Bell feels himself lifted from the ground, feels his legs fly out from beneath him. He lands hard, somehow on his back, head ringing and bile in his throat. He attempts to roll, can’t manage it on the first try, curses himself, and pushes again, this time making it onto his stomach. He’s been turned around, he realizes, facing the square again.

The blessing of the blast is that it steals his hearing, and so he can’t hear the pain, only see it, but that, in its own way, makes it worse. Through dust and smoke, he can see that where the car was there is now nothing, a crater ringed in black, and all around, on every side, there is blood and meat and the dumb show of those miraculously spared blinking in their concussion-stupor. He hears a thread of someone’s keening, sees the dead. Old men and young, women and boys and girls, and there are the wounded, clutching at themselves where holes that shouldn’t be are, where limbs that once were have gone absent. Bell’s gaze falls on the boy, the plastic ball in his hand, its bottom half sheared by the blast.

Just like the boy.

Board is pulling Bell to his feet, shouting at him, words dim. Bell nods, knows what he’s asking. Bone is supporting Chain, blood rushing down the side of his face in a sheet. They push off, heading for their vehicle, then for Venus and Brickyard, trying to put this all behind them.

Knowing they never will.

Bell finds him two blocks down, standing at the corner, and it’d be a believable tourist act if it weren’t for the military-issue haircut and the ramrod posture. Civvies notwithstanding, you can take the man out of uniform, but some men-you will never take the uniform from the man.

“Jad,” the man says, apparently admiring the trees.

“Colonel,” Bell says.

The man turns to look at him, the slight curl of a smile as he takes Bell in, then shakes his head. “You look like a pilgrim who’s lost his way, Master Sergeant.”