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The first three ramps had soldiers just like the ones he’d seen at the tube station Prax didn’t bother stopping At the fourth, a supply tunnel that led from the surface warehouses doard the reactors, there was nobody He paused, the scooter silent beneath hiht acid smell in the air that he couldn’t quite place Slowly, other details registered The scorchthe floor He heard a distant popping sound that it took three or four long breaths to recognize as gunfire

Rapidly evolving apparently e of Mei’s classroom stippled with bullet holes and soaked in children’s blood popped into his ining The panic he’d felt in the doain, but a hundred times worse

“She’s fine,” he told the plant beside hiht in a day care There’re kids there”

The green-black leaves were already starting to wilt They wouldn’t have a war around children Or food supplies Or fragile agricultural doain, but not so badly he couldn’t steer

The first explosion ca down the ra the side of one of the cathedral-huge unfinished caverns where the raw ice of thebetween a reen space and a work of art There was a flash, then a concussion, and the scooter was fishtailing The wall loo out of the way before the i Coh their radios At least, he thought they would The people screaed the cavern wall, a section of blue-white ice the size of a tractor calving off the roof and falling slowly and inexorably down to the floor, grinding into it Prax scraht His heart felt like it was trying to break out of his rib cage

On the upper edge of the curving raures in armor He didn’t know if they were UN or Mars One of theunned the scooter, sliding fast down the ramp The chatter of automatic weapons and the smell of smoke and steam melt followed him

The school’s doors were closed He didn’t know if that was o scooter to a halt, juently on the steel drop door, but his first try split the skin over his knuckle

“Open up! My daughter’s in there!” He sounded like a madman, but someone inside heard him or saw him on the security monitor The articulated steel plates of the door shuddered and began to rise Prax dropped to the ground and scrah

He hadn’t met the new teacher, Miss Carrie,her up She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old and was Belter-tall and thin He didn’t reray

The schoolroo a song about an ant traveling through the solar system, with rhymes for all the major asteroid bodies There was no blood, no bullet holes, but the sh the vents He had to get Mei someplace safe He wasn’t sure where that would be He looked at the circle of children, trying to pick out her face, her hair

“Mei’s not here, sir,” Miss Carrie said, her voice tight and breathy at the sa?” Prax said, but hison Ganye frootten from Ceres to Ganymede in two days …

“Just after snack,” the teacher said

“You mean she was evacuated Someone ca the ice One of the children htened sound The teacher looked froain, her voice was lower

“Her mother came just after snack She took Mei with her She hasn’t been here all day”