Rain hammers so hard the jungle leaves moan in pain.

Omeyocan’s twin moons glare down.

The rain transforms the yellow jungle to red. It’s not water that pours from the sky—it’s blood.

“Look what you’ve done, Em.”

That voice.

J. Yong.

He’s curled up in a ball on the floor of a Xolotl hallway, his blood mixing with the endless gray dust to make crimson slush. Red stains his white shirt where I stabbed him in the belly. He rolls from side to side, but his eyes never leave mine.

“Look what you’ve done,” he says.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!”

I know that’s a lie.

Yong cries out. His cry becomes a squeal, because he’s not Yong, he’s a pig—the pig I killed in the Garden.

“Look what you’ve done, Em,” the pig says.

Blood sprays from its slashed throat, a crimson gusher that coats the green grass.

“But I had to,” I say. “You were in pain.”

The pig’s head tilts back, the cut I made widening until the head comes off and tumbles across a nighttime jungle floor. It rolls to a stop—now it’s a Grownup’s coal-black head wearing the metal and glass mask they use to breathe Omeyocan’s air.

“Look what you’ve done,” Old Visca says.

I want to turn away. I can’t.

“You were going to shoot my friend,” I say. “You were going to murder Barkah. I had to kill you, I had no choice!”

The head is a head one second, a huge Grownup the next. Coal-black skin is cratered, cracked and smoking, because this thing was ripped to shreds and now has been put back together.

“There is always a choice,” Old Bishop says. “Look what you’ve done!”

His words are thunder, a concussion that echoes through the city, bounces off ancient stone walls.

The fissures in his body flare with white fire, and once again he is torn to pieces, but each piece moves as if it is a living animal, grows arms and legs and vibrating blurd wings, crawls and scurries and flies back together in a self-assembling puzzle of gore that becomes a Springer…

“You murdered me,” it says. “Look what you’ve done.”

It’s the one I shot in the battle with the Belligerents. When I killed it, I didn’t think I saw details, but I was wrong—I would recognize this being anywhere.

“Look what you’ve done,” it says again.

“I had to!” I’m crying. I never cry. My voice is the voice of a weakling, someone who begs. “I’m so sorry, I had to.”

The Springer’s two-fingered hands slide to its belly, grab the spear sticking out of it. Blue blood sprays out, mixing with the ankle-deep red dust-slush at its feet.

“Look what you’ve done to me, Em.”

Now it is Ponalla, the Springer I killed in the jungle.

“The first Springer you killed,” Ponalla says. “There were more. Look what you’ve done to us.”

Ponalla stands in a field of carnage. Blood rain pours down. All around me are the twisted, ravaged bodies of Springers and humans, shattered remains of ruined spiders. Smoke and fire and flesh and bone.

“Your fault,” Ponalla says. “You could have stopped all of it, if you were stronger.”

“Aramovsky did this, not me!”

My words come out as cracked little things, as worthless and ineffective as my leadership.

Leadership. The spear in Ponalla’s belly…it’s mine. I need it to stop this nightmare.

I grab the spear shaft, but it’s not a spear anymore. It’s the handle of a knife, thick with jewels and slick with blood.

Red blood.

A knife buried in yet another belly, the belly of a boy wearing black coveralls.

No.

No, I can’t take this, I will go insane and I will never wake up I will never wake up I don’t want to see this I don’t want to remember!

“Look what you’ve done,” Kevin O’Malley says.

The stone walls shake around us, the stone floor trembles beneath. His head is in my lap. He smiles up at me with pure love, which makes it even worse. I killed him, but he was still in there.

“Look what you’ve done to me, Em.”

I want to tell him I love him, that I will always love him and that I’m so sorry, that I didn’t know he was still in there, but I suddenly can’t even hear my own words. Everything is a roar. The world shudders around us.

His hands reach up, grip my shoulders.

“Wake up, Em,” O’Malley says. “Wake up.”

His fingers curl in, squeeze hard enough to hurt. He doesn’t know his own strength.

Just like Bishop.

“Wake up.”

O’Malley shakes me. The world roars louder, and then he vanishes into the darkness of a fading dream.