He fell asleep almost at once. Unlike during his previous unconsciousness, he dreamed. In his dream, he lay chained to the floor of a pit. Above him, robots moved. They began throwing corpses into the pit. They piled up around Lorn, threatening to crush him. The headless Ekwansi thudded down on his right, and then the pregnant woman he had shot in the Skywatcher enclave hit the ground to his left, and as their blood pooled beneath him, he came awake, gasping…
It was still dark. And it wasn’t only the dream that had awakened him.
Someone was sitting on the end of his bed.
“Hello,” said a soprano voice. “We need to talk.”
Lorn blinked at the strangely small silhouette. “Who are you?”
“My name is Kiri Ishida. And you’re Lorn Kymbal.”
That sent a chill through him. “Who?”
The indistinct
