Fior stood amidst the corpses and tried, briefly, almost recreationally, to be horrified.

To feel that wound in the world, in her home, as if it were fresh. As if the scars charred into its walls would last a second longer than she let them. But she couldn’t match the shock burned into the faces of the dead. Their lips blistered back from blackened teeth, their eyes flickering flashbulb-glassy, seeming, still, to follow the electricity that walked in restless arcs between them. She had seen those same faces broken or horrified by too many other deaths before.

Only those wandering grave-warden arcs of electricity lit the concourse. Between them, the smoke bleeding from its wall seemed to be only shadow, restless and roaming as well. She picked a careful course through that between, stepping over the dead, on scorched tile rather than the crackling, precarious carpet of their bodies, because it still mattered somehow, even in the dark and without horror. Even though the only thing that would last was her memory of tile instead of corpses crunching underfoot, and the cause.

Every disaster, no matter how senseless it seemed, had to start somewhere. A first tiny fault, warning signs ignored, a final cascading failure. Whether she could look at those corpses with horror didn’t matter. Whether she treated them with dignity shouldn’t have mattered. All that did was skirting her way around sparking, darting, lingering death to that wound in the wall, where it all must have started.

Where the air seethed and hummed like the guts of a storm cloud, lifting strands of hair light as scarlet plasma from her shoulders. Past charred and crumbled plaster, the wall’s guts were all shadow and frayed metal ruin, the memory of momentum in how duct and wire warped and twisted outwards. She couldn’t see the disaster’s first and foremost source deep within it, but she didn’t have to. She only had to remember the precise place where, just a few hours ago, that tiny fault would have been running out of warning signs to give.