"What's that? Oh, you don't want to keep them?"
Snake shook his head.
"All right," said Geo. He took one jewel and put it around his neck.
Geo took the wrought chain with the platinum claw from his neck and hung it around Iimmi's. The white eye shown on his dark chest in the moonlight. Now Snake beckoned them to follow him back across the clearing. They came, stopping to pick up swords from the shriveled darknesses on the ground about the clearing. As they passed around the edge of the broken building, Geo looked for the corpse they had left there, but it was gone.
"Where are we going?" asked Urson.
Snake only motioned them onward. They neared the broken cylinder and Snake scrambled up the rubble under the dark hole through which the man-wolf had leaped earlier that evening.
At the door, Snake turned and lifted the jewel from Geo's neck, and held it aloft. The jewel glowed now, with a blue-green light that seeped into the corners and crevices of the ruined entrance. Shreds of cloth hung at the windows, most of which were broken. Twigs and rubbish littered the metal floor. They walked between double seats toward a door at the far end. Effaced signs still hung on the walls.
N .. SM .. K .. G
The door at the end was ajar, and Snake opened it all the way. Something scuttered through a cracked window. The jewel's light showed two seats broken from their fixtures. Vines covered the front window in which only a few splinters of glass hung on the rim. Draped in rotten fabric, a few metal rings about wrists and ankles, two skeletons with silver helmets had fallen from the seats. Snake pointed to a row of smashed glass disks in front of the broken seats.
Radio ... they heard in their minds.