Time after is of the essence, too. Morgan and her women are the kinds of allies they will need once the uprising is put down. That’s the favorable reading. The unfavorable reading is that these are the kinds of rivals they may face in reunifying the nation; splinter groups, petty nations, warlords. It has happened, disastrously, within her lifetime, in Afghanistan and Iraq , in Syria and Palestine . In either case, they need to take the measure of the Amazai, who are, apparently, a growing territorial power. “Annie?” she says quietly.

Kirsten sets down her bowl. “Let’s do it.”

A murmur of approval runs around the group, and Inga, the woman with the guitar, strums a descant on her twelve-string and begins to sing. Other voices pick up the song around the circle.

In an anarchistic garret, so dingy and so mean,Smell the pungent odor of nitroglycerine.Midst the piles of pipes and powder, and pamphlets to the skies,‘Neath the dust and dirty laundry, you can hear this mournful cry:

Oh it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)God knows what’s become of Brother Tom. (Brother To-o-o -om.)Mama’s aim is bad, and the cops they all know Dad,So it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)

There are knives and guns and daggers scattered on the front room floor.Look behind the sofa, you’ll find two dozen more.But Cousin Mac’s in prison, and Grandpa is long dead,And Uncle Jim has left us to become a ‘Frisco Red.

The tune is lively, and Koda finds her foot tapping of its own accord. Kirsten has begun to clap in rhythm to the chorus, and Koda takes it up, adding her own voice to the chorus.

Oh it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)God knows what’s become of Brother Tom. (Brother To-o-o -om.)Mama’s aim is bad, and the cops they all know Dad,So it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)

In the hall you’ll find the baby teething on some dynamite.Try to get it from her, you’ll find you’re in a fight.But she’s too young to do it, and Mama’s baking breadAnd Uncle Jake is tripping, and he’s flipping out his head.

Oh it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)God knows what’s become of Brother Tom. (Brother To-o-o -om.)Mama’s aim is bad, and the cops they all know Dad,So it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)

There’s a saveau tabby kitten sittin’ purrin’ by the door,And lying in the bed, there’s a smiling saboteur.But a cat’s no good at bombing, and none of us is sureThat that smiling sleeping freak is not a pig provocateur.

So it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)God knows what’s become of Brother Tom. (Brother To-o-o-om.)Mama’s aim is bad, and the cops they all know Dad,So it’s Sister Jenny’s turn to throw the bomb! (Throw the bomb!)

The song ends on a cheer, and Morgan rises as the roar subsides. She raises her arms, her hands open, over her head. “Sisters! Shall it be so?”

“So mote it be!” thunders back, with more clapping and war whoops. Koda finds herself shouting with the rest, the spirit of the song infectious. Kirsten, her face flushed, is caught up in it, too. She catches Koda’s eye, and where there might have been embarrassment a month ago, there is now both the joy of battle and frank desire. They have come a long way, in more ways than one. And now there is but a little way to go, for life or death. Slipping her hand into Kirsten’s she says huskily. “Ready to go?”

Kirsten’s green eyes sparkle up at her. “Where you go. Always.”

*

Koda leans one shoulder against the concrete block wall and carefully eases her right leg out from under her, stretching to relieve the cramp in her thigh. The long muscle that runs from hip to knee has twisted in the hour and more she has crouched in the alley across from the Carson City Women’s Clinic, waiting for the wreck of the city to grow quiet. She grits her teeth and rubs at the knot, willing herself not to swear aloud, though obscenities in at least five languages cascade satisfyingly through her mind. Beside her Kirsten leans forward, her face a pale shadow in the moonlight that filters down between the two strips of shops that once housed medical offices, pharmacies and the odd restaurant or two. Koda shakes her head, reaching out to touch the other woman’s hand reassuringly. The cramp hurts like hell, but it will not kill her.

Not unless she makes noise and attracts the attention of the droids across the street.

There are droids at the clinic; they have seen the metal-collared guards pacing the perimeter of the grounds. Arriving on the outskirts of the city at sunset, the twelve women have picked their way cautiously from house to vacant house through a ruined residential neighborhood populated only by stray dogs, feral cats and the small prey that sustains them. From the suburbs through the business district and now down medical row, they have encountered not so much as a single human. Except, it seems, for the droids, the city stands completely abandoned. The survivors of the uprising have all fled. If, that is, there were any survivors.

The sound of boots on the clinic walkway announces the arrival of a guard droid on its rounds, and Kirsten shrinks back into the shadows at Koda’s side. Further down the alley, the other members of the raiding party crouch behind the detritus left by the city’s vanished inhabitants. A dumpster blocks half the passageway; further down, a Mercedes sedan continues its gradual descent onto its wheelrims as air seeps out of its tires. The sentry crosses Koda’s narrow angle of view. Like the clinic, like the alley, the street lies in shadow, but the moon gives enough light to show the droid in silhouette. A humanoid type, it wears a uniform of some kind, its M-16 slung casually across its back, its cap set at an angle that would pass for jaunty if it were anything to which self-assurance had any meaning. It passes, turning the corner of the building, and Koda feels the muscles in her back unravel along her spine. The next sentry should appear in five minutes; this one again in another five. They have the timing down.

Wastepaper rustles softly to her left, and Morgan steps out from behind the dumpster to crouch beside Dakota and Kirsten. “Okay,” she whispers. “Their rounds haven’t varied in almost an hour. We let the next one go by, then the one after it. Then we go in.”

“Got it,” Koda replies almost soundlessly.

“Swing wide, take the west side. I’ll go straight for the front. Inga and Sarai will head for the back.”

“Got it,” Kirsten repeats.

They have gone over the plan a dozen times back at the camp. All on one floor, the clinic has three distinct sections. The central area consists of offices and waiting rooms. Nothing interesting there except the door to be bashed in. Branching off to the east, the wards and private accommodations give onto a long corridor, rooms offset in stair-step fashion to give maximum natural light. Opposite, in the west wing, are the delivery rooms, the labs, the pharmacy and storerooms and kitchens. Koda, like the rest of the party, has the layout firmly in her mind. Break in, destroy the android staff and any humans cooperating with them, determine if any living children are present, bomb the place to flinders. Simple.

“Good,” Morgan says, touching Koda’s arm briefly, Kirsten’s more gently, lingeringly. Then she backs again into the darkness, and they wait.

The first sentry passes. Koda shifts slightly as his footsteps fade, trying again to ease her leg. Carefully she shifts the flashlight and the two small bottles that hang at her waist. Filled with gasoline and fused with rag run through holes in their metal caps, they may not be regulation grenades but will do the job at hand. From somewhere across the parking lot comes a faint whimper, a low sound that might be made by a puppy or a newborn kitten. Either is likely enough. The droids have shown no interest in any non-human beings, either for good or for ill. The shrubbery around the long, low clinic building, with its offset rooms in the patient wing, provides plenty of sheltered nooks where a pregnant animal might bear and nurse her young. The sound comes again, louder, is repeated in a broken cadence that rises in volume, finally becoming the full-throated wail of a human baby in distress.

“Goddess! There’s kids—!” someone behind her exclaims and is cut off abruptly by Morgan’s rough, “Go! Go, dammit!”

Koda levers herself up to her feet, the cramp in her leg still hampering her, and sets off across the pavement at a shambling run. Kirsten paces her, with Morgan and Beatha on their heels. Morgan and the three women in her squad peel off to the right, making for the main entrance. Sarai and Inga, backed by two more Amazai, split and make for the rear, the backpacks that hump against their shoulders bearing the explosives and the timing devices that will bring this obscenity down in a cloud of dust and mortar. Except, now, they have to find the children first, and bring them out.

Koda skids around the corner of the building, Kirsten on her heels, running flat out now that the cramp in her leg as loosened. The wailing sound comes again, fainter now with the angle of the building in between. Behind Koda, Beatha shouts, “Windows! Go for the glass!”

The side entrance was also, apparently, once the emergency entrance. As they pound up the ramp, Koda can make out the sheen off the sliding pocket doors and beyond them the second pair that leads into the wide receiving bay. She shifts her rifle in her hands as she reaches the head of the incline, ready to smash through the doors with its butt. To her shock, the doors simply slide open on their well-oiled rails, and she half stumbles into the airlock space between the two entrances, Kirsten and the other women barreling into her from behind. “Well,” says Kirsten as she regains her balance. “That’s convenient. They’re expecting us?”

“Or dead sure they’re not expecting anybody,” Beatha adds. “Whole damned atmosphere’s pretty casual.”

“Whole damned town’s pretty dead.” Koda lowers her gun and stands for a moment before the inner doors. “Trap, maybe?”

From somewhere toward the front of the building comes the sharp rattle of automatic weapons fire, punctuated by a high-pitched scream. Koda cannot tell if the sound signals pain or triumph. They do not have time to think about it, nor about a trap. Koda takes two steps forward, and the glass panels slide back.

Heat rolls over them, the pent up heat of a closed building that has stood for months in the summer sun without air conditioning. With it comes, faint but discernable, the distinctive odor of human infant, a hint of warm milk and the riper smell of unchanged diapers. And under it all, fainter still, runs the stench of blood and rotting flesh.

Kirsten coughs, a small, strangled sound. This clinic must bring back the horror of Craig, the hideous confirmation of the incinerator at Salt Lake , but there is no time to take or give comfort. Motioning the others to stillness, Koda stands for long seconds, letting her senses expand into the space around her. Hunter-sight, shaman-sight. Along with the odors that signal the presence of live infants and the underlying stink of death comes the sharper tang of alcohol, the acid-tinged smell of formaldehyde. She has no sense of physical human presence in the rooms stretched out before them; the only living things, it seems to her, must be further down the corridor, perhaps in the rooms on the other side of the main entrance at the center. But there is something, something. . . .

Something not living but conscious, waiting for them to move down the corridor. Something with death on its mind.

“All right,” she says softly, switching on her flashlight. “We’re going down that hall, checking each room as we go. They already know we’re here. There’s no point in secrecy now.”

The beam of yellow light precedes them down the corridor, sliding over a bulletin board with tattered announcements still dangling from bright red pushpins, over the fire extinguisher in its glass box on the wall, over a floor that shows hardly a mote of dust. So the facilities in this wing are still in use, which means that women are still delivering here. Rape does not need a clean floor. Neither does the butchery of infants.

A door opens off the hall to her right; a quick sweep of the room with the torch shows the a low table and a tangled witch’s cradle of black cables snaking down from the ceiling: Radiology. The door opposite remains closed and locked; playing the light through the narrow, wire-reinforced window, Koda sees only shelves of neatly ranged bottles and boxes. Beatha, on tip-toe behind her, whispers, “Pharmacy?”