Alex is an unwilling scavenger for the army.

He follows the bombs, creeps in through the sides of shattered houses, cllimbing in through mouths of brick, to pick through the detritus people left behind when they fled, the things too bulky to carry or too worthless to keep. The shattered ribs of a crib are still wood; the tangled rags wrapped around the cooling body of a father too old to run are stil cloth.

He dreams of escape, of fleeing south and west, of slipping across rivers, floating across seas; of motorcycles leaping fences, of clever ruses that hoodwink and befuddle. He has no memory for faces, so the soldiers in his dream are featureless, like an ink drawing someone dragged a thumb across before it was dry. They flicker and stutter as they turn to watch him, the jerky uncertain motion of a movie in the hands of an amateur projectionist.

He meets his wife walking the edge of the river, her nose buried in a book, her eyes busy everywhere but the book. She is funny, determined, and furious, technically skilled and kept idle by a regime that wants nothing of women but their wombs. Together they engender a bomb.

He’s walking home from the reading slightly buzzed and they scoop him up as he crosses Squalicum creek, zoop. A bright light and gravity reverses and he falls horrifyingly upward, too phobic to make a sound. They dump him on the floor and he barnacles to it, spread-eagled and tenacious, fingers and toes trying to burrow into its slightly warm plasticity.

Eventually someone lifts him like a sack of potatoes and slings him over one titanic shoulder. He’s more aware by that point, at least that gravity is down again and he isn’t falling, but still: he wraps himself around hir and whimpers.

The room xie takes him to is choked with plants he doesn’t recognize, not that that signifies; he’s not much of a botanist. Lots of leaves and vines and in the center a pod filled with a viscous orange gel. “Get in,” xie tells him, strangely accented, “and breathe.”

“I’m not breathing that gunk,” he says.

Xie leans down — far, far down — until something his brain refuses to parse as a face is at eye level. “Get in,” xie repeats, “and breathe. We will dismiss, once and for all, the myth that you animals produce carbon dioxide.”

“I won’t—” Alex starts, and all the vines twitch hungrily towards him, towards the hot promise of his breath, and he screams.

The cats fell in love with the revolutionary, and refused to beat him in a foot race.

So the first thing you have to understand was that it was a different time; tastes were more baroque. The second thing you have to understand is this: the cats were on specially designed lightweight stilts, to give them legs as long as a human’s. The third thing you have to understand: everyone loved the revolutionary. There were none purer in their dedication to the noble cause of freedom. The racing was a distraction, a way to bring some joy in those dark times. How the stadiums would fill to watch the long-legged revolutionary sweep around the track!

The cats had known the revolutionary since they were kittens, and were no less immune to their righteous charms. They always gave a good race, were always close on the revolutionary’s heels, but still: it was obvious. The revolutionary was proud, and would liefer a fair loss than a string of empty victories, so this stung. A person you could talk to, but what can you say to a cat? A cat goes its own way.

So the revolutionary hatched a plan, for once one with stakes no higher than their own pride. How full the stadium was on race day! how bright were the stilts beneath the cats! how joyously they purred when the revolutionary stroked their heads! The revolutionary knew every inch of the track, so this time, coming into the blind corner around the quarter mark, they threw themselves down behind some bushes that grew there. Fast, so fast: if you blinked, they all but disappeared. The stadium roared in surprise.

The cats were no less startled than the smallest child in the stands. Had he gotten that far ahead of them? They put their ears back and charged after. The revolutionary gave them a length, then sprang from behind the bushes and gave chase. The cats were determined to catch up, and never looked back, and the revolutionary, running flat out, couldn’t come close. The distance between them lengthened.

The cats blew past the finish line, and, not seeing the revolutionary, kept going around the track. They caught up to them in the final stretch, and stayed close on their heels until the finish line. A lap ahead, but dutifully just behind; the cats never did quite understand the purpose of these races.

The revolutionary finished the race, and the stadium wept with laughter; laughter and forgetfulness were rare in those days. The revolutionary laughed no less than anyone else: better a fair loss than an unearned victory! But all the same, they never raced a cat again.

Still, you can’t say it didn’t end happily: the cats were content enough to stay at home and curl up on their bed, and wait for the revolution to come.

Alexander Hammil has a moment of clarity, when he is red with blood to the waste and when the shrieks of the boy are still echoing off the parlor walls and ringing through the streets, a moment of pure awareness when he recoils in horror. Then he pushes on. The war must still be ended.

He takes the still warm skin from the child’s back and spreads it across the frame, pulls it taut. It lacks the shape of life, but the image is clear, North and South in matrimonial dignity beneath a spreading tree, the work of agonizing hours. He settles himself beneath it and cuts his own throat, quick and clean with a knife.

It will be days before they breach the walls and find him, but Death and History are there before the knife has fallen to his lap, have been there for hours, have always been there, watching.

“So unnecessary,” says History, revolted. “The Union will survive. The Union was always going to survive.”

“Let him have this moment,” Death says. “He tried, poor thing.”

History shudders and turns her eyes away. The Union survives, and Alex and his victim are forgotten, a gory footnote in a gory century, two minor deaths lost amid the noise.