THE ATTACKERS CAME from the south, out of the forest. Mariama never discovered whether Rodrigo and Marie, the sentries on duty in the towers on the southwest and southeast corners, had seen anything, whether they’d had any warning at all.
Or maybe they’d been asleep. The predawn hours were hard for everyone, and the sentries had been nearing the end of their shift. The end of just another shift after countless hundreds during which absolutely nothing important had happened.
No one ever learned what had taken place in those last few moments, and how much Rodrigo and Marie might have prevented. All that mattered was that they died before they had the chance to ring the alarm.
The first wartime deaths in the Next World, as lacking in detail as countless millions that had preceded them in the Last.
* * *
THE ASSAULT ON Refugia came in three waves. The first was an advance force that climbed the towers and killed the sentries. The second followed almost immediately, as the southern and eastern walls were set afire, an act not designed to burn them down—the walls were too solid to go up in flames—but to spread billows of smoke and sow confusion and panic.
But not as much panic as the third wave provoked: the attackers that erupted from the tunnels connecting Refugia to the forest. The passageways designed to provide the colonists with secret escape routes in case of attack instead gave the invaders access to the very heart of the colony.
In retrospect, Mariama thought, perhaps this kind of attack had been inevitable. But only in retrospect, because in designing the tunnels she—all of them—had made a mistake both simple and profound. The kind that can’t ever be repaired.
Mariama and Malcolm had built Refugia, with its high walls and its sentries, in anticipation of an attack by humans. In their imaginations, they’d visualized a disorganized horde of survivors who, upon discovering a colony that could feed and clothe itself—and protect itself against the thieves—would try to overwhelm it.
But neither of them had guessed that the attackers would be guided, directed, by the hive mind. The mind that saw everything and left the colony’s inhabitants with few secrets to keep and nowhere to hide.
That was the part they’d missed. The part that ended the war for Refugia nearly as soon as it began.
* * *
MARIAMA EMERGED FROM sleep to find two men coming through the door of her cabin.
Two unfamiliar men.
For an instant, caught in transition between dreaming and waking, Mariama lay still. She heard her voice, still muzzy, say, “Who are you?”
Coming clearer, she saw that at least one of the two understood her words. But he did not respond. Nor did either of them hesitate as they took three strides across the floor to her.
Finally, almost too late, Mariama rolled away. As one of the two came across the bed—she could smell his rank breath, and the odor of thief as well—she twisted back around, and in her right hand she held a knife.
The M9 bayonet with the seven-inch blade that she had kept well sharpened, hanging from a hook in the wall beside her bed these twenty years.
By now she was fully awake, and she’d always been good with a knife. And she was still strong. As always, stronger than anyone—any man, any creature—ever seemed to expect.
The first attacker, dark-eyed and blank-faced, had his hands on her as she got her feet under her and pushed upward with all her strength. Her sudden movement knocked him off balance as she thrust upward with her right hand.
She felt the blade scrape against his rib before cutting through the flesh of his chest and into his heart.
Pulling the blade out, she felt his hands lose their strength, saw them drop, clenching and unclenching, to his sides. But even then, as his blood flooded out through the gaping wound she’d made, he stayed upright, allowing her to see the thief riding on the back of his neck.
Finally, he fell to the floor in a graceless collapse. As he went down, the thief rose and hovered at Mariama’s eye level. She saw that it was struggling to fly, its wings damp with the man’s blood. A moment later, after she’d snatched it out of the air and smashed it against the wall, it was dead as well.
If the other man had intended to attack, this would have been the moment. But he hesitated. And now, as she leaped off the bed, she saw a familiar expression on his face.
A human expression. Fear.
Before she could reach him, he’d turned and fled. Out of reach of her blade and her rage.
Leaving the door open behind him, which allowed Mariama to hear for the first time the shouts and screams echoing outside.
* * *
PULLING ON A T-shirt and cotton pants, she went out the door and ran through the earliest gray light of dawn to the edge of the plaza. There she stood still, half-hidden behind a bush, and witnessed the ruin of the colony she’d always considered her own responsibility.
Smoke billowed across the plaza, mixing with the rising morning mist and the twisting skeins of thieves. Figures ran here and there, some recognizable—people she knew, had known for the only part of her life that still seemed real—and others strangers.
Human strangers, some of them, and some not. Some being ridden by thieves, and others that Mariama saw—with a long-buried jolt of recognition—were last-stage hosts. Dozens overall, inexorable, unstoppable as they swarmed the plaza, entered the cabins, captured the Fugians who did not react as quickly as Mariama had.
Some of their captives were naked, the rest clad only in nightclothes. None seemed to be armed or in any condition to fight, and already some were cowering on the ground, awaiting imprisonment or death.
Some, but not all. As she watched, Nick Albright came around a corner and into the plaza. He was carrying a handgun, a semiautomatic .9mm SIG that Mariama had often seen him practicing with on the target range.
But even before he appeared, some of the last-stage hosts were moving in his direction. So, regardless of his gun’s ability to spray its bullets around, he only managed to get off three shots—all at close range, none of which would have required target practice—before he was overwhelmed.
He gave a single hoarse shout as he went down under the onslaught.
Mariama felt a great anger rise up in her, a red anger that filled her skull. She wanted nothing more than to rush into the crowd of invaders, to take them all on, to spill as much of their blood as she could before she died.
But she knew she had to restrain herself. It would be a useless gesture to die for the other Fugians, as Nick had.
Maybe, by holding back now, she could save some of them.
Beginning with one.
She turned away from the carnage and began to run.
* * *
TWO ATTACKERS WERE dragging Sheila, still in her nightgown, from her isolated cabin. Two . . . humans, Mariama thought. Too alert and fast-moving to be last-stage hosts, and she could see no riders.
Two humans attacking her oldest, closest friend.
For just a few seconds more. Then they were merely two humans thrashing on the ground, blood spewing from their slashed throats.
Humans were easy.
* * *
SHEILA WAS STARING at the dying—dead—men. Mariama grabbed her by the arm and yanked her away.
For a moment Sheila, eyes and mouth both wide with terror, fought to escape Mariama’s grasp. Then she seemed to come back to awareness, at least enough to stop struggling and draw in a big, ragged breath.
“Sheila,” Mariama said, “move.”
Finally, Sheila came with her, and they headed away from the plaza and the cabins, away from the shouts and screams, which were already dwindling. The battle for Refugia—if it could even be called that—was coming to an end, half an hour after it had begun.
“Move where?” Sheila managed to say.
But Mariama, leading her forward, was silent. Either her instincts—or maybe they were just hopes—would prove correct, or they wouldn’t. The two of them would live a little longer, or they’d die now.
In either case, there was no need for her to explain.