The tune seemed distantly familiar, though she couldn't quite place it, and frowned slightly in mild puzzlement. His description of his world as a new Dark Ages distracted her.

"'Barbarism triumphs'," she murmured, a fragment of a long-ago conversation with her friend Major Nye coming to mind, accompanied by a memory of St James's Park in London, ruins and reduced to an encampment for refugees. Her expression went a little odd in that moment—faintly distant, difficult to read, and apparently fixed on something not in the room.