No one ever remembers an event quite as it happened. In memory, the moment after the doors opened was endless.

She raised her weapon, expecting them to pour through the door, and first noticed that they didn’t.

She recognised River, standing in the doorframe. Unhurt.

She had a vague awareness that Alliance troops entered after that, but, somehow, memory edited that out and she moved slowly, silently into the room in the same endless moment.

The room was so full of the dead, there seemed to be no room for the living.

During the war she had come upon a shelter, hit by a bunker-buster during a raid. There was not a single body within the bunker, but the place was covered in human remains. Just no recognisable bodies.

The room was worse, somehow. She seemed distant from it even as she walked through it, as if she was seeing everything through a pane of glass. The place was covered in bodies, left where they fell. Many had wounds to the chest, face, or arms, and had probably died attempting to fight. Others perhaps had been caught by surprise, looking the wrong way, expecting an attack from the wrong angle. Some of the fresher wounds, on the bodies of the last to die… they had been running, or hiding. They had finally encountered something so terrible, it overcame even their condition and so they had tried to escape. Not that it did them any good.

The bunker had suffered an impersonal event, like a volcano erupting or an engine exploding. The room had witnessed a massacre. A mass execution, not a battle. There was hardly a body there with more than a single injury. Almost every one had been simply, efficiently, artistically, been given a solitary, lethal, blow.

River stood easily, unafraid, almost obscured by big, armoured, heavily armed, clearly capable, nervous soldiers. She had never seen axes quite like those that River still held. They must have come from the rooms other, now-peaceful inhabitants. She wondered if River had ever used or even touched an edged weapon before entering this room, and she shivered.

Behind her, Kaylee retched.