“Oh God. Oh God.”

“Lights.” Mallick gripped her hand. “With me. Lights.”

She shuddered through it, joined her power with his to create a pale green glow.

In it she saw another door behind the remains, one of bars inside thick glass. Through it a security center, a guard station. And more, many more dead.

Skeletal remains slumped in chairs behind blank monitors. They spread on the concrete floor blackened by some ungodly fire.

Mallick released her hand, opened the barred door himself. He stepped through, turned to her when she didn’t follow him.

Pale in the charmed light, he noted, with her eyes dark and shocked. Not just by the dead, not only, he knew, as he, too, could still scent the stink of dark magicks trapped inside for years.

He nearly took her hand again, took it to take her home again, away from the dead and the dark. But that was the weakness of his love for the child, not the duty of the chosen to the Savior.

“This you must face. War—and it was, is, and will be war—brings death. Death by man or magicks. In war you will cause death, by your sword, by your power, by your orders. To be just, to be wise, to be strong enough to bring death, you must face it, see its costs.”

She trembled, but went through the door.

More doors, she thought. Dozens and dozens of steel doors lining the concrete walls. An open stairway leading to the second level and still more doors.

She made herself walk to one, though it felt more like swimming than walking. She opened the viewing slot, looked through the reinforced glass. No more than eight feet wide and deep, the windowless cell held a toilet bolted to the floor and a narrow bunk with the bones of whoever had curled tight on it.

Anger rose through shock, and she blew open the door, then another, another, so the crashing of metal to stone boomed and echoed. Some of the dead had been restrained to the bunks. Some had been children. All had been alone.

Rage shoved through anger and, on a furious cry, she threw out hands and power. More doors crashed open, some strongly enough to crack the steel.

“They’re still trapped here. I can feel them.” Her voice tore with outrage. “Can you feel them?”

“Yes. I can feel them.”

She yanked the dog tags from a body on the floor, gripped them tight in her hand. “Show me,” she commanded, shutting her eyes. “Show me.”

She saw him, as he’d been.

“Sergeant Roland James Hardgrove, U.S. Army, attached to Operation Roundup. Commanding Officer Colonel David Charles Pickett. Age thirty-six. Married, two children.”

Gripping the dog tags, she pushed.

“He would tell them they were taking them to safety. If met with resistance, the use of force, deadly force when warranted. Those were orders. A soldier follows orders. His team brought in the last group. Two men, three women, two minors. The boy, about eight, reminded him of his son, but he had orders. He’d completed the transfer, the paperwork, and was heading to the mess hall when he died.

“Orders. He followed orders.”

She dropped the dog tags, walked to one of the scorched walls, laid her hands on it.

“Others will follow mine. I have to face death to order it, to send others to meet it, cause it. Then let me see. Let me see what turned light and life to death and dark.”

“Fallon, you’re not ready to—”

She snapped her head around. Her eyes, nearly black with power and fury, blazed. “On powers within, on powers without, I call. Show me now and show me all. If my duty brushes the dark, then the curtain I will part. And I will hear and feel and see. As I will, so mote it be.”

Too much, Mallick thought, too much. But the die was cast.

Her body jerked, her head fell back, and her eyes went dark and blind with visions.

Voices screamed in her head, weeping, wailing, begging.

“Too many, too many. I can’t hear. Oh God, so many.”

Night. Though none in the cells knew day from night. They herded them in, already drugged with the food and water given out on the journey. So they shuffled, compliant, offered little resistance when they were examined, stripped, cataloged, given prison orange to wear. Most slept when led to their cells.

Some dreamed and cried out in sleep. Some pushed against the drugs pumped into them, day after day. And some, fighting, were restrained until another drug was pumped into them.

By category of MUNA—Manifestation of Unnatural Abilities—and date of containment, detainees were taken to the center’s lab for testing.

Pushing herself, pushing her limits, Fallon merged her mind with the spirit of a girl, strapped to a table in a harshly lit room. Janis, a high school senior when the Doom struck. A cheerleader struggling with her chemistry grade.

He drew her blood, the blank-faced man in the white coat and white cap. He hooked her up to a machine, sticking little cold circles on her bare chest.

They’d taken her clothes, and it mortified her to lie naked under the lights, under his eyes and hands.

“Please. I want my mom. Where’s my mom?”

They’d run together because her father died. Run because Janis grew wings, and her mom was afraid. Going to Grandma’s house. They were just going to Grandma’s, but Grandma wasn’t there. They kept running.

And the soldiers came.

“Please,” she said again, but the man who put needles into her, put the cold disks on her, said nothing.

She tried to turn her head, found she couldn’t move. Had she been in an accident? Was she paralyzed? “Please,” she said again. “Help me.”

Then, she realized the words didn’t make a sound. The words were only in her head, because she couldn’t speak.

Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. But she could see, she could feel. And when a tear slid down her cheek, the man dabbed the tear with a cotton stick, put the stick in a little jar. Labeled it.

“Brody, stimulant, on two.”

A woman moved into her view, went to a machine, touched a dial.

Janis felt the quick electric shock through her body.

At the monitor, the woman rattled off numbers. Heart rate, blood pressure, respiration.

“Up to four,” the man ordered.

Now the shock slapped, and she cried out in her head. Her wings flowed out with her instinct to flee, to fly away.

“Manifestation at level four. Let’s clamp these down.”

They hurt her, hurt her, hurt her wings.

Something inside her, through the drugs, remembered they’d hurt her before. Remembered her mother wasn’t there. They’d taken her mother somewhere else.

The pain flooded her, as it had before, when he used the scalpel to slice off a piece of her wing. More tears fell, and this time the woman collected them.

“As before the wing section loses its luminescence when excised.” The man sealed the bloody bit of wing in a bag. Sealed it, labeled it. “We need hair with root, Brody. Ten samples from the head, ten from the pubis. Another urine sample. All samples sent to CUS by special courier.”

“All?”

“This time. It has more when we need it.”

He didn’t smile, but something like satisfaction came over his face. With all her heart, Janis cursed him. Not for the pain, not anymore, but for that single look of satisfaction.

Then the fire washed in, black and brutal.

“No,” Fallon murmured. “No, no, not from her. But from where, from what, from who? Show me.”

Soldiers manned their posts. Three off duty ate in the mess hall—bean soup, mashed potatoes made from dehydrated flakes, hard rolls with their ration of margarine. Two more caught a smoke outside. Cigarettes went for five dollars each on the underground, but the army provided.

One swabbed out the cell of the detainee currently in the lab. The CO demanded every inch of the center be squared away, 24⁄7. With no other detainees scheduled for testing until morning, Private Coons planned to catch a little downtime with a DVD before he hit the bunk.

The CO sat in his office on level two, diligently reading reports. He had a picture of his family—wife, daughter, son, their spouses, his two grandchildren—on his desk.

His bitterness at their deaths by the virus burned continually inside him. His belief that those in cells below held responsibility was absolute.