium did. They had read the intelligence. They had seen the footage. But the mythic could not be understood until it was experienced.
    Infantry ran for mirages of cover. Caldwell crouched low behind the rubble that had destroyed the tent. The heavy armor fired one last time, a gesture of defiance as brave as it was useless.
    The Eschaton breathed death on Old Trafford. The doom took the appearance of a beam of braided impossibility. It was white, crystalline flame. The beast turned its head from left to right, spreading the blast across the entire field. Behind her shelter, Caldwell felt the horror pass just over her head. She bit back a cry of agony as frostbite and incandescence reached through her fatigues.
    Silence fell, ghastly with anticipation. Caldwell raised her head. The Eschaton stood there, cloud-breaker, sky-killer, looking down on its work. The fallen walls of the stadium and everything within them were encased in flames of ice. Human, vehicle, and ruin were twisted into immobilized writhings of absolute torment.
    For a few seconds, Caldwell stared at a tableau. Hell was motionless. It had a grace that came with perfect extremity. Then the explosion came, the ice becoming motion, becoming a solar flare. The heat forced Caldwell down again. She was surrounded by wall of flame thirty meters high. The Eschaton raised its arms and roared. It drowned out the firestorm. For a moment, she expected to see chunks of the sky fall earthward, smashed by the Jericho blast of the roar.
    The beast strode onwards, leaving the burning, broken toy of the stadium.
    Caldwell watched it go. Beast , she thought. That’s what it is. A beast. One we can’t kill, but it isn’t anything more. She was holding back something profound. She knew what it was, and at the same time refused to acknowledge it, even as a false possibility. She refused to let the impulse turn into a thought that might defeat her.
    The fire kept her trapped for a quarter of an hour. When it died down enough that she could leave her shelter without being incinerated, she made for a gap in the flames. It had once been the East Stand but the Eschaton had gone this way. Evans and a few other survivors joined her in escaping the burning stadium. Very few.
    Smoke rolled through the falling night. The city was lit by the glow of its own pyre. Where the Eschaton walked, it left a spreading wake of ice, then fire. The burn was already a kilometer wide. The beast wasn’t following streets. Caldwell watched it head northeast, roughly parallel to the canal, smashing its way through the city blocks. Buildings toppled at its touch. Its tail swept back forth behind it, bringing down the few towers that survived the initial moment of its passing.
    Caldwell tasted the bile of failure. It was a failure she had known was coming. That didn’t make it any easier to accept. She had lost