July 29. Near midnight and still infernally hot. The air shimmers with unspent static charge. It’s been two days since the journalist’s murder. Finn and his squad approach the cell’s safe house silently, invisibly. Their breacher plants his charge. Finn gives the signal. The charge goes off with a roar and they sweep through the place. There is no one there…
And then?
A gap.
Finn opened his eyes.
He was on the floor of his cell, back against the bulkhead, where he’d been sitting all day with the light switched off, looking for lost memories in the dark. He took a slow breath, shut his eyes again, and once more slipped back into July 29…
A flicker of heat lightning rips open the sky, a flash bulb instant.
He is somewhere else now, standing by himself in front of a small dwelling of plaster rubble and sun-baked mud bricks, facing a wooden door. He waits a moment for the flash’s night blindness to fade.
It feels all wrong. He shouldn’t be alone. This is what a squad is for. Like the civilian police: always call for backup. But he hasn’t. He doesn’t.
His eyes regain their sensitivity, and now the darkened scene in front of him starts to resolve.
Now he sees the door clearly.
Shattered to pieces.
Someone has smashed it in.
And then? Only disconnected fragments.
A flickering lightbulb, skips in an old vinyl LP.
He pushes aside the shattered wooden fragments and steps through the mud-brick doorway—
Skip.
Now he’s walking through the house, entering a room—
Skip.
Now he’s inside the room, sitting on the earthen floor, legs splayed, his back to the wall. A few feet away, a shape on the floor, too dark to make out. A sleeping child? boy? girl?—another lightning flash illuminates the room—the child’s eyes stare sightless, blood oozing from both ears, blood pooling black on the floor in the strange light—
Finn’s eyes snapped open, his heart racing in the dark.
The massacre.
He was there.