They came at all hours of the day and night. They scraped along the side of the house, moaned at the doors, ran their fingernails over the boards.

A man walks through a hub room where outside information is being gathered and translated by crew members who shuttle it through the circulatory system; he steps into the padded orange room at the center of it all, where he sits down at a black glass table and reports to an inscrutable Control that the enemy is on the move.

In the heat, my vision shimmers. / I thought it would be different, as a bird.