The elevator stopped.
The doors opened.
Smoke rolled into the lift before anyone stepped out. It carried the smell of gunfire, wet stone, blood, and something burned. Red light flashed across the ground level of Fort Schuyler, cutting the yard into broken pieces. Guards ran through the open ground. Their voices overlapped through the smoke, sharp and panicked under the hammering shots from the upper walls.
The broken gate hung inward, twisted from its hinges.
Bodies lay near the entrance.
Iyisha saw all of it in flashes.
Then she saw the tank.
It stood in the middle of the fort yard, blood running down its chest and water still dripping from its arms. Its skin was torn in places where bullets had struck, but some of the wounds were already closing. Slowly. Wrongly. The sight made her stomach turn. It looked bigger on the ground than it had from the bridge. Bigger than the memory of it. Bigger than anything that should have survived that much gunfire.
Her knees weakened.
