Crisis SINCE ROCKET ATTACKS were an actual emergency, the Sergeant was back at Brighton House and sitting at the actual emergency desk when the call came in. He didn’t know what time it was because he’d been awake for long enough that the numbers on the clock didn’t make any sense. It was five, but he had no sense of what that actually meant. It could be breakfast, it could be dinner, it could be Wednesday. Being awake for long periods in a crisis was doable, he’d done it before for days. Being awake alone and in a crisis was harder: your mind stewed in adrenalin and fatigue and threw mad notions at you, random words and reveries, you lost touch with why you were awake, what you had to do. He knew intellectually that it must be morning, that he hadn’t been to sleep, but he’d been moving all that time, moving without thinking, first at the impact site with the rescue crews in the hope that someone might still be alive in the rubble, then after that with Arno’s team as they demanded of two shocked marines why they’d chosen exactly that moment to leave the building.
