“Aww, you’re sweet,” she said, her voice faint, papery. “But it’s not. It never has been. You know that. Even before the Flashback.”
“Shhh,” I repeated, and diverted my eyes to the mural, which depicted, in stark black and white, seemingly all the atrocities human beings had ever committed—most of which I was unfamiliar with, the h*******t and Hiroshima being obvious exceptions.
“They’re right, you know,” she said, softly, having followed my gaze. “The lights in the clouds. The shapes ... in that beautiful borealis, that came with the Flashback. They’re right about us.”
But I only stared at the painting, at the depictions of medieval torture and Mayan beheadings, at the lifeless, flattened cities and mounds of emaciated corpses, like driftwood; at the piles of skulls and perfect, white
