uncontrollably, as the car tilted further. He grabbed desperately, hung on as the car dumped its load into the chute, down, down into a giant pit. The pit was surrounded with high mesh walls and a steel rail. And behind the rail a circular walkway, with panels, or doors, spaced at regular intervals. Maybe a hundred or more doors.

And cranes, cranes lifting metal mouths full of the squirming mass in the pit, lifting them to the railing and onto moving belts that carried them through the walls and out of sight.

To what? God, to what? Danton thought.

Danton clung frantically to the empty car. Sweat made a stream down his chest, though the pit was refrigerated. Cold. The metal was frosted, it shone like ice. And in the pit some of the bodies moved and made sounds. The girl soldier. She got to her knees.

Danton tried to crawl back, back up the slippery metal of the railcar. He sought darkness back there, a place to hide. Then he stopped trying and felt his fingers loosening as he watched the girl. Her face was unrecognizable behind a mask of blood and dirt. But she was standing up now. She raised one hand. She looked up at the many expressionless doors.

The strength with which she forced the keening death-song from her body was not the strength of her body. It came from someplace else. From outside, from memory, from a last defiance that could no longer suffer punishment, from the buried ghosts of thousands of years that had died.

Danton's hands let go, and he slid down the chute.

He scarcely felt the bodies under him. He looked at the woman singing and he listened.

Danton stumbled. He reached her side.

Danton touched her shoulder. Her uniform hung in tatters. A line of red ran down her torn arm. She sank to her knees. He could barely hear the last two lines of her song.

He lifted her and stood, holding her like a child. Now her eyes were closed. She would have a pretty face, he thought. The army uniform cap fell away and her hair tumbled down over his hand and arm like red dust. Her lips moved. She whispered: "No one hears. No one—ever hears."

"I hear you," Danton said.

But you don't hear me, he thought. Her body was limp. She's dead, he thought.

The 

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