Why am I here? To mourn a city I never knew? Stare into the emptiness in their skulls and try to feel something for the people they used to be? Remind myself what happens should I falter? The door with the answer is open. Not wide open, just cracked, beckoning. No one with any sense will disturb the Iconoclast. The air here tastes too much like contagion.

Skulls that stare back and broken ribs and bones I've never seen out of context, white like the full moon, are plastered without order along the facade of the only building in miles. Some have given in to gravity. Rot wafts through the cracked door and nothing moves nearby. Even the trees are nonliving, but I don't feel alone. I'm the one without sense. I'm the one disturbing the Iconoclast in its unmarked mausoleum in the middle of the woods. What an unholy place. Demons might see me home.

Grip tight on my rifle, which I doubt will deter anyone or anything I meet out here, the wooden door groans against my shoulder. I have to stop on the threshold. Organs spilling from bodies, severed and broken limbs, sucking lungs, my own brothers dead in summer heat for days—nothing has defeated me like the Iconoclast's fetor. I might be sick. Death hasn't made me sick in twenty years.

Knowing I can't get away with never inhaling again, I tuck my beak into my shoulder. Breathe through my sleeve. Taste the decay. Tell myself I'm getting used to the smell, don't be a coward, push past it. Nothing works. I barely make it outside before I break. Five miles, on an empty stomach, a day after losing more than a liter of blood, to visit a rotting carcass. Small lapse in judgment.

Clutching my stomach, kneeling over a puddle, the convulsions have taken everything I had to give. I don't think I can get up. Maybe I'm dying. I know the mice all believe the Anathem is binding after death, but there has to be more than this on the other side. Doesn't there? What if there isn't more? What if the other side is worse? What if I never see the Breaks again? Godcreature, I'll never go home, will I?

My lungs seize up and won't let go no matter what I do. I am dying. I have to be. But then something slams into my back and I'm flat on the ground but the world doesn't stop yet. No light, no dark, only the muted stars and the southern pines and the full moon. And a long, pointed—a spear? Is that what hit me? Who the hell still uses spears? My hand finds my sidearm before I can ask it to move, and when I sit up I'm staring between the sights at a coyote holding a stone dagger over his head and I feel Lennox tearing into me. But now I don't have to get on my knees and let him.

"Drop it if you want to live," I tell the coyote, who stops short. He wears furs. Riath.

"Why don't you bleed?"

Exetium weave, the layer under my plating, stops falling stars. But I'm not about to explain—he'd try to take it off me. "Drop it or I'll shoot," I say again.

He kneels. Lays the dagger in the soft soil. Raises his hands. He's only a pup, no more than twenty, but Riath live short lives from what I know of them. I might be the oldest person he's met. "Why do you seek Khenal?"

"I could ask you the same thing."

"I do not seek Khenal. I followed you long and you came here," the coyote says in an accent that makes Kridali sound like a foreign language. "You smell like blood."

Fuck, of course I do. How many others are following me? "Good hunting out here?"

"No. I am the lowest in my clan. Here is the worst—"

"Shut the fuck up." Cannibal. I'll kill him when I get the chance, but I won't kill him so near the Iconoclast unless I have to kill him here. "Are there more of you?"

The coyote's ear twitches. "No more." Liar. They're all so bad at lying.

Two in his chest, one in his head, dead before he hits the ground. And neatness stops with the bullet wounds. I have to pull his mail collar away but then the knife slips through hide like it's made of water. Fluid warms my palms. Sinew snaps under the serrated edge. I can hear the others closing in—a chorus of voices—a mile or two away. I have some time. Not much. But it can be enough if I want it to be enough. I should have stayed inside, as much as I love severing cannibal heads on a deadline. Tonight could still be a good night if I don't end it tied alive to a spit.

Dragging the headless carcass back and forth, painting the forest with blood until I can't paint anymore, I envy the Riath's easy death. Try not to think what mine will be should they find me. Cover my hands, my uniform, my feathers in blood, hope Riath disease doesn't kill me before their weapons do. And then I toss what's left of him against the roots of a southern pine, out of sight. Like trash. Part of me wants to carry guilt. The other doesn't sympathize with people who eat each other.

I pick up the assault rifle and pull it over my shoulder when I go back for the head, hoping its absence will delay them a few seconds longer. He still looks confused. Should have put one through his brain first. Godcreature, why does he have to be warm? I set him down the first place I find, in a grove of bushes not far from pine. The other Riath are close now, howling because they know it too. Where do I go? Where can I go? I can't outrun them. I can't keep a hoard at bay alone. No matter what happens, they'll find their wounded prey. When they do, I don't want to be fifty feet up a pine, surrounded. I'm ready to make my last stand here until the Iconoclast's stench takes me by the throat again. The mausoleum. They'll have to funnel inside.

Knife in hand, I shove through the door. Sink the blade into a pillar at the other end of the structure. Start a climb into the rafters. Ignore the forty-foot corpse begging to break my fall. When I count the compounded "shoulds" that would have kept my hands clean of cannibal blood, staying inside is still at the top of the list.

Perched on a high beam, moonlight on my shoulders, I brace the rifle against my knee, blink between the sights until the front post comes into focus. They're sniffing around outside. Searching. One cries a name out—Kialu—and the rest of the pack howls. At least some of him has been found. Now they want me, and I doubt they're hungry anymore.

Silence outside. My heart and lungs won't shut up. Head's on fire, hands unsteady, index finger laid helplessly beside the trigger. I don't trust myself not to jump. Safety's off. I need to be sure.

I'm loud. But when the next Riath comes through, severed head displayed on his flat palms, soft throat decorated with gold and bones, he doesn't think to look upward. His clan is louder. Some are in tears. Others fall to their knees before the Iconoclast, behind the first hunter. He offers the head to the moon, and there's that word again—Khenal. From all their mouths, Khenal. Moonlight fades as clouds gather. Sinking to his knees beside the rest, the one in gold and bones lays the head down and touches his nose to the soil. Something mammoth shifts beneath me. Godcreature. Another should.

The Riath don't raise their heads to the Iconoclast. I watch its dripping flesh return to its bones alone. She was right. He looks like me. The way we all were before Zaneth. More reason to let it burn.

Demonfire is demanding in the way any weapon is demanding. But it wants everything. Only ten, aside from its parent-scientists, watched it consume the Badlands on Frontier. And ten went to their posts with one capsule, for one emergency. For a one-way resolution. I slip the pericarp from my pocket. Twist at the median. Let it fall.

The Iconoclast goes up in emerald light, thrashing, hissing like the hearth, bleeding afterlife. Khenal echoes in the voices of dying Riath. Should have stayed inside. From childhood.

Flame already laps at the high rafters, seeping through my uniform's heat-resistant exetium weave. Safety on. Rifle on my back. Knife buried in blackening wood, free hand anywhere it finds a hold. My chances atrophy with the mausoleum, but I climb out of the heat anyway. Better ways to die than burning alive—might as well have given up when I met the first Riath.

On the roof, the trees reach out to me and I fall into their arms. Try to breathe the heat from my limbs. Watch the firelight die. A skeleton of the mausoleum lingers, then collapses on itself. Keir Ashthorn, one of ten, traitor of two nations, Destroyer of Kunrough, is in ashes. Good riddance.